An Aspidistra in Babylon Read online

  AN ASPIDISTRA IN BABYLON

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  An Aspidistra in Babylon

  A Month by the Lake

  A Prospect of Orchards

  The Grapes of Paradise

  Bonus Story:

  The Duet

  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

  An Aspidistra in Babylon

  1

  Nearly forty years ago, when I was a young girl and my mother, a widow, kept a small boarding house at one end of the sea-front the houses there ran in a sparkling crescent of white and cream under the massive shoulder of chalk cliff on which the castle and its garrison stands. From a distance the castle still looks like an enormous bastion of pumice-coloured flint. By contrast, in those days, the curving line of houses always looked like a freshly starched collar, intensely stiff and respectable, against the strip of biscuit-coloured shingle and the sea.

  A great deal of this, I must point out, has changed now. During the war bombs ripped out the entire centre of the collar and you can still see the dirty scars made by shells on the grassy slopes above the town. But two things remain exactly as they were when I lived with my mother there and, in the long blistering summer of 1921, when I was eighteen, I first met an officer in the guards, a man of forty, named Captain Archie Blaine.

  The first thing that has never changed at all is the castle itself. It has the imperishable and inviolate air that belongs to great churches and high mountains. But sometimes, especially on rainy days, it also looks like a prison. At other times something about the particular arrangement of the battlements gives it the appearance of a great clenched granite fist, fingers perpendicular, threatening the sea. The other thing about the town that remains unchanged is far less spectacular. It is, perhaps, even rather trivial, though it may be its very triviality that makes it stick in my mind.

  It is simply that all the chimney pots on the houses remaining in the crescent are a very bright, impossible canary yellow. They are also unusually tall and as they stand there above the roofs in blocks of six, eight or even a dozen they have exactly the appearance of lofty organ pipes. You fully expect them to start playing solemn tunes. Of course nothing of the kind ever happens and the only sound you ever hear from them is the greedy squawks of the many huge hungry sea-gulls that sit on them and, by some curious trick of light, or perhaps because the pots are that quite impossible yellow, often look like gross blue owls.

  Speaking of this curious trick of colour, I have now remembered a third thing that never changes. It is the extraordinary light that, whenever the sun shines, hangs above the crescent, the castle, the chalk cliffs, the harbour, the sea-walls and the sea. It is not that it is merely of a strikingly pure candescence. It seems actually to leap in air. In some curious way it is uncannily transcendent. It seems to lift you off the ground.

  On very hot days, when the chalk of the cliffs looks more naked than usual and there is the faintest ripple on the sea, it has still another quality. It suddenly robs your eyes of the power of focus.

  It was on just such a day of naked, blinding light, in June, that I first met Captain Blaine.

  2

  Of course in a garrison town the one consistently unsurprising thing is to meet a soldier. They are naturally everywhere. You can’t escape them. The rankers come into town to drink beer, eat fish and chips and get off with girls. The officers, less evident simply because there are fewer of them, come in to drink at the better hotels or have occasional dinner parties, mostly on Saturdays. The rankers get very drunk and rowdy and fight among themselves when they can’t find marines or sailors to fight with, which isn’t very often. The officers also get very drunk and are finally carried home up the hill, in their own exclusive fashion, in taxi-cabs. The fights, especially with marines, are apt to be rather bloody.

  Nearly forty years ago there were also, of course, many more pubs to get drunk in than there are now. Soldiers, too, were soldiers, not mere conscripted cyphers serving a couple of reluctant years and wearing luminous socks and drain-pipe trousers in off-duty hours. They were cast in Kipling’s belching, bawdy mould. They were what Rupert Brooke calls somewhere ‘loud and black of mouth’ and their women weren’t much better.

  Small wonder, I suppose, that my mother had her own special name for that brawling soldiers’ town.

  ‘Babylon,’ she called it. ‘That Babylon. Keep away from that Babylon,’ she always said to me. ‘Don’t ever go near that Babylon.’

  When you add to all this the fact that ships from the continent were coming into the harbour every day, regularly bringing French and B
elgian sailors ashore or foreign visitors on a ten-hour excursion spree, you would naturally come to the conclusion that the town, whatever else it might be, was never dull. You would naturally think also that in that robust male Babylon a girl of eighteen wouldn’t have much difficulty in getting herself noticed, taken out or even made a fuss of by a man.

  Both conclusions would be very wrong. To me, at least until that blistering eventful summer of 1921, it was never anything but infinitely and terribly dull. It was so dull that I couldn’t even hate it. Today I think it a very pretty, charming town, full of colouring and bristling with a certain character. In those days it was just a smudge on the shore.

  As to the men, the soldiers and all the rest, I simply didn’t exist for them. This is not entirely surprising, however, since I was clearly infinitely and terribly dull myself. The best description of myself that I can think of is to say that I was as dull as one of the many aspidistras that cluttered up the rooms, the hallway and even the dining tables of our little boarding house. I was just that—a female aspidistra and nothing more.

  For example I had, until my seventeenth year, worn my hair down my back in a long thick plait tied with a large plain black ribbon. It was rather greasy hair, dark and unwaved, of the kind that most women struggle frantically to alter or at all costs to disguise. I just wasn’t aware of it. When I looked in the mirror I saw it simply as a frame for a rather narrow paste-coloured face in which the dark brown eyes were too large and consequently much out of proportion. Naturally I wore no make-up either, so that my forehead and my rather high cheekbones always shone very soapily.

  The one thing about myself I might have claimed as not being dull was my figure. My body was slender but very smooth and without a single blemish except a perfectly circular brown mole, rather large, between my left breast and my shoulder. But since no one except myself ever saw my body or caught even the faintest glimpse of the mole it really wasn’t very important to me. I ought to add here that although my legs were really quite shapely I naturally wore black woollen stockings.

  My mother wore black stockings too. In fact she wore nothing but black, continuously. Mourning for my father, who had died ten years before, had become a habit. Widowhood was a cross to be serenely and, when possible, silently borne.

  I must refrain from being unjust to my mother, especially as what happened to me that summer was not really of her making, but she was a woman who had life neatly summed up in a series of catch-phrases, all of them fallacies.

  Her favourite among these was ‘If you trust other people they will trust you.’ Second only to this, I fancy, was ‘If you don’t want people to think ill of you don’t begin by thinking ill of them.’ Under such fallacious guidance, delivered in her mournful, rather monotonous voice, all individuality in me had died. I was dull only because I was fearful of doing anything opposed to these apparently solemn truths of hers.

  Ruby is an illustration of this curious and important business. Ruby was one of our chambermaids, a generously-built, good-looking, juicy girl of twenty eight or so with reddish hair and half-dissolute grey-green eyes that always looked much older than the rest of her. I liked Ruby and I have good cause to remember, and be grateful for, those half-dissolute, old-looking eyes.

  On her days off Ruby was, in fact, part of that Babylon my mother always warned me so much about. She was the good time free-and-easy, the soldiers’ friend.

  ‘Over-affectionate, duckie, that’s me. Give, give, that’s my trouble. Never know when to stop. Ought to think about settling down. Never will, though.’

  I very much liked going into the maids’ room, behind the kitchen, and talking to Ruby, or even upstairs to her room, where we could be alone. Chambermaids didn’t have luxuries like bathrooms in those days and sometimes I went into her bedroom and caught her having what she called a strip-wash, bare to the waist, over her marble wash-stand.

  ‘Come in, duckie. Sit on the bed. Don’t mind me. Up as far as possible and down as far as possible. Got to get the muck off today somehow. Only had a cat-lick yesterday.’

  Ruby’s ripe and infectious laugh always bounced about the bedroom as generously as her big breasts swung above the soapy water as she bent to wash them.

  I not only liked Ruby; I was fascinated by her. I was also, I confess, sometimes a little horrified. I was horrified, for instance, when I caught her washing one day and found her back and shoulders scored with a sickly mass of black and yellow bruises.

  ‘Ruby,’ I said. ‘Your back! Whatever happened? Whatever on earth did you do?’

  Ruby, far from being concerned, merely filled the bedroom with her customary ripe and careless laughter.

  ‘Bit of love, duckie, that’s all. They get taken a bit fierce like that sometimes.’

  ‘You mean a man did it? You mean you actually——’

  Ruby pealed with laughter again.

  ‘Oh! that’s all right, duckie,’ she said. ‘That’s a good sign, that is. You know they got it bad then. Know they really feel about you.’

  My mother’s counsel of putting yourself into other people’s places, under other people’s skins, didn’t work out very well that day. Try as I would I couldn’t get under Ruby’s handsome, dissolute skin and imagine myself being beaten black and yellow for love and what Elizabeth Barratt Browning called ‘for love’s sake only.’

  Two days after this revealing occurrence it was Ruby’s afternoon off. After lunch had been served my mother was taking her usual hour’s rest in her bedroom. I was in our private sitting room, alone, reading verse, which as you’ve probably gathering I liked to do. Verse, in fact, was the only thing through which, ever so remotely, I came near to finding myself. I had naturally gleaned all I knew of love from what I read in verse.

  That afternoon, I remember, was extraordinarily hot and still, without a single breath of breeze across the harbour, and it must have been at its hottest when, about half past three, one of the other maids tapped on the door, came in and said:

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Miss Christine, but your mother’s sound asleep and I don’t like to wake her. Can you come a minute? There’s an officer here who says he’d like to speak to you. A Captain Blaine.’

  When I am reading I have a curious habit of tucking one foot under me and sitting on it. After a time the foot either goes to sleep or gets stiff and twisted so that when I get up I find myself temporarily off balance, walking for the next half minute or so as if I’d sprained my ankle.

  This is how I went out to make my first acquaintance with Captain Blaine. I imagine I must have looked pretty silly as I hobbled into the hallway, which incidentally was paved with those cold and slippery Italian mosaic tiles which were so fashionable years ago, and the result was that the first thing the Captain did was to take a swift and inquiring look at my legs.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I hope I haven’t disturbed you?’ he said. ‘Have you hurt your foot?’

  With a rush of diffidence I blushed and assured him I hadn’t. I’d merely sat on it.

  He gave a short engaging chuckle.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘I always thought legs were for standing on?’

  ‘Oh! that’s just me,’ I said. I tried to speak coolly as a means of suppressing my growing shyness. ‘I like to be different.’

  For the second time he gave that engaging chuckle of his. At the same time he shot another quick and inquiring glance at me. His face was also turned towards the sea, so that for a moment or two the reflected light of it, with that curious blinding power I have already tried to describe, was full in his eyes.

  They were eyes of a very remarkable and liquid quality of blueness. If I describe them as being without depth it will perhaps convey the impression that they were shallow. On the contrary they were extraordinarily subtle. They were like the petals of certain sorts of flowers that appear at first glance to be merely of a single, solid colour and then suddenly prove to be excitingly iridescent.

  What made them still more arresting was th
at they were uncommonly cool, not to say glacial, in that awfully hot afternoon, and that they were set in a face that in all other respects was very dark—dark brows, dark chin and jowls, dark guardsman’s moustache and rather fine dark nostrils.

  ‘Terribly remiss of me,’ he said suddenly. ‘Didn’t introduce myself. Blaine.’ His officer’s cap was tucked with military correctness under one arm. The uniform was a bluish-grey, a sort of pigeon colour, high in the collar. Magnificently band-box, the whole thing. ‘I called to inquire about a room.’

  He gave that engaging chuckle again and signalled vivid assurances with iridescent eyes.

  ‘Oh! not for myself. I’m up at the castle. Quarters there. No,’ he said, ‘it’s for an aunt of mine. She’s a shade shaky. Asthma—heart gets strained.’

  ‘When would you want the room?’ I said. ‘For how long?’

  ‘Depends. Might be a long time. Might be very short.’ He gave a sort of resigned shrug of the shoulders. ‘Never really tell, with this heart thing. It’s dry here. She’s been living in the West Country—far too damp for her. I thought if I got her here—one never knows. Might hang on for years.’

  ‘Was she really an invalid?’ I asked. My mother didn’t like invalids about the place and nor did the maids. In fact they were all rather against the tyranny of long lets.

  ‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Far from it. Very spry. Even gads about a bit.’

  I hardly knew what to say. I started to explain to him that I could do nothing without asking my mother but that she was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her.

  He was at once all charm and solicitude.

  ‘Oh! don’t give it a thought. Wouldn’t dream of letting you wake her. Certainly not. I can come back. When would it be convenient to see her?’