The Bachelor

by Stella Gibbons

  “Quite. I’ve got some more at home.” The mother took a cigarette which Alicia lit, and then she offered her case to the girl with the plaits.

  “I have cigarettes too also.” The smile grew wider on her round sallow little face as she took from her shabby handbag an exquisite case of hammered silver, flat and ancient, with delicate scrolls outlined in turquoise-coloured enamel. She held out the case to Alicia, who laughed and shook her head.

  “No thank you. Too strong. Make my head go——” she waved her finger round and round and shut her eyes.

  “You know Bairamian tobacco?” asked the girl, laughing too.

  “Oh, yes, I know Bairamian tobacco. I’ve had some.”

  “You smoke tobacco in Bairamia?” she asked eagerly, leaning forward.

  “No. In the Dorchester Hotel in London.”

  Alicia then said no more because the conversation was beginning to bore her, and the girl began to smoke in a way that fascinated the children, who sat and stared at her graceful movements and absorbed face in silence. The quick gestures and the blue smoke winding up from the little dark yellow cigarette made them think vaguely of a dance.

  The train was drawing into a station, and the mother stood up to collect her parcels from the rack. With the help of the Bairamian girl (Alicia never joined in such communal manifestations of goodwill, and old ladies might die of heart failure wrestling with obdurate windows before she would say, “Let me do that”) she got them all down just as the train stopped. Alicia watched them climbing out, and thought what a circus the children were, with gas-masks, and pieces of wet biscuit, and grubby panties showing under their shabby little dresses. She yawned, and looked down at her wicked shoes.

  The Bairamian girl was helping out the last of the children.

  “Come on, Joy—be careful now, Shirley. Thank you! Hope you hear from your family soon. Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye.” And then the Bairamian girl, standing at the window, made a deep respectful bow and said clearly, as the train began to move away, “Hail to you, honoured mother of four daughters, peace and joy be yours.”

  Suffering cats, thought Alicia, staring hard and wondering if this was an old Bairamian custom or if the gin was making her hear things. But she was certainly not going to ask, for in her opinion there was too much asking and discussing in the world; too much chewing and not enough doing; and she sometimes amused herself by seeing how few sentences she could get through the day on. She shut her eyes, hoping that the girl in the corner would not talk to her, and dozed until the train began to draw into the next station, which was St. Alberics. Doors opened and soldiers began to crowd in. Alicia stood up and pushed her way out, wondering if the little number with the plaits would try to string along too, but the little number had competently saddled herself with an enormous rucksack and showed no signs of stringing along beyond catching Alicia’s eye and giving her a smile and a polite little bow. Alicia returned it with a reluctant grin, and then the girl disappeared in the crowd of commuting business men, noisy young girls from the new munition factories outside the town, and Service people.

  Alicia went upstairs to find her bicycle and the sheepskin boots she would pull on over her lovely stockings, while her shoes rode in the carrier. Just outside the station she ran into Mr. Fielding, wearing civilian dress for once, and looking thoroughly browned off.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHE HAD KNOWN him since she was nine, and so she continued to think of him as “Mr. Fielding,” although the more natural mode of thought now that she was twenty-seven would have been “Kenneth Fielding.” He used to pull her bobbed hair and makes jokes that, even at nine years old, she had thought silly; and now of course he was just an old thing; in fact he was a year younger than that H. who had done all the damage, but whereas no one could possibly have thought of that man-of-the-world as an old thing, Mr. Fielding had probably seemed one to the more discerning among his contemporaries when he too had been nine years old.

  He’s had a few, too, she thought as he came towards her. At first he did not see her, for he was looking moodily down at the pavement, and she hoped that she might slip past without having to speak to him, but suddenly he stopped and glanced at her uncertainly, then smiled and took off his hat.

  “Hallo, Alicia. How are you? Lovely afternoon, isn’t it? Been shopping?” His glassy gaze slowly wandered down to her feet. “I say, I say! What stunning shoes!”

  “They are rather nice, aren’t they?” she said, bored. “Are you lost or something?” she went on, in the impertinent tone she had always used with him.

  “Ha! ha! No, I happened to get away from the office early this afternoon and I just blew along to see if a wild and hairy Austrian that Connie’s expecting had come on this train. The buses are so crowded nowadays, I thought I might drive her home. Got twopennyworth of petrol; may as well use it, you know. Suppose I can’t give you a lift too?”

  “No, thanks very much. I’ve got the bike here.”

  “Mind my bike!” laughed Mr. Fielding. “Oh, come now. No nice ride home?”

  (He’ll be saying “La!” in a minute, she thought.)

  “No, really not, thanks.”

  “I’d like to, Alicia,” he said, and looked down sentimentally at her with his head on one side.

  “I’m sure you would,” she said coolly, “but I can’t hang about while you find your Austrian. Good-bye.”

  “No—but look here—Alicia——”

  She smiled slightly and shook her head and was turning away from him when a pretty voice said “Hallo, Kenneth!” and a tallish slender woman in fashionable grey tweeds came up to them and took Mr. Fielding’s arm and gave it an affectionate squeeze.

  “Betty!” cried Mr. Fielding, and his red face went redder with pleasure. “What luck! We didn’t expect you until to-morrow. How are you?”

  “I’m very well, thanks. Yes, I came on this train. Didn’t Connie get my wire? No, of course she didn’t; as if anyone ever got wires in time nowadays. How are you, Kenneth?”

  “Oh, I’m flourishing, thanks. Being a Happy Warrior suits me down to the ground—literally sometimes, ha! ha! Now this is really great luck, I can drive you home. Is this all you’ve got?” picking up a shabby pigskin suit-case.

  “My other stuff’s coming later. Kenneth, it is nice to see you again and you haven’t changed a bit, you don’t look a scrap older——”

  That’s right. You get on with your bits and your scraps and I’ll get home, thought Alicia who was now striding to the bicycle shed. A shout came after her—

  “Alicia! Don’t run away! Come and talk to Mrs. Marten while I go and get the car.”

  Curse, thought Alicia. “How do you do?” she called, smiling and half-turning. “I really can’t, Mr. Fielding, I shall be late and the foreman charge-hand will knout me.”

  “We’ve met before—years ago,” said Betty Marten, coming towards her smiling, with the sun on her face. She had a clear skin and sparkling grey-green eyes and delicate impertinent features; a very pretty woman, but so charming that her prettiness was only a secondary charm. Vintage 1914, too sweet; I like mine drier, thought Alicia. In a few minutes she decided that she had better go by car, and after she had arranged about her bicycle, they waited for Kenneth together.

  Betty Marten was thinking that the affair with H., of which she had heard details from Miss Burton, had spoiled Alicia almost completely. She remembered her as a striking twenty-three-year-old, elegant and dowered with personality, who had kept a younger brother and sister and a father who had divorced her mother amused and in order. Now, four years later, she was still elegant and striking but her personality was dimmed in some way; and she was so plainly unhappy that she made Betty feel uncomfortable.

  “Mr. Fielding has to collect an Austrian or something,” Alicia observed, after a pause.

  “Oh, yes, Miss Fielding said something in her letter about getting a refugee to help with the housework. Of course that’s a huge house for the two of th
em to run with only a daily woman.”

  Betty was a completely civilized person, as perhaps only people who grew up before 1914 know how to be, and the details and difficulties and plans of daily living among her friends were interesting to her. Her power of deep feeling had been destroyed twenty-five years ago, when her husband had been killed, but what had grown up in the ruins were the flowers of affection, and gaiety, and courage, and the little joys of every day. She only differed from most people in her indifference to the thought of death.

  Alicia said nothing. She did not give a damn if it was a huge house, for she considered Mr. Fielding a bore and Miss Fielding and Miss Burton asses. Our Mother, whom she had also known, she had at the age of twelve dismissed as a beast. The late Mrs. Fielding had been handsome, energetic, virtuous, clever, and active in promoting the good of her fellow beings; nevertheless, whenever Alicia recalled her nowadays she only modified her twelve-year-old verdict so far as to think of Mrs. Fielding as an old witch.

  “Would it be down on the platform, should you think?” suggested Betty, at last, as Kenneth did not return. “The Austrian, I mean.”

  “Heaven knows. I expect so. They’re all ropey anyway.”

  “Oh, do you think so? I met some rather nice ones in London.”

  “Yes, the men have got what it takes,” said Alicia maliciously.

  Poor little thing, she’s like a cat with a scalded tail, thought Betty, and wondered if Alicia would later on confide in her, as girls very often did. No, I shouldn’t think so, she decided, studying the shape of Alicia’s chin, and felt slightly relieved. Then she said:

  “Do you think this might be it?”

  Alicia looked. A small hatless figure in a black coat and skirt, laden with an enormous rucksack, was coming towards them, with hair sparkling in the evening light. She was accompanied by an old porter who looked stunned. She was saying cheerfully—

  “So if you find my hat you post it to me by the postman. At the house of Miss Constance M. Fielding, Sunglades, Treme, near St. Alberics, Hertfordshire.”

  “Yes, miss. Only I can’t quite make out what you say. If you could just write it down on a piece of paper——”

  “I have not any paper.”

  “Well——” and the old porter fumbled desperately in his bosom—“p’raps I’ve got a bit. Your name’s a bit of a mouthful, too.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Your name. Hard to make out. See?”

  “Still I do not, too also.”

  The old porter stood still, and said quietly: “Strewth. (Beg your pardon.) The 6.15’ll be down in three minutes. Look here. If I find your hat on the line——”

  “Can I help?” asked Betty, laughing and going up; she had heard Miss Fielding’s name. Alicia sat down on Betty’s case, determined not to be drawn into yet another funny refugee story, and at that moment Kenneth drove up in the car.

  “No use, girls. I can’t find her. Sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said.

  “I think that’s her,” said Alicia, nodding towards the group.

  He went up to them at once, thinking in a fuddled way that such a little thing ought not to scrub floors and hoping Con would not ask her to. He had had two or three double whiskies at the George, and he had come down to the station in the grip of one of those ghastly fits of depression he got sometimes; no reason for them; liver, probably. The double whiskies did not always succeed in banishing the depression; they had not done so this afternoon, but the prospect of driving two attractive women—and the little thing was rather taking, too—did cheer him up, and as he addressed Mrs. Marten he was jovial.

  “Sorry to have kept you hanging about, Betty. How do you do, Miss——”

  “Miss Annamatta,” said Betty, “has lost her hat, and we’re just arranging to have it sent on if they find it.”

  “It blow off,” confirmed Miss Annamatta, nodding.

  “How do you do, Miss Matta?” said Kenneth carefully, and he smiled down at her and held out his big hand. To his incredulous horror she at once made him a low curtsy, sinking down on her heel and smiling politely up into his face.

  “Good God—here—I say, you mustn’t do that!” exclaimed Kenneth, turning crimson and glancing at Betty, who was looking amused. “You mustn’t really, you know. Here, let me——” and he began to take the rucksack from her shoulders. After he had put it, and Betty’s suit-case, into the car, Alicia sauntered up (having resigned herself to going without dinner, for she never ate much after a pub crawl anyway) and got into the driver’s seat beside him.

  “That girl has lost her manners, too,” thought Betty, as she settled herself next to Miss Annamatta and felt a natural irritation because she was not sitting next to her old friend. However, her sweet temper soon recovered itself and she began to enjoy the familiar sight of the long hill leading from the station up into the town.

  This evening the High Street was crowded, but crowded with people, instead of the lengthy procession of cars coming out from London that would have been passing through it at this time three years ago. Women were wheeling perambulators down the middle of the road and there were many horse-drawn vehicles, including a graceful dog-cart driven by a girl in a sweater and trousers. The scene was softly coloured and cheerful and pleasing to the eye, although there was not a single completely beautiful object in sight except the evening sky. The pale old houses were marred by huge advertisements sprawling across them, shouting at the people to Dig for Victory and Save Fuel, and the newer shop-fronts were either in the Diluted Gothic style of the early nineteen-hundreds or copies of brick Regency fronts that looked flat and mean; yet the ancient shapes of the streets were charming. They were like the beds of old streams: the weeds on the bank vary in thickness or type and trees are cut down or new ones grow, but the path of the water remains much the same, and so the line of these irregular, winding, steep streets had not changed much in the last thousand years. Every now and again there were alleys leading into paved courtyards where geraniums and pansies and beans grew in window boxes outside ancient little houses, or a flight of worn steps led down to a smooth lawn. And sometimes, framed in a stone archway against the blue sky, as those of us who are lucky enough to have seen Italy remember that her towers and palaces and churches are so often framed, there was a glimpse of the cathedral.

  Betty was looking expectantly out of the window as the car began to go down the other long hill leading out of the town. It is nice to get out of London, she thought, even though it is such a little way out. (She had been born in Devonshire and kept her love of the country.) In a minute we shall pass the cathedral. Suddenly there was open space instead of houses on the left, and there were the lawns going down in their gentle slopes to the river, with the evening light shining on them and the big shadows of trees lying long on their grass, and there was the river reflecting the blue sky between the green and yellow water-iris plants and the flowering rush, with the hills and scattered woods beyond; and there at last, with flower-sprinkled grass sweeping up to its mighty walls, was the cathedral.

  The tall square tower is made of tiny Roman bricks, in colour neither rosy nor ginger but a happy marriage of the two, and it is a thousand years old. Behind it, as if protected by it, lies the long mass of the cathedral itself; a huge shell with high, pale, bare walls on which groups of apostles and saints wearing dim yellow haloes or faded red cloaks sometimes make a faint flush of colour. Through the windows of the clerestory, set at an immense height, pours the light, the first created thing, in an endless flood. On the large pale stones that form the floor there is ranged such a richness of sculptured tombs and broken statues, gilded wooden carvings and grilles of wrought iron work, images with hands clasped in prayer and tablets commemorating the dead of a thousand years, that the mind reels beneath the impact of the Past; and nothing seems to matter except the making of beauty and the loving of God.

  “What a mercy they didn’t hit it,” said Betty, leaning back after watching the cathedral o
ut of sight and saying what everybody, except Miss Annamatta, was in their different way thinking.

  “They did have one in the Close but it was only a hundred-pounder and it was a bit of luck, it fell in the Dean’s garden and did in his perpetual spinach, ha! ha!” said Kenneth. “Oh, and a couple of incendiaries on the roof but they soon put those out. About eighteen months ago the blighters used to come over and pop at it with machine-guns but they don’t do that now, oh, no!” and he glanced cheerfully up at the sky where a couple of Spitfires were playing about.

  His depression had disappeared, for it was a lovely evening and the air had smelled sweet of hay, he was full of good whisky, and he was driving home three attractive women. His revived gaiety communicated itself to Betty, who was always ready to laugh and had one of those delightful helpless laughs that is not quite a giggle but is a collateral of the giggle family and seems to gush out almost against its lucky owner’s will. Miss Annamatta smiled with a politeness that was partly Bairamian and partly because she was twenty years old and riding in a luxurious car with a big kind man, and once or twice even Alicia put in a wisecrack. So they were all cheerful, and gaily Mr. Fielding drove his harem on towards Treme.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT HAPPENED THAT Miss Fielding had endured a trying day. She was in the habit of telling her intimate women friends (she had no men friends, unless we count one Dr. Stocke, with whom she had for many years corresponded upon international matters of interest to them both) that although her appearance might be robust she was in fact far from strong. And she Gave Out, too; if you are far from strong, and Give Out, milk, as is well realized nowadays, is very good for you; so are port and beef broth and chicken, of course, but whereas it would be merely silly, as well as wicked, to try to get hold of them, surely it ought to be possible to obtain some extra milk? It was not as if the time were the depths of winter when the milk is strictly rationed, or even as if the Fieldings obtained their milk from one of the large combines which are helpless in the grip of the Government and cannot give you an extra drip even in summer without your milkman being flung into the Tower; the Fieldings had dealt for the last fifteen years with Soanes’s Farm, a small farm upon the hill which before the war had been exceedingly dirty (and lovely to look at and exciting to play in and smell) and was rapidly, as the saying is, falling into desuetude. But since the Nazi War Soanes’s Farm had perked up no end, and ploughed a lot of ground that had not been ploughed for twenty years, and it had got in a lot more cows, and some pigs, and a tractor too, and Mr. Wilkins the farmer (for of course no Soanes had been there for thirty years and more) had got a bit above himself and inclined to be up-stage about the milk; disobliging, Miss Fielding called it to Miss Burton, who was also not strong and required to be soothed by the sight of five pints of milk sitting in the refrigerator in addition to a jug on the dresser. After all, he had been on cap-touching terms with Our Mother, and Miss Fielding considered that this should have made him their admiring serf for life.