by H. E. Bates
‘Oh! you remember as plain as a pike-staff. You’d been to the point-to-point races on Easter Saturday and you met two girls and brought them along here afterwards. With a young man named Tim or something. Tom it might have been.’
‘It so happens that I never go to point-to-point races,’ I said. ‘I loathe them.’
‘Well, you’d been somewhere.’
‘It was Tim Walters who had been to the point-to-points. I was out for a walk when he stopped and gave me a lift and dropped me here. You were clipping the garden hedge and you asked us in for a glass of red-currant wine.’
‘I remember the girls so well!’ she suddenly said, with a beautiful, half-absent breeziness. ‘The one called Penelope was the jolly one, full of mischief—’
‘Her name is Peggy.’
‘Very well, Peggy.’
‘And she isn’t the jolly one. She’s the rather shy, thoughtful one.’
‘Oh! I thought that was Violet.’
‘Valerie,’ I said. ‘She’s the jolly one. She’s Tim’s sister.’
‘Oh! really?’ she said. ‘I thought they were married.’
‘Marrying your sister,’ I said, ‘isn’t generally done.’
‘Oh! well, then they should have been. I thought they were admirably suited to each other.’
Aunt Leonora is a divine, lovable crack-pot. Many people are tone-deaf or colour-blind or lacking a sense of humour or smell; in Aunt Leonora there are merely strange fundamental forces at work that prevent her from distinguishing, even remotely, between truth and falsehood, fact and fancy. For these reasons she is also a schemer; she for ever seeks to put things right. If two people are not friends when she thinks they ought to be friends, she will strive indefatigably to make them friends, even to the point of total disaster. When she dies there will be carved on her tomb – or should be – the words There is a Divinity which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and she, I fear, will have been the Divinity. She is the great divine end-shaper of all time.
‘Anyway, these are the three people you’d like to come to the picnic, are they?’ she said, again with that bland, toothy smile.
It was monstrous. It was also impossible.
‘Tim,’ I said, ‘is in Cape Town. He’s taken a job there.’
‘But his wife and the other girl will come.’
‘Not his wife. His sister.’
‘Anyway she’s the jolly one.’
‘She is not the jolly one.’
‘Anyway, they’ll come, won’t they?’
‘I haven’t asked them.’
‘But good grief, man, you must. You’re getting awfully slack, aren’t you? I’ve already asked another young man. There’ll be just a nice round six of us.’
‘What young man?’
Here Aunt Leonora proceeded to describe, in the vaguest possible terms, a young man she sometimes met at the public library. She thought his name was Bennett or Barnett or something of that sort. Her chief impression of him was that he seemed woefully undernourished. He was distressingly thin. He lacked fresh air. He seemed to read mostly books on engineering or science or kindred subjects and had a rather prominent mole on one cheek or the other and was going rapidly and prematurely bald.
‘Any idea of his first name?’ I said.
‘I rather fancy it’s David.’
‘It sounds like a man named David Benson I know vaguely. He works in insurance.’
‘That’s it. Benson.’
‘And what, pray, made you ask him?’
In answer she gave me one of those dark, meaningful glares, full of sinister suspicion, that were so typical of her.
‘I thought he ought to be taken out of himself.’
I was about to suggest that perhaps he didn’t want taking out of himself, but finally I decided to let this almost accusative piece of information pass without a word. It was just as well I did so because, a moment later, she broke into what sounded like a concluding twitter of song.
‘Well, then, that’s just about all fixed. I’ve asked Mr Benson. You’ll ask the girls. Uncle Freddie will see to the rods and tackle. And what would you like to eat?’
‘Now?’
‘No, no. For the picnic. Freddie!’ she suddenly called, ‘what sort of food do you fancy for the picnic?’
As if from the end of an invisible telephone line Uncle Freddie replied with remarkable alacrity:
‘Pork pie and cucumber salad.’
‘Oh! no, that’s dull. That’s ghastly. That’s plain cowardice.’
It seemed to me that at this moment Uncle Freddie, so peremptorily crushed, slipped suddenly deeper into the hammock and the zizz.
‘You know what I thought would be an absolutely marvellous thing?’
Amiable again, I begged her to tell me.
‘I think we should picnic off the land.’
‘Good God,’ I said.
This unlikely and impractical prospect so alarmed me that it was some moments before I could remind her that she hated shooting, hunting and violence of any kind to animals and birds and that she only tolerated fishing for Uncle Freddie’s sake.
‘I really meant picnic off the water,’ she said.
‘Good God,’ I said. ‘Not fish?’
‘Why not? I was thinking principally of perch. I once had them in Switzerland. On the lake of Geneva. Filets de perche. With local white wine. Absolutely delicious.’
‘But supposing,’ I said, ‘we don’t catch any perch?’
She merely gave me the toothiest of white smiles.
‘We’ll guard against that eventuality by taking smoked trout along.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Perhaps that was cowardice too but it was all, for the moment, I could think of to say. Inwardly I felt my heart grieve for the undernourished Mr Benson. I seemed to see, in imagination, the jolly, healthy, mischievous figure of Valerie, a girl whose bouncing frame needed strong sustenance if ever living creature did, sucking on the pale bones of a four-ounce perch.
‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘that we shall perhaps need something more substantial?’
‘Oh! that’s all arranged,’ she said with the most disarming brightness, ‘I’m making a big steak-and-kidney pie. We’ll have it cold. And salads and apricot tarts and things of that sort. Oh! nobody will starve. It was just that I thought we ought to have one little touch of the wild.’
‘One touch,’ I said, ‘will undoubtedly make the whole world kin.’
‘What was that? What were you muttering about?’
‘Nothing at all. Just thinking aloud.’
‘Well, just don’t. It’s an extremely bad habit. I’ve told you before. It’s worse than thinking with your eyes.’
A moment later she turned swiftly from these dark accusations to call yet again to Uncle Freddie:
‘Freddie, what do perch eat?’
‘Worms.’
‘Then you must be up at crack of dawn, don’t forget. Digging.’
From the round radishy figure of my Uncle Freddie there came, in answer, one brief sound. It might have been the croaking of a snoozing frog.
By half past eleven on Saturday morning I was lowering, gently and indeed with some reverence, half a dozen bottles of red-currant wine into a shallow pool on the Mill Lake, under the dark shade of an alder tree. The morning had on it a blissful and somnolent bloom, tenderly hazy and without glare. The surface of the lake even reeked with misty steam.
‘Where are those two children?’ Aunt Leonora demanded, I think perhaps for the third or fourth time and as if she didn’t know. ‘Lost their way, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Aunt Leonora continually sought in other people, but rarely found it, that quality of restless and unflagging energy with which she attacked everything in life from chasing mythical marauders from her garden to making currant wine and custard tarts. ‘Those children’ were the undernourished Mr Benson and the shy Peggy Mortimer, who were somewhere bringing up the rear of our fishing column with
a large basket-work hamper containing picnic plates, cutlery and food.
Aunt Leonora had enlisted them into this task with blatant deliberation, simply with the unashamed purpose of throwing them together. It was clearly her first move in taking Mr Benson out of himself.
‘They get on absolutely splendidly together, don’t you think?’ she said, airily tossing the first part of the sentence to Valerie Charlesworth and the second to me. ‘They sort of went for each other from the word go.’
Again I couldn’t help admiring her choice of words. ‘They sort of went for each other from the word go’ was just another characteristic, charming lie. No two people could ever have ached more not to be left alone together.
‘There’s a sort of fusion when some people meet,’ she said, ‘isn’t there?’
I didn’t bother to answer this but merely winked, sideways, at Valerie Charlesworth. With her extraordinary golden-brown eyes, that had in them some of the hazy languor of the morning air, she winked back at me, but whether in understanding or out of sheer mischievous habit or in secret invitation about something I had no time to decide.
‘Now off you go collecting wood, you two!’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Nice dry pieces. Ash, if possible. That burns so well.’
‘I thought of helping Uncle Freddie with the rods and tackle,’ I started to say.
Aunt Leonora peremptorily cut me off by brandishing the frying pan into the air.
‘Oh! don’t disturb the man. He likes to do it himself, in his own way.’
‘Absolutely sure you don’t need any help, Uncle Freddie?’ I said.
Uncle Freddie, puffing with enormous contentment at his big brown pipe, merely shook his head and said ‘No. Thanks all the same, dear boy.’
‘There!’ she said. ‘I told you so. Now off you go, you and Peggy. Wooding.’
‘This,’ I said blandly, ‘happens to be Valerie.’
‘Oh! does it?’ she said and gave me one of those remarkably dark accusative glares of hers, actually as if it were I who was now telling the lies.
So we went off to collect firewood, Valerie and I, walking slowly to the far end of the lake, in a morning that seemed to grow more exquisite in its summer embalmment every second. Deep woods of hazel and chestnut and alder fringed the lake on all sides and at the very far end of it a few wild duck were placidly paddling among islands of water-lilies, the new yellow buds of the flowers rising like crook-necked snakes among them. In the deepest shade of the woods, where no sun had penetrated for weeks, a few drifts of late bluebells still bloomed, smoky mauve.
Valerie was one of those charming animals whose presence is entirely physical. She was wearing lemon linen shorts and an emerald nylon blouse and her legs and arms were deeply tanned and bare. In the water she would have been a big golden fish; on land she was more like a large, affectionate, beautiful dog, with smooth glistening brown hair and an occasional habit of brushing her body against you.
‘And what,’ she suddenly said to me, ‘was the meaning of the big wink back there?’
I told her; I informed her, frankly, that in my opinion my Aunt Leonora was simply doing her damnedest to fix a match between Peggy and the undernourished Mr Benson.
‘Oh! don’t be silly.’
‘Absolutely as plain as daylight.’
‘You’ve got a suspicious mind.’
‘Not on your life. It’s an old habit of hers.’
At this she stopped on the path, in the warm sunlight now breaking through the haze, and turned to me. She was framed against the barely turning lower leaves of a big silver poplar and she suddenly gave me the slowest and most mischievous of smiles.
‘You wouldn’t by any chance suppose she had designs for us too?’
‘Not impossible.’
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘aren’t we going to do anything about it?’
I murmured that I didn’t see any reason at all why not and then put my arms round her and kissed her long and full on the mouth. The effect of this was that my body seemed to become a ’cello on which the very deepest reverberating notes were being played. The effect on her was startingly different. She finally held her big body away from me, locking her hands softly round the nape of my neck, and smiled full into my eyes.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Kissing always makes me terribly hungry.’
‘Glad to have been of service.’
‘I suppose it’s something to do with the mouth. But when you kissed me just now my stomach turned over and I started thinking about steak-and kidney pie and salads and bread and cheese and custard tarts and all that sort of thing.’
‘And perch.’
‘Why perch?’
I briefly explained about the perch; I told her about the touch of the wild. She just laughed and said:
‘Well, in that case the sooner we get back and start fishing the better.’
‘You have,’ I said, ‘the most charming way of putting things.’
On the way back, as we gathered firewood, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Aunt Leonora had after all made a mistake, that morning, in her careful arrangement of partners. It was really the shy Mr Benson who should have been wooding with Valerie, in the idyllic world of wild duck, yellow water-lilies and silver poplar leaves. She, undoubtedly, would have taken him clearly and finally out of himself.
But it was too late for such changes now, as I instantly discovered when we got back to where Aunt Leonora and Peggy were already laying out, in the alder shade, picnic cloth, knives and forks, pepper and salt and glasses.
In that distinctive, high-pitched voice of hers Aunt Leonora was saying:
‘Never fished before? I’ll bet a million to one he’ll have beginner’s luck. He’s just that sort. He’ll catch an outrageous whopper. You see.’
At these extravagant and prophetic praises of Mr Benson Peggy merely smiled shyly and polished a wine glass with a tea-cloth.
‘You can feel it in some men,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’
She could hardly have spoken with greater candour if she had suddenly speculated on the actual date of the wedding or something of that sort. She was once again at work as the great end-shaper and suddenly, almost punctually on the stroke of midday, prophecy was fulfilled. I heard a sudden excited shout from Uncle Freddie, thirty yards or so down the lake, where he and Mr Benson were already fishing.
‘Hold it! Take it steady! I’ll get the net!’
I promptly dropped a whole armful of wood and ran down to the lakeside. Uncle Freddie had the net in his hands and in the net was a splendid green-gold acrobatic perch, I judged of nearly a pound and a half in weight, glistening in the sun.
The expression on the pallid Mr Benson’s face was one of catastrophe. It might have been the look on the face of a man who, by some ghastly mischance, had just killed a child. It was chalky with fright. His hands were trembling too and his mouth actually fell open, in an extraordinarily fish-like way, as he watched Uncle Freddie take the hook from the perch’s mouth and lay the squirming fish on the grass in the sun.
‘Good God!’ Aunt Leonora said, rushing forward and peering excitedly through her flashing spectacles. ‘What a beauty. There! Didn’t I tell you?’
These last words were addressed to Peggy, who had crept up behind us with the reticence of someone coming to peer at a graveside. Her shyness was now composed completely of disbelief, which Aunt Leonora instantly shattered with another triumphant burst of candour:
‘It’s quite obvious you two will never starve!’
Aunt Leonora now looked almost ready to embrace Mr Benson; he might have been on the verge of entering the bosom of the family. Like a shy hero he stood watching Uncle Freddie putting another gluey pink worm on the hook and heard Valerie add still further to his discomfiture by saying, with a luscious laugh:
‘My, my, a positive Isaac Walton.’
Peggy blushed deeply and with unconcealed pain. Uncle Freddie, for once really excited, declared that perch, on
ce they got started, were great feeders. Mr Benson must therefore get at ’em; we must all get at ’em; in no time at all we’d be pulling them out by the score.
‘Filets de perche!’ Aunt Leonora exclaimed. ‘Thank God I brought plenty of black pepper and butter.’
Uncle Freddie, Mr Benson and I now began feverishly to fish and soon Mr Benson, blessed by that uncanny luck that so often falls on the shoulders of beginners, was pulling out perch at the rate of one every four minutes or so. Each time he hooked a fresh one the thrill of fright went through him again, completely draining his face of blood.
Soon wood smoke was blowing fragrantly on the air.
‘Somebody start bringing the fish so that I can scale and fillet them,’ Aunt Leonora called. ‘How many now?’
I started off towards the fire, carrying half a dozen fair-sized perch in Uncle Freddie’s creel. The lunch cloth was now spread out, filled with good things. Like a golden-brown crown, the steak-and-kidney pie, in a big round baking dish, sat in the centre of an array of salads, tomatoes, radishes, brown and white loaves, cheeses, custard tarts and fresh strawberries and cream.
Every now and then Aunt Leonora peered excitedly at the fish, pointedly asking to know what lucky, clever man had caught them all?
‘Mr Benson,’ I said. ‘Uncle Freddie and I haven’t had a touch.’
‘What a man! What a wizard!’
After this fulsome burst of praise for Mr Benson she turned on me with one of those accusatory thrusts of hers and said she didn’t suppose she could rely on me to gut and fillet the fish? I said no, indeed, she couldn’t.
‘If you want anything doing do it yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s extraordinary what hidden talents some men have.’
I murmured that this equally applied to some women too.
‘Eh? What was that?’ she said. ‘Mumbling again. Get me some water. There’s a washing-up bowl somewhere.’
I picked up a white enamel bowl and went down to the lake’s edge to dip water. A young green frog jumped out of a bed of reeds as I filled the bowl and fell into the lake with the merest whisper of a plop. I watched it swim away and then walked back to the picnic fire just in time to hear Aunt Leonora say: