by H. E. Bates
‘No more, grandad. Got to drive, y’know. You’ll get me for the high jump, smelling like a four-ale bar.’
‘Well: all right. But you’ll come in again, won’t you?’
‘Some time. Don’t have much time, most nights.’
‘Please come in,’ Broderick said, and the crease of a smile, yellowish, more than ever like the crinkle in the neck of a pale maggot slowly turning its head, came back again. ‘I like to talk to you. Don’t get much chance of talking.’
As he went out of the room with its dim night-light embalming and enshrining Broderick with its upward glow Williams felt the absence of death so keenly that he could do nothing but joke about it as a man jokes about an escape from it.
‘Perky as a chicken,’ he said. Downstairs, in the hall, she was waiting for him exactly as he had left her, almost as if she might have been listening all that time. ‘Probably live to be a hundred.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said. Her face was an extraordinary sight in the poorish light of the one electric light bulb shining through its stained glass bowl above her. It seemed twisted with tension. The muscles of the neck and cheeks were sucked in, darkly, making her fiercely alert and cadaverous. ‘You mustn’t talk like that. If you’d seen him this afternoon——’
And then suddenly:
‘What about the whisky? Did you give him his whisky?’
‘Whisky?’ Williams laughed softly. ‘You should have seen us. Totting it out. The two of us. Having a good old buddies’ party.’
‘I can’t understand why you joke about it,’ she said.
And long afterwards, when it was all over, that was one of the things he could not understand himself. Only the blindest kind of a fool could have joked about it. But that night, in his relief that he had not had to deal with death, he was glad of it as something of a distraction to seize on. It was not really that he was joking about it; perhaps the whisky had pepped him up a bit, he thought. He was just relieved that death had not complicated things. He did not want to be mixed up with death. If there was anything he loathed and hated it was dying and the dead. He had once seen the body of a man on the roadside, just out of London, lying on the grass, after a smash, the face covered with a sheet of newspaper, and the sight of it leered backwards and forwards across his mind, grotesque and haunting, for nights and days.
‘You’d better go now,’ she said.
When he took hold of her shoulders to say good-night he found that she was shivering. The tendons of her neck were drawn and cold. If it had not been for the intense pressure of light burning in the eyes it might have been, in fact, that she was the person who had died.
‘Here, come on. Come on,’ he said. ‘You got to pull yourself together. You got to snap out of this.’
Her heard her teeth crack against themselves, like a key snapping in a lock.
‘I don’t want to be alone here when it happens,’ she said. ‘That’s all. I can’t bear to be alone here with that.’
‘Don’t get jittery,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘All right,’ she said. She seemed to make a great effort to calm herself. She drew in a deep rasping breath. ‘You’ll know by the blinds if anything has happened.’
He supposed he must have called again five or six times, for perhaps ten days or so, perhaps two weeks, before two things occurred. Like so many other things that had happened, both were casual. Each time he repeated the habit of going upstairs and saying good-night to Broderick—‘coming to tuck you up, grandad, and give you your night-cap’—seeing that the old crinkled neck swallowed its tablets, talking a little, sharing a glass of whisky with him, and it was after about the fourth or fifth of these visits that she said:
‘You know, he’s quite taken to you. He likes you. He told me so today. He quite looks forward to your coming.’
And then, as if in an afterthought, more casually still:
‘He told me something else about you.’
‘Bad, I’ll bet.’
‘No. He’s probably going to alter his will and leave you a little money, that’s all.’
‘Stone the crows,’ he said.
‘There,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t that be nice?’
‘Well, knock me down.’
‘Now you’ll be able to have your own island, won’t you?’
‘Now why would he want to do that?’ Williams said. ‘I’m nobody. He hardly knows me.’
‘He says you help him to go on living,’ she said. ‘You give him confidence, he says.’ She smiled. ‘Of course I may have helped a bit. Just a bit—for you.’
Later, on the divan, before he left, she again drew out of the half-darkness, for only the second time for several weeks, the old, insidious dream of the island: the sun, the sea, the leisure, the way they could live together. ‘Like this,’ she said. ‘All the time. No more of this awful country. Where you can’t get warm. Where it’s always raining. And these awful winters.’
‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘I can go for plenty of that.’
‘Perhaps it won’t be long now.’
‘Oh! I can wait—I can wait till Doomsday for stuff like that.’
‘And how long do you think I’ve been waiting?’ She was almost yelling at him now, in a curious forced undertone, hoarse in the darkness with anger and frustration. ‘I’ve been waiting ten years and it seems like ten thousand—how would you like to wait like that? No fun, no bed, no nothing. When I married him they said he wouldn’t live a year—not six months. A cardiac complaint like that, they said—it can’t live. One bit of over-exertion and he’ll drop down and it’s all over.’
Her voice was rasping now with a tearless, suppressed rage. ‘But you see it’s never the sick that die, is it? It’s the healthy that drop down dead. The sick just go dragging on for ever.’
For a moment it seemed that she was going to break into uncontrolled weeping. He heard her mouth sucking air in an enormous sob. Then it stopped suddenly and she said:
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get worked up like that. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
He did not know quite what to say. He was distracted, not for the first time, by the emotional change of her voice. It almost mesmerized him and then she said:
‘It was bad enough when there wasn’t you. But now it’s awful. I can’t wait like that any more—I can’t wait much longer.’
Before he went that night he thought he heard Broderick calling from his bedroom. ‘Yes, perhaps it’s him,’ she said. ‘He’s been terribly restless. Would you go up? You could give him another tablet or two if he’s still awake. And just a sip to calm him down.’
* * *
Two days later it happened that a mate of his, a day-driver named Davies, broke his wrist at the depot when a starting handle kicked. He had been going to drive a load of plaster-board to Bristol. And that was how Williams found himself driving out of London at eight o’clock in the morning instead of eight o’clock at night, in misty September rain that sprayed back on his windscreen in a greasy film that never wiped away.
Twenty miles out he decided to stop and wash his windscreen and have a plate of eggs and bacon and some tea at a shack where he sometimes breakfasted coming back to London from the West. While the eggs were cooking the woman who kept the shack lent him the morning paper and he sat for some moments with elbows on the counter, reading it, casually wondering whether he should do a horse named Snow Flurry at 40-1 at Hurst Park that afternoon or be sensible and have something each way on the favourite at Worcester, Lorelei.
Then while he was still reading the woman leaned over from behind the tea-urn and said:
‘There’s a thing there that give me a turn when I got down this morning. Here, where is it, I was reading it when you come in. I’ll see I never take another, if I lay awake a week. You see that?’ she said. She turned the pages over for him. ‘My blessed fingers are all thumbs this morning. There—there it is.’
Dully, not fully g
rasping it for a moment, he found himself reading the piece the woman had found for him. It was the account of the inquest on an actress who had died. Her death, the coroner said, was the third of its kind in a month: an alarming situation that should serve as a warning to people who took sleeping tablets and a night-cap of neat brandy or whisky on top. It could not be stated too strongly that the combination of these things was likely to be fatal.
‘I done it,’ the woman said. ‘Two or three times last winter. And once last week. Two tablets and a tot of Johnny Walker. And neat at that. I hadn’t slept right for a week. I felt I’d got to have something——’
The smell of eggs and bacon was suddenly an insufferable sickness, searing in his throat. A few moments later he was walking out of the shack, slopping through big black puddles of rain that lay all across the cinder surface of the pull-in.
For some time he did not know whether it was raining or not. It was perhaps ten or fifteen miles farther on that the clap-clack of windscreen-wipers on dry glass really woke him. His hands were smeary with sweat and there was a dry acid crust on the walls of his throat. Most of the time he was not really seeing the road before him, drying in the September sun, but only the recurrent, entangled, haunting picture of the big ugly house that no one had ever seemed to stop building. It was a picture with something evil and luminous about it. He saw it in the purplish glow of the spirit kettle, then in the feeble aura of the night-light and the broad stabbing flashes of lightning on the night he had first gone up to Broderick. He tried to remember how many times he had been up to that room and how many tablets and glasses he could have given Broderick and above all he kept thinking what a fool he had been ever to go there and stay there and listen to her.
The sun was hot in a clear noon sky by the time he came to within sight of the house. He decided to park the truck half a mile away, on the top of a hill, and walk the rest of the way to the back of the place. The air was humid and thick after rain and when he got out of his cab he felt his knees buckle and sag underneath him with a complete absence of feeling that was more sickening than sudden pain.
He walked through a field at the back of the house and came into the garden through a fence that had fallen down under the weight of blackberry and bindweed. Instinctively he looked at the windows, but the blinds were not down. Up to that time he did not know quite what he was looking for. He was aware simply of groping in a scared cold way through sensations of nausea, through horror at being caught in a trap, through revulsion at the dead.
Then he remembered the conservatory. He remembered that that was where Broderick sat during most of the afternoon. He had heard her speak of a gardener named Smithson who came in for two hours in the morning to work among the flowers and then left at noon.
He did not know how long he stood in front of the conservatory door in exactly the way he had stood in the bedroom, in the storm, calling Broderick’s name.
‘Mr Broderick,’ he said, ‘Mr Broderick.’
The little figure in the straw hat was sitting among the flowers. It seemed to be transfixed in the same torpid coma as when Williams had first seen it there. The skin of the face was blotched, as it had been then, with blobs of coloured light streaming down, diffused, from the roof above, giving it the appearance of a marbled, artificial flower.
For a moment he could not make up his mind whether in fact he was not, after all, looking at the dead. All his sickness and revulsion came rushing back. Then he turned the handle of the door and through the steamy unreal heat of the conservatory he saw Broderick stir, raising his eyes from their torpor.
‘Williams,’ Broderick said, ‘what are you doing here?’
Under the torrid glass, brilliant in the September afternoon sun, the bloodless face was actually bathed in sweat.
‘Are you all right, Mr Broderick?’ Williams said. ‘I dropped in to see how you were.’
‘Perfectly all right.’ The face tottered in the overheated air like a petal about to fall. ‘This isn’t your time, is it?’
‘Got a change of job,’ Williams said. ‘I’m on day-shift now. Are you sure you’re all right, Mr Broderick? Don’t you want some air in here?’
‘Perfectly all right,’ Broderick said. ‘Thanks to you.’ Incredulously Williams listened. In stupefaction he heard Broderick mumble on: ‘The whisky seems to have given me a new lease of life. Done me a power of good. Gives just enough stimulus to the heart without affecting it.’
In the stifling heat, among the scent of flowers, Williams felt his own sweat prickling harshly through every pore.
‘I got to go now, Mr Broderick,’ he said. ‘Got to push on. Got to get down as far as Bristol before tea-time.’
‘Haven’t you seen Mrs Broderick?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you want to see her? I fancy she’s asleep in the house somewhere.’
‘Not today,’ Williams said. ‘I got to push on today.’
By that time he was standing by the door of the conservatory, holding it open, ready to go. Behind him the free cool air was blowing in.
‘Shall I give her a message?’ Broderick said. ‘Is there some message I can give?’
Message? For some moments he stood thinking that there was no message. He had nothing to say that made sense about an island, the sea, the sun or about Mrs Broderick, who could not sleep at night-time.
Then he decided, after all, that there was a message.
‘Tell Mrs Broderick,’ he said, ‘that I shan’t be coming this way again.’ He was outside now; he was breathing at last the cool, sweet, free air. ‘Tell her that from now on I’ll be working in the day time.’
Summer in Salandar
Chapter 1
Manson lifted one corner of the green gauze window blind of the shipping office and watched, for an indifferent moment or two, the swift cortège of a late funeral racing up the hill. It flashed along the water-front like a train of cellulose beetles, black and glittering, each of the thirty cars a reflection of the glare of sun on sea. He wondered, as the cars leapt away up the avenue of jade and carmine villas, eye-less in the bright evening under closed white shades, why funerals in Salandar were always such races, unpompous and frenzied, as if they were really chasing the dead. He wondered too why he never saw them coming back again. They dashed in black undignified weeping haste to somewhere along the sea-coast, where blue and yellow fishing boats beat with high moon-like prows under rocks ashen with burnt sea-weed, and then vanished for ever.
He let the blind fall into place again, leaning spare brown elbows on the mahogany lid of his desk. He was thinking that that evening a ship would be in. It could not matter which ship—he was pretty sure it was the Alacantara—since nobody in their senses ever came to Salandar in the summer. There would in any case be no English passengers and he would meet it out of pure routine. After that he would go home to his small hotel and eat flabby oil-soaked esparda that had as much taste in it as a bath sponge and drink export beer and read the English papers of a week last Wednesday. In the street outside men would sit on dark door-steps and spit golden melon seeds into gutters, coughing with tubercular mournfulness. The flash of an open air cinema down the street would drench the plum-black air above the surrounding courtyards with continuous gentle fountains of light, above little explosions of applause and laughter. In one of the old houses behind the hotel a woman would lull her baby to sleep with a prolonged soft song that was probably as old as the moon-curve of the fishing boats that lined the shore. Under the infinite stars the red beacons on the radio masts would flame like big impossible planets above the mass of the fortress that obscured, with its vast and receding walls, nearly half the sky. And that would be his evening: a lonely and not surprising conclusion to a tiring day when nothing had happened, simply because nothing ever happened in summer in Salandar.
From across the quayside, out on the landing pier, he suddenly heard the sound of more voices than he thought was customary. He got up and parted the slats of the window
shade. The pier was massed with emigrants, emigrant baggage, emigrant noises, the messy struggle of emigrant farewells. He remembered then that the Alacantara was not coming in. It was the Santa Maria, coming from precisely the opposite way.
That sort of trick of memory always overtook him at the height of summer, two months after the tourist season had died. It was the delayed shock of seasonal weariness. He was as unprepared for it as he was unprepared for the sight of the Santa Maria herself, a ship of pale green hulls with funnels of darker green, suddenly coming round the westerly red-black cliffs of the bay. It made him less annoyed to think that he had to meet her. He did not like to hurry. There was no need to hurry. There was nothing to hurry for. He was not going anywhere. He was not meeting anyone. The point of his meeting a ship on which he had no passenger was purely one of duty. Like most of the rest of his life on Salandar it was a bore.
Was there a passenger? With the precision of habit he turned up a black ledger of passengers names that gave him nothing in answer. It was nice to be assured, anyway, that he was not mistaken.
A moment later he called to the only clerk to tell the porter that he wanted the launch in five minutes. His voice was dry from the summer catarrh that came from living low down, at sea-level, in the rainless months, in the sandy dust of the port. He cleared his throat several times as he went out into the street and the sun struck him below the eyebrows with pain. On the corner of the pavement he stood and closed his eyes briefly before he crossed to the water-front and as he opened them again the last black beetle of the funeral cortège flashed past him, expensively glittering, lurching dangerously, chasing the dead: a car filled with weeping men.
Chapter 2
On the ship the air seemed absorbent. It sucked up the life of the fanless purser’s cabin on the middle deck.
‘She got on at Lisbon, Mr Manson,’ the purser said. ‘She said she cabled you from there.’
A small quantity of pearl-grey luggage, splashed with varnished scarlet labels, among them the letter V, stood by the purser’s door. Staring down at it, Manson tried to remember back through a long drowsy day to some point where a cable might have blown in, rushed past him and, like the cortège of racing mourners, have disappeared. He could not recall any cable and the purser said: