Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read online

  Bertha, big arms and chest bare in a sleeveless chemise, was at the kitchen sink, washing away her factory grime.

  ‘Oh! come in if you can get in,’ she said. She clearly remembered the young curate at Tom Pemberton’s funeral. ‘I’m afraid the kitchen’s in a mess. Can you find a chair in the living room?’

  Ormsby-Hill sat down in the little living room while Bertha, entirely unaffected, finished washing and drying herself in the kitchen. It was never very clear to me, nor I think to anyone else, why Ormsby-Hill had entered the church. He was in all ways the complete opposite of the young curate of convention. Big, bovine, sensuous-lipped, fond of beer and rugby football, he belonged to that class of clergymen, not I think so common now, who thought godliness should be muscular and the way to heaven a hearty free for all. He thought the gospel went down much better from clergymen who offered it while dressed in tweeds rather than dog collars, with pints of foaming ale in their hands rather than crucifixes and by means of sportsmen’s services, sometimes actually held in pubs, where the congregation was roughly addressed as ‘chaps.’

  That evening he had gone to The Pit in trepidation, with some idea that Bertha was a wild bad girl. Nobody liked going down to The Pit if they didn’t have to and Ormsby-Hill had been deliberately sent there on a distasteful errand by a vicar too squeamish to stomach the sordid alleyway of privies, louts playing crown-and-anchor on the asphalt and the deaf-mute keeping guard for a stray policeman at the top of the yard.

  His surprise at seeing Bertha was very great. His surprise at hearing her voice for the first time was even greater.

  With Tom Pemberton it had become a shrill, empty, fun-at-any-price sort of voice; during her marriage to James William Sherwood it had been a decorous, sympathetic toned-down voice of charm and understanding.

  When Ormsby-Hill heard it for the first time it was a smooth, throaty voice, easy and rather casual: as if she had already decided what voice he would like her to have.

  ‘I’ll slip upstairs and put on a dress if you don’t mind waiting,’ she said. ‘I won’t be five minutes. I have to be at the dressmakers by seven anyway.’

  When she came down, about five minutes later, she was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress with a low neck and a very short skirt and with it white cotton gloves and white high-heeled shoes. She was very fond of white and yellow clothes and once or twice later I used to see her in this dress. It was tight and smooth across her thighs and so short that it showed her pretty rounded knees to great advantage. She hardly ever wore a hat in those days—she really didn’t need to because the fine close-trimmed blonde hair was shaped exactly like a hat itself—and the low-cut neck of the dress, in the fashion of the time, showed a deep curve of soft low breast, the skin clear, unblemished and wonderfully smooth.

  When Ormsby-Hill saw her come downstairs into the dingy little living room he forgot almost at once what he had come to say to her. She was already drawing on her gloves and she said:

  ‘I’m awfully afraid I shall have to go. My dressmaker closes at half-past seven and I have to have this fitting. I don’t know which way you’re going back, but it’s only in the High Street, this shop, if you’d like to walk that way.’

  Walking down the yard, out of The Pit, he managed to repeat a few words of conventional condolence about Tom Pemberton, asking her at the same time how she herself was.

  ‘It was very sad,’ she said, ‘but I don’t remember much about it.’

  ‘I believe you also suffered another unfortunate bereavement,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Some time ago.’

  By the time they were out in the street she was talking easily, lightly and readily of something else, quite unperturbed and sometimes laughing. She had a laugh that had a kind of spring to it. It uncoiled suddenly and lightly, ending in a series of high shimmering notes, merrily, like repeated echoes.

  And as he walked with her that evening through a High Street still crowded with late shoppers Ormsby-Hill could hardly bring himself to believe that he was with a young woman who had lost a husband and a lover in so short a time. Nor was there the slightest sign of the wild, bad girl he had expected. He felt indeed that he had never met anyone quite so pleasant to talk to, to look at or to listen to. Above all he couldn’t believe—it was simply incomprehensible—that she had been born, bred and shaped in The Pit. It made his head rock with wonder that she had come, so golden and impeccable and pleasant, from that sordid rat-hole.

  He fell in love with her at once, with abandonment, quite blindly, and she let him fall in love for precisely the same reason as she had let James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton fall in love: because it was natural, because it was pleasant and because she liked it.

  The scandal warmed and mounted quickly. It was one thing for a young curate to be seen in occasional conversation with a good-looking girl or even to dance with her at one of those decorous functions by which the church, in the nineteen-twenties, had begun to try to lure youth back into the grace of the fold; but it was quite another for Ormsby-Hill to be seen waiting for her at the factory door, often at the dinner hour and almost always at night, and then walking home to The Pit with her through the rushing crowds of shoemakers hungrily herding homewards on foot or on bicycles.

  ‘He comes of such a good family. He went to Oxford. His mother lives in a big house in Wiltshire. And Bertha—from The Pit. From there! What do you suppose the vicar thinks? And his mother? He doesn’t wear the dog-collar very often, does he? I suppose he’s ashamed.’

