Colonel Julian and Other Stories (12 page)

Soon after the excitement of the fur-coat had passed Joe discovered that the shop accounts, neglected for nearly three
months, were in a mess. He told the girl how, for two or three evenings at least, he must stay at home and straighten things out.

‘I thought you were taking me out?' she said.

‘But just this once. Just for a night or two.'

‘Just this once my foot. You either want to take me out or you don't. You can do the books when you get home. Who do you think I am?'

When she spoke to him like this he was pained and felt quite small. Pain and love and fear would drive him to do as she asked. In the evenings that were now growing dark a little earlier, he would still drive with her down to the sea. It was a long way and by the time he got back to the shop it was too late and he was too tired to touch the accounts. A great fear of losing her began to make him spend money recklessly. ‘Let's have a good time,' he would say. ‘Let's have a good time!' From a few gay evenings by the sea, under the heavy August stars, among the holiday crowds, he extracted from her momentary concessions of tenderness. They went to dances that were hot and crowded and where they drank champagne. For a little while the dark sea itself would seem to him to have the appearance of wine, glowing softly. Next day he would feel old.

Now, too, he began to be more worried about the accounts and the weekly takings. The shutting of the shop on Saturday afternoons, in the face of the weekend trade, was a bad thing. Many customers had gone away and not come back. He tried to confide to the girl, vainly, what was on his mind.

‘All you talk about is bananas,' she said.

He decided to cut out the luxury trade. In a few days he saw the effect on his better-class customers, who dropped away. One day a woman remarked tartly, ‘When I come for a pound of apples I don't expect an exhibition of spooning.'

To the girl he tried to conceal his dismay by anger. ‘Snobs! That's what they are. Because I won't give 'em credit. That's how they treat you. She's one of these caterpillarists. Treat you like dirt.'

‘Oh! stop worrying,' she said.

‘You never sympathize,' he said. He felt that he needed guidance and confidence.

‘Sympathize?' she said. ‘You want me to cry on your neck?'

A day or two later she did not keep the evening appointment. He wandered idly round the streets, looking for her, trying to think. After some hours he went back home and sat in the room above the shop. A huge sense of oppression held him immobile by the window. For some time he sat there looking down at the street, not thinking or moving, and then at last he saw her, walking on the opposite pavement with a stranger. As he saw her he felt his whole body rock, so that he trembled heavily on his feet.

When she came by the shop in the morning she did not stop. Joe walked desperately after her, beseeching her to tell him what it was all about, uselessly lifting his hands. She raised her small hard face, expressing weariness.

‘You just make me tired, that's all,' she said.

In the evening he waited outside the office where she worked. Coming out, she walked straight past him. Again he hurried after her.

She turned angrily on him. ‘For God's sake don't keep following me!'

‘I want you. I got to talk to you. What's wrong?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What have I done?'

‘Nothing.'

‘There must be something. It just can't happen like this. You just can't go.'

‘I tell you there's nothing!' she said, ‘and I'm going. That's all.'

After that, whenever he got the opportunity, he would wait for her in the street. Raising his large hands in a hopeless sort of way, he would run after her. He began to close the shop a few minutes before five in the evening, so that he could meet her outside the office.

‘Can't you take no for an answer?' she would shout at him.

‘No.'

‘Well then, learn! Because it's the only answer you'll get!'

Gradually there was aroused in him a sense of deep cold anger that began to vent itself on the customers. He began to be annoyed when they squeezed the hearts of cabbages or tested the ripeness of plums and pears. In resentment he put
up a large notice in the shop. ‘Don't handle the goods! It's unhygienic!'

‘What's the reason for that?' a woman asked.

‘A lot of people have got dirty hands, that's all!'

The trade of the shop fell rapidly away. It was almost October; the days were cooler. People did not like standing outside the shop, in the wind, to be told that they had dirty hands. When Joe came to straighten up the accounts that had been left for so long he got up and walked about the room, hitting his forehead with his hands.

His anger broke down into despondency. What he felt about the girl, what he had felt about her since first seeing her go past the shop with her bright careless eyes, was not changed. When he saw her in the street, from a distance, or thought of her, he experienced the rush of trembling tenderness that made him rock on his feet.

By the time he had given up the shop and had decided to go back to the street trade, with a horse and cart, it was late November. He once saw the girl in the fur coat. She walked softly, small bright eyes glittering above the brown fur, like a cat that watches people. Seeing her, he remembered with an acute, blinding pain, the days of the summer.

As he drove round the back streets of the town with the small cart and its boxes of fruit and vegetables and occasional flowers, he caught cold in his ears through forgetting his Balaclava helmet. The pain drove through his head, breaking down his nerves. But beside the pain of frustration and the everlasting feeling of tenderness for which there was no outlet it seemed a little thing.

‘I see you're back, Joe,' the people said. ‘Give up the shop, after all.'

‘Yes,' he would say. ‘Yes.'

For a moment he would be at a loss to explain his return.

And then, finding an explanation that had nothing to do with the frustration, the tenderness or the pain, he would raise his heavy hands and let them fall again.

‘It's the caterpillarists, you see,' he would explain. ‘It's the caterpillarists. There's no room for a man like me.'

In spring tall acacia trees bloomed early with inverted pagodas of white flower against the steel-blue cypresses that flanked the house. Later, in hot summers, at symmetrical intervals along the stone terrace, stiff blue yuccas blossomed with great bells of deep ivory, and still later a grape-vine on the south sun-bleached wall began to colour countless bunches of small sweet fruit, until in full ripeness they were a shade of dusty purple-rose. Between the trained arms of the vine three storeys of windows, open a little twice a week, were backed by white shutters faded by sun to ivory, like great frames from which the pictures had been removed. Below the terrace and for about a mile beyond the last formal beds of neglected lemon tea-rose the park spread away down a bland south slope of grass, broken only by large groups of elm and chestnut and crimson rhododendrons.

They said that once, when the Donnellys had lived there, a quarter of a million had been spent on the house; but now the only inhabitants were Ashton, the caretaker, and his young wife. On summer mornings, as early as six o'clock, Ellen Ashton unlocked the south door and came out and went down on her knees to scrub the step. As she scrubbed she kept her eyes lowered to the ground, not once looking up; as if the park, the sunlight and the beginning of another day did not interest her. She had features modelled of rather delicate bone, with grey thoughtful eyes in which there was a touch of un-kindled, mute affection. Although she and her husband had now been caretakers for two years, she remained unaware, as completely as on the day of their arrival, that there were yuccas which bloomed on the terrace or red islands of rhododendrons in the park below. Summer came and went; grapes turned dusky on the south wall and shrivelled for want of gathering; but she hardly noticed the ripening of the fruit or the year. Soon it turned cold and the great boiler-stove was
lit in the basement and gales drove into fantastic drifts along the terraces crowds of brown and lemon leaves that were eventually replaced by snow. But if she remained unaffected by such things as the changes of the year, she was deeply affected by something else. She was guided and oppressed by a sense of duty that had long since taken the form of fear.

Her fear, for some reason, was that time would overtake her. She was afraid that there would come a day when, at the end of it, the steps of the house had not been scrubbed, the closed rooms not aired, the great mahogany handrail of the staircase not polished. Fear kept her from leaving the house because the telephone might ring with an important message. It drove her fretfully about the empty unwanted house on agitated feet as if there were really people calling and wanting and watching her. It drove her upstairs three or four times between six and ten in the morning to call her husband, who had not then thought of getting up.

Albert Ashton had plump white features thrown into prominence by oiled black hair. He would lie in bed looking with sulky admiration at the half-moons on the fingers-nails of his finely-kept hands. What was there to get up for?

‘Damn all!' he would shout at her. ‘Why don't you stop worrying your head off? Who's going to know whether the damn place is cleaned or not?'

‘Nobody. Only me.'

‘Ah, stop worrying your insides out. Who cares?'

‘We got the job. It's up to us to do what we're paid to do.'

‘Job? Job?' he would say. ‘Who's worrying about a job? There's more jobs than men.'

‘I see in the papers,' she would say, ‘there's a million unemployed.'

‘What about it? A million unemployed where? Not in the servant class. People'll go down on their hands and knees to get you.'

‘I don't want people going down on their hands and knees to me.'

‘No, that's it, you wouldn't, you wouldn't. That's it. You'd go down on
your
knees, wouldn't you? You'd rather do that!'

‘Perhaps I would,' she would say. ‘Do you want your breakfast? I mean up here?'

‘No!'

‘A fried egg or something?'

‘For Christ's sake don't mention eggs!'

‘I'm sorry.' She would stand a little away from the foot of the bed, timorous and yet in a way brave in her atttitude towards him, mutely watching his pose of savage weariness, the pulling of the weak mouth into sulky toughness. ‘You were late in last night.'

‘What about it?'

‘I just thought perhaps that was why you didn't want to eat.'

‘God, you know I never eat breakfast. You know that.'

She would stand for a moment longer, watching him, one hand on the door, saying nothing now, simply waiting for some sort of word, touched with a hint of reconciliation, that would wash out the rest. When it did not come she would turn to go; and in that moment he would cry at her like a child:

‘Ah! If you're going to sulk over it, bring me the damned egg. Fried. And turn it over. You always forget. Anything for some peace.'

In the large almost empty kitchen downstairs she would cook his breakfast. They had been married four years; the progress and pattern of days now seemed as fixed as divisions on a ruler. But each day she hoped that something would happen to break the bitter measurement of bickering and distrust and estrangement. As she cooked his breakfast and went upstairs with it, the turned eggs neatly covered, the coffee hot under the cosy, the toast pared of crust, she knew quite well that she was a fool, but she knew quite well that she could do nothing about it. It was too late now to go back to the original unblemished ideal of what they were going to do with their lives together—she was always remembering how they were to work hard for a year or two, save hard, and then buy or rent a small boarding-house by the sea—but the original unblemished moments of affection, more pain now than anything else, still flared up whenever he looked at her.

At last, about ten or ten-thirty, Albert came down, collar-less, in brown canvas slippers, to smoke a cigarette and read the paper in the kitchen or to sit huddled up in the warm
security of the boiler-house in winter. On fine mornings in summer he made the exercise of a black spaniel an excuse to get out. Winter or summer he liked to wear the collar of his jacket turned up, swankily, a spotted claret muffler at his neck; and like this, black hair smoothed, handsome in a pale, overripe way, he would walk across the park, idly throwing stones for the dog. From the house she would watch him go, and, anywhere from twelve to two-thirty, when the pubs were shut again, watch him come back. During the early afternoon, in a temper, he would get the key of the great drawing-room from the board in the butler's room and sleep for a little while in the cool semi-darkness, waking up about half-past three or four to telephone the pub for the first results of the afternoon races. Towards six in the evening he went out again, really dressed now, pale soft hands prominent and expressive against his dark suit; black trilby hat, worn sideways, throwing up the heavy pallor of his face. From that moment, sometimes, she did not see him again until morning. Yet in a vague way she knew the life he led apart from her: the pub, the picking of the runners, the idle gossip, the soaking, the wild nights, the self-indulgence eating him away like rottenness. In the same vague way she knew that there were other women.

But it was not until the summer when they had been married nearly five years that she knew that one of these women had a name.

She began to know about the woman as early as May of that year; it was not until the grapes were ripening on the wall of the house that she knew about the name. Once a week, generally on Fridays, she went out, walking hurriedly across the park to the village beyond the great iron gates by the now empty lodge. In this short excursion there was little enjoyment for her. The ceaseless fear of time, of neglecting the house, drove her quickly down to the small village grocery stores, where she bought her weekly goods, and drove her once more quickly back. Though she saw people and passed the time of day with those she knew she very rarely stopped. She made few friends; there seemed so many people and so little time.