Oh! to be in England

by Bates, H. E.

  ‘You should not do this. I am very foolish. I do not deserve such things.’

  ‘Well, open it anyway,’ Pop said and was on the point of adding some quip about trying it on for size when he remembered Ma’s strict injunctions and merely said:

  ‘It’s from me. A present for the christening.’

  By no means tranquil yet, Mademoiselle Dupont untied the yellow ribbon with fingers that now and then jumped electrically They jumped even more when she finally had the parcel open and picked out from among white layers of tissue paper a black bra, a black slip and a pair of black briefs so scanty and transparent that they might have been made for the sole purpose of revealing more than they covered.

  It was a moment of such transcendent and palpitating intimacy and altogether so utterly unexpected that she was completely speechless and went very red. It was also a moment that Pop could resist no longer, warnings from Ma or not, and he said, in the lowest and most engaging of whispers:

  ‘Just about your size, eh?’

  ‘Monsieur Larkin!’

  In answer Pop kissed her with considerable pressure on her left ear, with the result that one of the long pearl drop earrings that she always wore to give her shortish figure the illusion of greater height fell off and slipped down the front of her dress, inside the bosom. Pop, though on the verge of executing some instantaneous rescue act, decided it was perhaps rather early days after all and instead merely invited her, in his best free and easy fashion, to stand up and shake the bag.

  She stood up and shook herself several times, but without success. The tightness of her corset and the fact that she had been too distraite to take off her money belt stopped the earring on its journey, though not before the slide of the earring against her body had produced in her a strange, beautifully irritant sensation, so that she actually began laughing, with a real touch of merriment, and for the first time.

  ‘No luck? Got lost on the way,’ Pop said and wondered where.

  She laughed again and slowly, in this way, became soothed and mollified. The nightmare of the afternoon receded. England seemed not so bad after all. Kindness and generosity were in the air.

  She duly thanked Pop several times for the gift he had made and said she would try never to be so foolish again. In turn Pop led her to the bedroom window and showed her the second of the day’s great surprises. There was, as it turned out, still a third to come but now, as she gazed down at the roundabout, the swings, the coconut shies, the dart stall and the big white marquee already erected in the paddock beyond the junk-yard, she actually cried out with disbelief and delight. The English were a strange, strange people. One could only think that they were, in the nicest degree, mad. They wore strange pink coats and caps. They had fairs in their back gardens and suits of armour on their doorsteps. They were beyond all understanding.

  ‘Notice the French flag?’ Pop said.

  Pop had caused a second tricolor to be run up on the marquee.

  ‘Ah! le tricolore!’

  ‘For you,’ Pop said. ‘In honour of you.’

  Then suddenly some of her mystification cleared.

  ‘Ah! it is a sort of pardon. Yes?’

  No, Pop told her, it wasn’t a pardon. It was just for the christening. He’d bought the fair specially.

  She again marvelled at this, with another loud ‘Ah!’ and Pop said:

  ‘Might as well make a proper do of it. After all there’s a lot o’ people to be christened.’

  This was again beyond her understanding and everything now seemed stranger still.

  When they finally went downstairs it was to find that the Rev. Candy had arrived. Mr Candy, who was in a state of bewilderment as great as that of Mademoiselle Dupont, perhaps greater, had called to acquaint himself with the Sunday order of battle. He hadn’t been sleeping very well. The moon had been coming to its full. Night after night, restless-eyed, his mind jumping about like a kangaroo, he had grappled with the problem of the christening. It wasn’t merely that there were so many people to be christened. It wasn’t merely that he was certain he would forget more than half those long fanciful strings of Larkin names. It was the awful intimate familiarity of the thing. It was the discomforting nature of the Larkin beauty. It was having to baptize a schoolgirl who was practically, in body as well as intent, a grown woman. It was that dreadful moment when he would have to touch her head with water and she would torment him with those too dark, too luscious eyes.

  ‘Mr Candy, this is Mademoiselle Dupont. From France. Going to be little Oscar’s godmother. That’s one of his names. Dupont.’

  The Rev. Candy and Mademoiselle Dupont shook hands, each nervous. Mr Candy, his timidity now accentuated into further complexity by the unexpected presence of a strange Frenchwoman, then sat down at the table, where he had already spread out several sheets of black paper. Ma was sitting at the table too and now, after sympathetically inviting Mademoiselle Dupont to take an easy chair and at the same time giving Pop an old-fashioned look or two, as if suspicious that he hadn’t been behaving very well, said:

  ‘Pop, you get the champagne while me and Mr Candy work these names out.’ She laughed broadly, shaking like a jelly. ‘We don’t want little Oscar christened Primrose or Victoria called Blenheim if it comes to that. Sometimes I half forget what some of ’em are called myself.’

  Pop laughed too and said he was blowed if he didn’t too, sometimes, and went to find the champagne, asking as he went:

  ‘Red champagne, Ma, or ordinary?’

  ‘Oh! ordinary,’ Ma said. ‘We had red last night.’

  The mere mention of Primrose’s name brought on the Rev. Candy a further attack of the acutest apprehension. But at least it was a relief that she wasn’t there. He thanked heaven, at any rate, for that blessing. Nor was Mariette and he could only pray, tonight, that he wouldn’t be called upon to give an opinion of her figure as seen in all its naked wonder by Ma.

  ‘Now Mrs Larkin, in what order would you like the christenings to be? I mean the babies first or –?’

  Oh! it was all one to her, Ma said.

  ‘Well, may I suggest we start with the babies, since the ceremony is bound to be rather protracted.’

  All right, Ma said, they’d better start with Blenheim.

  ‘And what are his full names to be?’

  ‘John Marlborough Churchill Blenheim Charlton,’ Ma said.

  The Rev. Candy wrote this down with slow and dutiful care and put the figure one against it.

  ‘And then Oscar. It is Oscar, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Oscar Columbus Septimus Dupont Larkin.’

  ‘Ah! Septimus the seventh. I must say you’ve shown the most extraordinary imagination in choosing your children’s names.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ma said. ‘It’s not everybody who’s got it.’

  ‘I once knew a man named Decius. The tenth.’

  ‘Get away with you,’ Ma said. ‘You’ll be putting ideas into my head.’

  Deep in further embarrassment the Rev. Candy wrote hard again, eventually pausing to say:

  ‘And who next?’

  Ma said she thought it ought to be the twins next. They were always as full of mischief as a pair of magpies and it’d be better to get ’em out of the way. They were fair devils sometimes. She wouldn’t put anything past ’em – even in church.

  Oh! Lord, Mr Candy thought. Great Heaven.

  Pop now came back into the room with a tray of champagne cocktails, all jewelled with bubbles and invitingly golden, with half moons of orange floating about in them, and proceeded to offer them to Mademoiselle Dupont, Ma and Mr Candy.

  Ma took hers with a vast sigh of satisfaction, as if she hadn’t had a glass of anything for a month or more and an eager ‘Ah! just what I wanted’ and Mademoiselle Dupont hers with a certain restrained finesse, the little finger of her right hand delicately extended. Amazement at the nature, content and doings of the Larkin house danced in her mind as quickly and effervescently as the bubbles rising in the glasses
and she merely uttered a low bilingual phrase of thanks.

  To Pop’s infinite astonishment the Rev. Candy, on the other hand, refused the cocktail. Pop felt less hurt than concerned at this extraordinary behaviour and said:

  ‘No? Sure? Not feeling dicky or anything?’

  Mr Candy said No, it wasn’t that he was feeling dicky or anything. It was merely – he was too shy to confess that he dreaded not being able to keep a clear head – it was simply that he wanted to be sure of getting all the names down correctly. Perhaps he might have a soupçon later?

  Pop, who hadn’t the faintest notion what a soupçon was, uttered a hearty ‘Course, course,’ and said he’d be mixing a new lot up in a minute or two.

  ‘And the twins?’ the Rev. Candy said. ‘Might I now have the names of the twins?’

  Ma took a deep gulp of champagne and said Oh! the twins were fairly easy They almost had the same names.

  ‘One’s Zinnia June Florence Nightingale and the other’s Petunia June Florence Nightingale.’