  Ormsby-Hill, strangely, was not ashamed. He existed boldly, for an entire autumn, a winter and part of the following spring, in a state of suspended enchantment. And Bertha in turn rewarded him as she had rewarded James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton: with the sort of affection that moulds itself on the pattern of the receiver. If it is possible to imagine her as being sensuous in well-cut tweeds that was how she looked that autumn, winter and spring. And she looked like that and dressed like that for a sound simple reason: because Ormsby-Hill loved her and because he wanted her to. She also went to church, though her mother was a Methodist and went to chapel, and watched him take part in the services and listened to him preaching and reading the lessons. She took on also some of his accent, slightly Oxford, his phrases and his muscular mannerisms. She was sometimes to be seen in country pubs outside the town, drinking from large tankards of draught ale, laughing with ravishing heartiness and saying such things as:

  ‘Darling, how could you? You’re too, too awful. You’re really shame-making, honestly you are. Really shy-making. All right, pet, let’s have another. Why not?’

  Suddenly, in the June of that year, there was no longer a Rev. Ormsby-Hill in the town, though down in Cornwall, in a remote rocky village isolated on the coast, a new congregation was getting ready to welcome a new curate in September.

  ‘One dead. One killed. One disgraced,’ people said. ‘Who’s she going to ruin next?’

  Nobody seemed to understand that, down in The Pit, it was not Bertha’s place to give an answer.

  I, in part, gave it instead.

  She was now, like the century, in her twenties. It was the bright, gay, desperate time. There was much dancing.

  She was always the central figure at dances, seldom wearing the same dress twice, always strikingly golden, elegant, friendly, in demand. Perhaps the friendliness was the nicest thing about her. She never refused the clumsiest lout a quick-step. She waltzed on equal terms with youth, age, undergraduates, shoe-hands, golfers, shooting men, clerks, masters of fox-hounds, always beautifully companionable, at ease, talking whatever language they spoke to her.

  And presently, the following summer, she was even dancing with me.

  It was a very hot sultry evening in early July and some of the men, after the habit of the twenties, were wearing blazers and white flannels. Most of the girls were in light silk or satin frocks and the doors and windows of the dance hall were all wide open and you could see the blue bril
liant evening beyond.

  I had just decided to disentangle myself from the hot sea-crab embraces of a Paul Jones when suddenly the music stopped and I found myself, by pure accident, facing Bertha, almost isolated on that corner of the floor.

  She smiled and at once raised her bare golden arms towards me. Both the smile and the gesture might have been those between two old friends, though we had in fact never even spoken before.

  She was dressed, that evening, in striking oyster-coloured silk. The dress was short and sleeveless, in the fashion of the day, and she had matching gloves and shoes. Her eyes, naturally very blue, seemed to catch in reflection all the brilliance of the evening outside, so that they appeared to be deep violet in colour. Her hair looked as if she had spent most of the day brushing it and she had now begun to let it grow a little longer again, so that it hung down in the shape of a casque.

  She danced superbly. But what really struck me, in that hot, saxophonic scrum of pounding feet, was not her dancing. It was her coolness. Sweat was pouring heavily from the faces of all the men and now and then you could see across the back of a girl’s dress the huge wet ham-print of a hand.

  Bertha’s arms and hands were, by contrast, as cool as porcelain cups dipped in spring water.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ I said.

  ‘Oh! awfully,’ she said, ‘aren’t you?’

  I confessed I felt it rather warm and then she said:

  ‘I hear you’ve started to become a writer.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I read an article of yours the other day,’ she said. ‘About flowers. I cut it out because I liked it so much.’

  After that it was impossible not to be happily at ease with her, friendly and greatly flattered. To my dismay the music stopped almost immediately. The dance had ended. She immediately gave me a wonderful smile of thanks and I had the presence of mind to ask her if she would like some ice-cream and if she would have the next dance with me.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How nice of you.’

  Over the ice-cream, which we took outside to eat, she said:

  ‘About those flowers. They weren’t from our part of the country, were they?’

  ‘Most of them.’

  ‘But the orchids?—I didn’t know we had orchids in this country. Do they grow here—the wild ones you said were like greeny white butterflies?’

  ‘In Longley Spinneys,’ I said, ‘just outside the town.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  She licked the last of her ice-cream from the spoon and looked at me with, I thought, an air of disbelief.

  ‘You don’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh! I don’t want you to think that,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  I have always found that women are frequently most incredulous when you tell them the truth. I have also always been, all my life, a person governed by the swiftest, if sometimes the most foolish, impulses.

  ‘If you don’t believe me I’ll take you to see them,’ I said. ‘They’re in bloom now.’

  ‘Oh! that’s lovely,’ Bertha said. ‘When should we go?’

  ‘Now,’ I said.

  The wide dark blue eyes did not look in the least surprised. It was only when I suddenly remembered that I was talking to a girl whose late habit had been to ride both in landaus and in cars of fast sporting design that I was aware of a stupid object standing in the way of what I had just proposed.

  ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I forgot I’d only got my bicycle.’

  Her reply was typical.

  ‘What’s wrong with a bicycle?’ she said. ‘I haven’t got mine but I could ride on the back of yours.’

