The Wild Cherry Tree

by H. E. Bates

  ‘What part of Germany do you come from?’

  She came from Bavaria, she said. Not far from the Zugspitze, the big mountain. In winter there were great snows and she skied a lot. In summer it was beautiful for walking.

  ‘Will you go back? I mean would you like to go back?’

  That was the curious thing, she said. She really didn’t want to go back. It was all very beautiful, but somehow – no, she preferred England. It gave her great satisfaction.

  The very ordinariness of this conversation succeeded in deepening his own feeling of satisfaction to a point almost of serenity. He felt as if relaxing after a long, tough swim. The almost lunatic days of turbulence with Mrs Palgrave not only now seemed slightly unreal; there was an uneasy aridity about them, a brittle shadowiness from which all heat had strangely departed.

  By contrast the girl sitting in front of him seemed like a bud that had only partly opened. Her physical appeal aroused in him no open excitement. He felt content merely to watch her, framed with an astonishing air of purity against sea and sunset.

  ‘You must give me your address in London,’ he said. ‘We live in Berkshire, not far out. Perhaps we could meet some time.’

  ‘Yes, I must do that. But I really don’t go out very much. Because of Mrs Palgrave. I told you how it was.’

  Abruptly he changed the conversation. Was she getting hungry? What did she fancy to eat? His father said the lobsters were perfect. The sole Normande was also marvellous, he said, and both he and his mother apparently always ate mountains and mountains of langoustines.

  ‘I find them a bit messy and finicky myself. A bit tedious to unbutton, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I will unbutton them for you – if you would like me to.’

  ‘Oh! would you? That’s awfully nice of you. And we must drink Montrachet. My father says the only thing is the Montrachet.’

  Presently they went inside the hotel to eat. Dark live lobsters crawled with slowly waving antennae about long glass tanks of green-lit water, among emerald forests of sea-weed.

  ‘No, not for me,’ Heidi said. ‘The poor things look in prison, somehow. Unhappy.’

  Soon they were facing prodigious pyramids of shell-fish and then a single big glass bowl of langoustines, flowering from rocks of ice like clusters of sea-anemones in pink and white. The Montrachet was cold and flinty and, as his father had predicted, excellent. He thought the langoustines were pretty good too, especially when, as he said more than once, you had someone to unbutton them for you. She was really spoiling him completely.

  ‘Well, there’s no harm in that, or is there?’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. I love it.’

  Outside, by now, the light had faded. Against and beyond the electric lights the sky took on the same deep bright blue as her dress and into it, at regular intervals, swept an encircling arrow of yellow, a beam from a lighthouse a mile or two away.

  When the last of the langoustines had gone and she was thoughtfully washing her hands in a finger bowl he poured out more wine and then asked her, for the first time, if she was enjoying herself? In reply she looked down at her wet hands and said an extraordinary thing:

  ‘More than that. For the first time since we came here I feel I am really myself.’

  What did that mean? He didn’t quite understand.

  ‘With Mrs Palgrave I am never myself. She makes me afraid and I go into a shell.’

  So this then, he thought, was the key to the superciliousness, the aloof cold air. But afraid? Why afraid?

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just how it is.’ With an abrupt smile she raised her glass to him. ‘Well, cheers anyway. Your father is quite right. The wine is splendid.’

  ‘Oh! he really knows, my father. You must meet him. He’d like you. He has such good taste.’

  ‘Really. What flattery.’

  ‘I know what, we’ll all come here. I’ll see if I can arrange it – for lunch on Sunday. If Mrs Palgrave is back she can look after the children herself for once. That’ll do her no harm, will it?’

  She sat very still again. He never got a single syllable in answer to that question but half way across the bay, on the drive back, he stopped the car. The beam from the lighthouse could still be seen swinging with brilliant regularity across the bay and in one of the spells of darkness it left every twenty seconds or so he kissed her lightly on the lips. Compared with the passionate bite of Mrs Palgrave’s mouth it was like kissing a petal freshly unfolded.

  ‘You’re not really afraid, are you?’ he said.

  Perhaps the question was a stupid one but he never got an answer to it either. She lay back on the seat of the car, very still. When the beam of light flashed again her eyes were very bright and it cut across them like a sword.

  Two days later he wandered along the beach, looking for her, but there was no sign of her or the children or the big yellow and white ball. Instead he caught sight of a pair of familiar golden legs and a smouldering head of auburn hair against the silver sand of the dunes.

  ‘Hullo there, you’re back.’

  Mrs Palgrave was assiduously polishing her finger-nails: so assiduously that she hardly bothered to look up at him.

  ‘When did you get in?’

  ‘Yesterday morning.’

  ‘Odd that I haven’t seen you.’

  ‘Odd? I had a lot of things to do. Some of them not very pleasant.’

  It was now she who had the aloof, icy, supercilious air. An impulse to sit down on the sand beside her left him abruptly. He stood still, stiff and awkward.

  ‘I haven’t seen a sign of Heidi or the children either.’

  ‘What a ghastly disappointment for you.’

  A small snake of irritation curled sharply up his throat and bit the back of his mouth. She gave a long quizzical look at her nails and then made an equally long search of her handbag, finally producing a mirror.

  ‘I think you might explain that remark.’

  ‘Explain? I can’t think why.’

  She looked for fully half a minute into the mirror, without saying another word.

  ‘I still can’t think why I didn’t see Heidi. She promised to meet me for coffee yesterday.’

  ‘She could hardly meet you for coffee if she wasn’t here.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘I’ve sent her home.’

  The snake jabbed harshly at his throat again, making his mouth sour and sick.

  ‘Home? You mean to Germany?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But she’ll never go. She hates the idea.’

  ‘She’s already gone. She left last night.’

  He stood stiff and impotent with anger. She stared into the mirror as if he didn’t exist and then suddenly he exploded in outrage.

  ‘But good God, that’s monstrous! – just like that – it’s monstrous!’

  ‘Don’t shout. After all I can’t have my children’s maid playing fast and loose with any Tom, Dick and Harry as soon as my back’s turned.’

  ‘Fast and loose – ye gods! – all we had was a quiet, simple innocent dinner.’

  At last she looked up at him, the smile on her lips cool and thin.

  ‘Innocent? I love that word innocent. Some of your performances last week hardly belonged to the realm of innocence.’

  ‘There was nothing like that! –’

  ‘How disappointing for you.’

  ‘It was not disappointing! For Christ’s sake! –’

  Hitherto she had treated him as a man; now she suddenly said:

  ‘Oh! don’t be a silly boy. Just go away. There’s no point in getting angry.’

  ‘Angry? I like that. It’s you that’s angry with me.’

  She actually laughed.

  ‘Angry? With you? Now that’s really funny. On the contrary I’m very grateful.’

  ‘I’m damned if I can think what for.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get rid of her for ages, but I never had a real good excuse. Now thanks to yo
u I got one.’

  He stood stiff and impotent with anger and humiliation. Again she stared into the mirror as if he simply didn’t exist. Then suddenly she gathered up her bathing basket and handbag and stood up, her brown-green eyes absolutely stony.

  ‘If you won’t go I’m afraid I must.’

  ‘You sound so bloody righteous somehow –’

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand. I told you what a responsibility these girls are. You simply can’t have them caught up in all sorts of cheap intrigues –’

  With icy contempt she turned abruptly and left him. He stood and raged within himself with sour despair, unable to move or say a word.

  The following afternoon he saw the familiar smouldering auburn head coming towards him along the promenade.

  He saw at once that she was wearing a dress, a light simple affair of plain yellow, with an emerald belt, and by comparison with the brief swim-suits he had seen her wearing so often it seemed to give her a remarkably respectable, conventional air.

  Walking with her was a man of sixty or so, wearing a pair of cream slacks, a navy blue blazer and a yachting cap. He carried a gold-topped walking stick and with this he sometimes pointed at objects out to sea. He too looked conventional, almost to the point of being prim.

  Franklin, as Mr and Mrs Palgrave passed him, stiffened himself to say ‘Good afternoon’ but in the moment of passing she turned with equal stiffness and stared at the sea.

  A few minutes later he was striding along the beach, out of the hot bristling sunlight into the shadow of the pines and then out into the heat of the sun again.

  ‘Heidi,’ he kept saying to himself. ‘Heidi.’ His echoless voice was arid with despair. The white stretch of sand in front of him was as flat and lifeless as the salt flats he had seen in the evening sun. ‘Heidi – Heidi – Oh! God, Heidi, where can I find you?’

  The First Day of Christmas

  On the morning of Christmas Eve a thin freezing rain, with sharp needles of sleet in it, cut down on the bare bald head of Archie Burgess as he turned into a pub called The Vine and then went downstairs to The Hole in the Ground, the bar in the cellar, to order himself a milk stout and wait, hopefully, for his friend Flo Greene.

  He and Flo always met in the bar at midday on Tuesdays and Fridays and in the evenings on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but although today was Friday and Christmas Eve Archie found himself in increasingly pessimistic mood about Flo. On Wednesday evening he and Flo had got themselves involved in one of those stupid, pointless tiffs that arise from nothing and then without reason grow dark and bleak. The result was that Flo had flung her way out of the bar, head high, without a word of good night.

  Charitably Archie put it all down to Flo’s cold or perhaps to the pressures of Christmas. Her head was completely stuffed up with cold, her nose streaming and her eyes running with moisture. With a cold like that, even at Christmastime, it was only natural for a woman to be short-tempered. Today, he told himself, he would try to make up for it all by asking Flo to marry him, but only if her cold was better. It wouldn’t be right to propose to a woman, even on Christmas Eve, when she had a streaming nose and possibly a temperature.

  The cellar, though dark and full of cobwebs, was snug. Fairy lights in scarlet, emerald, blue, pink and gold were hung about the ceiling. Sawdust covered the floor and bright red candles burned in black greasy bottles. The only window was covered by an iron grill at street level and through this the feet of passers-by could be seen, hurrying like lost, aimless pygmies along the pavement outside.

  The only other customers in the bar were three men Archie didn’t know very well: a thin whippet-faced fast-talking man in a black cap named Fred Dilbey, a pink dumpling of a man with a boiled nose nicknamed Pokey and a silent figure swathed in an old army overcoat three sizes too large for him and a thick khaki scarf wrapped so closely round his head that only a pair of grey, washed-out furtive eyes could be seen peering out of it. The three men were talking of Christmasses long ago.

  Fred Dilbey did most of the talking while the others sometimes said ‘Ah’ or ‘S’right’ or merely listened. Archie sat apart, staring into the dark depths of his milk stout.

  ‘All the bleedin’ beer,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘tastes the bleedin’ same.’

  ‘That does.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m bleedin’ tellin’ you it tastes the bleedin’ same. Even at Christmas time.’

  ‘It do.’

  ‘The same wi’ the bleedin’ bread. That all tastes the same. Else it don’t taste o’ nothink.’

  ‘S’right. It don’t taste o’ nothink.’

  ‘It’s my turn,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘Drink up. Two more bitters, and a whiskey, matey. After all, it’s Christmas. How’s your old woman, Pokey?’

  Pokey stirred himself from the depths of a mild whisky coma to declare that his old woman was about like the beer. About the bleedin’ same.

  Coarse laughter came from Fred Dilbey, who said that’s how women were. They was all as bad as one another, the old faggots.

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘Half the bleeders dressed like men, the other half like tarts and the rest a lot o’ naggin’ bitches.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t you miss your old woman, Fred, then?’

  Fred said he bleedin’ didn’t. Even at Christmas. He’d got peace now. Thirty years listening to the same nag, the same jaw, and now he’d got peace. She never could cook neither. You couldn’t trust her to cook a suet dumpling, let alone a Christmas dinner, without the bleeder turned out like a bleedin’ fossil.

  Archie Burgess stared from his milk stout to the grill beyond the window, earnestly hoping to see the feet of Flo Greene among the passing black pygmies of Christmas shoppers. There was no doubt, in his view, that Fred Dilbey had got it all wrong. Women weren’t the same, in his view, even if the beer was. Flo was very, very different. When he looked into Flo’s odd, thin little face, he was transported. He felt slightly light in the head.

  ‘I got my own Christmas dinner on now,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘Anyways the Christmas pudden. Tomorrow I’ll have a baked rabbit with swede turnips and mashed taters. Fit for a queen.’

  From the depths of his overcoat the figure in the khaki scarf grunted and said he was damned if that didn’t make him feel hungry. It sounded middlin’ half-tidy, Fred’s Christmas dinner did.

  ‘You betcher bleedin’ life,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘It’s better’n what no woman could do, I tell you that. That thick gravy, that’s how I like it, She never got it thicker ‘n bleedin’ hog’s wash.’

  Archie Burgess stared at the grill. Larger blobs of sleet were falling now in the darkening midday air and he was oppressed by a cold, sinking feeling that Flo wasn’t coming.

  ‘By the way, Pokey, you bin about a few minutes. You remember a girl named Rosie Godden? Come from the marsh. Married Stony Thomas, the baker.’

  Pokey said he remembered. By God, he did. For the first time he actually laughed and in such a way that his mouth seemed to water.

  ‘Now there,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘you got a woman who was a woman. Like a prize heifer. I’d like to have her in my Christmas stocking I tell you.’

  You were telling him alright, Pokey said. He could see her now. Chest on her like a bushel of apples.

  ‘They used to say it was all free, too,’ Fred Dilbey said and he too started laughing. ‘That mean old bastard, Stony, by God he never knowed it was going on under his bleedin’ nose –’

  ‘Got his ruddy eyes bunged up with flour,’ Pokey said. The third whisky was beginning to talk a little now and he actually laughed, fruitily, for the second time. ‘While he was baking at night she was –’

  ‘You know what?’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘I’ll tell you summat –’

  ‘Drink up,’ Pokey said. ‘I’ll get us all another. I’m just beginning to feel the benefit.’

  In the bar the air was now so gloomy that the barman after drawing two more beers and pouring another
whisky, lit two more red candles and placed them on the bar. The whole world seemed suddenly much brighter.

  ‘Lead kindly light,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘How the bleedin’ hell should we know? You never said it.’

  This time Pokey and Fred actually laughed together, in coughing alcoholic chorus, while Archie Burgess took slow cold sips from his milk stout and stared at dark feet passing in the falling snow. Every moment there seemed, he thought, to be more and more snow and fewer and fewer feet.

  ‘It was about these sovereigns,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘Ten gallon of ’em. Gold.’

  ‘Ten gallon? How much is ten gallon? I mean what was they worth?’

  ‘I mean they was all in gallon measures. Like you put apples in. She found ’em in an old flour trough in the bakehouse after he was dead. All locked up.’

  ‘Saved ’em all up for Christmas every year, I’ll bet.’

  Archie stared into his diminishing milk stout, wondering if to order another, and thought with increasing melancholy of Flo. Flo wasn’t pretty: he knew that. Nor was she exactly young any more. Nor was there much flesh on her. In fact you could even call her skinny. But whenever he saw her thin sallow face coming along the street or into the bar he was unbearably touched by the small bright black eyes and the thin fragile lips that curved exactly like the petals of a rose.

  ‘With a woman like that and a pint o’ beer that tasted like beer and a piece o’ bread that tasted like bread,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘you could have a Christmas that was a Christmas. What more could you want?’

  ‘Only a few golden sovereigns,’ Pokey said and laughed again.

  While Fred and Pokey guffawed into their glasses Archie got up, went to the bar and ordered himself another milk stout. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask the barman if he’d seen anything of Flo that morning but he finally decided against it and the barman, looking out at the increasingly larger flakes of snow, said he thought it was settling in for a real white Christmas. Archie said he thought so too and took his milk stout and went back to sit on his chosen barrel.