The Daffodil Sky Read online

  The Daffodil Sky

  H. E. BATES

  To

  SIR LOUIS STERLING

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  The Good Corn

  The Daffodil Sky

  Country Society

  Across the Bay

  Elaine

  The Maker of Coffins

  The Treasure Game

  Chaff in the Wind

  The Small Portion

  The Common Denominator

  A Place in the Heart

  The Evolution of Saxby

  Roman Figures

  Go, Lovely Rose

  Third View on the Reichenbach

  Bonus Story The Letter

  A Note on the Author

  A Note from the Family

  My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

  My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

  There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

  If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H.E. Bates Companion – a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found.

  I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

  Tim Bates, 2015

  We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign-up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

  Foreword

  I have always believed that H.E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you’d finished the story.

  When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as ‘The Watercress Girl’. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt’s spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work. Fair Stood the Wind for France was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

  Lesley Pearse, 2015

  The Good Corn

  For twenty-five years Joe Mortimer and his wife had lived in a valley, getting a living from raising hens and geese, a few cows and calves, the fruit from half a dozen cherry trees and an acre or two of corn.

  Their small red brick house, surrounded by coops of wire and low wooden sheds for chickens, stood close to a railway line, and occasionally passengers could look out and see, walking about the small grass paddock or across the bare autumn stubbles, a woman with wispy fair hair and long brown arms. Sometimes she was lovingly leading a calf by a halter; sometimes she seemed to be earnestly talking to flocks of geese and hens. At times a man was with her: a tall gaunt-framed man with close-cut hair and spare knotty muscle and water-blue eyes that slowly lifted themselves and rested absently on the windows of passing trains. In summer there were always many children on the trains, eagerly pressing faces to the glass as they travelled down to the sea, and whenever the Mortimers caught sight of them there was a sudden brightness on their faces, a great eagerness, almost an illumination, as they smiled and waved their hands.

  Every Tuesday and again on Saturday the Mortimers drove in a small black truck to market. They took with them cases of eggs, half a dozen unplucked brown chickens, a few chips of cherries in their season and odd things like bunches of turnips and onions, a brace of pigeons, a hare, and daffodils carefully tied in dozens.

  In the evenings, when they came home again, they counted out their money on the kitchen table. They laid it out in little piles of silver and copper and notes, counting it several times to make sure how much they had.

  Then when the counting was finished Joe Mortimer would divide the money exactly in half. Solemnly, from the very beginning of their marriage, he would put one half into a tin cash box and then push the other across to his wife, who took it from him with long, uneager hands.

  ‘You know what that’s for,’ he would say, ‘put that away.’

  At first they were quite sure about children. It seemed as natural to think of children coming as to think of eggs in the hen-runs and calves for cows and flowers on cherry trees. It was merely a question of time before children came. Mrs Mortimer thought of children laughing and running among flocks of hens, scattering grain, tossing it among the snapping, quarrelling brown feathers. In early spring, in cold wet weather, she sometimes nursed the first yellow chicks in warm flannel, in baskets, under the kitchen stove. That was the sort of thing children always loved, she thought.

  It was in summer, when the corn was ready, that Mortimer thought of them most. In imagination he saw boys riding in harvest carts or chasing rabbits among shocks of wheat and barley. He saw himself cutting them ash-plants from hedgerows or teaching them to thresh wheat in the palms of their hands. He saw them bouncing on piles of fresh light straw on threshing days.

  Then gradually, as time went by and there were no children, he became resigned to it in a puzzled, absent sort of way. It did not embitter him. If there were no children there were no children, he thought. That was nature; that was how it was. You could not alter that. It turned out like that with some people. There was nothing you could do about it but hope and make the best of it.

  But his wife could not see it like that. It was not simply that she wanted children; it was not merely a question of pride. It was a woman’s duty to have children; it was all of a woman’s life to give birth. Not to bear children, when her pride was deep, was something more to a woman than misfortune. It was a failure in her living. It was like a hen that did not lay eggs or a cow that was sterile or a tree that never came into blossom. There was no point in the existence of them.

  As time went on she drew more and more into herself. With something more than injured pride she drew deep down into an isolation where she thought of nothing but the failure that came from sterility. The reproach of failure never left her; she could not grow used to the pain of it. It was like a gnawing physical disabi
lity, an ugly mark she wanted to hide.

  All the time, waiting for children, the two of them worked very hard. They saved money. Chickens and eggs went to market every week; cherries brought good money in summer; there was always enough corn for the hens and enough hay for the cows and calves and plenty over.

  Whenever a new calf came she cried a little. The mournful tender glassiness of a cow’s big eyes after birth was something she could not bear. She liked to lift the soft wet heads of the new calves and hold them in her arms. She liked the smell of milk on their faces and the gluey suck of their mouths if she fed them from the bucket.

  After they had been married twenty-five years she stood one morning in the small cow-shed at the back of the house and watched a calf die in her arms. It was a red heifer calf and she began to cry bitterly. The calf had been dropped in the meadow the previous afternoon, prematurely, while she and Mortimer were at market. A cold wet wind with hail in it was blowing from the west. The calf could not stand on its feet by the time she and Mortimer found it and there was a drift of wet hail along the side of its body.

  She went on to grieve about the calf. The death of the calf became a personal thing. She found she could not sleep at night. She bit the edges of the pillow so that she could lay and cry without a sound. After a time there was a continuous pain in her chest: a great bony bolt that shot across her throat and made it difficult to swallow.

  At the same time she began to despise herself.

  ‘Don’t come near me. I’m no good to you. You should have found someone else, not me. What have I done for you? What good have I ever been?’

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t talk like that,’ Mortimer said. ‘You’re not well. You’re not yourself. I’m going to get the doctor to look at you.’

  The doctor spent a long time with her in the bedroom, alone, sitting on the edge of the bed, asking questions. She stared at him most of the time with pallid, boring eyes. After a time he went downstairs and gave Mortimer a pipe of tobacco and walked about the yard, among the crying geese, and talked to him.

  ‘All she can talk about is how she’s been no good to me,’ Joe said. ‘How I’m not to go near her. How she hates herself. How she’s been a failure all the time.’

  The doctor did not answer; the geese cried and squawked among the barns.

  ‘Neither one of us is sleeping well,’ Joe said. ‘I can’t put up with it. I can’t stand it much longer.’

  ‘Was there something that began it?’

  ‘The calf. We lost a calf about three weeks ago. She blamed herself for that.’

  ‘Never thought of going away from here?’ the doctor said.

  ‘Away?’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Five and twenty years. Nearly six and twenty.’

  ‘I believe you might do well to move,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Move? Where to? What for?’

  ‘It might be that everything here has the same association. This is where she wanted her children and this is where she never had them. She might be happier if you moved away from here.’

  ‘She misses children. She’d have been all right with children,’ Joe said.

  ‘Think it over,’ the doctor said. ‘She needs a rest too. Get her to take it a little easier. Get a girl to help in the kitchen and with the hens. It’ll be company for her. Perhaps she won’t think of herself so much.’

  ‘All right. It upsets me to see her break her heart like that.’

  ‘I wish I were a farmer. If I were a farmer you know what I’d like to do?’ the doctor said. ‘Grow nothing but corn. That’s the life. Give up practically everything but corn. With the cows and stock and birds it’s all day and every day. But with corn you go away and you come back and your corn’s still there. It’s a wonderful thing, corn. That’s what I’d like to do. There’s something marvellous about corn.’

  The following spring they moved to a farm some distance up the hill. All their married lives they had lived on flat land, with no view except the hedges of their own fields and a shining stretch of railway line. Now they found themselves with land that ran away on a gentle slope, with a view below it of an entire broad valley across which trains ran like smoking toys.

  The girl who answered their advertisement for help was short and dark, with rather sleepy brown eyes, a thick bright complexion and rosy-knuckled hands. She called at the house with her mother, who did most of what talking there was.

  ‘She’s been a bit off colour. But she’s better now. She wants to work in the fresh air for a bit. You want to work in the fresh air, don’t you, Elsie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said.

  ‘She’s very quiet, but she’ll get used to you,’ her mother said. ‘She don’t say much, but she’ll get used to you. She’s not particular either. You’re not particular, are you, Elsie?’

  ‘No,’ Elsie said.

  ‘She’s a good girl. She won’t give no trouble,’ her mother said.

  ‘How old is she?’ Mortimer said.

  ‘Eighteen,’ her mother said. ‘Eighteen and in her nineteen. She’ll be nineteen next birthday, won’t you, Elsie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said.

  The girl settled into the house and moved about it with unobtrusive quietness. As she stood at the kitchen sink, staring down across the farm-yard, at the greening hedgerows of hawthorn and the rising fields of corn, she let her big-knuckled fingers wander dreamily over the wet surface of the dishes as if she were a blind person trying to trace a pattern. Her brown eyes travelled over the fields as if she were searching for something she had lost there.

  Something about this lost and dreamy attitude gradually began to puzzle Mrs Mortimer. She saw in the staring brown eyes an expression that reminded her of the glazed eyes of a calf.

  ‘You won’t get lonely up here, will you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to get lonely.’

  ‘No,’ the girl said.

  ‘You tell me if you get anyways lonely, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want you to feel happy here,’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘I want you to feel as if you was one of our own.’

  As the summer went on the presence of the girl seemed occasionally to comfort Mrs Mortimer. Sometimes she was a little more content; she did not despise herself so much. During daytime at least she could look out on new fields, over new distances, and almost persuade herself that what she saw was a different sky. But at night, in darkness, the gnaw of self-reproaches remained. She could not prevent the old cry from breaking out:

  ‘Don’t come near me. Not yet. Soon perhaps—but not yet. Not until I feel better about things. I will one day, but not yet.’

  Once or twice she even cried: ‘You could get someone else. I wouldn’t mind. I honestly wouldn’t mind. It’s hard for you. I know it is. I wouldn’t mind.’

  Sometimes Mortimer, distracted too, got up and walked about the yard in summer darkness, smoking hard, staring at the summer stars.

  All summer, in the afternoons, after she had worked in the house all morning, the girl helped about the yard and the fields. By July the corn was level as a mat of thick blue-green pile between hedgerows of wild rose and blackberry flower. In the garden in front of the house bushes of currant were bright with berries that glistened like scarlet pearls from under old lace curtains.

  The thick fingers of the girl were stained red with the juice of currants as she gathered them. Her fingermarks were bright smears across the heavy front of her cotton pinafore.

  As the two women knelt among the bushes, in alleyways of ripe fruit, lifting the bleached creamy curtains in the July sun, Mrs Mortimer said:

  ‘I’m glad of another pair of hands. I don’t know what I should have done without another pair of hands. Your mother will miss you back home I reckon.’

  ‘She’s got six more to help,’ the girl said. ‘She don’t need me all that much.’

  ‘Six? Not children?’

  ‘When I was home there was seven. Eight befo
re the baby went.’

  ‘Before the baby went? Whose baby? What happened to the baby?’

  ‘It was mine. I gave it away,’ the girl said. ‘I didn’t know what to do with it no sense, so I gave it away. My sister adopted it. They all said it was best like that. I gave it to my married sister.’

  ‘Gave it away?’ Mrs Mortimer sat on the earth, between the bushes, feeling sick. ‘Gave it away? A baby? You gave it away?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s no bother to me now.’

  Towards the end of the month the first corn began to ripen. The sheen of olive on the wheat began to turn pale yellow, then to the colour of fresh-baked crust on bread.

  As he looked at it Mortimer remembered what the doctor had said. ‘You go away and you come back and your corn’s still there. It’s a wonderful thing, corn. There’s something marvellous about corn.’

  Now as he looked at it he could not help feeling proud of the corn. It helped him too as he thought of his wife. It hurt him to hear her cry that he must keep away from her, that the pride in her was still tortured, the love in her not smoothed out. The corn helped to soothe him a little. The wind that ran darkly across it on cloudy days had a beautiful twist as if long snakes were slipping among the ears.

  In the evenings, after supper, while the two women washed the dishes, he was often alone with the corn. And one evening as he stood watching it he did something he had always liked to do. He broke off an ear and began to thresh it in his hands, breaking the husk from the grain with the pressure of the balls of his thumbs.

  While he was still doing this the girl came down the hillside from the house with a message that a man had called to deliver a sailcloth. Mortimer blew on the grain that lay in his cupped hands, scattering a dancing cloud of chaff like summer flies.

  ‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ he said. ‘Here—tell me what you think of that.’