Oh! to be in England

by Bates, H. E.

  The man advanced heavily down the garden path, periodically grooming his moustache with elaborate strokes of his hand.

  ‘Morning, morning,’ Pop said. ‘Larkin’s the name. Nice morning.’

  ‘I’m Captain Broadbent. What can I do for you?’

  Pop explained about the buggy. The Captain’s voice was coarse. His manner was florid and set Pop on edge. The too-often repeated habit of grooming the too-handsome moustache not only irritated him but even made him, a rare thing for him, slightly ill-tempered.

  ‘Ah! you’re the johnny who buys junk. I’ve heard of you.’

  Pop so highly resented being called a johnny that he found himself, with amazement, resisting an unusual and powerful impulse to knock the Captain down. His good nature saved him, however, and he merely walked away.

  The Captain followed. Pop untied the pie-bald where he had left him by the garden fence. The Captain gave the pony a brief look of undisguised contempt and said something about the untutored animal not getting very far in the Derby, laughing at the same time. Pop decided to ignore the joke and walked across to the wood-shed, where the buggy stood.

  ‘You’re never going to ride about in that damned contraption, are you? It’s murder.’

  Pop, in silence, started to back the pie-bald into the buggy shafts and the Captain laughed again.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s one way of amusing yourself in this bloody awful countryside. God, what a hole. How anybody possibly sticks it out I’m damned if I know.’

  ‘We manage somehow.’

  Having heard his beloved countryside befouled Pop felt that he was ready for anything and started, again in silence, to buckle up the harness.

  ‘Even the one and only pub’s a bloody mausoleum. At nine o’clock last night there was one cock-eyed yokel in there with the twitch and two fat old trouts who never said a word. What do you do with all the women round here? Lock the poor bitches up in purdah?’

  ‘Oh! there’s a tidy bit O’ talent about if you know where to look for it.’

  ‘Is there indeed? Tell me where?’

  Pop, not answering and not really wanting to listen either, stood dreamily buckling the harness, silently dwelling on the attractions of Ma, Mariette, Primrose and the rest of his daughters. He thought also of Angela Snow, whom he had tried to telephone the previous evening about the christening, but without success. The idea of the christening, largely because of Angela, no longer depressed him. All seemed to be going well. Mademoiselle Dupont had already been written to and Ma and Mariette were already up in London, buying Blenheim’s christening robe. It seemed as if the date would be the last Sunday in July and it would be a good excuse, as Ma said, for a party.

  ‘I’ll lay you a fiver to a boiled egg that if you held a beauty-contest here there wouldn’t be a piece of tender meat among the lot. They breed ’em coarse here, like the cattle.’

  From a sudden pained recollection of the stony-eyed woman weeding the garden path Pop’s mind abruptly leapt, in a moment of inspired vision, to a thought of someone else. Unable to explain why, he was suddenly thinking of a girl named Jasmine Brown. He had been introduced to Miss Brown in a beer-tent at a point-to-point meeting at Easter and had talked to her for a few convulsive moments before someone had whisked her away.

  Miss Brown was unforgettable. In her own particular way she out-rivalled Angela Snow. Whereas Angela was all golden, languid and as smooth as honey, Miss Brown was a very dark, smouldering, big-built girl who had matured at twenty into the full-blown mould of a woman ten years older. She was the sort of girl who in a most sensational way radiated heat while remaining, apparently, surprisingly cool herself. She had managed to get him, in Ma’s words, properly on the boil.

  This inspiring recollection, following so close on the depressing remembrance of the Captain’s wife fearfully scraping up weeds, made him first thoughtful and then, in a quiet way, good-humoured again.

  ‘Sorry you don’t think much of our girls. You ought to come over to my place sometime.’

  The Captain preened his moustache with superior strokes from the back of his right hand.

  ‘Why? You keep a harem or something?’

  Pop laughed, stooping down at the same time to buckle the pony’s belly-band.

  ‘Well, it looks a bit like that some Sunday afternoons with all of ’em prancing in and out of the swimming pool.’

  ‘Ah! you’ve fallen for the new status symbol.’

  Pop said he didn’t know about status symbol. He’d got the pool for swimming in. For fun.

  ‘Junk trade must be flourishing!’

  Well, it was fair, Pop admitted, striving hard not to lose his temper again. It was fair.

  Suddenly he remembered something else. Ma had decided at the last moment that it really wasn’t very nice to send Lady Violet a gift of ham and sausage rolls. It might seem to imply that a titled lady couldn’t afford food or was starving or about to go on National Assistance or something of that lark. She thought it would be more tactful to send a bottle of her own cherry brandy. It was very powerful stuff, the cherry brandy.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear Lady Violet ain’t all that grand,’ Pop said. He privately hoped it wasn’t the cigar. Perhaps it was a bit rash, after all, the cigar. Still – ‘I’ve got a little present for her. I just remembered.’

  Before tying up the pony he had put the bottle of cherry brandy under the seat of the buggy and he now leaned over to fetch it out.

  ‘By Jove, a bottle, eh? What’s this, what’s this?’

  ‘Cherry brandy. Morella. Ma’s special. Seven years in bottle.’

  ‘By God, this’ll make the day.’

  ‘And when I say brandy I mean brandy. None of your muck. Napoleon V.S.O.P.’

  The Captain, for a moment shedding arrogance, seemed to become positively friendly. In an unguarded moment he actually addressed Pop as ‘old boy’.

  ‘Ma does peach and apricot too,’ Pop said. ‘You know where my place is? Drop in and have a nip sometime.’

  Was this an invitation? the Captain wanted to know.

  Pop, who tried to find some good in everybody, even the worst of stinkers, outsiders and the rest, said in his customary expansive fashion that of course it was.

  ‘Drop in next Sunday afternoon and have a swim. We’ll have a party going by about three.’

  ‘Sounds damn’ tempting. Harem and all?’

  Pop laughed, at the same time reflectively stroking the pony’s mane, and said he’d do his best to find a few good hand-picked ones and then added, in his blandest fashion:

  ‘Course, I know you’re not narrow-minded or anything. Man of the world and all that. But don’t be surprised if you see one or two of ’em running round in the never-never.’

  ‘The girls? Good God.’

  Airily Pop explained about Ma and the painting lark and anyhow the Captain must know how it was these days. Everybody free and easy and all that. Nobody capable of being shocked by nothing no more.

  He didn’t know about that, the Captain had to confess. There were after all limits. He suddenly seemed rather stiff, poised somewhere between pained surprise and curiosity. For a few seconds he positively scrubbed his moustache with a hand so nervously eager to demonstrate a dignified superiority that it was almost priggish.

  ‘Well, I shall have to see how I’m fixed. Very kind of you and all that, Larkin –’

  ‘Here, dammit,’ Pop said, ‘if I’m going to all the trouble to hand-pick ’em for you and when I tell ’em you’ll be there –’ the Captain fell to preening his moustache with a now gentler hand – ‘you twig what I mean? And after all they’ll all be nice girls. Five of ’em my daughters. Just a family party with a few more thrown in. There’s be some pretty good snifters too.’

  At the thought of snifters the Captain became suddenly amiable again. Well, he expected he’d be there all right. He’d got to relieve the bloody tedium somehow. He glanced with significance towards the bungalow and Pop, silent again, seemed
once again to see the fragile figure of Lady Violet and the fearful hunted figure of the wife fumbling among the weeds.

  ‘About three on Sunday then. Perfick! Let’s hope it’s a good sweltering hot day. Some of the girls are trying to get brown all over.’

  A moment later he was in the buggy, waving an abrupt farewell and driving away. The pony trotted well, he thought; it seemed quite at home in the buggy. It seemed as aware as any human being of the bright pristine beauty of the summer morning and now and then gave an excited snorting sniff with its nostrils, as if drinking at the scent of bluebells, growing grass and may.

  Pop breathed hard at them too. The air was cleaner now. The only blemish on the face of the morning was the picture of the Captain’s wife among her weeds and somehow he couldn’t get that yellow, fearful, fumbling figure out of his mind.

  4

  Late that evening, after admiring for the eighth or ninth time since supper the suits of armour, the shields and the battle-axes in the passage – there was no doubt that they gave the place terrific tone, terrific – Pop called Angela Snow on the telephone. Her voice, drawling, aristocratic and bewitching as ever, reproached him in tones of languid honey.

  ‘I hate you, sweetie. I don’t love you any more. You abandon me for weeks on end.’

  Laughing, Pop was quick to assure her with a honied affection of his own that she was, on the contrary, for ever in his thoughts.

  ‘In, yes,’ she said, ‘and out again. You must want something badly, sweetie, or you’d never ring me.’

  Pop blandly confessed that he did indeed want something. In fact, two things.

  ‘Greedy wretch. What’s the first?’

  When Pop explained about the christening she made purring noises at the other end of the line, assuring him of her undying devotion to himself, Ma and little Oscar. She was even ready, she declared, to be godmother to all his children if need arose and Pop was on the point of saying that it might well do at that when she said:

  ‘Well, and what was the other?’

  The other, Pop said, wasn’t so easy. It was about a girl.

  ‘You cad. You serpent. You stinking traitor.’

  ‘I just wondered if you knew her, that’s all.’

  ‘If I do I shall promptly wring her neck. And yours into the bargain, sweetie.’

  ‘Well, if it’s like that,’ Pop said, ‘I’d better hang up, hadn’t I?’

  ‘You do and I’ll never forgive you. Who is this Venus you’re after? Won’t do instead?’

  ‘Her name’s Jasmine Brown. Know her? I met her –’

  ‘Dearest Jasmine. Of course I know her. We graduated through virginity together.’

  These remarks were exactly the sort of thing that endeared Angela Snow very deeply to Pop. She was his sort all right, he told himself, laughing with quiet satisfaction. It might even be, he hoped, that Jasmine Brown was his sort too.

  ‘Are you still there, sweetie?’ Angela Snow said. ‘You make me very suspicious. What do you want with Jasmine?’

  ‘I just wondered if you’d like to bring her over for a swim on Sunday.’

  ‘What a piffling excuse. You make me more suspicious than ever. She’s blisteringly attractive, this girl. As if you didn’t know.’

  ‘No, honest,’ Pop said. ‘I’m just trying to make up a good party. Got to get some good scenery, after all. There’s a feller named Broadbent coming along. Captain Broadbent –’

  ‘Oh! my God, not that one.’

  ‘So you know him too?’

  ‘Met him once at a party, sweetie. Which was quite enough.’

  ‘Stinker?’ Pop said.

  ‘The great self-styled ladykiller of all time, I gather.’

  Pop laughed loudly, so that the sound crackled joyously in Angela Snow’s ear, making her say:

  ‘I’m still awfully suspicious, sweetie. I can’t help thinking you’re up to something. You’re not by any chance thinking of sacrificing Jasmine and me on the Broadbent altar, are you?’

  ‘Good Gawd, no,’ Pop said.

  ‘I’m profoundly glad to hear it, sweetie. We’re sporting girls, but not that sporting. I gather he’s already been thrown out of every club and hunt in the county.’

  Pop positively barked with delight into the telephone.

  ‘It was some think like that,’ he said, ‘that I’d got in mind.’

  ‘You don’t mean it? Charming. Absolutely charming.’

  Pop didn’t say a word for another moment or two. He didn’t want to do anything indelicate, he thought, and he found his next sentence for once rather a difficult one to phrase.

  ‘Is she the real sport?’ he said. ‘Jasmine, I mean?’

  ‘My dear, she’s the most uninhibited creature on God’s earth.’

  ‘Unin – what?’

  Pop, continually eager though he was to broaden his education by television and such means, now and then still came up against another long word that had him floored.

  ‘I mean she’s like me only more so. She’s the sort of girl who goes to a shop to try on a new dress, sheds all and doesn’t bother to pull the cubicle curtains.’

  This delicious picture of the wholly uninhibited Miss Brown set Pop chuckling warmly. This was the stuff, absolutely perfick, he was about to tell her when she said:

  ‘The nice thing is that she’s got brains too. Just give her a bare hint of what’s expected of her and she’ll –’

  ‘Bare it might be an’ all,’ Pop said darkly, chuckling again. ‘Anyway bring her to lunch. I’ll get Ma to do a turkey. I’ve got a new lot O’ sparkling red burgundy – I’ll get it nice and cold. Must go now. Ma’s gone up to bed already. Good-bye. Bless you. Love.’

  ‘Farewell, dear man. Fondest love. We’ll be there.’

  When Pop finally went upstairs ten minutes later it was to find Ma still sitting at her dressing table, brushing her thick dark hair with a silver brush half as big as a tennis racquet and wearing a bright magenta nightgown so short in style that it merely covered little more than the top half of her huge cushiony body like a parasol.

  ‘Been having a long chin-wag with somebody, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Angela. Been inviting her and one of her girl friends over for a swim on Sunday. Girl named Jasmine Brown.’

  ‘Nice one?’

  Pop, laughing richly, proceeded to explain to Ma about Miss Brown’s entire lack of inhibition, careful at the same time not to use the exact word in case Ma shouldn’t be any more familiar with it than he was.

  ‘Sounds just your type,’ Ma said, laughing too.

  Pop said he hoped so; he was looking forward to it a lot.

  ‘Very glad to hear it,’ Ma said. ‘You’ve been a bit quiet lately. I’d almost begun to think you’d gone off the boil.’

  Pop freely admitted he’d been quiet but not by any means off the boil: not on your nelly.

  ‘Something on your mind?’ Ma said. ‘You’d better get it off your chest if there is.’

  Pop said as a matter of fact there was and proceeded to tell her about Lady Violet’s niece, Mrs Broadbent, and how he hadn’t been able to get that crushed, haunted, groping figure out of his mind all day.

  ‘She looked as if she’d been horse-whipped,’ he said.

  ‘Who by?’

  Pop, standing at the foot of the bed, taking off his collar and tie, explained about the Captain, his distasteful contempt for local ladies, his arrogance about Pop’s beloved countryside and how, it seemed, he was the self-styled ladykiller of all time.

  ‘Sounds most attractive. What did you tell him?’

  ‘I invited him over for a swim on Sunday.’

  ‘Well, that’s a fine thing. Are you mad? Do you want the pool contaminated or something?’

  ‘No, no. I just thought he ought to meet a few real ladies, that’s all. Like Angela and Jasmine Brown.’

  ‘Oh! it’s like that, is it?’

  Pop, laughing, said it was, or somethink of that sort. Ma, wh
o had now finished brushing her hair, started drenching her great bosom with Chanel No. 5, shaking it from what seemed to be a quart-size bottle. As she did so she thought of Angela Snow. What had she said, Ma wondered, about the idea of being godmother?

  ‘Thrilled to bits.’

  That was nice of her. That reminds me – the parson telephoned. He’ll be round tomorrow evening to fix up about the christening.’

  ‘Frog-face, eh?’

  No, Ma said, it wasn’t Frog-face. It was a young man – a locum or whatever it was they called them. Frog-face was away sick –having an operation for gallstones or something nasty.

  Pop said he was sorry to hear that and wondered if he ought not to take some sort of nourishment, preferably liquid, in to the patient? A bottle of vodka, perhaps? It might dissolve the stones.

  ‘They say they do dissolve them nowadays,’ Ma said. Anyway he won’t be well enough for the christening, that’s sure.’

  ‘We’ll make a marvellous do of it, that day, Ma. Well really light up.’

  ‘I should think so too,’ Ma said. ‘After all we’ve never had a christening in the family before.’

  The following evening a young man of earnest demeanour, pale ginger-haired hands, scrubby, carroty hair and a voice that ended all its hesitant sentences with an almost musical squeak, like that of dry leather, sat in a state of stupefied bewilderment in the sitting room, utterly unable to reconcile Pop’s chromium galleon of a cocktail cabinet with the baronial armour regaling the passage outside or the luscious graces of Primrose and Mariette with the bucolic comradeship of Pop, who frequently called him ‘Mr Candy, old man’ and had, in response to a mild request for ‘just a little whisky please’, given him three-quarters of a tumblerful, neat except for a couple of cubes of ice and the merest teaspoon of water.

  Mariette and Primrose having been introduced as ‘two of my daughters, not the ones to be christened, though’ and Primrose more especially as ‘the intellectual one of the family, sort of. Likes poetry’, Mr Candy sat in a state of twitching suspense, enmeshed as a fly in a spider web by the rapturous beauty of Primrose, now, at fourteen, as fully developed as a woman of twenty and every bit as well aware of it too. Her dark eyes dwelt on Mr Candy with open insistence, bringing his face out in a repeated tepid blush.