Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  They all agreed. The same night they appointed Harry secretary, and within a week they had entered their applications for two top-notch contests in August and two others in September.

  ‘Next year we’ll bust the Crystal Palace,’ Sep said.

  In another week they were really practising. They hired a school-room for three nights a week and they were like men at devotion. One of the test pieces was Mendelssohn’s overture to a ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and it was pretty tricky. But they got the spirit of it at once. It was Alf who was responsible. He dinned it into them never to play a single note without the words of the title burning in their minds: that it was midsummer, that it was night, that it was a dream.

  ‘Play it,’ he said, ‘just as if you’d had a pint or two, like that. Sweet and dreamy and about half-drunk.’ And the way they responded was masterly. They got all the sweet dreamy intoxication of the dream into it wonderfully. They made it ethereal and unreal. There was no doubt at that time that they were going to knock spots off everybody.

  Then something happened. At the third practice, about half-way through the Mendelssohn, when they already knew the thing inside out. Alf suddenly stopped them.

  ‘We’ll go through that again. First bar, second line down the right hand page.’

  They played it and he stopped them again.

  ‘Somebody’s playing a grace note in the third line, second bar,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no grace note there, and whoever’s playing it can’t see straight. If Mendelssohn had wanted a grace note there he’d have put one in. Now again. And no grace note.’

  They played it again, and Alf nearly lost his temper.

  ‘Who the devil’s playing that grace note?’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘It’s a cornet, somewhere. Who is it?’ Nobody answered. It was an insult to suggest any of them couldn’t read, and in his mind everybody blamed everybody else. ‘Well,’ Alf said ‘we’ll try it again.’

  They tried it again, and the cornet played the grace note.

  ‘Who played it?’ Alf shouted. Nobody answered. ‘Come on, who played it?’

  ‘I did.’ Sep said.

  Alf nearly broke his baton. ‘Then by heavens you ought to know better.’

  ‘It’s here all right. It’s marked in the copy.’ Sep said ‘D’ye think I can’t see?’

  ‘Where? Where’s it’s marked? Let me see.’

  Alf stormed round behind the cornet and looked over his father’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s a fly muck!’

  ‘Who is? What is? Fly muck! That’s a grace note. Think I can’t read?’

  ‘It’s a fly muck. I tell you. Here, Harry, Charley! Is that a fly muck or is it a grace note?’

  Harry and Charley came to look and both said it was a fly muck. Then gradually the whole family crowded round, and everybody said that it was a fly muck. The old man was absolutely humiliated. He felt disgraced before his on brothers and his own sons. But still he would not have it that it was a fly muck and not a grace note. He was like all the Chipperfields: too proud to admit a fault, and he kept saying:

  ‘It’s there and I shall play it. It’s there and I shall play it.’

  ‘In that case,’ Alf said, ‘the band goes smash.’

  ‘Smash? What? What– –’

  The idea almost smashed him himself. The thought of the band going wrong was unthinkable, and suddenly the old man did, for a Chipperfield, a very magnanimous and wonderful thing.

  ‘All right,’ he said ‘I give in. I won’t play it.’

  ‘You’d better change copies with somebody,’ Alf said, ‘or you’ll be reading the fly muck again.’

  ‘No,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I’ll stick to my own. I ain’t saying the note ain’t there, but I won’t play it. That’s all.’

  And, when they tried the piece again, he didn’t play it. It was a great effort of will, but he succeeded. All the time everybody felt a little strained, and much of the dreamy, drunken spirit of the thing was lost. And all the Chipperfields felt that the old man was to blame. He, in turn, felt them against him. It depressed him. For the first time in his life he felt a crack in the family unity.

  Then, for a time, things went very well. The Chipperfields got to know the Mendelssohn inside out. They played it like angels. They were a small band, but they were so beautifully balanced and sure in understanding of the music and each other that nobody ever noticed that.

  But all the time the old man was worried. He couldn’t get the grace note out of his mind. Every time he came to the page showing the fly muck he went through a small agony of indecision and distress. It needed a constant effort of will and self-denial not to play a note which he was still sure in his own mind was there.

  Anybody else would by that time have forgotten it, but the Chipperfields were like that. Even about music they were as proud as horses and as stubborn as donkeys. All his life Sep had worked as a finisher in a shoe factory, and when he came home sometimes, in the evenings mucky and dishevelled, he looked rather like a tired, grizzly old dog who has had enough. The grace note wouldn’t let him rest.

  And when the contest day came it was still on his mind. The rest of the Chipperfields had forgotten it long since. But he was obsessed by it. He had begun to see it out of all proportion. And all that afternoon he kept wiping his grizzly moustache with the back of his hand in nervous distress. The Chipperfields played late in the afternoon. Even before they played there was something of a sensation: a whole band of one name, almost of one single family. And they were as cocksure as fowls on their own muckle

  They began the Mendelssohn wonderfully, exactly as Alf had always directed, half-drunkenly, dreamily, almost ethereally. They could have played it standing on their heads. And then, about halfway through, it happened. Tolstoy has related how learning to ride a bicycle he kept his eye on a lady in a frenzied effort to avoid her and succeeded at once in knocking her down. Sep Chipperfield did the same thing.

  Having striven for so long not to play the grace note, he only succeeded in playing it. And that afternoon, in the big concert hall he not only played it, but played it well and truly revengefully, with a kind of stubborn defiance against his sons and Mendelssohn and all who were listening. The minute the Chipperfields heard it they knew that they were lost. They were furious. They went straight to pieces. They finished up like a lot of demoralised rag-timers at a circus.

  Afterwards they went for the old man like dogs. Alf threatened to bust his cornet. The spit coming out of fifteen instruments was like acid.

  ‘He played the damn thing a-purpose! Played it a-purpose. My lord,’ Alf said. ‘I’d pawn my instrument and lose the ticket.’

  The old man could say nothing. He just stood in the middle of them with open mouth, broken up, dumb.

  ‘You wanted to smash the band,’ Harry said ‘and now you’ve done it. Well, I’m finished.’

  ‘And me,’ Alf said.

  They were all finished. It was the last time the Chipperfields played together as a band. Their pride was smashed. It was almost the last time they came together as a family too. Both Alf and Harry said they were never going home again and gradually, one by one, the rest of the sons got married and gave up going too. In a year or two the family unity was broken as surely and irrevocably as the family pride had been.

  And Sep could not bear it. It was a little thing, but it broke him up. Within a year it killed him. Any other family would have laughed at a little thing like a grace note. But not the Chipperfields.

  It was no joke at all.

  A Note on the Author

  H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

  Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

  His first novel, The
Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

  During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X’. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950).

  Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).

  His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

  Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

  H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

  Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/hebates.

  Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  First published in Great Britain in 1961 by Michael Joseph

  ‘The Grace Note’ first published in Great Britain in 1936 in the Daily Mail

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Copyright © 1961 Evensford Productions Limited

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

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  eISBN: 9781448215249

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