The Yellow Meads of Asphodel Read online

  THE YELLOW MEADS OF ASPHODEL

  by

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  The Proposal

  The Yellow Meads of Asphodel

  A Taste of Blood

  The Love Letters of Miss Maitland

  The Lap of Luxury

  Loss of Pride

  The House by the River

  Bonus Stories:

  The Mad Woman

  From This Time Forward

  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 Proposal

  ‘Great Heavens! What a mountain of raspberries! What am I to do with them all?’

  At frequent intervals on summer mornings Miss Shuttleworth, coming downstairs in her ballooning magenta dressing gown to open her kitchen door in order to take in her milk bottle, try to assess what sort of day it was going to be and, most important of all, to say a series of affectionate hulloes and good mornings and God-bless-yous to the wrens, robins, chaffinches, sparrows and other small birds waiting on the lawn outside for the first crumbs of the day, would find on her doorstep a little gift: a basket of early strawberries, a dish of nectarines, a cantaloupe melon, a bunch or two of asparagus. She never quite knew what next would be there.

  On the particular morning when she found on her doorstep a basket of ten or twelve pounds of the fattest, ripest red raspberries she observed also a thrush, its speckled breast almost white, gazing with intent longing at the basket of berries as if in anticipation of a fine fat feast.

  ‘Now off you go. Don’t be greedy. You know I don’t feed you all till later. Then if you’re good I’ll bring you sandwiches. Tomato, cucumber, cheese, anchovy and, if you’re very, very good, Gentlemen’s Relish. But you must be patient. The day is young.’

  As the thrush finally flew away to settle on the lawn beside the little stream that ran through the garden, there to cock its head to one side in the act of listening for a worm, Miss Shuttleworth lifted the basket of raspberries and took it into the kitchen.

  The mystery of who brought these constant and unsolicited gifts to her doorstep had long remained unsolved. No note ever accompanied them. Then after some weeks of summer it began to occur to her that their arrival was invariably succeeded by the figure of a grey-haired middle aged gentleman in a brown and white tweed suit, not at all unlike the breast of the thrush, walking slowly past her garden gate, walking-stick in hand, and as slowly back again.

  Often Miss Shuttleworth on these occasions would be engaged in trimming her yew hedge, the edges of her grass verge or hoeing weeds from the path that led to her garden. At such moments she would offer the gentleman in tweeds a greeting.

  ‘Good morning, Professor Plumley. Nice morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Shuttleworth. Yes, a nice day. A day to remember.’

  Miss Shuttleworth, more often that not dressed in a large scarlet straw hat and what appeared to be a floppy pink nightgown, would pause with her garden shears opened in the form of an executional cross and sharply remind the Professor that you could hardly remember something that hadn’t yet happened.

  ‘Ah yes, but it obviously will be.’

  At such a point Miss Shuttleworth would remind the Professor that if there was anything either reliable or obvious about the English weather she had yet to hear of it.

  ‘Ah yes, but I put it simply as a matter of optimistic conjecture.’

  Damn silly remark, Miss Shuttleworth would tell herself, closing her shears with an executionary snap.

  On the morning of the arrival of the large basket of raspberries Miss Shuttleworth, instead of snapping her shears, suddenly lifted her head sharply and said:

  ‘Oh! hark at that blackbird. If ever there was a voice with all Heaven in it it’s surely that one.’

  ‘Oh! curse the blackbirds.’

  Miss Shuttleworth, whose love of birds placed them far nearer Heaven and the Almighty than most human beings she knew, simply stared at the Professor with eyes that had in them ice, steel and pity in about equal proportions.

  ‘Professor Plumley, are you aware of what you’ve just said?’

  ‘Of course. I was merely cursing those damnable birds.’

  ‘There are no such things as damnable birds.’

  ‘In my garden there are. The wretched creatures eat all my raspberries.’

  ‘All your raspberries?’

  The Professor now looked acutely embarrassed. He pounded the ferrule of his walking-stick into the gravel path almost as if endeavouring to dig a hole in which to hide or bury himself.

  ‘What I meant was that I have to be up at dawn in order to get any for myself.’
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  Miss Shuttleworth now found herself to be both enlightened and touched.

  ‘Then is it you I have to thank for the gift of them this morning?’

  ‘I fear so.’

  Miss Shuttleworth, offering no comment on what she considered to be a remark of exceptional inanity from one who had been a university Professor of philosophy, simply smiled and said:

  ‘Well, thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s most kind of you. The only thing is that there are so many of them I simply can’t think what to do with them all.’

  ‘I thought perhaps you might make jam with them.’

  Miss Shuttleworth at once informed the Professor that she had no great partiality for jam, especially raspberry.

  The Professor confessed that she surprised him. He himself adored raspberry jam. It reminded him of the nursery teas of his childhood. He had also loved it on hot toast at his rooms in Cambridge. And what, if she didn’t make jam of them, was she going to do?

  Miss Shuttleworth, one of whose more absorbing hobbies was to make home-made wine and even brandies of a particular potency, said she thought of making a spot of wine with them.

  ‘Wine? But isn’t that rather sacrilege?’

  Now how on earth, Miss Shuttleworth silently asked herself, could making wine from the fruits of the earth be sacrilege? You might just as well maintain that it was sacrilege to make marmalade or rhubarb tart or horseradish sauce or something.

  Miss Shuttleworth, however, decided to ignore what seemed to her to be yet another highly unphilosophical remark and simply said:

  ‘Then I suppose it’s you I have to thank for the strawberries and nectarines and melons and so on?’

  Again the Professor could only express himself in three extremely painful words.

  ‘I fear so.’

  ‘Well, in that case, – oh, what time is it?’

  The Professor took a gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket, consulted it and said that according to his calculations it was half past eleven.

  Miss Shuttleworth, ignoring the fact that it was the watch and not the Professor who made the calculations, said:

  ‘Good. In that case I think it’s a good moment to go in and have a soupçon of something – or what nowadays they call a snifter.’

  Politely the Professor thanked her all the same but said he was afraid he never partook of anything in the middle of the day. A modicum of sherry in the evening perhaps, but—

  ‘Oh! Nonsense. Fiddlesticks. Come in and try a glass of one of my home-mades. It’s the least I can do to thank you for all those lovely gifts.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Come along do, come along.’

  The Professor, looking rather more like a shy lamb going to the slaughter than a retired Professor trying to enact the part of the country gentleman, followed Miss Shuttleworth into her cottage. There, in her ingle-nooked sitting room, Miss Shuttleworth proceeded to recite a list of the various liquid refreshments she had to offer.

  ‘Red currant. Elderberry. White currant. Potato. Lemon. Orange. Blackberry. Elderflower.’

  ‘Well, I hardly know. What do you yourself usually partake of?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. If it’s a damn cold morning I often start with a couple of pipe-openers of parsnip. And if it’s a damn cold night I finish up with a good whack of cherry brandy. My own seven year old.’ Miss Shuttleworth laughed with a certain fruitiness. ‘I often call it the Seven Pillars of Unwisdom.’

  ‘Well, I wonder if you don’t have something rather lighter?’

  ‘All right. I tell you what. Try the elderflower. Delicious on a summer morning like this. Not unlike a Moselle.’

  ‘Very well. I bow to your judgment.’

  Miss Shuttleworth, having decided on a spot of five year old elderberry for herself, now found two tall wine glasses, filling one with the red wine and the other with the pale greenish elderflower. Lifting her glass towards the Professor she then said:

  ‘Well, down the hatch. And many thanks, once again, for all your gifts.’

  ‘Not at all. You see I have so much to spare, with that large garden of mine and all those glass-houses – oh no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that at all. What I meant was—’

  The Professor broke off, shifted uneasily in his chair and then took two hasty mouthfuls of wine as if either to soothe or fortify his nerves.

  ‘But the garden is large, isn’t it?’ Miss Shuttleworth said. ‘When I first came to live here, just before the war, they employed twenty-two gardeners there. Then of course, after the war, they pulled the mansion down and now—’

  At this point a certain gloom seemed to have settled on the Professor. He sat in silence, lifting his lower lip and gazing into his glass of elderflower wine. His thoughts at that moment were with his garden. Truly it was large. A great walled red-brick quadrangle housed six glasshouses, partly in decay and sheltering grape-vines, nectarines and peaches. Half cultivated, weedy beds of earth nurtured impossibly large strips of asparagus, rhubarb, sea-kale, artichokes, raspberries, strawberries and black, red and white currants. It was totally impossible to know what to do with them all.

  ‘You see,’ the Professor said, ‘nobody wanted a house of that size. So down it came. And that’s why I bought it cheap.’

  ‘And not because you wanted it?’

  ‘Well, I wanted it in a way. I wanted to taste the country. After giving lectures for Heavens knows how long I wanted to—’

  ‘You live in the old keeper’s cottage, don’t you?’

  The Professor merely nodded. An inability to frame a coherent sentence of any kind merely served to increase his gloom. He gazed again at the elderflower wine, took a slow sip of it and then stared at the floor.

  ‘You haven’t said what you think of my elderflower,’ Miss Shuttleworth said.

  ‘Oh! delicious, delicious.’

  ‘Drink up. Have a spot more.’

  ‘No really, really. No thank you all the same.’

  ‘Well, if you’re not, I am. I’ve been up since five. I feel the need for a little alchoholic fortification.’

  As Miss Shuttleworth got up to refill her glass with a generous portion of elderberry the Professor drew a deep breath, took a brief sip of his own wine and then said:

  ‘So you wake early too, do you?’

  ‘Invariably. Invariably.’

  ‘I find those early hours so long drawn out, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh! never, never. On the contrary. They fly like the wind.’

  ‘I wish I could say the same.’

  Miss Shuttleworth now took a deep swig of her wine, gave her lips a slight smack of appreciation and then said:

  ‘Tell me something. I’ve often wanted to ask this.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is philosophy? I mean what is it all about?’

  For fully half a minute the Professor contemplated the floor, his grey eyes troubled. At last he said:

  ‘Well, the word itself means – it’s from the Greek – “fond of wisdom”.’

  Miss Shuttleworth laughed and drank her wine.

  ‘Not my old Seven Pillars—’

  ‘Well, no. Plato said that “philosophers are those who are able to grasp the eternal and the immutable. They are those who set their affections on that which in each case really exists.’

  ‘Really? Sounds rather like me and my birds.’

  ‘You’re very fortunate. Objects of affection aren’t always so easily come by.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m afraid – but am I boring you?’

  The Professor now, for the first time, looked straight at Miss Shuttleworth, seemed as if about to make some remark of importance and then remained dead silent.

  ‘Why should you bore me?’ Miss Shuttleworth said.

  The Professor had no answer. He simply drained his glass and got to his feet.

  ‘Oh! don’t say you’re going.’

>   ‘I fear so. I’d like to stay but—’ a great sudden unpremediated rush of coherence overcame the Professor. ‘Would you misunderstand me if I said that I’d like to stay for—’

  The rush of coherence dried up as suddenly as it had begun. In the same moment the Professor seized his walking stick and rushed from the room.

  Alone and in silence Miss Shuttleworth refilled her glass and sat for a time in thought. Then she got up, went over to the mantelpiece and looked in the mirror there. As people living alone often do she sometimes got into the habit of talking to herself.

  ‘Well,’ she said, raising her glass to her reflection in the mirror. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers about what?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you might say you’ve just had a proposal.’

  ‘Oh? Bit late in the day.’

  ‘Better late than never I suppose.’

  There, for a few moments, the conversation between her two sides ended. She sat looking dreamily, but also with a certain sadness, into the mirror. As she did so she found herself thinking of the Professor, the big impossible garden, the morning gifts on the doorstep and what the Professor had called ‘those who set their affections on that which in each case really exists.’

  At last she roused herself from these thoughts, took another deep swig of elderberry wine and then told herself that if she was going to make raspberry wine she’d better make a start. There was no fruit like raspberries for going mouldy quickly.

  ‘Well, here goes—’

  She took a final swig of wine, draining her glass.

  ‘Or shall I make that damned jam?’

  The Yellow Meads of Asphodel

  ‘Shall we have breakfast in the garden, darling?

  It’s so beautiful. The first real summer day.’

  ‘Of course, darling. Splendid idea.’

  ‘Good, I’ll tell Grace to set it up on the lawn. And darling, did you notice that the first flower is out on the Gloire de Dijon?’