  As he wrote down these names the Rev. Candy was struck by another awful thought. The twins were dreadfully, dangerously alike; they were like two eggs; he would never tell them apart.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘will they be differently dressed? Or perhaps they have some distinguishing mark I could note? A mole or something?’

  ‘Well,’ Ma said, giving one of her deeper, fruitier chuckles, ‘Zinnia’s got a mole, but not where you’d be likely to see it in church.’

  ‘Could they wear, perhaps, different dresses? Or different coloured hair ribbons?’

  Ma said she thought hair ribbons. What about a scarlet one for Zinnia and a purple one for Petunia? Same colour as the flowers.

  The Rev. Candy said he thought this would do and carefully wrote the colours down, at the same time saying to Ma that he profoundly hoped they wouldn’t – he was going to say ‘try anything on’ – but hastily added the words ‘make any confusion’ instead.

  ‘They’d better not,’ Ma said, ‘or I’ll warm their bottoms. And in church too, if I have to.’

  ‘That I fancy, is four,’ the Rev. Candy said. ‘Exactly how many more have we?’

  ‘Four,’ Ma said. ‘We’re half-way.’

  ‘Like dipping a flock o’sheep,’ Pop said. ‘Eh?’

  It was indeed, Mr Candy thought, and could only hope and trust that the Lord would make him a good shepherd.

  Ma then proceeded to give him the full names of Montgomery and Mariette and while all this was going on Mademoiselle Dupont listened in a growing trance of disbelief and wonder. Half hypnotized as she was already by the vastness of the Larkin television set, the lavish and even grotesque nature of Pop’s cocktail cabinet, all glass and chromium, in the form of a galleon, she now found herself facing the even more grotesque fact that, apparently, none of the considerable concourse of Larkins had ever received the blessing of holy baptism. This incredible and shocking fact had her, as Pop might have said, on the floor. It revived in her the strong belief that there was something outlandish about England – something, well – the mot juste escaped her and she merely sipped champagne in silent reflection, at a loss even for a silent word.

  ‘And who is next?’ the Rev. Candy said.

  ‘Me. I mean I’m next now but I don’t want to be then. I’d like to be last. Somebody’s got to be last and Victoria doesn’t want to be.’

  Mr Candy looked up to see that the vision he dreaded, that of Primrose, had suddenly entered the room. He quailed silently. The already too beautiful black hair, freshly shampooed and brushed, glowed deeply, with dark blue lights in it. Every separate hair seemed to vibrate; the entire mass of it was a thick and tremulous wave. It might have been washed in the juice of elderberries and anointed with oil of roses. There was a strong seductive fragrance in the air.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s all right,’ Ma said. ‘Somebody’s got to provide the finishing touch.’

  That, the Rev. Candy thought, was what he feared and he was now dismayed to see Primrose sit down at the table, directly opposite him. He looked down hard at his papers and quailed once again at the precocious, womanly air of the girl in front of him. She was wearing a shortish mauve dressing gown, quite open at the neck, and he could have sworn that she was wearing little, if anything, underneath it. The soft, sallow skin of her neck curved away into a taut bust uplifted and enlarged by the particular way she folded her arms underneath it. She ran her tongue over her lips, moistening them slightly, and fixed him with dark, still eyes.

  ‘You don’t mind if I’m last, Mr Candy, do you?’

  ‘Oh! no, no, no, no, no.’

  ‘You really don’t?’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. Of course.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  There was no other escape from this disquieting piece of temptation, apart from running like a hare, except to ask, as Mr Candy now did, in one of his squeakier moments:

  ‘And may I – I – please – have your names?’

  ‘I’ve got one more than all the rest,’ Primrose said.

  Oh! Lord, Mr Candy thought, it simply wasn’t fair.

  ‘Born bang in the middle o’ spring,’ Pop explained.

  ‘Drop o’ champagne now, Mr Candy? Beautiful spring too, it was an’ all. Rich. Busted out all of a sudden. Everythink was sort of in calf all at once.’

  Something in the Rev. Candy surrendered. He confessed weakly that he would indeed like a drop of champagne. The vision of the world in calf, in all its reproductive splendour, was too much. The champagne cocktail was like liquid manna to his soul.

  ‘And what, please, are your names?’

  As Primrose said each of her names in reply the exact expression in her eyes seemed to change by an infinitesimal fraction, but Mr Candy’s own eyes were downcast, so that he was mercifully saved the sight of these variations on a seductive theme.

  ‘Primrose, Violet, Anemone, Iris, Magnolia, Narcissa.’

  At the name Narcissa Mr Candy was compelled to look up; and the open face of the purest white narcissus could hardly have faced him across the table with greater innocence. He quailed yet again before the sheer candour of its charm.

  ‘Narcissa? Or Narcissus?’

  ‘Narcissa.’

  ‘Prettier than the “us” at the end, don’t you think?’ Ma said.

  ‘Oh! much, much.’

  ‘I think so,’ Ma said and then proceeded to put to Mr Candy a devasting theory of her own. ‘I always say she’s like all her names. Primrose one minute, Violet the next, Narcissa the next – you can see it all in her eyes. She’s several people in one, our Primrose. Of course I don’t suppose you see it, but I do.’

  Involuntarily Mr Candy looked up, only to be confronted not by the quick chameleon-like beauty of Primrose’s eyes but by a fractional glimpse of her bare upper breast, firm and cool as a shell. It unnerved him even more than her eyes’ flowery variations.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Candy,’ Ma suddenly said. ‘Would you like something to eat? Bloater paste sandwich or something? Don’t think we’ve got any smoked salmon left today.’

  Mr Candy recoiled at the thought of a bloater paste sandwich. ‘Thank you, but –’

  ‘Gentleman’s Relish, then?’

  The sound of the words Gentleman’s Relish in Mr Candy’s ears was like nectar. It was an irresistible delight; he went for it bald headed.

  ‘Well, if you really have it –’

  ‘Course,’ Ma said. ‘We always have it. Never without it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t afford it very often.’

  ‘Good. I’ll get some made up –’

  ‘No,’ Primrose said and there was something sinuous, not at all flower-like, in the way she slipped sideways out of her chair and got up from the table. ‘Sit still. I’ll get it. You’ve still got Victoria to do.’

  Victoria, though really named after a plum, was blessed with other names that were queen-like. Ma was very much given to queens, especially those, like Ma
rie Antoinette, she could feel sorry for. Accordingly Victoria had also been named Adelaide, another unhappy one, Ann – after the queen who had had eighteen children without any of them surviving, a fact that tore something dreadful at Ma’s heartstrings – and Cleopatra. Perhaps because of this burden Victoria was the quietish one of the family. She ate well and all that, as Ma said, but from time to time she was inclined, as Pop said, to go cluck, like hens did.

  ‘Well,’ Pop said, ‘got the wholesale order wrote out? En gross, eh, Mademoiselle Dupont?’

  ‘May I ask a question?’ Mademoiselle Dupont said. ‘Would the curé perhaps explain my part? I am not to be godmother to all the children?’

  ‘Blimey no,’ Pop said.

  Mr Candy allayed Mademoiselle Dupont’s fears by saying that there was nothing to worry about; it was all very simple; and only wished his own could be so easily tranquillized.

  On the contrary, several minutes later, they were greatly stimulated, again by the entry of Primrose, carrying a dish of Gentleman’s Relish sandwiches, nicely decorated by lettuce leaves and tomatoes. Mr Candy felt his mouth water; the evening perhaps hadn’t turned out so badly after all. He seized one of the proffered sandwiches with alacrity and started munching, only to discover that in her absence Primrose had changed from her dressing gown into a canary yellow jumper and a green skirt. The jumper seemed at least a size and a half too small for her and produced an effect even more electrifying than the dressing gown, so that he munched in tremulous preoccupation.

  ‘What’s all this going to cost me?’ Pop suddenly said. He liked to be fair and square and above board in these matters. ‘Fair old whack I suppose?’

  ‘Oh! as I told you before, if you remember, there is no charge for baptism, Mr Larkin. Of course, if you’d like to make a small contribution to funds for –’

  ‘Course, I remember now. Quid a head be all right?’ Pop said with that bird-like swiftness so greatly characteristic of him. ‘Make it ten,’ and suddenly tugged from his pocket a roll of fivers far fatter than a polony sausage, peeling off two.