Colonel Julian and Other Stories (16 page)

In the large high-windowed room with its prospect of un-mown grass the Captain poured drinks and then walked nervously about with a glass in his hand. I do not know how many drinks he had before his wife appeared, but they were large and he drank them quickly.

‘Forty-six rooms and this is all we can keep warm,' he said.

When his wife came in at last she was carrying bunches of stiff robin-orange lilies. She was very dark and her hands,
folded about the lily stalks, were not unlike long blanched stalks of uprooted flowers themselves. She had a hard pallor about her face, very beautiful but in a way detached and not real, that made the Captain's festering rosiness seem more florid than ever.

I liked the lilies, and when I asked about them she said:

‘We must ask Williams about them. I'm frightful at names. He'll know.'

‘Williams knows everything,' the Captain said.

He poured a drink without asking her what she wanted and she seemed to suck at the edge of the glass, drawing in her lips so that they made a tight scarlet bud.

‘Are you keen on flowers?' she said.

I said ‘Yes,' and she looked at me in a direct clear way that could not have been more formal. Her eyes had slits of green, like cracks, slashed across the black.

‘That's nice,' she said.

‘Has Williams done the cabbages?' the Captain said.

‘What cabbages? Where?'

‘He knew damn well he had cabbages to do,' the Captain said. ‘I told him so.'

‘How should I know what he has to do and what he hasn't to do?' she said.

‘How should you know,' he said. He drank with trembling hands, trying to steady himself a little. He went to the window and stared out. The room was so large that his wife and I seemed to be contained, after his walking away, in a separate and private world bordered by the big fireless hearth and the vase where she was arranging flowers. She smiled and I looked at her hands.

‘Williams will tell you the name of the flowers if you like to come along to the conservatory before you go.' She did not raise her voice; there was no sound except the plop of lily stalks falling softly into the water in the vase. ‘He would like it. He likes people who are interested.'

She dropped in the last of the lilies and then took off her coat and laid it on a chair. It was black and underneath she was wearing a yellow jumper of perpendicular ribbed pattern over a black skirt. It went very well with her black hair, her white long face and her green-shot eyes.

I heard the Captain pouring himself another drink, and he said:

‘What about the tower? You still want to go up?'

‘I really ought to go.'

‘Oh! Good God man, no. We've hardly seen a thing.'

‘He's coming to see the conservatory, anyway,' his wife said.

‘Is that so?' he said. ‘Well, if he's to see everything you'd better get cracking.'

He made a jabbing kind of gesture against the air with his glass and he was so close to the window that I thought for a moment he would smash one glass against another. I could not tell if he was nervous or impatient. He covered it up by pouring himself another drink, and his wife said, with acid sweetness:

‘There are guests too, my dear.'

‘No thanks,' I said.

‘You haven't had anything,' the Captain said. ‘Good God, I feel like beating it up.'

‘If you still want to see the conservatory I think we'd better go,' she said.

I went out of the room with her and we had gone some way to the conservatory, which really turned out to be a hothouse of frilled Victorian pattern beyond the walls on the south side of the house, before I realized that the Captain was not with us.

‘Williams,' she called several times. ‘Williams.' Big scarlet amaryllis trumpets stared out through the long house of glass. ‘Ted!'

Presently Williams came out of the potting shed and I thought he seemed startled at the sight of me. He was a man of thirty-five or so with thick lips and carefully combed dark brown hair that he had allowed to grow into a curly pad on his neck. There was a kind of stiff correct strength about him as he stared straight back at her.

She introduced me and said: ‘We'd like to see the conservatory.'

‘Yes, madam,' he said.

It was very beautiful in the conservatory. The pipes were still on and the air was moistly sweet and strangling. The big scarlet and pink and crimson-black amaryllis had a kind of
golden frost in their throats. They were very fiery and splendid among banks of maidenhair, and when I admired them Williams said:

‘Thank you, sir. They're not bad.'

‘Don't be so modest,' she said. ‘They're absolutely the best ever.'

He smiled.

‘What we haven't done to get them up to this,' she said.

I walked to the far end by the house to look at a batch of young carnations, and when I turned back the Captain's wife was holding Williams by the coat-sleeve. It was exactly as if she were absentmindedly picking a piece of dust from it, yet it was also as if she held him locked, in a pair of pincers. I heard her saying something, too, but what it was I never knew, because at that moment the fiery festering figure of the Captain began shouting down the path from the direction of the house. I could not hear what he said, either.

‘He's worrying to get you up to the tower,' she said. ‘I'm frightfully sorry you're being dragged about like this.'

‘Not at all.'

Williams opened the door for me. The cuckoo was calling up the hillside, and the Captain, more rosy than ever, was coming up the path.

‘Don't want to hurry you, but it takes longer than you think to get up there.'

At the door of the conservatory his wife stretched out her hand. ‘I'll say goodbye,' she said, ‘in case I don't see you again.' We shook hands, and her hand, in curious contrast to the moist sweet heat of the house behind her, was dry and cool. Williams did not come to say goodbye. He had hidden himself beyond the central staging of palm and fern.

The Captain and I walked up to the tower. Once again we could see, as from the top of the hill, the whole pattern of the thing: the four avenues of elms flying like long green pennants from the central cross of the house, the quadrangle of stone below, the corn-like bluebells wind-sheaved on the hill. The Captain staggered about, pointing with unsteady fingers at the landscape, and the flag flapped in the wind.

‘Curious thing is you can see everything and yet can't see a damned thing,' the Captain said. On all sides, across wide
elm-patterned fields, there was still no sign of another house. Below us the conservatory glittered in the sun and it was even possible to see, huge and splendidly scarlet under the glass, the amaryllis staring back at us.

The Captain began to cry.

‘You get up here and you'd never know any difference,' he said. His tears were simply moist negative oozings on the lids of his pink-lidded eyes. They might have been caused by the wind that up there, on the tower, was a little fresher than in the hollow below.

‘Never know it was going to pot,' he said. ‘Everything. The whole damn thing.'

I felt I had to say something and I remembered the flag.

‘Oh! it's simply a thing I found in an attic,' he said. ‘Just looks well. It doesn't mean a thing.'

‘Nothing heraldic?'

‘Oh! Good God, no. Still, got to keep the flag flying.' He made an effort at a smile.

I said I had seen somewhere, in the papers, or perhaps it was a book, I could not remember where, that heraldry was simply nothing more than a survival of the fetish and the totem pole, and he said:

‘Evil spirits and that sort of thing? Is that so? Damn funny.'

Again, not angrily but sadly, biting his nails, with the trembling of his lower lip that was so like the lip of a cow, he stared at the green empty beautiful fields, and once again I felt all the warm sweetness of spring stream past us, stirring the green and scarlet flag, on tender lazy circles of wind.

Below us the Captain's wife and Williams came out of the greenhouse, and I saw them talking inside the winking scarlet roof of glass.

‘Well, you've seen everything,' the Captain said. ‘We'll have another snifter before you go.'

‘No thanks. I really ought——'

‘No?' he said. ‘Then I'll have one for you. Eh? Good enough?'

‘Good enough,' I said.

We climbed down from the tower and he came to the gate in the fields to say goodbye. Across the fields there were
nearly two miles of track, with five gates to open, before you reached the road. The Captain's eyes were full of water and he had begun to bite his nails again and his face was more than ever like a florid fester in the sun.

There was no sign of his wife, and as I put in the gears and let the car move away he looked suddenly very alone and he said something that, above the noise of the car, sounded like:

‘Cheers. Thanks frightfully for coming. Jolly glad——'

Half a mile away, as I got out to open the first of the five field gates, I looked back. There was no sign of life at all. The Captain had gone into the house to beat it up. The greenhouse was hidden by the great cross of stone. All that moved was the cuckoo blown once again from the dying elms like a scrap of torn paper, and on the tower, from which the view was so magnificent, the flag curling in the wind.

When she had finished her afternoon nap she stood by the open bedroom window, still in her yellow slip, looking over the harvest field. She could feel the heat rising in a great steamy breath across the plain. On shimmering waves of it, across a half-cleared field of wheat where every stalk of stubble seemed to quiver like a crest of water, an orange tractor appeared sometimes to bob up and down, rocking under the glare of sun.

She always felt relaxed and soft after sleep, her body lovably smooth and damp, the skin almost oily, like the skin of a sleepy pear put away and kept in a drawer too long. She was growing a little over-ripe and fleshy and the straps of her yellow slip had made weals of bright pink where they had cut into her deep white shoulders while she slept. In London she sometimes did exercises for it before she went out at midday, but it was not much use, and Andrew was always telling her she should work in the harvest field and do healthy things like throwing sheaves or shocks about and always teasing her because she did not know one from another. But the weather was too hot and her arms always skinned raw in the sun and her face and the deep plump front of her neck got an awful unhealthy appearance, like a heat rash, that powder could never quite conceal.

When the tractor and wagon came nearer to the house she could see Andrew quite clearly, bronze arms pinning his pitchfork into the top of the truck. He was growing tremendously thick and dark-skinned and healthy, and already, she thought uneasily, he looked more than eighteen. It was surprising how, in their last terms at school, boys suddenly became men and before you realized it were completely detached and separate creatures.

She thought she saw him begin to lift his hand to her. She wanted to wave in reply, but she knew if she did so that
George Bellamy, the man who camped in the trailer caravan down by the brook, would see it and think it was meant for him. She had to avoid that sort of thing; she had to be careful with Bellamy. In other years there had never been anyone like Bellamy on the farm. There had just been the country folk: farm-hands, women who came in to help in the fields, Jess Martin and his wife and two boys, Wilf and Charlie; just the country folk. Nobody intruded. Only once, during the war, there had been an American army lieutenant from Illinois who had come to help with the harvest and who had looked at her several times rather as Bellamy did: not so much with his eyes as in deep oblique pulses of feeling and a slow smile with his tongue wet and red as it pushed down over his fleshy underlip.

Bellamy, like the lieutenant, made her very uneasy. It was not simply that she felt he knew so much about her; that he might suddenly disclose something Andrew would hear. It went much deeper than that. In London, in other circumstances, in circumstances that were so different that she could never quite relate them to empty corn-fragrant August nights when nothing stirred about the farm except countless frittering poplar leaves above the pond, she would have picked out Bellamy in a million. She did not need to be very expert for that.

Standing by the window, still drowsy and dreamy with sleep, it came to her suddenly that the tractor had drawn in to the very edge of the field and that Bellamy, who was driving it, was sitting there staring up at her. The light of mid-afternoon was so fierce that she saw a smear of new oil flame-green on his near check, where he had freshly wiped his hand.

She went back into the bedroom and immediately began to dress. As she put on her clothes she felt the little room, close under the rafters, insufferably thick and stifling with sun. There was so little movement of air from the fields that she simply put her short-sleeved white dress over her slip and combed her thick red-brown hair and put on her flat-heeled white shoes. It was too hot for stockings.

Later, when she went out with a can of tea and cups in the basket that she always took to the men at half-past three, the tractor had moved away on a half-circuit of the nearly empty
field. Once she was clear of the poplar-trees shading the gate by the end of the farmyard there was no sound across the white stubble except the voice of a single yellow-hammer, almost bleating its song, in a still green patch of burnt hedgerow where corn had caught fire three days before.

The four men, Andrew, Bellamy and the two Martin boys, sat by shocks of corn in narrow shade cast by the truck while she poured tea. Her skirt was rather short, and she found it a little difficult to manipulate and sometimes as she struggled to her feet it slipped briefly up over her white plump knees and she saw Bellamy looking at her with drowsy mindless eyes.