  Suddenly I knew I had made the first of several new discoveries about Bertha. I knew now that she was not merely beautiful, sumptuous, companionable and physically delightful. She had an altogether wonderful innocence about her.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said. ‘Before we change our minds.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but you ride the bike and I’ll step it on the back. In case you soil your dress or tear your stockings.’

  There are an infinite number of ways of making love to a girl for the first time but the approach from the back of a bicycle, on a hot half-dark summer night is, I suppose, not among the most common of them.

  The road to Longley Spinneys is a fairly flat one and the actual business of bicycling was not hard for Bertha. It was I who had the difficult job of keeping my balance on the back and at first I rode with my hands on her bare cool shoulders.

  ‘Are my hands heavy for you up there?’ I said. ‘Say if they are.’

  ‘Just a little heavy.’

  I put my hands round her waist.

  ‘Is that better?’

  ‘Much better.’

  As we rode I could smell the fragrance of hay from summer meadows, the lightest of scents from hedge-roses and from somewhere farther off, in the hot darkness, the deeper, thicker breath of limes. By the time we were coasting down the last small incline to the spinneys, in that soundless intoxicating air, my hands were holding her breasts. They were firm and corset-less and my mouth was resting against her bare smooth shoulder.

  It was the most exquisite bicycle ride ever undertaken, but as we stood by the wood-side she made no comment on any of these happenings. They were perfectly natural to her. Soon I started to kiss her. I let my hands run over the cool sumptuous skin of her shoulders. In exquisite suspense, with closed eyes, I forgot the orchids. I thought she had forgotten them too but at last, in a low voice, she aroused me from a daze.

  ‘What about these flowers? These orchids?’ she said. ‘Or did you just invent them?’

  I took her into the spinneys. It was still not fully dark; but presently, under the ashlings, we came upon the first of the orchids, rare, fragile, milk-green winged, the ghostliest of flowers. The scent of them was overpoweringly sweet, too sweet, un-English, almost tropical, on the calm night air. ‘You must have extraordinary eyes to see them in the dark,’ she said. ‘Or does the scent guide you?’ I had no answer to make to her and for the second or third time, with trembling intoxication, I stopped under a tree, took her in my arms and kissed her. The acquiescence of her body was sensational in its quietness. There was not a murmur in the spinneys, the fields, the sky or the hedgerows about us. I could hear only in my own mind the echo of some words of a poem that had been haunting me since waking and that the later saxophonic pounding cries, the bicycle ride and the orchids had driven temporarily away:

  Dear love, for nothing less than thee

  Would I have broke this happy dream.

  She stood, dream-like herself, for a few moments as insubstantial as the flowers she was holding, while I quoted to her with ardent quietness Donne’s words about excess of joy. She listened not only as if she had been used all her life to hearing young men quote verse to her at night, in summer woods, but also as she must have listened to those other accents, the accents of James William Sherwood, Tom Pemberton, Ormsby-Hill and the rest, charmingly ready to take on their pattern of speech, just as she was ready, now, to take on mine.

  When at length I finished with the last line I could remember,

  Enter these arms, for since thou thoughtst it best

  Not to dream all my dream, let’s act the rest,

  she laughed softly, throatily, and said:

  ‘Did you write all that? It’s lovely.’

  ‘No,’ I said and I told her who had written it. ‘Three hundred years ago.’

  ‘He was a man who knew about things,’ she said. ‘Like you with your flowers.’

  We rode home, hours later, in a darkness no less sultry for the pink, breaking light in the east, the paling stars and a thin rising dew. Towards the end of the journey a few birds had already begun a light July chorus and once a leveret skimmed across in front of the bicycle, almost throwing us, so that I clutched harder, half in self-preservation, at her body. She was even then so acquiescent, so friendly and so ful
l of her own apparent excess of joy that she actually half-turned her head a few moments later and kissed me as we rode.

  Presently I took her as far as The Pit in order to say, in the rapidly rising dawn, the tenderest of goodbyes.

  ‘Tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry. I can’t tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m going out with George Freeman.’

  I felt as if I had been hit rudely and ferociously with the bicycle.

  ‘But Bertha——’

  ‘I’m going out with George three nights a week,’ she said, ‘but I’d love to come with you on the others. I would—I love the way you talk. I loved that poetry. I want to hear all about you and your writing.’

  It was hard to believe she was still in her early twenties. It was harder still to believe that she could forsake my own particular excess of joy, the verse, the summer woods and the green-ghost orchids for George Freeman, a muscular flat-capped skittles player who drove a brewers’ dray.

  A few days later my father started to admonish me.

  ‘I hear you’ve been seen with that Bertha Jackson girl.’

  I started to protest.

  ‘Oh! yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I daresay she is all right. She may be. But that sort of girl can easily trap you. You understand?’

  There was really not much need to understand.

  ‘Probably a good thing,’ my father said, ‘that you’re going to live in London soon.’

  A few weeks afterwards, bearing a sheaf of torn, tender memories that already seemed as delicate and hauntingly insubstantial as the milk-green orchids, the ghostliest of flowers, I went to live away from home.

  Seventeen years later I stood before the desk of my commanding officer, who had sent for me with some urgency and now said: