The Day of the Tortoise Read online

  THE DAY OF THE TORTOISE

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  The Day of the Tortoise

  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 fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share not only information on forthcoming publications, but also exclusive material such as free downloads of recently re-discovered short stories. You can sign up to the H.E. Bates 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 Day of the Tortoise

  Thursday was always custard day: extra milk for the cats, the tortoise and the custard.

  Fred Tomlinson, fifty-seven, wearing carpet slippers of a faded red plum colour that sprouted untidy grey sprigs of cotton wool here and there at the toes, came down the shabby Victorian staircase at half past six in the morning carrying half a stump of candle in a pink china holder, his collar and tie, yesterday’s newspaper and the remains of a pork pie he had been too tired to finish the previous evening and had taken to bed with him in case he woke hungry in the night.

  The tie, of the kind that is ready-made and fixes to the collar with elastic, was exactly the colour of his tired-looking hair and moustache: a shade of uneven reddish brown, as if both had been dressed with stale boot polish. Two cardigans, one a bleached sage green that buttoned over the other, a red one, like an ancient envelope that had been stuck and restuck over and over again but never in quite the same place twice, hung down a foot or so over the tops of his creaseless denim trousers. His face, with the eyes floating in it like a pair of damp pale blue lozenges, had the slightly concentrated yet absent air of an unhurried dog trying to remember, though not very hard or successfully, where it had hidden a favourite bone the day before yesterday.

  In the kitchen two budgerigars, one green, the other blue, were still quiet in the circular cage covered over with a yellow duster by the window. Three cats, one black, two marmalade, were still half asleep under the table, the two marmalades together in a wicker basket.

  Fred took the duster off the cage and one of the budgerigars, Joey, the blue one, said ‘Good morning.’ The other, Mr Sylvester, the green one, said ‘I trust I see you well, sir?’ and Fred said ‘Good morning. Yes, very well, thank you. And you?’

  ‘Everything in the garden’s lovely,’ Mr Sylvester said.

  Mr Sylvester was an apter and quicker pupil altogether than Joey, who was a trifle lethargic, and could have been taught to say anything if only Fred had had the time. Unfortunately his three elder sisters, whom he called the girls, took up most of it. Sometimes in fact he was so busy that he neglected to shave for a day; often his shirts needed washing and changing and he neglected these too.

  Presently he unlocked the kitchen door and put the cats out. The morning had a warm summery air of promise about it and across the lawn a tortoise with several yards of string tied to one of its legs was crawling slowly in the sun.

  ‘Good morning, William,’ Fred said, and it seemed almost as if the tortoise slightly turned its head in answer.

  In the middle of the lawn a big catalpa tree stood already in full sun, but beyond it the shadow of two gigantic horse-chestnuts, almost as tall as the three-storeyed Victorian house itself, lay across a strip of orchard at the far end of the long garden, putting a group of stables entirely in shadow.

  Back in the kitchen Fred had several pieces of small washing, handkerchiefs, tea-towels, dusters and so on, soaking in the sink. He rinsed them out, hung them over the stove to dry and then went back to the sink to wash out six milk bottles, a saucepan and a cat’s dinner plate. A cooker of overnight porridge stood on the stove.

  Upstairs his three sisters, Aggie, Flossie and Ella, were still asleep. Flossie, the youngest, was dumpy, with bleached thistledown hair, cheeks always powdered a heavy tooth-paste pink and large vain blue eyes. She was never awake before eleven, when Fred took up her breakfast of coffee and toast to her room on the first floor.

  Some time before this he took up early morning tea and petit beurre biscuits to her black miniature poodle, which slept in a basket just inside the bedroom door; and later, when Flossie had gone out to have late coffee or lunch or to play bridge with friends, he took up to the poodle chopped portions of best fillet steak, carefully underdone.

  Ella, the middle one, was fair too, but in a very different way. Her hair had the appearance of a forkful of hay carelessly dumped down on the top of her head and never combed. The few freckles on her face might have been old grass seeds. Her room was on the second floor and in it she had made a little altar by the fireplace. This consisted of a mahogany sofa table covered with a yellow silk runner, two brass candlesticks, a crucifix and two Chinese dishes of pot-pourri. In front of it stood a black and red needlework footstool on which Ella kneeled for long periods of the day, praying for the souls of all and sundry, especially animals and birds.

  Far away at the top of the house Aggie lived in supreme isolation, strictly apa
rt, in self-chosen purdah, never coming down. Fred had never seen his eldest sister in entirety for several years, though he was familiar with her head and shoulders, which appeared several times a day at her bedroom window, from which she hauled up groceries, letters, milk, books, writing paper and anything else she wanted in a large wicker basket at the end of a pulley.

  For the greater part of the day Aggie sat writing messages. She fancied herself as a chosen emissary between this world and the next, which she called the Other Side. She was tall and thin, with a yellowish knuckled face and pondering grey eyes with large smoky stains underneath them. She lived mostly on cocoa and fried fish which Fred bought at the fish-and-chip shop at the end of the road and then warmed up in the kitchen and periodically sent up to her with bread and butter, in the wicker basket.

  The people she most liked to send messages to were the Queen, various Presidents of the United States, both living and dead, and Gandhi. It didn’t matter that Gandhi or even some of the Presidents were dead. In some ways it was better. It meant that Aggie was in closer contact with the Other Side.

  Messages of importance, to people of great influence scattered over the world, were always posted, sometimes registered. The brief local ones were sent by jackdaw. Fred had found the jackdaw, now called Francis, sitting on the stable steps one morning, a tame tenacious visitor who refused to fly away. When Aggie heard of it she knew, in her heart of hearts, that Providence had sent it. Francis was a Divine Instrument placed in her hands as part of the will, the great pattern, for a more peaceful, better world.

  All day, now, the jackdaw flew over streets, roofs and gardens with some cautionary message or other ringed to its leg. Strangers to the town found themselves picking it up, unfolding the message and reading short injunctions of startling innocence, such as Do You Want to Be a Murderer? – Pray for Peace! or Look Down! Is there Blood on your Hands? Make Haste for Peace! – Wash it Away!

  Far downstairs, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the stables, in the big Victorian rooms that had long since frightened away all servants, Fred slaved. Fred, his sisters said, liked to be busy. It was good for him. The long, full days kept him out of mischief. Fred, with his tired brown moustache and floating lozenge eyes always so pensive, looked utterly incapable of mischief of any sort, and filled his day to the full with cats, tortoise, budgerigars, cooking, washing up, dusting, shopping, digging, mowing the lawn and further essential tasks like making custard.

  Was there an errand to be run? Fred would run it. Aggie had a registered letter for Gandhi. Fred would post it. The milkman, as is the natural habit of milkmen, would have delivered milk to the house every morning, but the three sisters thought on the contrary that Fred should fetch it from the dairy. The walk was good for Fred. He liked it. It didn’t hurt him at all – the dairy wasn’t more than seven or eight minutes away.

  It was only in the late evenings that Fred, with the last of the tea-cloths put in soak, the budgerigars put to bed, the stove banked up and the porridge started, found himself with time enough to go up to the loft above the stable, smoke a pipe, even have a glass of beer and read the daily paper.

  The nearest Fred ever came to mischief was the evening glass of beer. No horses had lived in the stable for a long time and now, upstairs, Fred had devised for himself, in his own den, a few degrees of comfort that the house never gave. He could sit in an old Windsor chair or lie at full length on a faded Victorian sofa, in his shirt sleeves, his carpet slippers on, in welcome peace, puffing and sipping.

  Once a week the beer delivery came in secret by the back garden gate, where the two huge horse chestnuts spanned with an arch of cool black shade the roof of the stables. In spring the air was full of the scent of chestnut blossom and in late autumn the chestnuts split from their husks and drummed down on the roof with a monotonous but friendly sound.

  Tired but happy, long fixed in the habit of reading alone under the single electric light bulb, Fred wished for nothing else. It didn’t occur to him, in fact, that there was anything else to wish for.

  On his way to the dairy Fred saw the first of Aggie’s messages, carried by the jackdaw, going out over the calm, sunny town. It was going to be warm again, he thought, and already he had taken off one of his cardigans. In a wire bottle carrier he was carrying six empty milk bottles, one more than on any other day except Thursday. He had never troubled to ask himself why Thursday was always custard day or why the only thing he had in common with his sisters, or they with each other, was a liking for custard. He might have supposed it was something left over from childhood, another old fixed habit they couldn’t get out of.

  The dairy was clean and cool-looking, with a front of emerald and yellow tiles made to form a picture of summery meadowland and a herd of grazing cows. A faint smell of butter, with a thicker, half-sour odour of milk, came through the open door.

  ‘Good morning, Shirley. Going to be warm again. Wouldn’t you think so?’

