Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read online

  Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

  by

  H. E. BATES

  And Other Stories

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  The Enchantress

  Lost Ball

  Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

  The Place where Shady Lay

  The Yellow Crab

  Daughters of the Village

  Where the Cloud Breaks

  Mrs Eglantine

  Thelma

  The Snow Line

  The Spring Hat

  An Island Princess

  Bonus Story

  The Grace Note

  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 Enchantress

  Nearly fifty years ago I knew her as a rather plump, fair-skinned child with eyes of brilliant hyacinth blue and long ribbonless blonde hair that hung half way down her back in curls.

  Her mother was a gaunt, hungry faced, prematurely aged woman who, with sickly yellow eyes sunk far into her head behind steel-rimmed spectacles, treadled feverishly all day and half the night at a sewing machine, in a black dress and apron, closing boot uppers, in the dirty window of a little house in one of the narrow yards we used as short cuts at the railway end of the town. Her father was an ex-pug grown coarse and fat who worked little, boozed a lot and spent most of his time in a pub called The Waterloo, re-telling for friends and strangers alike the story of how—incredibly as a light-weight—he had won impermanent fame and a silver belt as a champion twenty years before.

  On Sundays her mother skulked furtively to Methodist Chapel, wearing a black dress that might well have been the one she worked in, an old black straw hat without trimmings and black button boots worn badly down at the heel, looking like the poorest of the poor. In a town like Evensford, where boots and shoes are made, even the poor have no way of acquiring public derision more swiftly than to be seen in boots or shoes that need heeling badly. It is not merely a point of honour not to do such things; it incurs a sharp communal scorn. But no one felt either scorn or derision for Mrs Jackson. Nor did anyone ever seem to know the cause of her state of perpetual mourning, but as the years went past I guessed—correctly—that it was not mourning at all. She was merely saving for Bertha.

  The yard in which they lived was no more than a slum alley eight or nine feet wide and only those who lived there knew what went on behind the narrow backways that, bounded by fearsome little privies on either side, were no more than naked asphalt squares from which the fences had been ripped down. That stretch of the town, low down by the station, was called The Pit. To come from The Pit was the social equivalent of having leprosy. Sometimes a deaf mute, a scrawny wild-eyed man of thirty or so, stood guarding the upper end of it, making the noises of a caged animal and spitting at passers-by. It was a place of loafers playing crown-and-anchor under smoky walls, of yelling women in perpetual curling rags and men’s caps who leered down to The Waterloo with beer jugs in their hands and made twice-weekly visits, with rattling prams, to pop-shops.

  On Mondays Bertha’s mother went to the pop-shop too; on Saturdays she redeemed whatever she had pawned. It is my guess that she went about in apparently perpetual mourning only because whatever clothes she otherwise possessed were in almost eternal pawn. And they were there because of Bertha.

  Even as early as these days they started calling Bertha the princess. At ten she was already big for her age. She had already a clean, splendid sumptuous bloom about her. Her eyes were most wonderfully clear and brilliant, with a great touch of calm and candid pride about them. Her hair was magnificent. It is quite common to see young girls with hair of palest bleached yellow and of extraordinary lightness in texture, but Bertha was the only child I ever saw whose hair was the colour of thistledown and of exactly the same lovely insubstantial airy quality.

  She was always beautifully dressed. It used to be said that her mother, sitting up into the small hours or surreptitiously working on Sunday afternoons, made all her dresses for her, but years later I met a woman, one of two sisters, the proprietress of a very good class dress shop at the other end of the town, who said:

  ‘Oh! no. Bertha’s clothes all came from here. We made them for her, my sister and I. And her underclothes. I suppose it would surprise you to know that that child never had anything but pillow lace on her petticoats? And always paid for.’

  At thirteen she already looked like a girl of sixteen or seventeen. She was tall, with full sloping shoulders and a firm high bust. Her legs were the sort of legs that make men turn round in the street, at least once if not twice, and she had a ce
rtain languid way of swinging her arms, with a backward graceful pull, as she walked. All this time her mother sat at the little window in the yard, treadling with sick desperation, almost insanely, at the sewing machine, and her father sat in The Waterloo, working his way through the chronicles of his history as a light-weight. You never saw them together.

  At fourteen she put her hair up. There was a good deal of it—it had been her mother’s eternal pride never to cut it at all—and now, not so light in colour, though still very blonde and airy in texture, it made her seem an inch or two taller, giving her better proportions.

  By this time she was working in a boot factory. In those days women went to work in the oldest clothes they could find, pretty shabbily sometimes and often in the sort of thin black apron that Bertha’s mother wore, but Bertha went to the factory exactly as she had previously gone to school: with her own impeccable quality, beautifully, fastidiously dressed.

  Already, by now, she looked like a young woman of twenty and already, people began to say, you could see all the old, eternal danger signs. It was only a question of time before girls of sensational early maturity found themselves in trouble, disgraced and tasting the fruits of bitter unlearned lessons. Girls of fourteen who went out of their way to look like women of twenty, dealing in the deliberate coinage of voluptuous attractions, had only themselves to blame if they bought what they asked for. The time had come for Bertha’s fall.

  Just under three years later she astounded everybody by suddenly getting married—quite undisgraced—to a retired leather dresser with a modest income, a most respectable Edwardian house enclosed by an orchard of apple and pear trees and a taste for driving out in a landau, in straw hat and cream alpaca suit, on summer afternoons.

  William James Sherwood was a neat, courteous, decorous man of the old school, very gentlemanly and of quiet habits; and the whole thing was a sensation. No one could say how it happened.

  ‘But she comes from The Pit!’ they said. ‘She’s from The Pit! From there. And seventeen. How do you suppose it happened? What possessed him?’

  When a man of seventy marries a girl of seventeen who is remarkably mature, fastidious and beautiful for her age it never seems to occur to anyone that all that has possessed him is a firm dose of taste, enterprise and common sense. Consequently it did not occur to anyone that William Sherwood might have made, in Bertha, a good bargain for himself.

  ‘But she’s from The Pit!’ they kept saying. ‘She works in a factory. And the way she walks. The way she fancies herself. She isn’t his kind. She can’t be. Look who she comes from—the poorest of the poor. Her mother scraping and saving at shoe-work, her old man cooked every day in The Waterloo.’

  Presently Bertha was to be seen driving out with William James Sherwood in a laudau on fine summer afternoons. By the way she sat there, upright, composed, holding a parasol over her head, one hand resting lightly and decorously on the side of the carriage, you could have supposed that she had rarely done anything else but drive in landaus for the better part of her seventeen years. But there was something else still more surprising and more interesting about her. She looked supremely content and happy.

  For the next three years she went on matching herself, her ways and her appearance to William James Sherwood. She behaved more like a woman contentedly settled in her middle thirties who had been born and brought up in a quiet country house, of good family, than a girl still in her teens who had been brought up in The Pit, on pawn-shop bread. Sometimes in summer you would see her not only driving out in the landau but walking, quietly, slowly and in thoughtful conversation, with William James Sherwood, in the orchard of apples and pears. They looked like a couple locked in the most harmonious tranquillity. It was easy to see that he was fond of her. His ways had obviously become her ways. In the swiftest and most unobtrusive fashion the daughter of The Pit, the child of the coarse ex-pug, had become a good wife, leaving all trace of any other self behind.

  Then suddenly, when she was twenty, James William Sherwood slipped from a ladder while pruning a pear-tree, fell to a concrete path below and died of a haemorrhage two days later.

  ‘Now watch her,’ everybody said. ‘She’s got what she wanted. Now watch her let it rip. Now watch her slide.’

  Sherwood died in January. One very hot oppressive evening in the following July I was walking slowly through the town, up to the tennis club, when a low green open sports car cut a corner as I was crossing, almost killed me and then roared away through rapid changes of gears and the guttural grind of twin exhausts. I had just time to catch sight of a man named Tom Pemberton at the wheel, and a very fair, bare-headed girl with one arm round his neck, before the car cut another corner and disappeared.

  It was some minutes before it came to me that the girl was Bertha, and the fact that I hadn’t recognised her instantly was due to an interesting thing. Bertha had bobbed her hair. Twenty minutes later I walked into the tennis club and found her playing tennis with Pemberton and a man named Saunders and another girl whose name I can’t remember. Saunders was a rather surly, dark-eyed man of great virility who played tennis well above the local average and Pemberton, though a fool in all other respects, was as polished and fluent a player as you ever get in an ordinary club.

  I was still trying to recover from my astonishment that Bertha was playing as well as any of them—in fact from my astonishment that she could play tennis at all—when I saw that Tom Pemberton had been drinking. Though not actually drunk, he threw the ball in the air several times and missed it and once, missing a smash, he fell headlong into the net and lay underneath it cursing and giggling. Every time he did something of this kind Bertha started giggling too.

  It was plain, presently, to see that Saunders was tiring of this and soon they were exchanging, hotly, some words about a ball being on the wrong side of the line. Pemberton, I thought, was less drunk than stupid. But Saunders was not the kind of man who took any kind of argument very lightly and presently, surly as a mongrel, he hit a ball deliberately high over the shrubberies and into the street beyond.

  The next thing I realised was that Pemberton was walking off the court, followed by a cool, racy, slightly haughty Bertha who looked, I thought, more striking than ever. But this was not what impressed me, at that moment, most powerfully.

  What impressed me so much was that she had trained herself to Pemberton’s pattern. She no longer looked like a woman nestling down into the contentment of her middle thirties. Though she was now a widow she looked, with her close-bobbed hair, severe twentyish tennis frock, her low waist and short skirt that showed her magnificent legs to superb advantage, like a careless wild-headed girl of seventeen.

  Five minutes later they were roaring away in Pemberton’s sports car and older members of the club began to say, prophetically as it turned out, that Pemberton would kill himself before he was much older. And I actually heard her scream—with delight, not fear—as the car skidded round a bend.

  I never cared much for Pemberton or indeed for men of Pemberton’s upbringing, outlook and class. Tom was the only son of a wealthy boot-manufacturer who lived in a house of hideous chateau-like design surrounded by large conservatories with occasional diamonds of coloured glass in them. He had no need to be anything but empty headed and the father encouraged the condition by ceaseless indulgence with sports cars, open cheques, expensive suits and the ready payment of court fines whenever, as so often happened, Tom ran the sports car into lamp-posts, trees or even other sports cars. Drunk or sober, he always looked pitifully handsome, vacant, vain and without direction.

  It occurred to me—I don’t know why—that Bertha, who had married so unexpectedly and quietly into the gentility of James William Sherwood’s septuagenarian household behind the pear-trees, was the very person to dispossess him of these unlikeable characteristics. I was wrong.

  It was many years indeed before I grasped that Bertha never dispossessed anybody of anything. The truth about Bertha was in fact very slow in coming t
o me. All I thought I saw in the incident of the tennis club was a girl who, consorting with an idiot, had caught a rash of idiocy. It was too early for me to know that the same characteristics that had turned her temporarily into a decorous wife for an elderly gentleman were the very same as those that were now turning her into a flapper of loud clipped speech, skirts above her knees and a taste for wild parties at dubious clubs on riversides. Grieflessly, swiftly and with not the slightest pressure on the nerves of conscience she had slipped out of the part of widow as easily as she might have slipped out of one of her petticoats, taking on the new tone, new pattern and new outlook of another man.

  About a year later Tom Pemberton, driving his car home very late and very fast one night in a thunderstorm, with Bertha at his side, crashed into a roadside tree for the last time.

  By one of those strange tricks that surround violent and accidental death Pemberton was terribly mutilated while Bertha, thrown clear, landed with miraculous gentleness on grass, dazed but unbruised, as if she had slid gently down a helter-skelter at a fair.

  Only a few weeks later a great scandal broke out in the town.

  Bertha, by this time, had gone back to live with her mother in The Pit. It might have been supposed that the few hundred pounds James William Sherwood had left her would have revolutionised life behind the dark little front window and the treadle sewing machine. Nothing of the kind had happened. The sick, yellow-eyed figure went on treadling as desperately as ever; in The Waterloo the ex-pug unfolded to all who would listen his tale of light-weight triumphs; and Bertha, splendid and well dressed as ever, went back to the factory.

  Two or three days after the death of Tom Pemberton a young curate named Ormsby-Hill called to see Bertha in The Pit, bearing the conventional condolences of the clergy and hoping, after the crash and its mutilations, that all was well as could be expected. Clergymen have a strange habit of calling on their sheep at awkward times and Ormsby-Hill, getting no answer at the front door of the house, which no one ever used anyway, went round to the back, among the miserable naked yards, just after six o’clock. The ex-pug, by that time, was already in The Waterloo, and Bertha’s mother, free for a few minutes after the long day of treadling, was out doing shopping.