The Fabulous Mrs. V. Read online

  THE FABULOUS Mrs. V.

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  And No Birds Sing

  The Fabulous Mrs. V.

  A Couple of Fools

  The Ginger-Lily Girl

  Afternoon at the Château

  A Party for the Girls

  The Cat who Sang

  The Trespasser

  The Diamond Hair-Pin

  A Dream of Fair Women

  A Nice Friendly Atmosphere

  The Lotus Land

  Bonus Story: The Electric Christ

  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

  And No Birds Sing

  It wasn’t only being alone; it was the way the house smelt dead.

  She sat under a big sweet-chestnut tree, in the heart of the woodland, watching Mr. Thompson with grave brown eyes. Mr. Thompson was frying mushrooms over a hazel fire in an old half-circular billy-can. The peculiar aroma of hazel smoke and the tang of mushrooms was so strong on the October evening air that every now and then she licked her lips like someone in a hungry dream.

  ‘Never had wild mushrooms before,’ she said. ‘Never knew you could get them wild.’

  ‘No?’ Mr. Thompson said. He kept turning the mushrooms over with the point of an old bone-handled shut knife. ‘And how old did you say you was?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Don’t they tell you nothing at school?’

  ‘Not about mushrooms.’

  ‘The sort you git in shops eat like leather,’ Mr. Thompson said. He dropped another lump of butter into the mushrooms. The butter sizzled and he lifted the billy-can a few inches off the fire. ‘Don’t taste of nothing at all.’

  ‘I only ever had them out of tins.’

  ‘Tins, eh?’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘They git ’em up in tins now, do they?’

  Mr. Thompson took the billy-can completely off the fire and peered down at the mushrooms. The girl sat holding an egg in each hand. Something about the neutral blankness of the eggs seemed to be reflected in her eyes and she hardly stirred as Mr. Thompson took the eggs away from her and broke them one by one into a battered coffee tin.

  ‘Smells rich,’ she said.

  Mr. Thompson beat the eggs with his knife. His face was rough and greyish from a two-day growth of beard. The battered brown hat that was pushed to the back of his head made his eyes appear to be protuberant, like a pair of big blue marbles, but at the same time docile, harmless and contented.

  ‘It’s quiet in the wood tonight,’ she said. ‘You don’t even hear the birds.’

  ‘No, the birds are settling down. I heard an old pheasant a little while back though.’

  ‘Pheasant? Are they wild too?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Half an’ half, this time o’ year. Half-wild, half-tame. Till they git shot at a bit.’

  ‘Tame? You mean you could keep one in a cage? Like a budgie?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Thompson said. He laughed. ‘They ain’t them sort o’ birds.’

  She sat quiet, her eyes roving to and fro suddenly, half-wild, half-tame themselves. The birds, like the mushrooms, were another part of her many revelations. Their songs woke her in the early mornings, before the mists cleared, when she sometimes lay alone for a long time under Mr. Thompson’s raincoat, staring up at the great roof of branches, wondering if Mr. Thompson had gone away and left her. This was the time of day when she remembered most clearly the way the house smelt: that dead smell, the smell of night before day washed it away.

  But before very long Mr. Thompson was always back, bringing mushrooms, blackberries, wood-nuts, perhaps a bit of watercress, clean water for her to wash in and fresh branches for the fire. Once he brought a handful of wheat-ears and the sound of them being rubbed between the leathery palms of his hands was the sound that woke her.

  ‘Mum works at the food factory,’ she said. ‘I told you that though, didn’t I? She brings stuff home. I think she wins it—you know. That’s how I know about the mushrooms that one time.’

  ‘Wins it?’

  ‘Bones it. You know.’

  ‘Works too, does she? All day?’

  ‘All day. She’d work all night too if they’d let her. Wants to get the fridge paid off. The telly took two years. She wants a spin dryer next. She’s gone before eight in the morning and gets back about ten at night. Does a washing-up job at a hotel on the way back. That’s what makes her bad tempered.’

  That too was why the house smelt dead. You didn’t really live in it and it just smelt dead. It was a hole you crawled back to after work was over. Her father was away at half-past six in the morning and sometimes in the winter she didn’t see him at all. With o
vertime he was knocking up big money. They were both knocking it up. Really big. All the time.

  Mr. Thompson, giving the beaten eggs a screw of salt, poured them into the billy-can with the mushrooms and started to scramble them with his knife, holding the can at the very edge of the fire.

  ‘Hand us that spoon, will you?’ he said. ‘And you cut some bread with my knife. We’ll be ready in a minute now.’

  She started to cut slices of bread from a loaf. The aroma of eggs scrambled in with mushrooms rose more richly than ever through the woodland air. Everything Mr. Thompson cooked was good. Everything that had happened with Mr. Thompson was good. Everything since she had first met him on her way home from school five days ago had been good. It was all a revelation.

  ‘You can have the spoon back now. I’ll eat mine with me knife.’

  The only utensils Mr. Thompson seemed to possess were the spoon, the knife, the billy-can, the coffee tin, a cup, an old blue plate and a kettle. Now he put half the scrambled eggs and mushrooms on the plate and the kettle on the fire.

  ‘Eat up,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘It gits cold quick out here.’

  She started shovelling eggs and mushrooms into her mouth with the spoon, cramming slices of bread in after them like wads of stuffing. Her own eyes were protuberant now: big with unconscious, happy greed. Small points of reflected firelight gave them excitement too, so that she might have been sitting there watching some complex sort of drama being played out on a screen.

  While she was cramming in the food Mr. Thompson paused in his eating to wash out the old coffee tin with boiling water. Then he dropped a handful of tea and sugar and half a tin of condensed milk into the kettle and stirred it round several times with a hazel stick, finally letting it all boil up.

  Even the smell of tea excited her. Like everything else it was good too. It was good and living. Lost and rapturous, she sat there eating madly, waiting for her cup to come.

  ‘Been holding your cup out a good minute,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Don’t you want it? Been thinking of something?’

  She didn’t say anything; she didn’t tell Mr. Thompson how, for quite five minutes, she had been thinking again of the dead smell of home and how it seemed to strangle her: the living-room with the telly, the fridge, the radio, the cooker and the washing machine all crammed in together, the table with uncleared breakfast remains still on it when she got back from school, the grey eye of the television set holding her a mute captive there in the dead half-darkness while she waited for someone to come home.

  She merely said instead: ‘I was thinking how you’re always so friendly.’

  ‘Got nothing to be unfriendly about. Got nobody to quarrel with.’

  She gulped fast at her cup of tea, staring at him with big grave eyes over the top of it. She was right about Mr. Thompson: he was always so quiet and friendly—like the day she first ran into him, carrying his bundle of utensils, his raincoat and two loaves of bread. It was because he accidentally dropped one of the loaves and she picked it up for him that they got talking and finally walked on together. That was the first time she was struck by the large, friendly eyes.

  She had never really been aware of how far they walked that first afternoon; perhaps it wasn’t all that far. But because Mr. Thompson walked slowly, unprepossessed by time or distance, it seemed a long way. In an hour they were in the woods and Mr. Thompson was saying:

  ‘You’d better git back now, hadn’t you?’

  She remembered that moment very well. She knew for an awful certainty that she wasn’t going back. She remembered a shadow of sickness falling on her as her thoughts went back to the living-room and in a moment the stranglehold of it was round her neck.

  She begged Mr. Thompson to let her stay a little longer and he said:

  ‘Well, I’m going to boil myself a drop o’ tea. You better have a cup before you go.’

  After that, as she did now, she sat watching him over the top of the tea cup. The shadows of late afternoon fell on his face, breaking it up into a benign and trembling pattern, and she knew for the first time that she would never be afraid of Mr. Thompson. There was something about that face that gave you the same warm feeling of comfort and security as when you put a glove on your hand.

  Her father’s face was never remotely like that. He worked a lathe in a machine shop and when he got home at night it was as if you could feel the lathe still whirling madly in the living-room. You could feel a wild compressor still driving through his blood: the telly’s got to be paid for, the fridge has got to be paid for, it’s all got to be paid for—God, let me get out and have a drink somewhere.

  ‘You’ve only just got home,’ she said to him once. ‘You don’t have to go out again yet, do you?’

  ‘Stop jawing. I’ll mark you if you don’t stop jawing. You got the telly to sit with, ain’t you? Sit and watch the telly. I slave enough to get the telly, don’t I?’

  ‘Go and get yourself an ice-cream,’ her mother said. ‘Put that in your mouth. I’m tired.’

  After that first cup of tea with Mr. Thompson she was aware of feeling tired too: not exhaustively tired but rather as if she had been sitting for a long time in a too-warm room. The strong fresh air in the woods seemed to drug her and presently her eyes started to drift drowsily to and fro. When she woke she was lying under Mr. Thompson’s raincoat and Mr. Thompson was sitting gazing at the fire.

  He was gazing at the fire now, rubbing his two-day old beard with thumb and forefinger. He reckoned it was time to git himself a shave, she heard him say.

  This pleased her; the grave brown eyes started lighting up. She would be able to hold up the mirror for Mr. Thompson. It was only a cracked pocket mirror with some of the quick-silver worn off the back, but it pleased her to hold it for Mr. Thompson.

  ‘Had enough tea?’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take the kettle down to the brook and fill it if I’m going to git a shave.’

  ‘I could drink another cup.’

  He poured the rest of the tea out for her and she said:

  ‘There was something I was going to ask you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t you ever go back home nowhere?’

  ‘Puzzle me to,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘I —’

  ‘You mean you haven’t got a house?’

  ‘Had one once,’ he said. ‘A doodle-bug fell on it. My mother was in it. There was just a big pile of rubble when I got home.’

  ‘What did you do after that?’

  ‘Started walking.’

  ‘Walking where?’

  ‘Up and down the country.’

  ‘Nowhere particular?’

  ‘Nowhere particular.’

  Sipping her tea, she asked him then if he never worked and Mr. Thompson said no, he never did. His mother had had a bit of money tucked away in the bank. It was his now and it did him for most things.

  ‘Fancy never working,’ she said. The images of her parents danced frantically on the stage of her mind, like grotesque and desperate puppets on a treadmill.

  ‘As long as nobody don’t make me,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘I don’t see no reason to.’

  He laughed. He didn’t often laugh and when he did so it was with a dry sort of cough, partly a chuckle. No, he didn’t work and, funny thing, he didn’t read no newspapers either. So that was another thing that never bothered him much: all that business about what was going on.

  ‘I don’t bother people either,’ he said, ‘and most of the time people don’t bother me.’

  ‘Was that why you let me come along with you?’

  ‘People quite often come along with me,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Walk a mile or two with me and then go back. Company, I suppose.’

  ‘You like company? You ever get lonely?’

  ‘I like company sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d ever be lonely with you. I like it with you.’

  ‘Perhaps you would, after a time. You can very often be lonelier with people than without them, I say.’ />
  Throughout this conversation she was again aware of feeling a growing sense of security and comfort about her, like the drawing on of a glove, and she was almost disappointed when Mr. Thompson at last got to his feet, picked up the kettle again and said he was off to the brook to fetch water.

  ‘I’ll pack things up a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ll wash up when you get back. Will you bring some watercress?’

  ‘Might do,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘if I see any.’

  Mr. Thompson struck off through the undergrowth of hazels. In a few open spaces thick bracken, turning fox brown already, grew higher than a man. A jay, like blue fire, flew suddenly over one of these spaces with a throaty screech, filling the wood with echoes that seemed to go zithering away far into the deep mass of branches.

  Something about these noises disturbed Mr. Thompson; he stopped and stared about him. The presence of the girl had never really worried him very much; he had never laid a finger on her; she was just another companion on the way. She’d turn back all right when she wanted to—she’d get homesick or bored, or something else would make her go.

  He waited, listening, but within half a minute the wood was deadly quiet again. The girl was right: there was hardly a bird to make a sound. She’d been quick, he thought, to sense the absence of the birds. There was a funny feeling about a wood when the birds weren’t there.

  The big wood ended in a line of yews and white-beam, at the bottom of a slope. A brook, six or eight feet wide, ran round its boundaries in a deep curve. There were a few deep pools in it and the night before last Mr. Thompson had had four fair-sized perch out of it and he and the girl had had them fried for supper. She had never tasted anything in all her life like that, she said. He remembered how she had sat sucking the perch bones as if every single one was a precious needle of sugar. That was the best fish she ever tasted, she said. You didn’t get fish like that out of a fried fish shop. Up to then that was the only kind she’d ever had.