  The girl behind the marble counter, reddish-haired, with grey-green eyes and a delicate pointed chin, stared back at Fred in a slightly estranged way, half-smiling, without a word.

  ‘Gracious me, I thought you were Shirley. Where’s Shirley today?’

  ‘Scalded herself with a kettle last night,’ the girl said, laughing as if it were a big joke. ‘All down one arm and part of one leg. She’s in hospital. She’s rather bad, they say.’

  Fred said he was terribly sorry. He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem right. Shirley had served him with milk for years.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ the girl said. ‘You’ll have to put up with me for the next six weeks or so.’

  Suddenly she laughed again and Fred couldn’t help thinking what a remarkable, brilliant sound it was. It was more like a spontaneous piece of bird song than a laugh. It was gay, buoyantly sharp and yet tender.

  Above all it was very infectious and for no reason at all Fred started laughing too, only coming to his senses some moments later to say:

  ‘I don’t know why we should stand here laughing. It isn’t exactly a laughing matter.’

  ‘Well, weeping wouldn’t do much good either, would it?’ she said.

  Fred supposed there was some truth in that but before he could say a word she went on:

  ‘I’m always laughing a lot anyway. I see the funny side of things. Do you? Do you laugh a lot?’

  Fred started to confess that he didn’t think he did, not all that much, and then broke off in unexpected confusion, held by the girl’s candid, commandingly bright eyes.

  ‘It only takes a little thing to set me off,’ she said. She started taking empty milk bottles from the basket Fred had put on the counter. ‘How many do you have? Six?’

  ‘Six on Thursdays.’

  ‘Only on Thursdays?’

  Solemnly Fred explained that it was because they always made custard on Thursdays and once again she started laughing. She thought that was killing, she said.

  ‘Do you live near?’ she said. ‘You must do, or you wouldn’t bring half a dozen bottles in.’

  Well, it wasn’t all that near, Fred said. He lived with his sisters right at the end of the avenue. Nearly ten minutes away.

  ‘I live with my sister too. Why don’t you have the milk delivered?’

  Fred said he liked the walk. It was good for him.

  ‘Who says so?’

  Fred didn’t exactly know who said so. He couldn’t actually recall anybody ever having said so. It was just assumed.

  ‘You’re a one, you are.’ She let out another brilliant laugh that seemed to slap at the shining walls of the dairy. ‘Do you fetch it every morning?’

  ‘Every morning.’

  ‘Do you want to pay or shall I book it?’

  ‘Book it, please,’ he said. ‘Mr Fred Tomlinson. I pay on the first of every month.’

  By this time she had put all six full bottles into the basket and Fred was just about to pick them up and depart when she smiled and asked him if there was anything else h
e wanted?

  There was nothing at all that Fred wanted. He got all the groceries, butter, bacon, eggs and such things, on Saturday mornings, but suddenly he found himself saying:

  ‘Yes, there is. Butter, I think. And a few eggs.’

  ‘How much? How many eggs?’

  Fred, not conscious of thinking, said he’d take two pounds of butter and a dozen eggs. All the time, as she packed eggs and butter into paper bags, he was watching her. She was so different from Shirley, who was dumpy, shiny and double-chinned. The deep reddish hair was more than startling. It was a flame and the brilliant grey-green eyes never let him rest.

  ‘This is rather a lot to carry, isn’t it?’ she said, after Fred had said he’d take a pound of bacon too. ‘You’ll never manage it, will you, with the milk too?’

  Oh! yes, he’d manage, Fred said. He was used to carrying things.

  ‘Suppose I pop them all into a cardboard box? You’ll manage easier then. Don’t want to have scrambled eggs and bacon all down your shirt front, do you?’

  This was the signal for another brilliant laugh, which pealed about the empty dairy like a bell, and again Fred found himself laughing too.

  ‘It’s no joke though,’ she said. ‘Do you really want all this now? Which end of the avenue do you live? Top end?’

  Fred nodded and she said:

  ‘I got to come home that way at lunch time. I could drop them in. Glad to.’

  ‘Oh! no, no,’ Fred said. The idea of someone doing something for him was too ridiculous for anything. Quite impossible. ‘Oh! no, no.’

  ‘What’s the name of the house?’

  ‘Ullswater.’

  ‘I know it. The big red brick one.’

  ‘Yes, but really—’

  ‘No trouble at all. I’ve got to come past it anyway.’