Colonel Julian and Other Stories (17 page)

‘When are you coming down to look at the caravan?' he said.

‘Oh! it's so hot,' she said.

‘Always cool by the brook. Coolest place on the farm.'

‘Oh! I don't know—anyone for more tea?'

Both Martin boys said ‘Yuh, please,' and tossed arcs of tea-leaves across stubble before holding out their cups. Andrew said, ‘I could drink for ever. I just wish I was a tea-urn and they made it inside me,' and the high fluent public-school voice, not strange to her except when she heard it with others, made her proud and glad with renewed confidence that, over the years, she had done so well for him.

‘Come down tonight,' Bellamy said. ‘Bring Andrew.'

‘We don't get supper before nine, and then it's so late,' she said.

‘The boy wants to fish,' he said. ‘I've been telling him I saw trout there. We could all fish.'

‘I'm not much good at that sort of thing,' she said.

‘I'd awfully like to have a smack at them, I really would,' the boy said. ‘Mr. Bellamy has rods.'

‘It's always so late when you get finished and then somehow we sit talking and before you realize it——'

‘We're on the last field,' the boy said, ‘it's all we have to do.'

‘Well, you go,' she said. She saw Bellamy looking at her with eyes on which the lids were lowered like heat-sapped petals: sleepy but challenging, and immediately she felt confused and uneasy again and blurted out:

‘You go by all means. I'd rather stay up in the garden and listen to the nightingales.'

The Martin boys roared with such gusty cracked laughter that she hardly heard what Andrew said and could not look at Bellamy sprawling back against wheat sheaves with legs and arms splayed, his brown naked chest heaving with laughter under his open shirt.

‘Mother, you're the limit,' the boy said.

‘Now what have I said?'

‘There aren't any nightingales, darling. They're finished. It's past the season. They've gone.'

‘Then what is it I hear at night? It's birds of some sort—what are they?'

‘God only knows,' he said, ‘but they're not nightingales.'

‘Oh, all right'—she smiled, indulgent, unoffended but still uneasy—‘I just don't know about these things.'

‘You can't know about everything,' Bellamy said.

He was looking at her closely, directly. She tried not to look back and was glad when one of the Martin boys said, ‘Load up, chaps. Sooner we load sooner we git done,' and swished away his tea-dregs in a black sparkling arc against the truck of wheat-sheaves.

She began to pack up the other cups, but Bellamy said:

‘Here, what about me? I only had one cup.'

‘Well, if you just lie there helpless,' she said, ‘expecting to be waited on hand and foot.'

‘I can come and get what I want,' he said.

As he heaved himself upright and came over to her with his empty cup one of the Martin boys shouted, ‘I'll drive!' and a second or two later the tractor moved past her like a lump of solidified oily heat, leaving her with a curious sense of being unsheltered in the middle of the completely shadeless field under a naked sun.

Bellamy lolled on one elbow and held out his cup. She filled it steadily while he looked beyond it at her dress drawing itself tightly across plump knees and then smoothly, under the strain of her arms, across her body.

‘Sorry I laughed about the nightingales,' he said. ‘But it's just about two months late—even for the Berkeley Square kind.'

‘There's no need to apologize.'

‘Ever hear them in Berkeley Square?' He drank tea, looking up at her over the tilted cup; but she did not answer.
‘It used to be a nice Square. But now it's gone over a bit. Gone down.'

When she did not answer again he looked straight at the shadow between her legs where the white skirt pulled stiffly across the heavy flesh and said:

‘Come down tonight. The boy really wants to come.'

‘He's perfectly capable of coming by himself without me.'

‘Well, I know that.'

‘If you know it, why keep asking me?'

He smiled, running his tongue across his lower lip, slowly, infectiously, so that she felt herself stir warmly and uneasily again. Sun hit the nape of her neck with blunt pain and she felt the world of the empty harvest field, with the tractor so far away now that it was simply like a thumping pulse in the heat, rock and tremble momentarily about her.

‘I really must go,' she said. ‘The heat's something awful. If I sit in it too long it makes me sick.'

Unconcerned, as if he had really not heard what she said, he asked:

‘Going back to business now the harvest is finishing?'

‘I'm independent.' She spoke coldly, trying to repress her uneasiness, and she felt her voice intensely trite and unreal. ‘I've got no business.'

‘Very lucky,' he said. He drank the rest of his tea in a single swift movement that became, in the swivel of his head, a rapid glance down the field to see where the tractor was. It glowed under distant grey smoky poplars like a ball of fire. In another second he had let the cup roll out of his hand across the stubble and was leaning and pressing across her body, kissing her.

It came to her so naturally that she felt her arms widen responsively and her mouth open moistly before she realized that she did not want it to happen at all: that she wanted it to happen less than anything in the world. She struggled against sensations that were hypnotic and repellent. It was only when she felt the sharp barbs of stubble pressing like needles into her back that she cried out a little and he let her free.

‘Now perhaps you're satisfied,' she said. She sat up and combed her fingers madly through her straw-laced hair and then stood up, smoothing down her dress.

‘You're good,' he said. ‘I knew you would be.'

He stood up too.

‘Why all the fuss?' he said.

‘Bring the cups,' she said. She strode off, face away from the sun, her neck bluntly pained by the naked heat of it again.

‘He's got to find out some day,' he said. ‘After all.'

She felt her entire body, in a single sickening drain of strength, go weakly cold, as if nothing were left to clothe the pared and frigid bone. When her blood came back it was with a corresponding stupefying thickness, so that as she turned to him she could hardly see.

‘Please,' she said.

His brown and white figure seemed to quiver and temporarily explode into fragments against the sun. When they solidified again he was holding her. She was glad of it and did not protest, and he said:

‘You can trust me. It's all right.'

She did not answer.

‘Come down after supper. Will you? It would be nice. We could talk——'

‘All right, if I can go now.'

‘Go,' he said. Quite gaily he let his arms open in a mocking sort of way as if she were a tame hen that he knew could not possibly fly.

And later, lying on the bed again in the stifling little bedroom, she felt rather like that herself: a tame, crumpled helpless hen, too stupid to know which way to run. When she got up at last her face, too, was ruffled and hen-like, her cheeks greyish with sweat-caked powder, like gills, her hair moistly matted, like a tattered comb. She felt awful as she stared at herself in the glass; she had never looked so ghastly. The evening air was full of what now seemed the intensely annoying sound of perpetually turning poplar leaves. Swallows were flying high over the empty wheat-field and she noticed them simply because they recalled her foolish and amusing remark about the nightingales. They might have been nightingales, too, she thought, for all she knew.

She dressed slowly and went down to supper. All through the meal, early tonight because it was Saturday and the last field was cleared, she could hear the perpetual fretting and
frittering of poplar leaves. It seemed as if millions of them were falling in the wind; it created for her the strange feeling that at last summer was breaking.

‘I'm not coming fishing,' Andrew said, ‘I'm going into town with Wilf and Charlie.'

‘You promised Mr. Bellamy to come down to the caravan,' she said.

‘You go.'

‘I'm not in the slightest bit interested in fishing,' she said.

‘Well, listen to the nightingales,' he said.

Again, from Martin and his wife as well as from the three boys, there was much laughter. She smiled and tried to take it well.

‘The trouble is I'm too easy-going,' she thought. As she walked away from the house, in the still hot evening ripely heavy with the strawy sweetness of corn, she felt her nerves recovering and smoothing out; she felt less and less like a frowsy crumpled hen. It was only when she was two fields away from the house, in sight of Bellamy's caravan and the brook, that she realized she had left the poplars and their irritation of leaves behind.

‘I'm too easy-going, that's it,' she thought. ‘I always was.' She felt herself, in the cooler air about the brook, relaxing. Odd how she always felt more human at night, a fraction more indulgent and tender; curious that night never brought its good resolutions. It was only during daytime that she gnawed at herself, telling herself to end this and that, to pull herself together.

Bellamy came out from the caravan and across the meadow, to meet her. ‘Where's Andrew?' he said. He had changed his working suit for a blue one. Three fishing-rods were standing ready, with pale sky-blue casts, by the van.

‘I came down to tell you he went into town,' she said. ‘I didn't want you to wait or anything.'

‘Oh! it's nothing,' he said. ‘Come in.'

‘I mustn't stay.'

‘There's nothing to prevent your coming in to have a drink is there?'

‘I suppose not.'

‘I should suppose not at all,' he said.

It occurred to her suddenly, as she went into the bright chromium and plastic living-van that her coming had nothing to do with indulgence, with being easy-going; she had come because she was frightened of what Bellamy would say.

‘How do you like your gin?' he said. ‘With water or pink? Sit down.'

‘Pink.' She sat on the bed.

‘What shall I say?' he said, holding up the glass so that one blue eye seemed to flower with cold globular irony about the brim, ‘here's to the next time? or this time? or what?'

‘Just what,' she said.

He smiled and drank and said, ‘When do you leave?'

‘Day after tomorrow.'

He twisted his mouth and seemed about to make some fresh remark of crisper and obliquer irony, but nothing came of it and suddenly he drew her down on the bed. She did not protest. Her body melted into incredibly swift fusion with his, her blood beating up into her throat and ears. ‘You're good,' he said. ‘I knew you were good the first time I saw you,' and she felt anger and heat rise up in her in a ravenously sweet impulse to bite the words from his mouth.

Some time later, when darkness and a slight late summer breath of coolness had crept up from the brook, she heard him say, ‘I ought to light the lamp,' but she felt once again like a hen, clipped and frowsy and scraggy and old, all passion gone out of her, and she said:

‘For God's sake don't. I can dress in the dark.'

He lay still in the darkness while she was dressing.

‘Will the boy come fishing tomorrow?'

‘You must ask him.'

‘You brought him up well. You made a lot of sacrifices. It must have cost something.'

She did not answer; she felt there was nothing to answer; and he stirred on the bed.

‘I'll walk across the fields with you,' he said.

‘No,' she said. ‘I can go alone. I'd rather.'

As she walked across the fields, up the rising slope of grass towards the cleared stubbles of corn, the light in the farmhouse and the renewed trembling sibilant sound of poplar leaves, she kept telling herself that she was too easy-going,
that she ought to give it up, that she had to pull herself together and be firm with herself now, once and for all.

‘I shall really have to do something,' she thought.

Two days later, when the taxi drove into the stackyard, between gold-white houses of corn, to drive the boy and herself to the station, the whole family, with Bellamy, stood by the gate to say goodbye.

‘See you next year!' they said. ‘Come earlier next time. Get here for the nightingales.' Everyone was laughing. Under their teasing she felt once again like a foolish, frustrated and haggard hen. ‘Make up your mind earlier! Come for the hay!'

‘My love to Berkeley Square,' called Bellamy.

Across empty fields, cleared of harvest, swallows were flying very low under thin grey cloud, and in the cooler air she felt there was a break, at last, in the long summer.

She rapped angrily on the glass to the taxi-driver, dawdling between cloudy, empty fields.

‘Get a move on!' she said. ‘For God's sake. We shall be late for the train.'

My uncle silas was very fixed and very firm in the notion that women were no good to you. ‘They're allus arter you, boy,' he said. ‘Allus arter you.'

I was, at the time, very small, and it was much too soon for me to point out that Silas, on the contrary, was always arter them.

‘Like her,' he said. ‘Take her. Allus arter me.'

At the age of ninety-one my Uncle Silas still had something of the look of a crusty farmyard cock. He gave a great sniffing sort of sigh, fixed his bloodshot eye on me in cunning reminiscence and whipped a dewdrop off his nose.

‘She wadn' half a tartar,' he said. ‘Everlastin' arter me. Night and day.'

‘Doing what?' I said.

‘Plaguing on me.'

‘For what?'

‘Tormentin' on me,' he said. ‘Whittlin' me to death.'

His bloodshot eye had a crack of scarlet glee across it.