by H. E. Bates
‘Ten gallon. That’s a hell of a lot of sovereigns,’ Pokey said. ‘She was what you might call a good catch.’
‘She had some made into earrings,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘A pair on each side.’
Archie was not only unbearably moved by the sight of Flo. He longed desperately that she should replace a wife that had been able to cook a good hot beef stew, bake a carraway cake and even make almond toffee at week-ends. He even dared to think, with something like passion, of one day kissing Flo and perhaps, eventually, of sharing a bed with her. His heart was filled with a small slow ache when he thought of it all.
‘I can see her now,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘of a summer evening, sitting outside The Green Man at Market Broughton. Chest like a bushel o’ ripe apples, like you said, and the sovereigns bobbin’ up and down in her ears like gold cherries. God, I tell you – drink up, Pokey, I’ll buy you another bleedin’ whisky. Damn it, it’s Christmas!’
Laughing again, Fred Dilbey got up to order more of the beer that didn’t taste of anything and two more whiskies. You’d got to keep the weather out somehow, he said to the barman and with a trembling hand poured one of the whiskies into his beer.
‘She’d got a laugh on her like a bell,’ he said. The beer and the whisky had begun to talk together now. An aura positively rosy, as if from the light of a good fire, hung about the cellar. ‘You could have heard her in the next parish.’
Archie stared from the milk stout to the diminishing numbers of passing feet. In the short intervals between the voices of Fred and Pokey he could fairly hear the deadly silence of the darkening Christmas Eve. Flo, he told himself, would never turn out in this weather. It would be crazy with her cold.
‘I saw her once in a purple dress,’ Fred Dilbey said, ‘and with three sovereigns in each ear. She looked like the bleedin’ Bank of England.’
Archie was moved by this last sentence to think again of Flo. Her ears, far from looking like the Bank of England, were very small. They seemed to be no bigger, he often thought, than snails. They were extraordinarily white and might have been made of china. You saw them best when she took her hat off. Suddenly it was almost as if she might have been undressing. The small unexpectedly naked ears gave him the same inexpressible sensation.
Loudly Fred Dilbey proclaimed that Rosie Godden was a woman in a million. They didn’t come like her any more, with chests like that and golden sovereigns in their ears. Nowadays, like the bleedin’ beer, they all tasted the same.
‘How often do you have a taste?’ Pokey said.
‘I’d rather,’ Fred said, ‘have a good rabbit dinner.’
Suddenly Archie wondered if he shouldn’t buy a quarter bottle of whisky and take it round, as a sort of Christmas peace-offering, to Flo. It would do her cold good if she took it with hot lemon. Or perhaps port would be better. For some five minutes he debated with himself on this and then regretfully decided against it. She might think he was trying to bribe her back, sort of.
‘Well, it’s gone one o’clock,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘I got to see how my Christmas pudden’s cooking –’
‘Is she still alive?’ Pokey said.
‘Oh! dead,’ Fred Dilbey said. ‘Dead.’
The word fell on Archie’s ears like a sepulchral knell. At the same moment a pair of feet, a woman’s, in small black shoes, paused beyond the grill, on the pavement outside. Briefly Archie stared at them, saw them as belonging to Flo and then watched them move out of sight.
It was suddenly as if by some miracle Flo had turned up after all and as suddenly and completely moved out of his life. He found himself struggling with the unbearable conviction that she was out there on the pavement, in the snow, vanishing for ever. The ache produced by this became abruptly so large that it expanded into pain. He picked up his milk stout to finish it off, suddenly felt sick and set it down again.
‘Well, I bid you all good morning,’ Fred Dilbey said, voice husky, narrow legs as unsteady as a foal’s as he rose to depart. ‘All good morning.’
‘Morning, Fred,’ Pokey said. ‘Don’t do nothing we wouldn’t do.’
‘Some folks talk a lot.’ Fred Dilbey looked with a lugubrious watery eye at Archie Burgess, staring down at his milk stout. ‘I said all good morning. All.’
Archie, neither listening nor speaking, found himself suddenly gripped by the conviction that if he didn’t move quickly it would be too late. Flo would be gone for keeps.
He started to hurry from the bar, up the stairs and into the street, leaving his milk stout unfinished on its barrel in the candlelight.
Then as he reached the top of the stairs he changed his mind again, half ran back to the bar and said to the barman:
‘Give me half a bottle of port. How much? No, better make it a bottle.’
His hands were trembling as he picked up the bottle and went back up the stairs. Out in the street snow was slicing the dark air with thick fast flakes. There was no sign of Flo. Nor was there any sign, anywhere, of women with golden sovereigns in their ears.
The Black Magnolia
Hartley Wilkinson Spencer was a bachelor of nearly fifty. If he had been a stick of rock the word ‘Good’ would have been printed clean down the entire centre of him.
He was in fact not at all unlike a stick of rock: face brightest pink, body slim and erect, prematurely white hair thick, handsome, strongly curled, his general air wholesome, saintly, virtuous to a point of sugariness, splendidly pure.
On Sunday morning he read lessons in Chapel; on Sunday afternoons he delivered homilies both stern and brotherly to Bible Classes; on frequent week nights he read papers to various gatherings on such illuminating subjects as The Place of God in the Welfare State, Prison Reform and To Hang or Not to Hang? By day he worked with an acumen not far short of cunning at the book-binding business left him by his father. Everywhere, continually, he toiled massively for charities, rallies, good causes. With almost patriarchal dedication he presided on committees of every possible kind. He was a magistrate and a Justice of the Peace. And since the Ten Commandments were not quite ample enough to satisfy his pious appetite he had invented several more, including ‘after all, business is business’, ‘thou shalt not cheat or at least be observed to be cheating’ and ‘the greatest good for the greatest number – the number being Number One’.
Two or three days a week he went to London by train: not always the same train, but sometimes as early as eight-thirty in the morning, sometimes as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. Always the clean, upright figure with the handsome white hair had a look of saintliness, almost that of a prophet, incredibly pure and strong as it stood out above the weaker mortal flesh of the rest of the world.
Late one April he found himself the victim of three extraordinary coincidences. On the London train he saw the same woman, age about forty-five, at three different times of day: once on a train at nine-thirty in the morning, then at midday, and the third time at four o’clock in the afternoon.
On two of these occasions she was wearing the same attire and it was perhaps because her complete outfit was in the shade of the most brilliant acid green, a colour so many people regarded as unlucky, that his attention was first drawn to her. Over her bright green dress she wore a coat of the same colour trimmed at the collar and cuffs with light black fur; her small round hat, which she wore pushed well back from her face, was also of black fur; her gloves and shoes too were black; round her neck she wore a necklace of rather large beads of an even brighter green than her coat and dress, with earrings to match in the shape of a star.
On the first two occasions he merely saw her on the station platform, waiting for the train. On the third occasion he had a sudden conviction that she deliberately got into the same carriage with him, though at the time he couldn’t think why. Another striking thing about her that afternoon was that she was carrying a large bouquet of flowers, among them narcissi, tulips, sprays of red flowering currant, pink and white camellias and a few branches of pure mooncream magnoli
a.
After she had laid the bouquet on the seat beside her she put on a pair of tinted horn-rimmed glasses and started to read a book: or rather, as he presently discovered, merely to look at it. For twenty or thirty seconds she would stare at a page and then rapidly flick over another dozen or more pages and then stare at another.
All this went on for a quarter of an hour or so before she suddenly took off the glasses, laid them with the book on the seat, leaned forward and said:
‘It is Mr Hartley Spencer isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope you’ll forgive my introducing myself.’ She suddenly smiled with a look of deliberate enchantment, her large brown eyes restless and bright. ‘I’m Vanessa La Farge. I’ve just taken over Waterfield Court. You probably know it?’
‘Of course. But oddly enough I’ve never been there. It always looks immensely attractive from the road.’
‘The reason I spoke to you is because I’m told you’re the great one for charities. Raising funds and things.’
‘Well, one tries one’s best.’
‘I think that’s over-modest. I heard you raised a thousand and something for the Turkish earthquake thing.’
‘I fancy it was nearly fifteen hundred by the time we’d finished. I forget the final figure.’
She made an expansive gesture with her left hand, saying it was marvellous anyway. Her wedding ring flashed and for some reason it eased the slight tension he had experienced ever since she had joined him in the carriage. To be alone with a woman invariably made him taut and defensive and moreover there were undoubted dangers to be associated with travelling alone with a strange woman on a train. You never knew.
‘It’s rather warm in here, don’t you think?’ she suddenly said and got up and slipped off her coat, at the same time slightly pushing back the neck of her dress. This gesture served not only to bring back his feeling of tension but to make it rather worse. ‘Not that one should complain after the wretched April we’ve had.’
‘I know. Rain almost every day.’
‘What I was going to ask you was this – do you think I might talk you into helping me with a big charity thing on June the first? Well, not exactly charity – it’s for the Florence Art disaster thing.’
‘June the first?’ Hartley Spencer, with prompt efficiency, took out his pocket diary and looked up the date. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve an important business lunch in Nottingham that day.’
‘Then let’s make it the second. I know a man like you must be absolutely inundated with requests and all that.’
‘Yes, the second, I could do the second.’
‘How marvellously nice of you. I think we should do something for art for a change, don’t you? It shouldn’t always be for people. Do you know Florence?’
No, Hartley Spencer said, he didn’t know Florence. Nor, though he refrained from saying so, did he quite agree with her about art and people. Pictures and that sort of thing were not much in his line.
‘I lived for a time in Florence,’ she said. ‘Well, rather just outside it. I got to know the Tuscan countryside. It’s very real to me.’
As the train slightly changed its course the afternoon sunlight poured with increased warmth and brilliance into the carriage, suddenly drawing out the honey breath of tulips and the sharper fragrance of narcissi.
‘The spring there was lovely. Not like ours of course, but warmer, beautiful –’
‘What exactly, if I may ask, did you want me to do?’
‘Well, I’m open to any suggestions. One thing I’m going to do is to charge five shillings as an entrance fee and for that you get free sherry. Not just a measly glass, but a good whack. I find people don’t start spending until you’ve got them steamed up a bit.’
‘H’m.’
With this half-stifled syllable Hartley Spencer withheld his opinion on the powers of sherry to induce heavier spending. In his work for charities he had found no need for alcohol.
‘There’ll be a plant and flower stall. Would you care to run that?’
Hartley Spencer confessed that he wasn’t a great one on flowers. It wasn’t that they left him cold exactly – he just didn’t know half of them from another. A little bemused, he looked at her bouquet. For instance he hardly knew if the pink branches were apple-blossom or not. He knew the tulips of course, but he hadn’t the remotest idea what the big creamy-white thing was.
‘Oh! surely you know magnolia.’
‘I have to plead ignorance I’m afraid.’
Hartley Spencer said this not in fact as if he were ignorant but as if the pretence of ignorance made him superior.
‘They’re in their full glory now, the magnolias,’ she said. ‘They must have been planted twenty-five or thirty years ago and they’ve got to be really big trees, most of them. Especially the black one.’
‘I beg your pardon? The what one?’
‘The black one.’
Hartley Spencer smiled with saint-like indulgence.
‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a black flower.’
‘Well, you’ve heard of one now.’
‘Once when I was a boy my father took me to a friend’s garden and showed me a green rose but I always had a sneaking impression that it was dyed. Is yours dyed?’
Vanessa La Farge suddenly felt herself sharply annoyed by this remark.
‘I’m sorry you doubt my word.’
‘Oh! I don’t exactly doubt your word. But you must admit it does sound a bit like a fairy tale.’
‘I’m not in the habit of telling fairy tales.’
For a minute or more the air in the carriage grew icy. Mrs La Farge put on her tinted spectacles and in silence stared at her book.
At last Hartley Spencer, now smiling in a way that was on the verge of being supercilious, said:
‘Perhaps you look at it through your dark spectacles.’
Mrs La Farge, now keeping her temper with difficulty, answered this by saying:
‘It’s name is Soulangeana nigra and nigra, in my dictionary, means black.’
‘I suppose it does. I was never very good at Latin.’
After this remark, which she didn’t bother to answer, a great cold gap opened up between them. For a prolonged silent period, during which the outer suburbs of South London began to show up beyond the carriage windows, Mrs La Farge simply looked at her book with a blank, restrained stare.
Soon, as the train began to run into the inner suburbs, Hartley Spencer felt the need to break the ice of the long, embarrassing silence and at last said:
‘We didn’t finish talking about your charity affair.’
‘Oh? I thought we did.’
‘Well, anyway, what can I do to help?’
‘Nothing, thank you.’
The only other words they exchanged that afternoon were a flat ‘Good day’ from her, which he answered with an excessively stiff ‘Good-bye’.
With the large bouquet of flowers lying across one arm Mrs La Farge finally floated caustically, rather than walked, from the train.
Following her down the platform, Hartley Spencer suddenly found himself staring at her disappearing legs. As he did so a curious guilty spasm shot through him and suddenly even he, inexperienced as he was in the shape of the female body, was startled into a realization that they were very beautiful.
A moment later he swiftly averted his eyes and turned his thoughts to more important things.
The meeting with Vanessa La Farge on the train had on Hartley Spencer much of the effect often experienced by boys when kissed, for the first time, by a girl at a party or in a meadow on the way home from school. As adolescence is rapturously, painfully shattered by such experiences Hartley Spencer was mentally disrupted in middle age.
It was typical of him that he suffered this unexpected turmoil with a nagging conscience that imposed a degree of pain. For some days he found himself afflicted with a mental need to make amends for all he had said in the railway carriage. From his d
eep well of inherent goodness rose a positive hunger to apologize.
At first he felt he should do this by means of a letter. Then he considered, and rejected, the idea of the telephone. Neither, though clearly less painful than meeting Vanessa La Farge face to face, would really satisfy the demands of a conscience so wholesome and strong. He realized, eventually, that there was nothing for it but to meet her, express his infinite regret and hope to be forgiven. It was altogether not unlike a schoolboy going to a headmaster to confess some grave misdeed.
On a warm evening in early May Hartley Spencer parked his car in a gateway a quarter of a mile from Mrs La Farge’s rather large Georgian house set in a park-like landscape illuminated with many enormous flowering chestnuts, both pink and white, along the banks of a stream. It seemed to him that a walk for the rest of the way to the house was the best and only possible means of calming his embarrassed, even tortured thoughts.
When he at last arrived in the garden it was to find a further series of embarrassments awaiting him. He was first of all caught completely unawares by meeting Vanessa La Farge face to face on the terrace of the house, where she was sitting with a friend. The uncomfortable fact of finding her not alone was further complicated by the fact that the friend was another woman, quite as strikingly attractive as Mrs La Farge herself but at least ten years younger. The entire purpose of his visit now seemed to lie shattered at his feet and he realized with further acute pain that he could no longer apologize. He stood on the terrace hopelessly flustered and frustrated.
By contrast Vanessa La Farge was cool, friendly and serene. The incident of the railway carriage might never have happened.
‘What a nice surprise, Mr Spencer.’
‘I was just passing – I hope it isn’t too awkward a moment –’
‘Absolutely not. In fact we were just talking about you. May I introduce Miss O’Connor? Kitty O’Connor – Mr Hartley Spencer.’