by Bates, H. E.
‘Oh! Lord, no. He got the boat all ready to take me himself before lunch but Ma called us in to eat. Oh! he won’t mind our taking the boat.’ She laughed with a beautiful deep contralto. ‘He’ll just be jealous of you.’
‘Will he, by Jove?’
Across the meadow lying between junk-yard and river Jasmine Brown walked deep in buttercups, her half-naked breasts thrust forward like those of some stately figurehead, her bare feet bright yellow with pollen. Once she started running and the rear view of her, its curves firmly marked and yet quivering, was of so sensational a substance that the Captain actually halted in his stride. It was only when she suddenly stopped, turned and held out both arms to him as if he were the only person in the world that he was prompted to move again.
‘Come on! Race you, Colonel, race you!’
In puffing pursuit, the Captain caught her up at the boat-house, where Pop’s new golden row-boat lay side by side with its sister status symbol, the motor-boat, both resplendent with purple and yellow cushions.
Stripping off his jacket, the Captain told himself that this was really where he came in. He could really show some prowess. now With a strong arm he held the boat steady while Jasmine Brown climbed in. Her body, if sensational on the stairs, was now positively volcanic in its unsparing beauty as she lay full length, every curve and contour tautly revealed, on the brilliant cushions.
The Captain got into the boat too and rowed out into a stream just wide enough at that point to take his oars. The surface of the river, broken here and there by small islands of water lilies just coming into flower, was sometimes rippled by the gentlest breath of air. Now and then a leaf of yellow flag-iris twisted on the banks. A swallow or two occasionally came low over the stream, piercing the air with voices of needling excitement, but these, except for the level slip of the oars, were the only sounds.
By Jove, this, the Captain let it be known, was rather good.
‘Absolute heaven.’ Jasmine Brown, cool but radiating that same sensational heat of which Pop had taken such good notice, stared up at him with eyes that seemed to fill with a deep entrancement of wonder. ‘You row beautifully.’
The Captain was sure that he did.
‘After all I used to stroke –’
‘Stroke?’
The single word seemed to be caress, flattery and invitation all in one. She raised her arms and clasped them together behind a head almost too beautiful in its frame of black hair. This gesture too seemed to be open invitation but the Captain made no sign of accepting it, and merely made steady progress with the oars. Like a cat snuggling down to half-sleep she then nestled even lower into the cushions, the soft underparts of her arms quivering, and held him with blissful, predatory, drowsy eyes.
‘Come on. Do I have to drag you down here? You bring a girl out in a boat and then do absolutely nothing about it.’
The Captain, though half-terrified, could resist no longer. With nervous hands he shipped oars, stood up precariously and then half-sat, half-knelt on the cushions beside her.
The boat rocked. At the same moment Jasmine Brown seized him in an embrace as fierce and all-enfolding as that of a lioness overcoming its prey. Her splendid frame encompassed him completely. The boat rocked again and the Captain, half-suffocated, uttered a stifled shout. Her lips smothered his own with a passion so well simulated that he actually found himself struggling against it and then the boat rocked a third time, this time with violence, dangerously.
A moment later the Captain, flamboyant as a tailor’s dummy, flopped helplessly overboard and Jasmine Brown fell with him, shrieking with splendid laughter.
Ma’s casual suggestion about telephoning the Captain’s wife for tea had made Pop curiously uneasy, almost upset. He was haunted yet again by the unhappy, grovelling figure among its weeds. In moments of anything like unhappiness he always confided in Ma and now he walked round the pool to where, in her unruffled way, she was busy at her canvas under the black umbrella.
‘Ma, you said summat about asking Mrs Broadbent over to tea. Why don’t we? I got an idea that woman don’t very often get off the hook.’
Nice idea, Ma thought. Pop had better go and get her on the blower.
‘They’re not on the blower. It would mean I’d have to fetch her. Think I should? It makes me miserable to –’
Certainly, Ma thought. She understood his feelings perfectly. He had so often described that moment or two of wretchedness on the path.
‘Take her out of herself a bit. You go and I’ll lay a bit of quiet tea in the sitting-room. She’ll very likely find it a bit noisy out here with all the kids shouting and rushing around. By the way, where’s Jasmine? Haven’t seen her lately.’
He hadn’t the faintest, Pop said.
‘Funny,’ Ma said, ‘that you shouldn’t know after the way you’ve had her in your inside pocket all day.’
To this Pop could conjure no sort of answer and merely walked airily away, his habitual jauntiness back, whistling.
Some time later Mrs Broadbent, astonishingly rescued from the all-embalming boredom of Sunday afternoon, sat in the sitting-room nibbling like a mouse released from a dark box at cucumber sandwiches, chocolate biscuits and Ma’s delightful maids-of-honour. An infinite shyness kept her silent for the greater part of the time. Now and then Pop, in his customary way, made springly, jovial attempts to enliven the proceedings but he noticed that she never laughed at all.
Her shy nibblings reminded him greatly of the two little Barnwell sisters, Effie and Edna, who also sometimes came to tea, their little elderly yellow faces so crowded with freckles that they looked perpetually as if stung by bees. But in their case hunger, so richly satisfied as it always was in the Larkin household, made them chatter brightly and even inspired in them, at times, fits of immoderate giggles. It was the same with Edith Pilchester; food and drink went rapidly to her head, making her tipsy with happiness and even, as Pop had often noted, a little bit sexy. He expected it was really some urge in all of them, as he frequently told Ma, that hadn’t yet been satisfied.
But in Mrs Broadbent, he was sure, there was neither sex nor laughter; he doubted even if there was life apart from the mere mechanics of movement; and he was just about to reach the point of half-wishing that he’d let well alone and hadn’t invited the poor woman over at all when Ma, looking out of the window, suddenly leapt up and very nearly dropped her tea-cup on the floor.
‘Good Gawd Almighty,’ she said, ‘whatever in the name of Beelzebub has happened to the Colonel?’
Pop got casually to his feet with an air of indifferent surprise, as if the incident were, to him, totally unexpected.
‘Got caught in a thunderstorm or somethink.’
The erstwhile flamboyant figure of the Captain, now dragging itself across the yard, looked like that of a ship-wrecked mariner washed up on some blighted shore.
Mrs Broadbent got slowly to her feet too and stared out of the window. She stared for perhaps some fifteen seconds or so before the room was filled with the strangest of sounds, her loud uncontrolled cascades of laughter. It was as if she had been rocked to near-hysteria by an explosion of sudden joy.
Fearful of some explosion in himself, Pop slid out of the room, to be met at the front door by Angela Snow who slipped her cool aristocratic hand in one of his.
‘We didn’t fail you?’
‘Think every think went perfick.’
‘Good. Absolutely splendid. Well, that’s one christening over, dear man. And without benefit of clergy’
Pop laughed, kissing her with mischievous lightness on one ear, in silent thanks.
‘By the way, Jasmine and I tossed up for it.’
‘Did?’
‘Yes: I won. But I put her in first. Hadn’t you better go and find her?’
‘Where do you think she is?’
‘I rather fancy she’s in the boat-house,’ Angela Snow said, in that lovely drawling way of hers, ‘waiting for a little thank-you.’
That nig
ht, sitting in bed, smoking his late cigar and watching Ma at the dressing-table, brushing her hair, Pop suddenly made a remark of casual profundity.
‘Ma, I’ve been thinking.’
‘Now steady.’
‘No, serious. I mean about people, men and women.’
That was a tall one, Ma said. If he got started with that he’d be stuck with it all night. There was no end to that one.
‘They’re funny,’ Pop said. ‘People, I mean.’
Not, he hastened to assure her, people like him and Ma. Or even Angela or Jasmine. Not normal people. No, the others: some of ’em anyway The Colonel for instance. And Mrs Broadbent.
‘How do you work that one out, Ma?’
Ma said she was blessed if she knew.
‘Me, neither. You’d want Solomon on that one. By the way what did you think of Jasmine?’
‘Girl after my own heart.’
‘Good. Thought you’d like her. Well made, too, don’t you think?’
‘You should know. You were in the boat-house long enough with her before lunch today.’
‘That was a sort of briefing, Ma, sort of dummy run,’ Pop proceeded to explain blandly, with all his customary frankness. ‘After all I’d got to get the idea into her head somehow.’
Dummy run? Ma wanted to know what on earth he was talking about. Dummy run? Idea? What idea?
The Colonel’s christening.’
Pop, laughing, started to explain about the Colonel and how Jasmine and Angela had tossed up for the privilege of performing the ceremony.
‘Well, praise God from whom all blessings flow,’ Ma said and burst out into one of her own uncontrollable fits of jellified laughter.
‘Really, on the whole,’ Pop said airily, ‘I think it went orf perfick.’
Laughter, especially at night, always put Ma into the warmest and most magnanimous of moods and now she suddenly turned on him with a slow, engaging smile and said:
‘You know something, Syd Larkin?’
‘No, Ma. What?’
‘I believe if I’d have married you,’ Ma said, ‘you’d have committed bigamy long ago.’
‘More than likely,’ Pop said with great cheerfulness, ‘more than likely.’
6
On a damp dull afternoon in mid-July – it was what Ma was accustomed to call a wet day and no rain, or alternatively bad courting weather – Pop drove the Rolls Royce out of the junkyard and, though using the contrapuntal horn with care and frequency, almost ran into the figure of his old friend the Brigadier, walking dreamily in the mizzle on the road outside. The open black umbrella he was carrying over his shoulder might well have been borrowed from a scarecrow. One of his shoelaces, a brown one as opposed to its fellow, which was black, was undone and flapping muddily about its canvas shoe. His once-cream trousers hung sack-like about his spindly legs, the behind showing a patch of some thicker material that might possibly have come from a bed quilt. It had a distinctly raised pattern of flowers on it and, though once white, was now worn to a sort of pied grey. But the Brigadier’s crowning sartorial features were new to Pop and made even him start with surprise. The first was a pale pink rowing blazer, of a sort of crushed raspberry shade, with a white and black silk badge on the pocket, and the second a small and very ancient rowing cap in a rather deeper shade.
‘What cheer, General!’ Pop said, laughing with most friendly robustness, ‘must look where you’re going, else we’ll be having cold mincemeat for supper.’
Pop’s choice of cold mincemeat as opposed to hot struck the Brigadier as a singularly apt one, if rather macabre, and woke on his face the driest of smiles. He readily confessed he’d been day-dreaming and Pop said:
‘Well, hop in, General. It’s no day for walking.’
The Brigadier coughed abruptly and thanked Larkin all the same but said he really preferred the exercise. It helped him, among other things, to let off steam.
‘About what? Summat bothering you?’
‘It’s that damned common market all the time. I frequently feel my blood boil.’
‘Don’t like it much, eh?’
‘I call it a damned unholy alliance. Damned unholy, I tell you. Always loathed the French anyway.’
In reply Pop barked out a loud and cordial “Ear ‘ear!’, the immediate result of which was that the Brigadier snapped down the umbrella, opened the Rolls monogrammed front door and got inside the car.
‘Changed my mind after all.’ He struck Pop a sharp genial blow on the knee. ‘Man after my own heart, Larkin. Man after my own heart. Where are you bound?’
Down to the coast, Pop told him. He’d got to see a man about a little deal in cats’ meat. And while he was there he’d got to get Ma a pint of whelks and winkles. Did the General care for whelks or winkles?
‘Not awfully, I’m afraid.’
‘Ma adores ’em. Well, anyway, come for the ride. I was thinking of picking up Edith and giving her a spin. Just for company. I get the pip without company.’
‘Ah! the Pilch, eh? Haven’t seen her for a long time.’
Pop laughed with great vigour, at the same time letting in the clutch, so that the Rolls moved smoothly away. It always made him laugh when the General, in his drier moods, called Edith Pilchester the Pilch, though he could never tell him why. He would have to get Ma to explain to him what a pilch was one day. He didn’t suppose the General knew.
‘Doesn’t she know you’re calling? She’ll probably be spinning wool or something. Or deeply engaged in making mead.’
Pop, laughing again, said if he knew Edith she’d come even if she’d broken both legs.
‘The last time I saw her she was in a state of some excitement about a yellow flower she was growing,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Going to make woad with it, she fancied. That blue stuff, you remember, that the Ancient Britons painted their bodies with.’
‘Good Gawd.’
A fantastic vision of Edith Pilchester, unclothed and painted blue, floated before Pop’s eyes, leaving him otherwise speechless. You never knew what women were going to be up to next. It bowled you flat.
‘Cats’ meat?’ the Brigadier said suddenly. ‘I wasn’t aware you were in the meat trade.’
Tinned, Pop explained. Big call for it nowadays. West Indians ate most of it. It was cheaper than the butcher’s.
‘Good grief,’ the Brigadier said, feeling very faintly sick. ‘What will one hear of next?’
Five minutes later Pop was poking his head round the back door of Edith Pilchester’s low-pitched thatched cottage, Bonny Banks, even more gimcrack in its pseudo antiquity than Lady Violet’s bungalow, and calling was anybody at home? Something like an alarmed sigh instantly answered him from one of the tiny bedroom windows, from which the head of Edith Pilchester popped out like a jack-in-the-box a moment later, her shoulders hastily covered with a shawl of her own knitting and dyeing. This was of rather an indeterminate toad-like hue and once again Pop was for a moment or two utterly silenced by the thought of what Edith might possibly look like if dipped blue all over.
‘Oh! my goodness, Mr Larkin, you caught me unawares! My dear! –’
‘Thought you might like to come for a trip in the Rolls. Going as far as the sea.’
‘Oh! but – my dear, I’m simply not ready – it’s absolutely ghastly –’
‘No hurry, Edith. I can wait. I got the General with me. I’ll go and talk to him.’
‘Oh! will you? I’ll just slip something on – I’ll be down the instant I’m ready.’ Miss Pilchester disappeared swiftly from the window, only to come back a moment later to ask with piping fervour: ‘Will I need an umbrella? Will I, do you think?’
‘No,’ Pop said, with that bland innocence of his that might have concealed anything, winking at the same time. ‘I’ll keep you dry.’
‘Awful man.’ A sort of indrawn giggle fell from her lips and Pop found himself momentarily transfixed with a toothy, dedicated smile. ‘You do put meanings into –’
An interval of a
bare five or six minutes was enough to bring Edith Pilchester stumbling from the cottage in partly dishevelled haste. The slight mizzling rain had ceased by now and a burst of light wind seemed to catch her half-way down the garden path and fairly blow her into the Rolls, the front door of which the Brigadier was holding open for her with a combination of his best military and rowing politesse. He actually raised the rowing cap as she half-crawled, half-fell into the car, giving her at the same time a dry, charming smile and saying cryptically:
‘Dear lady. I trust I see you well?’
In tones of loud and hearty excitement Miss Pilchester, who had forgotten to close the door, confessed that she literally didn’t know. It was all such a thrill, so absolutely unexpected. Had she been an age? If only she’d been able to collect her thoughts a little better, she thought widly, she might even have been a teeny bit longer, so that perhaps Pop might have been forced to search for her, and then – Well, it was terrifically nice of him to come anyway.
‘I’ll just shut the door, Edith. Otherwise we’ll be having you in the cold mincemeat lark too.’
‘Extraordinary thought!’
Pop, leaning across her and lightly brushing against the cabbage-green suit of hairy sack-like material she was wearing, closed the quiet, heavy door of the Rolls. This sudden physical contact with him at a moment so early and unprepared sent a half-rapturous quiver through her body, to be followed a second or two later by an almost cataclysmic palpitation as Pop deftly and with an accuracy born of long practice pressed one of her right suspender buttons. Heaven, she would dream of this, she knew, for days.
‘All right, General? Don’t mind sitting at the back? Have a doss-down if you feel like it.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it. Feel as lively as a cricket.’
‘Perfick. We’ll get crackin’ then.’
As the Rolls moved regally and smoothly away Edith Pilchester felt lively as a cricket too. Another five minutes and she’d have been off to the post-office and she’d have missed it all. The thought was too absolutely ghastly.