by H. E. Bates
Hartley Spencer now found himself gazing into a pair of dark eyes that had on them a bloom like that of grapes. Their returning liquid, misty stare had not only a certain mysterious quality that was also mischievously impish but succeeded in creating yet another embarrassment even more acute than Mrs Vanessa La Farge’s remark that the two women had been talking about him. He had no idea what to say except ‘Good evening’, at the same time ruffling a flustered hand through his hair.
‘Kitty’s Irish. From Limerick. She’s helping me with the charity thing. But you know what the Irish are. Quite impractical. You can never pin them down.’
Kitty O’Connor laughed at this with bell-like glee, her voice fresh as a mountain stream.
‘You’ll stay for a drink?’ Vanessa La Farge said. ‘Sit down while I go and organize something. Talk to Kitty.’
Vanessa La Farge went into the house. Hartley Spencer sat down in the bamboo garden chair she had left and looked obligingly for some twenty seconds or so at Kitty O’Connor, who was wearing a striking pink linen dress in colour not unlike that of the pink chestnuts. Now and then she caught his uneasy eyes with an impish flash of her own, as if trying to tease him into opening the conversation.
At last he said:
‘Were you really talking about me? I’m afraid you couldn’t have given me a good report if you were. I fear I’m in bad books.’
‘Oh? I didn’t get that impression at all.’
Kitty O’Connor’s dreamy Irish accent, liquid as her eyes, seemed to hang on the warm May air.
‘I’m afraid I doubted her word about a tree she has in the garden. A black magnolia.’
‘She was telling me that.’
‘I looked it up in a book on shrubs. Of course it is nigra. Meaning black.’
‘It’s more a purple shade. A dark sort of plum. I think she calls it black just to tease people. She’s the great teaser sometimes.’
Kitty O’Connor laughed again, her voice beautifully gay and clear, and Hartley Spencer half got the impression that she might almost have been laughing at him. He was unused to gaiety.
‘I never take her too seriously,’ Kitty O’Connor said. ‘There’s a little of the Irish in her too.’
A still slightly embarrassed Hartley Spencer suddenly said that the garden was very beautiful.
‘She does a lot of it herself. It keeps her occupied now that Edward’s away.’
Hartley Spencer presumed she meant Mr La Farge?
‘International lawyer, shipping mostly. Goes away on big tricky lawsuits for ages and ages, in the name o’ God.’
Hartley Spencer, unused to hearing the name of God taken in vain, sat further embarrassed and was intensely glad to see Vanessa La Farge, a moment later, appearing with a tray of drinks and glasses. It relieved him to get up and rush to help her dutifully with the tray.
‘Now, what shall it be? Gin, whisky, sherry or what? Kitty?’
‘A load of gin with a touch of French, dear. I’ve a craving thirst.’
‘Ice?’
‘Lots of ice. A glacier of ice.’
Ice tinkled into Kitty O’Connor’s glass with a sound not unlike the echo of her high laughter.
‘And you, Mr Spencer?’
‘Oh! nothing for me, thank you, not for me.’
‘Nothing!’
‘Well, just plain bitter lemon if you have plain bitter lemon.’
‘Damn, I didn’t bring it.’
‘I’ll go,’ Kitty O’Connor said. ‘I need some cigarettes anyway. Just bitter lemon? Is that all?’
Just plain bitter lemon, Hartley Spencer said, still further embarrassed to be a bother.
Alone with him, Vanessa La Farge poured herself a handsome gin-and-tonic and remarked, coolly, that it was nice of him to have dropped in, surprised though she was to see him.
‘I felt I had to say that I was sorry for what I said on the train.’
‘Oh! nonsense. I never gave it another thought.’
‘Really? Still, I am sorry.’
‘Oh! life’s too short for these things.’
‘Is the magnolia still in bloom? Miss O’Connor says it’s more purple than black.’
‘It’s still out. We’ll go and see it when we’ve had a drink or two. I’ve been gardening all afternoon. We’re making a new water garden. I need a stiffener or two. Don’t you ever?’
‘Never.’
On Kitty O’Connor’s return with the bitter lemon she and Vannessa La Farge had a number of generous stiffeners, at the same time contributing a good deal of laughter to the evening air.
Now and then they also discussed the charity affair.
‘What we need is some good, original ideas,’ Vanessa La Farge said. ‘What about it, Mr Spencer?’
Hartley Spencer suggested he organize a raffle or perhaps guessing the weight of a sack of apples. He had once done that with great success. Peals of laughter greeted these exciting suggestions and Vanessa La Farge said:
‘What about Kitty giving kisses at a guinea a time? That’s an idea.’
‘Two guineas for a bang on the lips. I’m game.’
Hartley Spencer’s attempt to join in the laughter that greeted this left him with a mere wry smile.
‘All right, kisses it is then, in the name o’ God,’ Kitty O’Connor said. Her merriment, inspired by further glaciers of gin, was increasing every moment. ‘Shall I be putting you down for five guineas’ worth, Mr Spencer?’
Hartley Spencer could only receive the offer with a second thin wry smile.
‘No, no, I’m serious about this. The Forbes-Walters had a film star down to do it at their garden party a couple of years ago and they cooked up a hundred and fifty quid. They even had a character who offered fifty quid for more interesting privileges.’
‘My God,’ Kitty O’Connor said. ‘Spare me.’
‘Many a girl,’ Vanessa La Farge said, ‘would do it voluntarily and for nothing.’
Hartley Spencer could only sip in silence at his bitter lemon.
At last Vanessa La Farge said it was time to walk down to see the black magnolia before darkness fell and, if Mr Spencer would like it, the new water garden. She was really rather pleased with the way the new water garden was shaping up.
‘Coming, Kitty?’
‘I’ve seen it. You two go.’
An intoxicating scent of lilacs filled the air down the path to the water garden. Completely lost on Hartley Spencer it nevertheless woke in Vanessa La Farge expressions of rapture almost sensuous.
‘It always reminds me of Vienna and Mozart and Schubert and all that. The scent starts making the most marvellous pictures for me.’
This too was lost on Hartley Spencer, who said:
‘Pictures? I don’t understand.’
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘it’s a sort of teleprinter thing in the brain. The brain photographs the scent and records it as a picture. Years after, ages after, there comes a moment when you smell the same perfume again and the brain responds with the picture.’
Hartley Spencer walked unresponsively past a huge white lilac, its heavy double trusses of flower like milky drooping breasts. She might have been talking Greek to him.
‘Haven’t you ever had that experience? Doesn’t it ever strike you as a miraculous thing?’
In a flat voice Hartley Spencer confessed he had never had that experience.
‘Perhaps I’m hypersensitive in these matters,’ she said. ‘Violets do terrific things to me. And honeysuckle. Honeysuckle’s a positive torture.’
Hartley Spencer, to whom it had never even remotely occurred that flowers and their fragrance had the power to affect emotions, let alone to torture, was trying to frame some answer to all this when she said:
‘You’ll never guess what does things to Kitty. We were talking about it the other day.’
‘I suppose the peat bogs of Ireland or something.’
‘Grass. Not hay. But grass – just grass bruised by people walking on it. You know that ju
icy aroma? She says it sends her wild.’
Like a man thrown suddenly with neither direction nor compass into a territory utterly strange and unexplored Hartley Spencer walked on in a silent daze, until at last aroused by her simple statement:
‘Well, there it is.’
She halted before the black magnolia. Its petals, in the lowering evening sun, had the same dark bloom, pink-black, seen sometimes on Indian skins.
‘I know it isn’t truly black,’ she said. ‘But there it is.’
Some instinct prompted Hartley Spencer to bend forward, take one of the dark magnolia flowers in his hand and hold it to his face. The heavy chalice of petals was quite without perfume.
‘Oh! there’s no scent. And actually this dark one isn’t a favourite of mine. I much prefer the pure white one.’
‘Once again,’ Hartley Spencer said, releasing the big magnolia flower, ‘I do apologize.’
‘Oh! do stop apologizing, Mr Spencer.’
‘I’m sorry. But things like that always make me uneasy.’
‘I’ve already told you – life’s too short for these things.’
They walked on to the water garden. Pausing now and then, she explained her intentions. Already part of the stream had been damned, creating a series of waterfalls. The sound of water spilling over shallow walls of rock fell like light music on the summer air. There were also to be a series of tributaries in turn passing into pools, in turn to be filled with water lilies, water arums and water grasses.
Sometimes as she explained all this she stood framed against the lowering sun, arms upstretched in such a way that the taut curve of her breast and the smooth spoon of her back were silhouettes of olive green. The breathless air by the stream had in it a quality of suspense that was magical. The sound of falling water was a rain of silver scales.
In such an atmosphere another man might have been driven, even a little tortured, to express an excited delight in being alone in the presence of a woman of singular attraction. Hartley Spencer merely said, with solemnity:
‘And will you have fish?’
God, I must tell Kitty this, she thought.
‘They tell me you have to put in molluscs, fresh water mussels, to oxygenate the water. Do you?’
‘I’m sure you do.’
As they began to walk back a nightingale began singing high up in a row of silver poplars beyond the stream, but the entrancement of this, as with the lilacs, her own attraction and the music of falling water, was also utterly lost on him. Nor did he even remotely sense that she was teasing him with the coolest deliberation when she said:
‘And what did you think of Kitty’s idea of selling kisses at a price?’
‘Did she mean in public?’
‘Oh! gracious, no. We’d have a tent or something. There has to be a little mystery.’
‘H’m. Do you approve?’
‘Certainly. I’d sell a few guineas’ worth myself. After all what’s better than being kissed in a good cause?’
For some long time after Hartley Spencer had left the two women sat on the terrace of the house, drinking glasses of cool white Alsatian wine. Now and then Kitty O’Connor’s mischievous laughter floated, very like scales of rippling water, into the darkening summer air.
‘Nobody,’ she said once, ‘can be that good. No one man can have that amount of goodness in him. It isn’t human. Even virgins have some vices.’
‘I’ve a deep suspicion that virginity is more painful in the male.’
‘Really? And would you care to try to remove it?’
‘Well, God knows he’s handsome enough. You can’t deny he’s handsome. You try. I fancy it might be like eating raw fish.’
‘Please.’
After this exchange they again laughed a good deal, until at last Vanessa La Farge, pouring the last of the white wine, said:
‘What about a little more of this? Another bottle? Good idea?’
‘Heavenly idea. After all we’ve got to comfort our poor starved female souls with something.’ Again Kitty O’Connor suddenly laughed with impish delight. ‘No, what he clearly needs are the attentions of a wanton woman.’
‘Are you, by any chance, looking at me?’
‘Not necessarily.’ Once again Kitty O’Connor lifted the music of her voice high into the dark summer air. ‘I was once not unwanton myself.’
The thin grey alpaca suit that Hartley Spencer was wearing on the following Thursday evening gave him a slightly clerical air. The day had been one of windless serenity.
A maid at Waterfield Court told him that Mrs La Farge was down at the swimming pool. He took this to mean that the pool was somewhere by the water gardens but the maid said ‘Oh! no sir, it’s the other way. On the west side of the house,’ and at the same time gave his handsome face a covetous sideways glance of her dark young eyes that quite unnerved him.
He was still recovering from this when he found Vanessa La Farge by the pool, a circular one painted thrush egg blue, with a pleasant colonnaded bath-house at one end. Mrs La Farge was alone and if the covetous, slightly saucy glance of her maid had unnerved him the sight of a naked body whose only covering consisted of three modest black triangles actually brought a flush to his cheeks and a sudden prickle of cold sweat to the nape of his neck.
She was lying on her back in front of the bath-house, in full sun, on a white foam rubber bed. Her skin was the colour of honey. Her navel might have been a soft dark bee. Undressed, she looked younger than he had always supposed her to be and in a confused effort not to look at the more intimate parts of her body he hastily turned his attention to her feet. The toe nails, to his even greater confusion, were painted a singular orange carmine.
‘Oh! how nice to see you, Mr Spencer. Did you bring your swim trunks? Kitty isn’t here I’m afraid. She’s gone into town to get the evening papers. Still, all the luckier for me.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t know you had a pool.’
‘Oh! we can lend you trunks. I’ll telephone up to the house. The maid will bring them down.’
‘Oh! no, no, please. I really mustn’t stay that long.’
‘But you must stay for Kitty. She’ll be desperately disappointed if she misses you.’
During this conversation she sat up. Her altered position now caused the upper triangles of her costume to slip a little, revealing the outer and upper edges of a pair of fine taut breasts. His acute embarrassment at this became acuter still as she suddenly lifted both arms to her hair, smoothing it down with both hands and at the same time revealing the dark shadows of her armpits.
‘Wouldn’t you like a drink? There’s everything in the bath-house. We always run a bar down here. Do help yourself. And if you’d like to be a darling pour me a gin-and-tonic. A nice large one, with plenty of ice.’
She too gave him a winning smile beside which the covetous smile of the maid seemed quite innocuous, so much so that as he poured out drinks in the bath-house he found himself actually trembling.
‘Thanks. You’re a darling.’ She took her drink from him, curled her legs gracefully and sat on them, looking him full in the face. ‘Haven’t you got one yourself?’
‘No, thanks. I had rather a late tea.’
‘Well, cheers anyway. Perhaps you’ll have one when Kitty comes.’
There seemed to be nothing he could say to this and for fully another half minute he sat silent, trying desperately to avoid the trap of eyes, breasts, navel, painted toe nails and the provocative curve of her thighs.
‘Oh! speaking of Kitty – don’t let on that I said so, but you’ve made quite a conquest there.’
He sat on the edge of the pool completely dumbfounded, able to mutter no more than ‘I – I really – a what?’ at the same time slightly blushing.
‘Oh! don’t underestimate yourself. Don’t be modest, Mr Spencer.’
‘I’m afraid you must have misinterpreted –’
‘Not on your life. What do you think my eyes are for?’
‘I hardly k
now what to – I wouldn’t want to give Miss O’Connor any wrong impression.’
Vanessa La Farge immediately gave a deliberately provocative laugh that filled him with vastly increased discomfort and then said:
‘Don’t you think she’s marvellously pretty?’
‘Oh! I suppose she is attractive.’
‘Suppose! She’s a beauty. You wait till you see her in a swim suit.’
The brief and sensational nature of one swim suit having reduced him to a state of near nervous panic Hartley Spencer found himself secretly and inwardly running from the experience of another with something like the terror of a man being pursued by a hostile dog.
‘Won’t you really have a swim? I’m sure Kitty will when she comes. The pool’s heated, by the way. We’ve been swimming quite late at night. Great fun. In the dark one feels quite – well, you know, uninhibited.’
He could only guess at what this meant and at the same time profoundly hope it wasn’t true.
‘Anyway, what new ideas have you come up with for the fête? I’ll bet you’ve had some splendid ones.’
Hartley Spencer gave a difficult sort of cough and now found himself facing yet another moment of acute embarrassment.
‘Well, actually that’s what I came to talk about. I’m afraid I shan’t be available to help after all.’
‘Oh! Mr Spencer, you can’t do that to us!’
‘I’m most awfully sorry, but I now find I have to be in Manchester and Salford on that day and for the following two days. I really do apologize –’
‘Mr Spencer, Mr Spencer. How could you?’
Hartley Spencer sat in misery, conscience-stricken, incapable of saying a word.
‘We were absolutely relying on you. You’ve got such a reputation for these things.’
‘I know how – of course I’ll give you a subscription – I – would five guineas? –’
‘Oh! no you don’t. No buying yourself out and taking a discount on Kitty’s kisses. Oh! no.’
‘Please, Mrs La Farge. Don’t make it any worse for me.’
Vanessa La Farge now sat up, body at first straight, knees together, eyes transfixing him liquidly and completely. Then she moved the upper part of her body forward, so that once again her fine expanded breasts seemed about to escape from their black triangular covering.