The Triple Echo Read online

  The Triple Echo

  H. E. Bates

  Contents

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  A Note from the Family

  The Triple Echo

  A Note on the Author

  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

  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.

  The Triple Echo

  ‘My husband’s a prisoner with the Japs. I’ll probably never see him again. That’s all I know.’

  The farm was one of those small half-lost farms that are cut off from main roads in summer by dense barriers of beech and chestnut and repeatedly in winter by mud and fog and snow. The red-brick two-storied house and its one barn had once been thatched. Now both had a roof of corrugated iron that shone harsh grey in the summer sun and lay on them in winter like a rusting, crumbling crown.

  The war was already nearly three years old when Alice Charlesworth started the hard slog of running the place herself. Even before her husband was a prisoner with the Japs all she had for company was a cow, a couple of dozen hens and a terrier that hunted the rats that infested the hen-run. The blow of losing her husband to the Japs was followed by the blow of losing the terrier when it severed a leg in a gin-trap she had set for hares. She promptly shot the dog with a double-barrelled shot-gun and after that she was quite alone except for the hens, the cow and the rats that she shot too as they came out to prowl in the hour before darkness.

  She looked, if anything, rather older than her twenty-seven years. She had thick cottony black hair. She always wore dull brown denim trousers and a thick dark green sweater. Her black gum-boots were always caked with mud. The oak-brown skin of her face and arms was rough. Her eyes too were brown. Normally they were keen and warm, but sometimes as she stared down the white chalk hillside at the vast expanse of valley below they also had something of the lost glassiness seen in the eyes of birds imprisoned in cases, with only dead grass and ferns for company.

  Most evenings she got into the habit, like the rats, of prowling about the place. She always carried the shot-gun. The first fears of German invasion were over by that time but, she told herself, you never knew. If there were no unexpected parachutists to shoot at there was always the danger of two-legged foxes after the hens. Food was getting scarce. Nowadays everybody was nicking things.

  She had also grown intensely, almost fiercely jealous about her few acres of land. Isolation had made her suspicious of every shaking leaf or bough. At the far end of the path was a post-box nailed to a tree-trunk. She walked down to it perhaps once a week, looking vainly for letters that never came. She had long since cancelled her newspapers. The only news she got was from a small portable radio. She hardly ever had time for that either but now and then some comic or other made her laugh.

  One evening in May she walked farther down the hillside than usual. It was already daylight at that time until after ten o’clock. The air after a long warm day had exceptional softness. Big white trees of hawthorn lay dotted about the valley like soft woollen puff-balls and from over the crest of the hillside, from the depths of the beech-woods, flowed a continual exquisite breath of great lakes of bluebells in flower. The war seemed a million miles away.

  When she at last got back to the farm-yard, ready to shut up the hens for the night, she was suddenly aware of the figure of a man disappearing towards the woods, behind a stack of hay.

  She was quick to raise the shot-gun and started running. She caught another glimpse of the man climbing a stile. Another two-legged fox, she told herself, and shouted:

  ‘Here, you there! What’s the big idea, traipsing all over other people’s property?’

  He stopped and turned. She was still running as he turned but suddenly she stopped too. Gun still raised, she found herself face to face with a thin, boyish young soldier.

  ‘What the blazes you think you’re up to? Nicking something I shouldn’t wonder.’

  He started to mutter something about losing his way. His intensely pale blue eyes seemed scared. He was carrying his forage cap tucked in a shoulder strap. His fair light hair shone almost white.

  ‘What you doing up here, on other folk’s land? Don’t they give you nothing to do in the army nowadays?’

  ‘Walking. That’s all. Just walking.’

  ‘Funny you should walk into my place.’

  ‘Just got lost. A bit lost –’

  ‘Well, you can get lost again. I don’t want nobody trespassing and traipsing about up here.’

  ‘I thought there might be a way, foot-path or something, down the hill –’

  ‘That’s the only path there is. Through the wood. That way.’

  She lifted the gun again, pointing it straight at him. This time he seemed more offended than scared.

  ‘Don’t you know you should never point a gun at anybody?’
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  ‘Sorry,’ she said and surprised herself in saying it. ‘Sorry.’

  She lowered the gun. There was a good ten seconds of silence between them. Once or twice he ran his fingers through his hair. As it moved it seemed whiter than ever, almost luminous against the darkening background of tree shadow.

  ‘You see, I –’

  She found herself starting a confused explanation. Well, she was all alone up here. You never knew about people. She was always afraid there might be somebody –

  ‘You’re not afraid of me, are you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘No need to be afraid of me. I’m nobody. My name’s Barton.’

  All the time the light blue, boyish eyes seemed to indicate more and more that it was he, not she, who was afraid.

  ‘I had things nicked before now. Hens. I know what soldiers are. Scrounging. On the scrounge all the time. I know. My husband’s a soldier.’

  ‘Nightingale,’ he suddenly said. ‘Nightingale.’

  He lifted his head, listening. She could hear the nightingale too, somewhere far up, hidden in beech branches. For fully half a minute they listened to it together until at last he said:

  ‘Marvellous, that. Marvellous.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Haven’t heard one for a long time,’ he said. ‘Used to have them where I come from but they’ve all gone now.’

  ‘Where’s that, you come from?’

  ‘Hampshire. Like this. Not far from the sea.’

  Up in the beech trees the nightingale held to one long pure sustained high note. The soldier drew in his breath and held it too.

  ‘Nothing like it,’ he said. ‘They say some birds can imitate it but –’

  ‘They sing so much I hardly seem to notice it.’

  ‘They sing all day sometimes. Do they up here?’

  ‘Like I said, I hardly seem to notice it.’

  Now there was another long pause between them and again they listened to the nightingale. This time she broke the silence by saying:

  ‘Sorry about the gun. I ought to have known better than that.’

  Whether this embarrassed him or not she never knew. He simply said:

  ‘We got a place like this down in Hampshire.’ He looked about him for a second or two. ‘Bit bigger, though. My Dad and me used to run it together. He’s on his own now. Hard graft for him, all on his own.’

  ‘I should know.’

  Sharply his brilliant blue eyes turned to the direction of the high beech tops and the nightingale.

  ‘I could listen all night to that. I could just stop and listen all night.’

  To her own great surprise she actually found herself laughing.

  ‘I can see you turning up at the guard-room,’ she said, ‘with a nightingale for an excuse. What would they say to that?’

  ‘Put me on a charge,’ he said and laughed too. ‘Worth it though.’

  There was now yet another silence and it was she who broke it again.

  ‘I was just going to have my supper.’ She again felt conscience-stricken by her stupidity about the gun. She wanted, somehow, to make up for it. ‘You could come in for a few minutes if you’d like. I’m sorry I spoke like that.’

  ‘I don’t want to take up your time –’

  ‘Are you hungry? I’ve always got plenty of eggs.’

  He followed her slowly, almost with shyness, into the kitchen. The table had an old green oil-cloth on it and a cup-and-saucer and plate and tea-pot left over from tea-time. She hastily cleared it and wiped the oil-cloth with a duster.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said.’ ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I generally have an egg some way or other. I’m out of bacon though. I eat the ration week-ends. Would you like poached? You can eat two, can’t you?’

  ‘Two on a raft,’ he said, ‘isn’t that what they call it?’

  ‘Oh! I never heard of that,’ she said and laughed again. ‘Sit you down. I’ll lay the table.’

  He sat down. By now it was growing dark. ‘There’s no electricity up here,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the lamp.’

  In the lamplight, as she set the lamp in the middle of the supper-table, his eyes seemed more blue, more brilliant than ever. As often as not he kept them downcast. It was when he suddenly lifted them that they were both unbearably penetrative and at the same time shy.

  While she busied herself with kettle, tea-pot, cups and eggs he barely spoke at all. But now and then he sucked at his lips and bit at them gently, as if trying to summon up courage to say something, and at last he said:

  ‘You say your husband’s a soldier?’

  ‘Prisoner with the Japs. I’ll probably never see him again. That’s all I know.’

  An egg cracked on the side of a cup. He seemed to catch the desolation in her voice and stared at the lamp in silence. It might have been that he wished he had never spoken. In fact he had no other word to say until she put a cup of tea and two poached eggs on a big thick square of toast in front of him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I don’t know why you should do all this for me.’

  There was nothing, she found, that she could say to that. He had no more to say either. They ate together, she rather slowly, he very quickly, swilling eggs and toast down with big gulps of tea and finally mopping up his plate with bread.

  ‘You needed that,’ she said. ‘You were hungry.’

  ‘I never thought I was but –’

  ‘How about a repeat?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Oh! eggs are things I’ve always got plenty of.’

  She immediately left her own food and went over to the stove and started to cook eggs and make toast all over again. He watched her all the time with shy, furtive eyes, painfully blue in the lamplight.

  ‘I see you got a tractor.’

  ‘Fat use though. Packed up on me yesterday.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Search me. I’m stuck with it, that’s all I know. I phoned the garage up from the call-box but if I know anything about it they’ll be here next Doomsday.’

  Presently he was eating the second plate of eggs and toast. She poured more tea for him. Then she sat holding her own cup in her two hands, elbows on the table, not very hungry.

  ‘I expect I could fix it.’

  ‘Worst of machines. When they pack up they’re dead. I sometimes wish I had a horse.’

  ‘Nothing much, I expect. I’ll have a look at it if you like.’

  ‘You would? Too dark though, now.’

  Well, he could come tomorrow night, he said. No trouble about that. Except when he was on guard he had the evenings off. That was why he was walking. He liked walking. Nothing else to do.

  ‘Don’t you keep very busy then?’

  Farce, most of it, he said. Pointless. Parades, bull, schemes, talk about a Second Front, lot of waffle. He’d be better off on the land. Growing something. That’s where he belonged.

  ‘You’re right there. I wish –’ She found herself about to say something about her husband and then abruptly decided against it and stopped: ‘Well, it’s all pointless.’

  He was quiet again. She watched him eat. By now her own tea was getting cold and she got up to fill her cup again. Then she saw that his own cup was empty and she filled that too.

  ‘Nice to get a good drop of tea,’ he said. ‘God, that army muck.’

  She never once asked herself how long they sat there at the table, talking, draining the tea-pot and now and then looking furtively at each other across the lamplight. It was only when he at last suddenly got up and said, ‘Time I was going. They’ll have my ears off,’ that she realised how great the ache for company had been.

  ‘Well, I’ll come up tomorrow if that’s all right. Will you be here tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s a laugh. Am I ever anywhere else?’

  ‘About half seven I expect it’ll be.’

  She followed him into the yard outside. The far western horizo
n, still not completely dark, was cut across by the merest tongue of purple-orange. There were already stars.

  ‘Thanks about the tractor,’ she said. ‘I’ll be needing it any time now. I got a bit of early clover wants cutting.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said.’ ‘Listen to that.’

  Once again, together, they listened to the nightingale. Sometimes there were soundless, breathless pauses in the song.

  After that, except when he was on guard duty or some occasional night scheme, he came to see her every evening for the next three weeks or so. In this time he repaired the tractor, sharpened the knives of the hay cutter, cut the clover, turned it and finally carried it and stacked it in the yard.

  Every evening, after work, they sat in the kitchen and had supper together. They might have been husband and wife. There were always eggs and tea and toast but sometimes he scrounged a tin of bully-beef and she cooked potatoes. Once or twice, on her weekly visit to the stores at the foot of the hill, she managed to get a bottle or two of beer, a half pound of sausages, some extra cheese or even a piece of fish. Once she said:

  ‘I had a go at a hare yesterday but I missed it by a mile.’

  ‘You got plenty of pigeons up here. Ought to have a go at them.’

  ‘Opportunity’s a fine thing. When do you think I ever get time for pigeons?’

  ‘All right. I’ll have a go.’

  But after less than a hour wandering up and down the hillside he came back, empty-handed. The gun was no good, he explained to her. All cock-eyed. You couldn’t hit a church-steeple with a gun like that.

  ‘What’s wrong with it? I get the rats all right.’

  ‘Only because you’re breathing down their necks. Anyway, I’ll have a good look at it when I get back.’

  ‘Get back?’

  ‘Off the day after tomorrow.’

  She felt her heart give a dry, sudden leap. Her mouth hung open.

  ‘Off where? You mean you’re moving? Posted or something?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said and laughed. ‘Leave. A whole ruddy week. Back home. Back to the farm.’