* * *
She sat there for twenty minutes, alert, on edge, listening. Voices drifted to her across the river. She saw a figure come down to the water and fill two watering-cans; another figure followed it, also with cans. So still was the valley that she could hear what one of the voices said.
“We’re going to lose those trees, Bob.”
The other voice was a tired grumble, and she could not distinguish the words it articulated. Actually it accused the weather of being completely cussed.
“If I could afford to pipe the place and put in a pump, we could draw from the river. Save time and labour, and trees.”
They came and went with their cans, and gazing across the water at all the floweriness of Marplot, she could suppose that her dark lad had troubles of his own. Did trees die for lack of water, as some people died for lack of love? But trees did not suffer like humans, and she had suffered too much. Life could make such fierce demands upon you; it was so inconsistent and fickle and ruthless in its exactions and its favours.
Then she heard a car travelling on the main road towards the Weir Bridge, and she drew her feet up and sat forward in her chair. Was it His car? And why was she so strung up and conscious of her heart-beats during those minutes of waiting for him to reappear upon her stage? Was it fear or love, or both? Did she fear him more than she loved him, and if so, what was it that she feared? Yet another crisis in her life, one more shabby and humiliating adaptation to the casual malevolence of circumstances?
It was his car. She saw it cross the bridge, a long, low, black machine with a buff-coloured hood. Her hands clenched themselves. She stood up, sat down again, put a hand to her heart, and looked anguished. Her lips moved, as though she were admonishing herself. “Don’t be silly. You know he hates tension. Try to be casual and easy.” She rose, and walked slowly across the grass, with a smile on her face, but though her lips smiled, her eyes were anxious. Heavens, had she remembered to open the gate at the end of the lane? He hated to have to get out and open gates.
* * *
She had forgotten to open the gate. He had to halt his car in the throat of the lane, and he swore.
“Damn! Why the devil——?”
He opened the off-side door and extended a pair of long legs in fawn-coloured trousers. Their creases were precise and perfect. He was one of those dark men with tenuous black hair, a high and rounded forehead, a nose that was slightly beaked, and a long, thin-lipped mouth. It was not a pleasant mouth, being both sensual, and capable of saying smart things, and smart things are usually cruel. His eyes had a kind of sleepy insolence. That he was a handsome person was known not merely to his tailor, nor to the reflection he observed so carefully in his mirror. It was a quality more considerable and superfine than his name, which was Broster, Max Broster. Less ornamental males might call him a cad about town, but the male is a jealous beast, especially when a man can carry his clothes well, impress women, and make money.
He swung the white gate open, pushed the retaining catch to with the toe of a brown suède shoe, and returned to the car. The garage had been the farm stable, and its doors were open. He drove the car in, switched off the engine, picked up a black “anarchist” hat that lay on the seat, and glanced at himself in the car’s mirror after donning the hat. The consulting of mirrors had become a habit with him; almost, he lived in front of one like an actor.
She stood on the lawn, waiting for him to appear at the garden gate. A year ago she would have met him in the lane but now such impulses were restrained. She had to take her cue. She did not lift a slim arm in a Roman salute and hail him as “Hallo Man,” and master! His was a face to be watched, and its mood met and instantly propitiated. She stood there reproaching herself for the closed gate, and hoping that it had not peeved him.
“Hallo, my dear.”
“Hallo. Where the devil is everybody?”
Her smile came wincingly.
“I’m here.”
He seemed to look at her and yet not at her, and she had come to know so well that evasive glance. He had his hands in his pockets. He was casual, flippant, ready to shrug off any attempt at playfulness.
She said: “I’m so sorry about the gate.”
He looked at her starkly for a moment, and smiled, a kind of frosty glitter seen through smeared glass.
“Where’s Best? Having a rest cure?”
She stood confronting him and the occasion.
“Sorry, there is no Best. Not even a better.”
“How?”
“They walked out and vanished. The place didn’t——”
“What? Bolted?”
“Yes.”
“The damned swine!”
She made herself laugh. Would he have to carry his own luggage up, or would she do it? No, he was not going to kiss her. Nor did she desire it. Such casual stabs hurt.
“Afraid we shall have to picnic. Tea’s ready.”
“Improvisations, what? Anything to eat, or shall we——?”
“Cold supper, my dear.”
He gave her an oblique glance and strolled across to the chairs and table under the limes. Some days were all crooked, crooked at every turn. A year ago her person would have made even cold mutton seem desirable, and he supposed, being a very vain person, that she expected him to find her desirable. But he was not feeling like that. He sat down in the shade while she went into the house to make the tea. He pushed out his long legs and lounged and stared at nothing in particular. No, he was not in a pup’s mood. He had no wish to scamper all over the new house with her, and blurt out the obvious and nice thing in every room. He happened to know the house; he had known it in old Tate’s days. In the shade of the trees his face looked sallow and liverish and supercilious. Would she ask him that eternal question? If so he would have to tell her that Irene was as implacable and as virtuous as ever, and insisting upon cherishing the prerogatives of the wife. Irene and Renata. Didn’t they mean the same thing? He wasn’t quite sure. But could two women have been more different? He supposed it was the difference that had piqued him.
In the kitchen she had put the kettle back on the stove. She sat down on a hard chair and watched it. Her little face looked crumpled and plaintive. So, after all, he was in one of his difficult moods, and she would have to accept it as such. But he was becoming more difficult, and reserved about it. A year ago he had told her things, talked about himself and his projects, but now he seemed to regard her only as a man regards a hectic evening, as a sensational interlude, a physical and occasional distraction. He enjoyed her body, but he had become a stranger to the thing she called her soul.
She made the tea and carried it out. He was lounging deep in the chair, and he did not turn his head to look at her. She sat down and poured out her tea. She saw him put out a casual hand and take a slice of bread and butter from the dish. She was watching his face. It expressed sudden disgust.
“Faugh, what’s wrong with the butter?”
“Is there anything wrong, Max?”
He sniffed at the slice.
“Paraffin. Village shop, I suppose!”
It did not promise to be a happy week-end.
* * *
Temple Manor and its mistress held that no man can be interesting unless he has a temper. As to the controlling of that temper, it should be like a sheathed sword, drawn only on particular and human occasions, and then used as a gentleman’s weapon.
That one could lose one’s temper with impersonal things, and rage against Nature and her inconsistencies was the prerogative of natural man, and perhaps more impressive than the cold negations of the philosophers. Be that as it may, Peter Ghent fell into one of those elemental rages against Nature which the pure countryman will understand and condone.
It was on the Saturday morning that Ghent realized that the wind had changed with a suddenness that appeared to characterize this wayward year. He and George Garland were watering the young trees in the propagating frames when Ghent felt the wind on his left cheek
. It was blowing across the river.
“The wind’s changed, George.”
Garland put down his can, and looked at the sky.
“So it has, sir. Clouds going t’other way.”
“By God, I hope it means rain.”
Listening-in to the news that night Ghent heard that a depression sited over the Atlantic was moving slowly east. The anticyclone was breaking up. The announcer had nothing to say about the drought, nor did the B.B.C. ever appear to understand that thousands of its listeners were more interested in the absence of rain than in the blood bath in China. Ghent was ready to grant the B.B.C. China and Spain, but much of the bathotic and fragmentary stuff they dished out to their listeners irritated him. He would get up and turn the thing off. Somebody’s quadruplets were doing finely!
He woke to an overcast sky, and a wind that was warmer; yet that smirched sky would not rain. It did produce about eight o’clock a very few casual drops that spotted the dust, and then ceased. The canopy of cloud grew thin. The sun came out and shone intermittently.
Ghent cursed the weather. He would take the day off and let work and his worries go to hell. He went to unlock the garage, and in the yard met the unexpected shape of Bob Fanshaw in his Sunday clothes.
“Hallo, Bob! What are you doing here?”
“Just lookin’ round. Seen those young rhodos and azaleas, sir?”
“Which, Bob?”
“The stuff we moved last autumn. Tongues hanging out. This ruddy year gets one cursing on a Sunday.”
Ghent’s face seemed to go thin.
“Let’s look, Bob. That’s our best bit of ground. I thought we were safe there.”
To Ghent, Bob’s description of the bushes was distressfully adequate. Many of the azaleas were showing leaves that had turned from green to grey, and were hanging down like furred and thirsty tongues. The young rhododendron bushes made a less dramatic confession of their lack of faith in the soil’s blessedness, but their leaves drooped and looked leathery and starved.
Peter looked at them sadly. These young azaleas and rhododendrons were, perhaps, his most valuable trees, some of them new varieties and worth two guineas apiece, and as luxury trees he had given them loam and leaf-mould. He could not afford peat.
“Something has got to be done about it, Bob.”
Fanshaw was ready to take off his coat. There was nothing for it but hand-watering with cans carried from the river. Two stout planks supported on oak posts projected from the bank, and formed a dipping stool.
“You can put in an hour, Bob, not more. It’s my job to-day.”
Fanshaw was not a young man, nor was he a fellow who spared himself on six days of the week, and Ghent knew that he needed his rest on Sunday.
“Pity we haven’t a pump and hose, sir.”
“We’ll have them, Bob, even if I can’t afford it.”
“You can get half-inch hose at threepence a foot. And one of them little rotary pumps don’t cost much.”
“I’ll go into Loddon to-morrow. I don’t know whether we have a right to pump from the river.”
“Who’s going to make trouble? Try it and see.”
They set to with cans, and at the end of the hour Ghent sent Bob home and carried on alone. It was a hundred yards walk from the river bank to this particular plantation, with the soil cloddy and loose under his feet, and the insect world showing an increasing interest in him as he sweated. The heavy cans tugged at his arms and slopped some of their water over his boots. He gave each tree half a canful, and even while he was giving them drink he wondered whether he would save them. He was feeling fierce and cussed about it. Oh, damn Nature! This might be an Ajax gesture, but there was a savage satisfaction in being man and in slapping Nature’s face and calling her a jade. Why cause the seed to germinate, and then kill it with a drought? But, then, of course, Nature, according to the scientists, was incoherent and incalculable and planless. Only that fool man persisted in believing that things mattered, and that the urge he worshipped had a purpose. Well, he did believe it, somehow, and in spite of the very clever people! Things mattered to man. When they ceased to matter came decadence and madness. If it was a mad world, let the plain man insist upon sanity.
His strong young body endured. He did not count the number of cans he filled and carried. Now and again he stopped and set down the cans to slap and squash a mosquito that had settled on arm or hand. His face had a sultry grimness. He would water all those hundred trees, and the drought could damn itself, but as he tramped to and fro on that June day, his brain was busy, bitterly busy. He knew if that plantation failed, he would lose a couple of hundred pounds or so. His bank balance was sick. That was its normal state in summer, until the autumn sales and their cheques arrived. He had had no luck during the last year with his garden planning and making. There was money in garden architecting, especially when you supplied your own trees. The spring had been damnable, frost and drought together. And here he was, humping cans. Had he been blessed with more capital, he could have put in a force-pump and irrigation pipes. Yes, the fellow with capital always had the advantage, a man like old Crabtree, for instance. To hell with old Crabtree!
* * *
The man in the deck-chair was amused. Here was an oaf’s show, a poor donkey-business that made him forget some of the frustrations of the commercial world, or to regard them as dramatic and adventurous when compared with the carrying of cans.
She, approaching him, after busying herself in a conspiracy to make a cold supper appear delicate and chic, saw that supercilious smirk upon his face. She had put flowers on the table, and a bottle of Hock. She was afraid it was not very good Hock, and he could be so superior about wines.
But he was smiling, and that was consoling.
“Supper’s ready, Max.”
He was lighting a cigarette.
“Say, look at that laborious boob over there.”
“Which?”
“The can slave. How many cans do you think he has lugged out of the river?”
She stood with a hand to her cheek.
“I don’t know.”
“A hundred and fourteen. At least, I’ve counted up to that. He started before I began. Why the blazes doesn’t the fool put in a pump?”
So, that can-carrying amused him. Perhaps, it made him feel intelligent and superior.
She said: “I suppose he can’t help it. He grows trees and the weather has been so dry.”
He sniggered, and the sound was a dry one.
“The country mind is a strange product. The fellow’s got the river at his feet, and he has no more brains than an ant.”
She felt challenged, and moved to flout his infallibility.
“Perhaps he has to do it like that.”
He was sententious.
“Too damned poor to be able to buy the oil of efficiency. All jobs that are under-capitalized deserve to go broke. Verb. sap. You see, I know, my dear. I don’t function in a can-shop. By the way, what about a little drink?”
She stood looking down at him obliquely.
“Will Gin and It do?”
“In a crisis.”
“I have them mixed. Like them here?”
“Yes. I’d like to see how many more cans that human ass carries.”
She went to fetch the drinks. Max was a man who never fetched or carried anything.
* * *
Sunset and aching shoulders, even though they were young shoulders! Ghent put down his cans, and looking across the river saw his Lady of the Matches sitting under the lime shade with a man. A garden table stood between them; the woman was sitting upright, the man lounging with his legs crossed. It was not Ghent’s first glimpse of them, and he could remember registering a little twinge of bitterness over the sentimental suggestiveness of the scene. Her impetuosity in punting across to borrow matches was explained; she had been expecting that fellow who was so much at his ease over there. Her husband, probably. But was a woman so stimulated by the advent of the marital mal
e? Well, anyhow, it was no concern of his.
He was tired, but not with a tiredness that could relax and go easily to bed, and leaving his cans on the grass-way above the river, he strolled up past Folly Island. He could see Temple Manor white among its beeches, and the mock tourelles of Temple Towers. He felt that he wanted to walk for a while in the cool of the evening without two loaded cans dragging at his shoulders. At Marplot Mrs. Maintenance’s cold salmon and a gooseberry fool were waiting for him, but Folly Island, green and afloat in the still water, seemed to accuse him gently of playing the implacable fool.
Well, while he was about it he might as well look over the outlying parts of the nursery, and discover whether nature was playing him scurvy tricks elsewhere. He had a look at the big thuyas, only to realize that he might lose half of them. Passing on to the Badger’s Lane boundary he came to a plantation of Cupressus Allumii, four-foot trees that had been moved the previous autumn, and here he found more trouble. Some of these cypresses were looking grey and starved.
He was examining the trees when he had a sudden feeling that he was not alone. Someone was watching him. He glanced at the hedge, but, for the moment, he could see nothing. About twenty yards from the Badger’s Lane gate a tree that had been felled had left a thin place in the thorn hedge; it had been closed with wire and planted up, but the hedge was no more than a tenuous green curtain. Ghent saw a face here, close to the hedge, a face that was unpleasantly familiar.
Shabby Summer Page 5