The Golden Oriole Read online

  The Golden Oriole

  by

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  The Ring of Truth

  The Quiet Girl

  The Golden Oriole

  Mr Featherstone Takes a Ride

  The World is Too Much With Us

  Bonus Story

  Mademoiselle

  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 Ring of Truth

  George Pickard, with a sickening start, woke for the fifth time in a month from a strange dream of his father, who had died suddenly six weeks before.

  As always in the dream, his father was catching a train. It was mid-winter and bitterly cold and the train, as always, was the night express to the north: sleeper coaches with drawn blinds, white steam from two big engines curdling into a black freezing sky, a strong air of suspense under the hooded yellow lights of an almost deserted platform No. 3.

  His father had been a thin tallish man of not very distinguished appearance with deeply fissured cheeks and fair receding hair: a sufferer from gastric disorders that kept him in what seemed to be unenterprising despondency. He had been, in fact, merely a quiet, reserved, conscientious man, and the most remarkable of his features were his very bright, remarkably clear blue eyes.

  In each of the five dreams George was seeing his father off, but it was only in the fifth and last dream that any sort of conversation took place between them. Then, as his father leaned from the carriage window, they clasped hands and his father said:

  ‘Goodbye, George. Awfully nice of you to see me off so late. Don’t linger. It’s pretty cold. The Midland Hotel at Skelby Moor will find me until Monday.’

  Then, as the train began to move away and George turned to go too, a strange incident occurred. George almost ran into a hurrying figure of another man walking away from the train: a biggish, burly figure, healthily and expansively handsome, with a fine walnut brown moustache and an air of superlative confidence and engaging charm. This figure was expensively dressed in a thick grey ulster and a cocoa-brown bowler hat and was carrying a malacca cane umbrella and a rather shabby brown gladstone bag.

  Nothing about all this would have been unusual except that the gladstone bag was, as George recognised, his father’s. He had carried it on his travels for many years. In it he had brought home little presents for George as a boy, model railway engines, chocolate, toy soldiers and so on, the sort of things that fathers love to bring their sons. It immediately occurred to George that the bag was being stolen from his father and he started shouting. When the figure in the ulster took no notice of this George started running, or rather trying to run. But as always in dreams his legs were incapable of moving and a second later he was awake, crying aloud, his heart racing.

  Always, on waking, George could still smell the sulphurous tang of train smoke, the steamy odours of the restaurant car, the freezing bite of night air. The friendly depth of his father’s voice – it was a remarkably coloured voice, a deep shade of brown – was so affectionately real in its every intonation that he fully expected to see him still sitting there at the bedside, still talking. The sudden shattering of the dream-world notion that his father was still alive left him first shocked and then sunk in unbearable loneliness. But what affected him even more deeply was the curious incident of the gladstone bag. Not only was the bag being stolen but somehow, because of it, George felt that a great wrong had been done to his father and it continued to haunt him like a pain.

  At breakfast, after the fifth dream, he said: ‘Is there such a place as Skelby Moor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ his mother said. Her answer seemed offhand. ‘I never heard of it.’

  His mother was a taut blonde woman of fifty with eyes so fair that they seemed to be lashless. She had an irritating breakfast habit of rapidly spreading butter on dry toast and then, in parsimonious thought, scraping most of it off again.

  ‘Did father ever go there?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I never heard of it. Why are you asking?’

  ‘I’ve got a funny idea I saw a post-card from there once.’

  ‘Your father was always sending post-cards. He was the champion post-card sender.’

  ‘I seem to remember something about fishing. Trout, I think, or it might have been salmon.’

  ‘I don’t suppose your father ever went fishing in his life,’ she said. With irritation she did her toast scraping act for the second or third time. ‘That would have been too enterprising.’

  Looking away from him, she began to spread marmalade in a thin golden veneer on a square of toast.

  ‘Do we still have the old post-card album
?’ he said. ‘I mean the big brown one. The one with the brass clasps.’

  ‘It’s somewhere,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s somewhere.’

  ‘I think I’ll get it out.’

  ‘Oh! don’t go charging about!’ she said. ‘Don’t go rummaging about upstairs.’

  ‘I don’t propose to go charging about,’ he said. ‘What is it about you this morning? What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve got a head. I’m brittle,’ she said. ‘I’m just brittle, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ve been brittle ever since father died.’

  ‘And how else do you expect me to be?’ she said. ‘How else?’

  After breakfast he started searching in a black tin trunk, up in the box-room, for the big post-card album with brass clasps that he remembered so often poring through as a boy. He supposed it had been started by his maternal grandmother. It began with views of Paris and the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, lemon trees at Mentone, heather-pink scenes of Scottish glens and portraits of famous people such as Houdini, Dan Leno, Caruso and Madame Patti. It ended with countless dutiful messages, meticulous and uninspired, from his father, the commercial traveller in various lines of carpet slippers, from places as far apart as Aberystwyth and Aberdeen. ‘Weather not too good. Sold ten gross to Watson & Watson today. Food at Wrexham good. More peas than I could possibly eat. Not sure when I’ll be home.’ It contained, among other things, a picture of his mother when a young woman in an expensive-looking sleeveless afternoon dress with a skirt well above the knees. She looked uncommonly attractive and vivacious. She was smiling and her legs were very pretty. Unlike his father, his mother’s side of the family had been comfortably well off. They had travelled a good deal: Nice and Mentone in the winter, Scotland in the summer, Paris in the spring: so that she had rather grown up to take pretty, expensive things for granted.

  At the back end of the album there was a flap and in this he found a loose assortment of about a dozen cards. On one of these his father had written ‘I’ve drawn you a picture of a fish I caught yesterday. It weighed lbs and when they cooked it for me at the Midland it was bright pink. Just like a shrimp’. The little sketch of the fish had actually been drawn in red ink and on the back was a picture of the parish church at Skelby Moor.

  The fact that the fish was sketched in red ink delighted him and he at once supposed that this was why Skelby Moor had lingered so long and so tenaciously in his memory. He went downstairs excitedly, taking the card, and said:

  ‘What do you make of that? Isn’t that odd? There it is – the fish and everything. In red ink. I remembered it from all that time ago.’

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘These old albums are fun. I’m glad we kept it. By the way, didn’t we used to have another one?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘I feel sure we did. Can’t you remember? I’m sure I used to look at it as a boy.’

  ‘Why all this sudden fuss about an album?’ she said. ‘Why all this sudden cufuffle about Skelby Moor? You’re not thinking of going there, are you? I thought you were going to Brighton in September.’

  ‘I think I’m old enough to please myself where I go. There’s no fuss.’

  ‘Naturally. You’re twenty-three.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I am going. It’s sort of got under my skin, this place. I’ve decided to go up for a long weekend.’

  Suddenly, as he said this, some of her brittleness seemed to dissolve. A certain haggardness about the eyes was partially smoothed out. She seemed to become nervously alight and urged him quickly and almost too fussingly to let her pour him another cup of coffee.

  ‘I think that’s the way to do things. Quite impromptu. You always get the most fun when you do things at a tangent, don’t you think? You could stay for a week if you wanted to. Why not?’

  ‘I might if I can get the time.’

  ‘Be sure to let me know when you’re coming back though, won’t you?’

  He promised he would and then, five minutes later, started for the office, no longer haunted by the dream but feeling in a curious way uplifted. Skelby Moor, he told himself, might be fun. He might even catch himself a trout as pink and delectable as the one his father had sketched on the post-card.

  Skelby Moor turned out to be a God-forsaken dingy little town of seven or eight thousand people on the edge of a coalfield in Derbyshire: a place of squat terraces half in red brick, half in grimy stone, with a short main street of shops, five or six pubs, two working men’s clubs and an outdoor beerhouse or two. The square was of stone too, with a central market cross worn almost to alabaster smoothness by generations of lounging men.

  Stone walls split the surrounding countryside of hills and dales into lop-sided fragments, here and there mauve with heather, mostly bright green from summer rain. It was early August when he arrived and the wind had a grizzling winter sound.

  The Midland Hotel was also of stone, also grimy and with a stout front portico. It stood close by the railway station. Trains shunted noisily past it all day and some part of the night, belching darkly. The navigation coal they used showered down a fine black dust that settled like a crowd of minute flies on window sills, table linen and even bed-clothes.

  The woman who kept the hotel, Mrs Lambton, was a stolid sort of cart mare. She had a well scrubbed appearance, almost over-clean. Her white blouse crackled.

  ‘For how many nights would you want the room, sir?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Four or five. Perhaps a week. I understood there’s some good fishing here.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘It’s the first I heard of it.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ve come to the wrong place after all,’ he said. ‘It’s odd how—’

  ‘Well, if you have you’d better book from night to night until you’ve made up your mind, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Let’s say three nights,’ he said. ‘I’d like to do some walking anyway.’

  He began to feel, from that moment, slightly foolish about it all. The long train journey – he had come by train in the slender hope that, in some sort of way, it might tell him something about that burly figure in the ulster – now seemed unnecessary and futile. The dream, though so consistently vivid and real in repetition, now started to mock him slightly.

  After supper he walked about the town. From much rain the hills beyond it were acid green in the falling sunlight. In the distance, across the town, someone was practising scales on a cornet and soon the repeated monotonous phrases, like the dream, started to mock him too.

  After half an hour of strolling about he went back to the hotel and ordered himself a beer. He stood at the bar, drinking it, and said to Mrs Lambton:

  ‘I wonder if you remember my father? He used to stay here. Albert Pickard.’

  She pondered for some moments, absently scratching one arm through the sleeve of her crackling blouse.

  No, she told him at last, she’d never heard of anyone of that name. But then she wasn’t so very good at names.

  ‘Did he stay here often? When would this be? If he was a regular I’d remember him.’

  ‘I think pretty often. I suppose he probably first came here seven or eight years ago. Probably longer.’

  ‘Oh! that accounts for it,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t here seven or eight years ago. My husband died suddenly and I got very run down what with one thing and another. You wouldn’t perhaps believe it to look at me now, but I had a long bout of T.B. at that time. It nearly took me home.’

  He sipped his beer, telling her that it really didn’t matter. It was just that his father had mentioned the fishing at some time.

  ‘My sister ran the place while I was away,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been back so long.’

  Suddenly, for some reason he couldn’t explain, he felt intensely curious about the sister. Behind the hotel a train shunted past, belching smoke. A rattle of buffers hit the evening air, raising a chain of echoes that still hadn’t died when he said:

  ‘Is sh
e here with you now?’

  ‘Who, Kitty? No, I sent her away about a month ago,’ she said. ‘She was getting like me, a nervous wreck. I didn’t like it. She’d been overworking a lot and got herself into a state. I sent her down to the sea for a while.’

  ‘She’ll be back, I suppose?’

  ‘She’ll be back next Friday, but whether she’ll settle, I don’t know – that’s another matter. She’s a restless girl, Kitty. Lately she’s really got awfully restless. I sometimes wonder if she’ll ever settle here any more.’

  Perhaps it was the trains, he was on the point of saying. That constant battery of shunting trains raining black dust was hardly, he thought, a cure for restlessness. Instead he said:

  ‘She’s younger than you, I take it?’

  ‘Oh! much. There’s fifteen years between us. You’d never know us for sisters.’

  Later in the evening he took another walk across the square. It was quite dark now and he could actually feel grains of smoke dust from the railway falling on his face and hair and hands. The air was dank with sulphur. This is a God-forsaken hole for a restless girl to live in, he thought, my God, how could you bear it? and from across the town, on the chilly August night wind, the monotonous scales of the cornet, still tenaciously playing, came to mock him in answer.

  Three days later he was back home. It was late afternoon when he arrived. The front door of the house was locked and he noticed that the blinds of his mother’s room were drawn. The afternoon had been rather showery, with only fitful bursts of sun, and it struck him at once that she couldn’t be at home.

  After letting himself in with his latch-key he stood at the foot of the stairs and called up:

  ‘Mother, are you there? Are you at home?’

  There was no answer. He mounted three or four steps of the stairs and called again: