The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  If there seemed to be a certain contentment arising from self-satisfaction in Georgina’s drooping eye, almost a smugness, Mr Plomley failed to notice it. Instead he embraced Georgina about the neck with both hands, pressing her against his chest as another man might have pressed a girl.

  ‘Now you’ve really got to be made a nice, clean, pretty girl, haven’t you? We’ve really got to doll up today, haven’t we? And what about something special – eh, for lunch? Some of those nice coffee-beans? And a toothful of whisky?’

  Over the years Georgina had developed a decided taste in coffee-beans – they were perhaps the reason, Mr Plomley thought, for the rich and perfect brownness of the eggs – and he in turn, as he took a whisky or two or perhaps even three or four with his lunch, had induced in her a taste for something stronger. Neither of them got exactly drunk at midday but most afternoons they were very comatose and sleepy and often they ended up with a long snooze together.

  ‘I rather think I’m out of coffee-beans. I’ll have to pop across to the shop. Heaven knows what the new people are like – haven’t set eyes on them yet.’

  In the course of the next few minutes Mr Plomley proceeded to wash Georgina’s legs and comb in soapy water, carefully trim her claws with the scissors and clean and brush her feathers with the powder and the baby brush.

  ‘And a very pretty girl, too, aren’t we? A very, very pretty girl. Boy’s very proud of you.’

  On very special occasions, such as this one, Mr Plomley referred to himself as ‘boy’. The word served to bring a new intimacy into their relationship and sometimes, in consequence, his voice seemed almost to curdle with pleasure.

  ‘Boy won’t be long now. Just popping across to the shop. Like to get down and stretch your legs?’ He lifted Georgina off the harmonium with the palm of one hand and let her flap to the parlour floor. ‘And what about something else a little special? Ice cream?’ Georgina had also developed a taste in ice-cream, especially the sort that is frozen in fruit flavours on sticks. ‘Lemon or raspberry? I’ll see what they have.’

  Presently Mr Plomley slipped on a beige alpaca jacket and walked through the garden towards the road, occasionally brushing his moustache with his finger tips and muttering absently to himself in disjoined words. The morning was pleasantly brilliant for early September. The summer had been mostly dry and warm and already from the pine-trees that screened the boundaries of the garden large sere brown cones were falling. Not only did the pines shut out all view of the big red-brick house from the road; Mr Plomley had also made sure that no one if possible ever came near it by studding the cement top of the garden wall with broken bottles and a battle front of thick barbed wire. He had also fixed to the heavy gate a large metal notice which read:

  ALL COMMUNICATIONS TO BE LEFT HERE.

  By contrast the shop across the road, with a garden so small that the solitary laburnum tree shading its ten square yards of grass seemed overpowering, looked accessible and friendly, as village shops so often do.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Nice bright morning. Does your heart good to be alive, eh?’

  Across the shop counter, on which stood what he knew to be a gleaming new bacon slicer, Mr Plomley found himself facing, with surprise, a well-built, comfortably breasted woman of fifty or so wearing an emerald overall, turquoise earrings and a massive crop of orange hair. The burning nature of the hair so startled him that it was some moments before he could say, uneasily and absently:

  ‘Good morning. Yes, I suppose it’s a sort of Indian summer, isn’t it?’

  ‘I love this country air. Never thought I should, but it gets you.’

  Still uneasy, Mr Plomley tried hard to take his gaze away from the inflammable pile behind the bacon-slicer. At the same time it occurred to him that he ought to introduce himself and he said:

  ‘Oh! I’m Plomley – from The Pines, across the way. I always had a monthly account when Mrs Hardstaff was here. I use the shop a lot. I hope that’s all right with you?’

  The orange hair, almost tribally rich and brilliant, seemed to rock from side to side as the woman in the emerald overall twice patted it from the back with a generous hand.

  ‘Oh! anything’s all right with me. Must keep the customers happy.’

  She laughed heavily and moistly. The muscles of her throat rippled like those of a large cat. This fleshy rippling so disquieted Mr Plomley that he said:

  ‘It was awfully sad about Mrs Hardstaff. Going off so suddenly. I see you still haven’t changed the name over the shop.’

  ‘Going to be done tomorrow.’ She laughed again. ‘Not sure what to put up though yet. Can’t decide if it’s to be plain Phoebe Spencer or the Nice ’n Cozy Stores. What do you think?’

  Mr Plomley, after some hesitation, said he thought that undoubtedly plain Phoebe Spencer sounded the more dignified.

  ‘Oh! I don’t care about dignity. I want something bright. Got to get the customers in somehow. If they won’t come willing hit them over the head with a hammer. That’s what Joe used to say.’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘My husband. He got run down by a train last year, working outside Paddington. That’s why—’

  Before she could finish her sentence a sudden wailing whistle shot out with ferocious impact from somewhere behind the shop.

  ‘That’s my kettle. Won’t be a jiff. Just going to make myself a cuppa tea. Have one with me, will you?’

  Mr Plomley had no time to frame any sort of reply before she disappeared through the door behind the counter. The piercing whistle stopped as suddenly as it had begun. A moment or two later she was back behind the counter, saying:

  ‘Didn’t hear you say if you’d have a cuppa or not. No trouble. I’m dying for one.’

  ‘Well, really, no. I don’t think so. Thank you very much all the same.’

  ‘That’s all right. Well, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, coffee-beans for one thing. I think two pounds—’

  ‘Oh! you prefer coffee. I see.’

  ‘No, no. Not really. They’re for Georgina.’

  Phoebe Spencer’s eyes, which were sugary and greenish, like large lumps of candied peel, roved slowly from Mr Plomley to the shelves behind and above her head.

  ‘Think you’ve got me there. In fact I know you have. Haven’t really got sorted out yet. The carpenters didn’t leave till late last night. But I can ring up my wholesalers and get some over by lunch-time.’

  Mr Plomley said it was rather disappointing about the coffee but so long as it arrived some time during the day it didn’t really matter. He’d promised Georgina, that was all.

  ‘Oh! it’ll be over. Slit my throat. Anything else, meantime?’

  ‘I think two lemon splits and a tin of baby powder. If you haven’t got lemon ones raspberry will do. Oh! yes and three packets of popcorn.’

  ‘Nothing like keeping the kids happy,’ Phoebe Spencer said. ‘How many you got?’

  With shyness Mr Plomley confessed that there were no kids. It was all for Georgina.

  ‘Oh! your wife, I see.’

  This time Mr Plomley was too shy both to confess that he had no wife and that Georgina was, in fact, a hen. It had always seemed to him something very nearly approaching sacrilege to disclose Georgina, except by name, to the world at large. He could not bear that her existence might be misunderstood or, worse still, become an affair of ridicule. Consequently they kept themselves very much to themselves.

  ‘Well, no, we’re just friends. We sort of – well, you know – get along together.’

  Phoebe Spencer’s large candied-peel eyes expanded with abrupt and almost lilting surprise. The things that went on in the country! She seemed about to give a juicy sort of whistle. Her fleshy lips actually pursed themselves together for the act and then suddenly opened in a smile of total understanding.

  ‘Bet you have a tiff or two though, sometimes, eh?’ With fresh embarrassment Mr Plomley could have sworn that Phoebe Spencer winked at him. ‘Nice to make up though, I a
lways say.’

  ‘I don’t think Georgina and I have ever had a cross word,’ Mr Plomley said.

  ‘No? That’s nice. Well, there’s the two splits. Both lemon. And the baby powder.’ The baby powder was a bit odd, she thought, wasn’t it? She couldn’t quite fathom the baby powder. ‘And the three bags of popcorn. That all for now?’

  ‘There was something else at the back of my mind.’

  ‘Matches? Cigarettes? Baked beans? Butter? All right for butter? Gone down again.’

  Mr Plomley was about to say that he was all right for butter when he remembered, with a vexed exclamation, what it was he wanted.

  ‘Of course. It’s one of those small pen-fillers I want. Mrs Hardstaff got a couple of dozen in specially for me. Georgina’s always breaking them. She’s inclined to nip the end off when she’s having her whisky.’

  ‘Oh! does she?’

  The inquisitive nature of Phoebe Spencer’s stare died this time from sheer astonishment. The big peel-like eyes were merely blank with defeat.

  ‘I suppose she could have it in some other way,’ Mr Plomley said, ‘but that’s the way she’s always had it. Habit, I suppose.’

  ‘Sounds a bit difficult, your girl friend, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Oh! no, Georgina isn’t difficult. Oh! no, she’s easy. She’s a frightfully clever little thing too. And terribly affectionate. Nobody in the world could be more affectionate.’

  The candour of these disclosures left Phoebe Spencer so bewildered that she had to add up the cost of the splits, the popcorn, the baby powder and the pen-filler three times and was even then not sure she had the total right.

  ‘Seven and ninepence. I think. Well, call it that anyway. Not sure about the pen-filler, that’s all.’

  ‘Mrs Hardstaff always charged a shilling.’ Absently Mr Plomley took a pound note from his pocket and put it on the counter and said, while waiting for his change: ‘You won’t forget about the coffee? You’ll get plenty of coffee in, won’t you? Georgina more or less lives on coffee.’

  Phoebe Spencer said yes, she’d remember the coffee and a moment later leaned across the counter to give Mr Plomley his change. Her deep breasts pressed forward roundly against the neck of the emerald overall. The pillar of orange hair too seemed to press forward and Mr Plomley felt himself instinctively recoiling from a figure altogether too near, too real, too female and too handsome in its own oppressive fleshy way.

  ‘Twelve and three-pence change. Oh! Good God, what a fool I am. I clean forgot – you want it on the slate, don’t you?’

  ‘I completely forgot too,’ Mr Plomley said. The nearness of the flesh was all of a sudden too much for him; the warm odour of Phoebe Spencer actually permeated the air. His thoughts rushed away towards Georgina and as he grabbed up his change he said: ‘I’ll take the change anyway. I’m rather short. I must get back to Georgina now. She likes her walk about this time.’

  He fled towards the door in undisguised and fretful haste. The crackle of the popcorn bags might have been the sound of splintered nerves.

  ‘I’ll ring for the coffee straight away,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll bring it over directly it comes.’

  ‘No, no, please. That’s quite unnecessary. I can fetch it.’

  Mr Plomley dived under the laburnum exactly as if ducking a shower of hostile poison arrows.

  ‘It’s early closing day,’ he heard her call with eager throatiness. ‘It’s no trouble at all.’

  After Mr Plomley had taken Georgina for her morning walk – he always walked quietly and gently behind her, letting her progress entirely at her own pace, simply keeping her from straying by occasional gentle touches of a hazel switch – they sat together for some time in the potting shed at the bottom of the garden, Mr Plomley on an old bag of peat, Georgina on his knee.

  During all this time he felt a continuously strange and insidious disturbance about his encounter with Phoebe Spencer in the shop and now and then he felt a strong compulsion to tell Georgina all about it. The disturbance, he discovered, wasn’t merely a physical one; it wasn’t merely a matter of that vast tribal pyramid of orange hair, the large intrusive breasts, the fleshy voice and the eyes that were so like lumps of candied peel. He was worried that he hadn’t been fair about Georgina. Out of an excessive shyness he had failed to be frank. Now Mrs Spencer clearly believed that Georgina was a girl and as a result he felt that he had, in a sense, let Georgina down.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about it, dear,’ he told her several times. ‘But I just don’t want anybody intruding. That’s the reason. We’re perfectly all right as it is. We don’t want people nosing around.’

  It was precisely for these reasons that Mr Plomley liked to do all his own shopping; why no one ever came in to clean or cook or dig or tidy up the weeds. Mr Plomley and Georgina got on splendidly in isolation. It couldn’t possibly have been better. Their lives were woven together like those of two figures in a piece of folk-lore: an eternal pattern of pure brown eggs, rewarding coffee-beans and ice-cream splits, communicative little walks and frequent tots of whisky.

  ‘I just hope she won’t come over with the coffee-beans, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Anyway I could do with a drink. I expect you could too.’

  Back in the front parlour Mr Plomley put Georgina on the top of the harmonium and uncorked a bottle of Johnny Walker. A certain nestling down of the feathers was Georgina’s only answer to the sound of Mr Plomley pouring out the whisky. But she seemed to listen with a certain idle smugness as Mr Plomley filled the pen filler with an inch or two of tea-coloured mixture and said:

  ‘You’ve been such a good girl, dear. I didn’t want anything like that to happen today. I felt so proud of you. That lovely egg. Anyway open up, dear. I made it just that tiny bit stronger today.’

  After giving Georgina her first drink of the day through the pen-filler, Mr Plomley totted out a generous measure, more or less neat, for himself. As he took his first taste of it he turned to Georgina and, with an affectionate smile and pat on her comb, blessed her.

  ‘I think I shall have an omelette for lunch,’ he said, and then added quickly, as if in order not to hurt her feelings: ‘Oh! not made with the new one. I wouldn’t dream of that. And what about you?’ Mr Plomley gave Georgina another affectionate pat on the comb. ‘You know what I’ve got for you? Popcorn and two lemon splits – a real special treat today.’

  After two further whiskies, each rather more neat than before, Mr Plomley began to feel rather less anxious and distraught about Phoebe Spencer. She seemed to fade into a slightly golden haze, leaving himself and Georgina again in untroubled isolation.

  By two o’clock he found that he cared very little whether his omelette was made of cheese or bacon or indeed if he ate it at all. The whisky had put a velvet cover on his appetite. He dropped into a big arm chair with Georgina on his knee, a half-empty glass in one hand and a lemon split in the other. Now and then Georgina, who had eaten up the three bags of popcorn with voracious haste while the omelette was cooking, took torpid pecks at the glittering yellow cone.

  Soon they were asleep together and it was not until Mr Plomley was in the middle of a dream in which Phoebe Spencer’s whistling kettle was shrieking again that he woke with a start to realize that what he was really hearing was the front door bell ringing loudly.

  In a sleepy hurry he shut Georgina in the kitchen and went to answer the door, twice telling himself on the way that on no account, if it was Phoebe Spencer calling, would he let her in. But the door was no sooner open than she was swiftly across the threshold, pressing him backwards with the bag of coffee-beans.

  ‘Mrs Spencer, no really you shouldn’t – I could have come across—’

  The uneasy realization that Phoebe Spencer was not merely dressed up but rather extravagantly so forced him into a hurried retreat in the direction of the sitting room. The afternoon was warm. A strong scent of violets filled the air, wafted this way and that by Phoebe Spencer’s every movement.
The massive orange pyramid of hair seemed to blaze, thrown into flamboyant contrast by a low-necked dress of shimmering purple, smooth and tight as a banana skin on the curves of hips and bust and shoulders.

  In a winning voice Phoebe Spencer said it was awfully nice of him to invite her in on such short acquaintance and Mr Plomley, who had done nothing of the kind, felt mortally afraid. A returning echo of his lunch-time whisky rose in his throat and stuck there with acid discomfort as Phoebe Spencer glanced searchingly about the room and said:

  ‘Oh! you’re all alone. I rather expected—’

  ‘Georgina’s out,’ Mr Plomley said. ‘Won’t be back for a while.’

  She seemed to take this as a signal to sit down and did so with friendly ease into the chair where Mr Plomley had fallen asleep with Georgina, the lemon-split and the whisky.

  The remains of the lemon-split lay on the floor and Mr Plomley hastily picked it up and stuck it on the mantelpiece. A lot of brown feathers lay about the floor too and Phoebe Spencer, who prided herself on being a person of sprucely clean and fastidious habits, noted them with vexed dismay. She didn’t know about living in sin – let them get on with it if that’s the way they wanted it – but a girl who could go out and leave the house looking like a hen run in the middle of the afternoon got no marks from her.

  The house, wherever she turned to look, seemed an unholy sort of mess. Popcorn bags lay torn to shreds in the hearth. Dirty plates and cutlery were piled on a chair and from the top of the harmonium there protruded a quaint straw-covered contraption, half-hat, half-basket, whose purposes defeated her. Nothing could have been further from her mind than that this was Georgina’s roosting bag.

  At this moment Mr Plomley detected with horror that his half-finished glass of whisky, over which he had fallen asleep, was still standing on the floor an inch or two from Phoebe Spencer’s feet. Only by a miracle had she avoided kicking it over.

  In his haste to pick it up he half-stumbled over the hearth-rug and found himself a moment later in a semi-kneeling position, facing the full view of Phoebe Spencer’s rounded healthy knees unashamedly protruding from the fringe of the purple dress. He felt as embarrassed and nervous about this as if he had suddenly discovered her completely naked. A strange and discomforting sensation, utterly remote from anything he had ever experienced with Georgina, shot through him: a white hot needle piercing all the central flabby marrow of his bones.