The Daffodil Sky Read online

‘The wheat?’ she said.

  She picked a few grains of wheat from the palm of his hand. She did not toss them into her mouth but put them in one by one, with the tips of her fingers, biting them with the front of her teeth. Her teeth were surprisingly level and white and he could see the whiteness of the new grains on her tongue as she bit them.

  ‘They’re milky,’ she said.

  ‘Still want a few more days, I think,’ he said.

  As they walked back up the field she plucked an ear of wheat herself and began to thresh it with her hands. The corn, almost as high as the girl herself, rustled in her fingers. When she bent down to blow on the husks a small gust of wind suddenly turned and blew the chaff up into her face. She laughed rather loudly, showing her teeth again, and he said:

  ‘Here, you want to do it like this. You want to bring your thumbs over so that you can blow down there and make a chimney.’

  ‘How?’ she said.

  A moment later he was holding her hands. He stood slightly behind her and held her hands and showed her how to cup them so that the chaff could blow out through the chimney made by her fingers.

  ‘Now blow,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t blow for laughing.’

  Her mouth spluttered and a new gust of laughter blew into her hands and a dancing cloud of chaff leapt up in a spurt from her fingers. She laughed again and he felt her body shaking. A few husks of wheat blew into her mouth and a few more stuck to the moist edges of her lips as she laughed.

  She pulled out her handkerchief to wipe her lips, still laughing, and suddenly he found himself trying to help her and then in a clumsy way trying to kiss her face and mouth at the same time.

  ‘Elsie,’ he said. ‘Here, Elsie——’

  She laughed again and said, ‘We don’t want to fool here. Somebody will see us if we start fooling here. Mrs Mortimer will see us. Not here.’

  ‘You were always so quiet,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t always the loud ones who say most, is it?’ she said. She began to shake herself. ‘Now I’ve got chaff down my neck. Look at me.’

  She laughed again and shook herself, twisting her body in a way that suddenly reminded him of the twist of dark air running among the ripening corn. He tried to kiss her again and she said:

  ‘Not here I keep telling you. Some time if you like but not here. Not in broad daylight. I don’t like people watching me.’

  ‘All right——’

  ‘Some other time. It’s so public here,’ she said. ‘There’ll be another time.’

  By the end of August the corn was cut and carted. The stubbles were empty except for the girl and Mrs Mortimer, gleaning on fine afternoons, and a few brown hens scratching among the straw. ‘I could never quite give up the hens,’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘It would be an awful wrench to give them up. I didn’t mind the cherries and I didn’t even mind the calves so much. But the hens are company. I can talk to the hens.’

  About the house, in the yard, bright yellow stacks stood ready for threshing, and there was a fresh clean smell of straw on the air. During summer the face of the girl had reddened with sun and air and as autumn came on it seemed to broaden and flatten, the thick skin ripe and healthy in texture.

  ‘Soon be winter coming on, Elsie,’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘You think you’ll stay up here with us for the winter?’

  ‘Well, I expect I shall if nothing happens,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Happens? If what happens?’

  ‘Well, you never know what may happen,’ Elsie said, ‘do you?’

  ‘I want you to stay if you can,’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘They get a lot of snow up here some winters, but perhaps we’ll be lucky. Stay if you can. I got now so as I think of you as one of our own.’

  In a growing fondness for the girl Mrs Mortimer occasionally remembered and reflected on the incident of the baby. It was very strange and inexplicable to her, the incident of the baby. It filled her with mystery and wonder. It was a mystery beyond comprehension that a girl could conceive and bear a child and then, having delivered it, give it away. She felt she would never be able to grasp the reasons for that. ‘You’d think it would be like tearing your own heart out to do a thing like that,’ she thought.

  Towards the end of November the first snow fell, covering the hillsides down to within a hundred feet of the valley. The house stood almost on the dividing line of snow, like a boat at the edge of a tide, between fields that were still fresh green with winter corn and others smooth with the first thin white fall.

  ‘I got something to tell you,’ the girl said to Mrs Mortimer. ‘I don’t think I’ll be staying here much longer.’

  ‘Not staying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think I will, that’s all.’

  ‘Is it the snow? You don’t like the snow, do you? That’s what it is, the snow.’

  ‘It’s not the snow so much.’

  ‘Is it us then?’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘Don’t you like us no more?’

  ‘I like you. It isn’t that,’ the girl said.

  ‘What is it then, Elsie? Don’t say you’ll go. What is it?’

  ‘It’s the baby,’ Elsie said.

  ‘The baby?’ Mrs Mortimer felt a pain of tears in her eyes. ‘I somehow thought one day you’d want it back. I’m glad.’

  ‘Not that baby,’ the girl said. ‘Not that one. I’m going to have another.’

  Mrs Mortimer felt a strange sense of disturbance. She was shaken once again by disbelief and pain. She could not speak and the girl said:

  ‘In the Spring. April I think it’ll be.’

  ‘How did you come to do that?’ Mrs Mortimer said. ‘Up here? With us——?’

  ‘I know somebody,’ the girl said. ‘I got to know somebody. That’s all.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mrs Mortimer said. She spoke quietly, almost to herself. She thought, with the old pain, of her years of sterility. She remembered how, in distraction, she had so much despised herself, how she had turned, out of pride, into isolation, away from Joe. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  At night she turned restlessly in her bed. Splinters of moonlight between the edges of the curtains cut across her eyes and kept them stiffly open.

  ‘Can’t you sleep again?’ Joe said.

  ‘It’s the girl,’ she said. ‘Elsie. I can’t get her out of my mind.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Elsie?’

  ‘She’s having another baby,’ she said. ‘In the Spring.’

  ‘Oh! no!’ he said. ‘Oh! no. No. You don’t mean that? No.’

  ‘It seems she got to know somebody. Somehow,’ she said. She felt across her eyes the hard stab of moonlight. She turned and put her hand out and touched Joe on the shoulder. ‘Joe,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t seem right, does it? It doesn’t seem fair.’

  Joe did not answer.

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not right. It seems cruel,’ she said.

  The following night she could not sleep again. She heard a westerly wind from across the valley beating light squalls of rain on the windows of the bedroom. The air was mild in a sudden change and she lay with her arms outside the coverlet, listening to the rain washing away the snow.

  Suddenly Joe took hold of her hands and began crying into them.

  ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. She kept asking me. It was her who kept asking me.’

  She could not speak and he turned his face to the pillow.

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted me. You used to say so. I got so as I thought you didn’t want me any more. You used to say——’

  ‘I want you,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid of that.’

  ‘Did she say anything?’ he said. ‘Did she say it was me?’

  ‘No. She didn’t say.’

  ‘Did you think it was me?’

  ‘I’d begun to think,’ she said. ‘I thought I could tell by the way you couldn’t look at her.’

  She heard him draw his breath in dry snatches,
unable to find words. Suddenly she was sorry for him, with no anger or reproach or bitterness, and she stretched out her long bare arms.

  ‘Come here to me,’ she said. ‘Come close to me. I’m sorry. It was me. It was my fault.’

  ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Never. I won’t have that——’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Listen to what I say.’

  As she spoke she was aware of a feeling of being uplifted, of a depressive weight being taken from her.

  ‘Listen, Joe, if I ask her perhaps she’ll give it to us. You remember? She gave the other away.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have that——’

  ‘I could,’ she said. She began smiling to herself in the darkness. ‘Tomorrow I’ll ask her. We could do it properly—make it legal—so that it was ours.’

  ‘If you forgive me,’ Joe said. ‘Only if you do that——’

  ‘I forgive you,’ she said.

  She went through the rest of the winter as if she were carrying the baby herself. ‘You mustn’t do that, Elsie. Don’t lift that,’ she would say. ‘Take and lie down for an hour. Rest yourself—it’ll do you the world of good to rest.’ She looked forward to Spring with a strange acute sensation of being poised on a wire, frightened that she would fall before she got there.

  When the baby was born she wrapped it in a warm blanket and succoured it like the early chickens she had once wrapped in flannel, in a basket, under the stove.

  ‘And I can have him?’ she said. ‘You haven’t changed your mind? You won’t change your mind, will you?’

  ‘No,’ the girl said. ‘You can have him. I don’t want the bother. You can look after him.’

  ‘We’ll love him,’ she said. ‘We’ll look after him.’

  On a day in late April she took the baby and carried him down through the yard, in the sunshine, to where the fields began. Hedgerows were breaking everywhere into bright new leaf. Primroses lay in thick pale drifts under the shelter of them and under clumps of ash and hornbeam. In every turn of wind there was a whitening of anemones, with cowslips trembling gold about the pasture.

  She lifted the baby up, in the sunshine, against the blue spring sky, and laughed and shook him gently, showing him the world of leaf and flower and corn.

  ‘Look at all the flowers!’ she said. ‘Look at the corn! The corn looks good, doesn’t it? It’s going to be good this year, isn’t it? Look at it all!—isn’t the corn beautiful?’

  High above her, on the hill, there was a sound of endless lark song and in the fields the young curved lines of corn were wonderfully fresh and trembling in the sun.

  The Daffodil Sky

  As he came off the train, under a sky dusky yellow with spent thunder, he turned instinctively to take the short cut, over the iron footbridge. You could cut across allotment grounds that way and save half a mile to the town. He saw then that the footbridge had been closed. A notice painted in prussian blue, blocking the end of it, saying Bridge Unsafe. Keep off. Trespassers will be prosecuted, told him more than anything else how much the town had changed.

  It was some time, the long way, down the slope and under the other bridge, before you got clear of the coal-yards. The street was narrow and torrents of thunder-rain had flooded the granite setts with tides that left in the gutters patches of black sand that gave off oily glinting rainbows in the hot wet air.

  Beyond the coal-yards, where sheds spanned strips of railway track like huge black bats in the gaping sky, there was a pub that he remembered well because, many years before, he often stopped at it as he came down from the country to market, bringing his plums or peas or broccoli or apples or, in early spring, his daffodils. In those days he had started first of all with a horse and trap, then a motor bike with a large flat side-car that he had made himself. He had good, powerful hands. In the year he had met Cora Whitehead he had saved enough for his first car. He was twenty-two then, and that was the year he had begun to go ahead.

  The brick walls of the pub were red-black with old smoke from passing trains. Just beyond it another road bridge, blackened too, spanned the tracks, and the lights of buses passing over it were a strange sharp green under the unnatural stormy glare of sky.

  The lights in the pub were burning too. They touched the cut-glass pattern of foaming jug and bottle in the glass door with outer stencillings of silver that the light of sky, in turn, impressed with a stormy copper glow.

  ‘I’ll have a double whisky with water,’ he said.

  Two railwaymen were playing darts in one corner of the saloon, perching pint jugs of dark beer on the mahogany curve of the counter. Another man was shooting a pin-table, making the little lights come up with jumping, yellow fires.

  There had never been a pin-table in the old days. That too showed how things had changed. The barman too was a stranger.

  ‘Hot night,’ the barman said. ‘Hot summer.’

  ‘How much is that?’

  ‘Three and six.’

  ‘Have something for yourself?’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ the barman said. ‘I’ll have a brown.’

  ‘I’m looking for a Miss Whitehead,’ he said.

  The barman drew himself an overflowing small ale in a glass. He set it on the counter and then picked it up again and wiped away, with a cloth, the circle of froth it had made.

  ‘You mean in here?’

  ‘No. She used to come in here. She used to live in Wellington Street.’

  ‘Wellington Street? When would that be?’

  ‘Before the war. She used to work in the stocking factory.’

  ‘That’s been a minute,’ the barman said. ‘They built a new one ten year ago. Outside the town.’

  ‘She was a big girl. Brown hair—a lot of it. Turning red. She used to come in here in Jack Shipley’s time.’

  ‘Jack Shipley—that’s been a minute,’ the barman said. ‘Jack’s been dead eight year—nine year. That’s been a minute.’

  The shorter of the two railwaymen stood with a dart in his hand, poised forward on the balls of his feet, in readiness to throw.

  ‘You mean Cora Whitehead?’ he said.

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘She’s still in Wellington Street. Her old dad works at the furnaces. He was a plate-layer once—then he went to the furnaces when they started up again.’

  ‘That’s been a minute,’ the barman said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  He drained his glass and set it down. There was no point in waiting. He went outside and heard, almost immediately, from beyond the coal-yards, a new peal of thunder. It seemed to roll back, in an instant, the entire discoloured space of sky above him, leaving it pure and clear as it had been on the morning he had first called in, many years ago, with the idea of giving his horse a bucket of water and having a pint of Black Boy for himself. He remembered that day as if, in the way the barman said, it had been a minute ago. His cart was piled with daffodils. Like the sky where the storm had ripped it open in the west they were fresh and brilliant, shot through with pale green fire. The morning was one of those April mornings that break with pure blue splendour and then are filled, by ten o’clock, with coursing western cloud. A spatter of hail caught him unawares on the bridge. He had no time to put the tarpaulin up and he gave the horse a lick instead and came down into the pub-yard with the hail cutting his face like slugs of steel. He drove the cart under a shed at the back and then ran through the yard to the saloon door and by that time the hail was big and spaced and glistening as snow in the sun.

  ‘Don’t knock me flat,’ she said. ‘Somebody might want me tomorrow.’

  Running with head down, he had reached the door at the same time as she did. He blundered clumsily against her shoulders. She had a morning off that day and she had started out in a thin dress with no sleeves, thinking that summer had come. The funny thing was that he couldn’t remember the colour of the dress. It might have been anything: black or white or blue or cream. He didn’t remember. He remembered
only the shoulders and the bare arms, the big fleshy arms cold and wet with splashes of hail, the big soft lips, the masses of heavy red-brown hair and the brown eyes set into whites that were really a kind of greyish china-blue.

  Then the door stuck and he could not open it. A final whip of hail lashed along the pub-wall as he tried to twist the loose wet brass knob. She began laughing and the laugh was strong and friendly and yet low in key. A moment later the sun flashed out. The glare of it was white and blinding after the shadow of hail and he felt it hot on his face and neck, burning the skin where hail had cut him.

  ‘You’re as good as an umbrella on a wet day,’ she said.

  Then the door opened and they were inside the pub. It was simpler in those days: just a beer-house where railwaymen called as they came up from the yards and a farmer or two like himself from across the valley. There was a big triangle of cheese under a glowing brown cheese-dish on the counter and a white round spittoon on the sawdust floor. You could smell steam-coal smoke and stale beer and cheap strong cheese, but she said almost at once:

  ‘There’s a smell of flowers or something. Can’t you smell it?’ and he saw her nostrils widen and quiver as she breathed at the scent of daffodils.

  ‘I got a load of ’em,’ he said. ‘Been gathering them since six this morning. It’s the scent on my hands.’

  Almost unconsciously he lifted his hands and she took them and held them against her face.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s lovely.’

  She smiled and drank Black Boy with him. It was early and there was no one else in the pub. Once as she lifted the black foaming glass of stout she laughed again and pretended to wince and said:

  ‘I believe you bruised my arm. My drinking arm at that.’

  ‘I always been big and clumsy,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘Then somebody will have to teach you better, won’t they?’ she said. ‘Can you see any bruise?’

  He looked down at her arm, the upper part soft and fleshy and bruiseless, and he felt the flame of her go through him for the first time.

  ‘Farmer?’ she said, and he told her yes, sort of, hardly knowing what he said, feeling only the racing flame running hot through his blood and choking his thinking. She asked him a lot of questions, all about himself, how he was getting on, how many acres he had, what his plans were, and she seemed somehow to talk with the enormous glistening brown eyes rather than with her lips. At least that was how he remembered it: the big brown eyes always widening and transfixing him, bold and warm and apparently still and yet not still, drawing him down in fascination until he could hardly trust himself to look at her.