The Four Beauties Read online

  She stared into the sky with eyes screwed up, again seeing nothing.

  ‘I said your eyes were keener than mine.’

  ‘It’s farther up than you’re looking, Mrs Bartholomew. Look farther up.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m looking a million miles up now.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re looking too much against the sun.’

  ‘I’m just plain stupid, that’s what.’

  Suddenly she gave a cry. In a moment of unexpected revelation both sound and sight of the lark, from a height that seemed to her impossibly distant, merged together. She became conscious of a moment of great, simple, exquisite pleasure and in the unremitting thrill of it she actually threw up both hands.

  ‘It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,’ she said, ‘it’s the most beautiful sound I ever heard.’

  This moment of snow and skylark crystallised itself in her mind in imperishable fashion. For the first time she found herself actually extracting pleasure from the cottage, the isolation, the marsh and the entire simplicity of it all.

  ‘Roger tells me he can do things. Chores and so on. Cooking. He paints and hangs wall-paper and does gardening and all that. He can even wait at table.’

  ‘Don’t tell me we’re about to give grand dinner parties with butlers and caviare. We’ve got this place for escape—’

  ‘I’m not talking about that. I just thought I’d ask him to paint and paper the kitchen. It’s never been done. The window frames have got cracks you could put a mouse through. I thought something simple and clean – just plain red and white. To make it brighter.’

  ‘Far be it from me to do anything to come between you and the house.’

  ‘I’d like to do it.’

  ‘Good. You’ll be telling me next you’ve cooked up some affection for the place.’

  Some time later she appeared to change her mind about this. She was uneasy, she said, about leaving the boy alone in the house. You never knew quite with these people. You didn’t know whether to trust them with the key.

  ‘You trust Mrs Blackburn.’

  She knew that, but somehow—

  ‘Solution’s easy. Stay down here for the week. You can then superintend. Keep the watchful eye.’

  She agreed, after some hesitation, that this was a likely solution. But she would need the car. She would have to drive into Seahaven to get paint and things. Not that she was all that fond of driving in snow.

  ‘The snow will have gone by tomorrow. They’re forecasting rain.’

  She said she hoped the snow would stay for a time. She really loved the snow.

  The next day the boy prepared to decorate the kitchen. Snow still covered the landscape outside except for occasional dark islands melted by sun. The strong reflected light of it showed up unmercifully every shabby crack, every smoky shadow, in the cramped brick-floored room and she said:

  ‘You feel you want to push the walls out six feet or so. You think red’s too strong?’

  The boy said he thought green would be better. Red was too strong, too fussy.

  ‘I believe you’ve got taste,’ she said.

  Wearing a pair of old chamois gloves she spent the greater part of the first day rubbing down the old paint with sandpaper while the boy, wearing a thick tattered blue sweater with a heavy rolled collar, filled the many cracks in the walls with new plaster.

  ‘There’s a strange smell of fish about the place,’ she said once.

  He at once flushed sharply and apologised. He was afraid it was his old sweater she could smell. It was the one he went sea-fishing in.

  ‘Oh! you go fishing? You don’t mean you actually catch things?’

  Oh! yes, he went almost every night. He mostly caught small cod and plaice and occasionally soles.

  She marvelled. ‘You clever thing. You fish from a boat?’

  No, he said, from the shore. He wasn’t always lucky, of course, but seven or eight times out of ten he caught something or other. Did she like fish? He’d bring her something, a sole perhaps, next time he had any luck.

  ‘That’s terribly sweet of you. Yes, I adore fish. I suppose you never get lobster?’

  No, he never got lobster. But he knew a boatman who often did. She had only to ask and he would get her lobster any day.

  ‘You marvellous man.’

  These casual utterances of hers, apparently effusive but in reality nothing of the kind, had on him the disturbing effect of pure open flattery. It was only natural that, as the day went on, he began to feel that he had aroused in her something like affection. Sensitively anxious to do nothing to offend her in any way he also threw off the sweater, with its slightly rank odour of fish, and worked in his shirt sleeves, revealing dark muscular arms sun-brown to the elbows.

  At intervals she made tea for him and poured a drink for herself. ‘I’ll get some beer in tomorrow for you if you’d prefer it instead of tea.’

  No, he was all right with tea. He was a great tea man.

  Sometimes in these conversations she found herself caught up again, unwittingly trapped, by the intense vividness of the strong blue eyes, disturbingly limpid under the equally strong black brows. Once or twice he looked at her in the same precise moment, his gaze caught and held by hers, uneasily.

  By the end of the afternoon she confessed to being tired, in fact absolutely worn out. ‘Aren’t you tired? You’ve worked like a black.’

  No, he wasn’t tired. He never got tired.

  ‘Ah! but you’re young,’ she said. ‘You’re young.’

  The next morning he arrived with a basket of fish, two fair-sized plaice, a sole and a small cod. Again she marvelled. He’d fished, he told her, until two in the morning. He didn’t get his first bite until almost one o’clock.

  ‘Oh! you poor lamb. You must have been frozen.’

  Hadn’t noticed it, he said, and again she marvelled.

  ‘What am I going to do with all this fish?’ she said once. ‘It’s enough to keep me going for weeks. I hardly eat a thing.’

  He would, he said, cook it for her if she liked. He loved to cook. The sole would be better kept a day or two but the plaice were better fresh. He’d be glad to cook them for lunch for her.

  ‘It’s awfully sweet of you but I don’t think I could eat fish with the kitchen in this mess.’

  Let him cook them for dinner then, he said.

  ‘Oh! would you? That would be marvellously nice of you. But even then I couldn’t manage the half of it. You’d have to eat too and help me out.’

  By seven o’clock that evening he was grilling the two plaice for her and preparing to fry four cod steaks for himself. He had put on a sort of white mess jacket in which to do the cooking and it gave him a correct, professional air. He had also cooked potatoes, made a salad and sauce tartare.

  ‘I marvel at the way you do things,’ she said. ‘You’re so calm. You never get flustered. Me, I should go crazy doing all this. As it is I sit here not doing a damn thing. Not even opening the wine.’

  He had, he said, already opened the wine.

  ‘I thought we ought to have wine,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s all right. The Chablis was the only decent one I could find.’

  They ate eventually in the sitting-room, by the light of a pair of candles, in a golden glow. She never tired of saying how terribly marvellous the plaice was. She had never eaten such plaice. You could fairly taste the sea in it. And the sauce. It was a dream of a sauce. He was a genius. She would like to employ him for ever.

  ‘I’ll cook for you any time,’ he said, ‘whenever you say.’

  ‘You dear boy.’

  Such casual, effusive terms came to her naturally. She never dreamed that they might be interpreted by him as expressions of affection. Just as naturally she sometimes called him darling.

  After the meal he insisted on washing up the dishes while she sat curled up on the hearth, in front of a wood fire, sipping brandy. When he had finished at the kitchen sink she was insistent that he sit by the fire too. B
y this time she had slipped on a short olive green house-coat and the colour of it heightened appreciably, in the firelight, the deep autumn copper of her thick crown of hair.

  Wrapped in a warm spiritous dream deepened by several brandies it was merely natural that she should presently begin to make such remarks as ‘heavenly, all this. Absolutely heavenly. I wouldn’t have believed an evening could be so nice in this house. And all because of you.’

  It was equally natural that she should presently turn to him, like a fire-drowsy cat, and rest her head against his knee, a gesture he accepted with a nervous tautness, not saying a word. The long silence that followed was merely blissful as far as she was concerned, but highly and tensely self-conscious on his part.

  Suddenly he seized one of her hands, gripping and then caressing it with trembling eagerness. She treated all this with tolerant amusement. Even when he suddenly pressed his face against her hand and gave it a series of quick, broken kisses it never occurred to her that it might be the beginning of an exchange of affection.

  Instead, in a spiritous haze that was still some way removed from actual drunkenness, she found herself feeling slightly sorry for him. Then, inconsequentially, she started teasing him in a light ardent sort of way.

  ‘You’re a very nice boy. I’ll bet you have a thousand girls running after you.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Oh! darling, of course you do.’

  ‘One or two, sometimes, perhaps, but—’

  ‘Don’t tell fibs. I’ll bet they all love you.’

  ‘They’re daft, most of them. Only half grown up.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you really like older women? Do you? Naughty.’

  He said nothing in answer to this and there followed another protracted, painful silence which she finally broke by saying:

  ‘Pour me another brandy, darling. A nice big one. I like to feel it going round and round in me.’

  Some time after this she began to lose control of her lips. She started slightly to slobber her words. Breaks of unsteady laughter punctuated her sentences and once as the spiritous hazy glow in her brain enlarged and deepened she remembered saying, playfully, with a bright giggle:

  ‘All right, you can kiss me if you like. Just for this once I’ll let you.’

  There followed a moment or two of passionate ardour abruptly cut off, on his part, by a great convulsive sigh. She remembered feeling his hands at her breasts and then the entire heated trembling episode started to fade, leaving her body willingly exposed, her mind drowned in an enormously pleasurable half-consciousness.

  Some hours later she woke, alone, cold, half-stripped, the fire completely out. Shivering, she felt fuddled and stricken with a dry shaking loneliness that lasted long after she had dragged herself to bed.

  ‘Did you try to seduce me last night?’

  They had been working for an hour or more on the kitchen the following morning when, cigarette in her nervous lips, she suddenly flung this question at him.

  ‘Are you mad with me?’

  ‘Oh! God, no. But a girl likes to be asked if she minds about these things.’

  ‘You asked me.’

  ‘Did I, by God? I can’t remember.’

  Half a minute later she suddenly did remember. A key abruptly clicked in her mind and she said:

  ‘Oh! yes, I do now. It seems to me it wasn’t very successful.’

  He had nothing to say to this bruising remark, nor did it occur to her that it was something near to being a brutal one.

  ‘If you’re going to do these things, darling, you must learn to do them properly. It’s an art, dear.’

  He stood there unable to frame a single word. And then as if she suddenly realised that she had said something extraordinarily, impossibly insensitive she was again abruptly sorry for him and said:

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean it quite like that. You were very sweet. But there’s a way. Was I drunk?’

  ‘I think you’d had—’

  ‘I always think I’m a far nicer woman when I’m drunk.’

  ‘I think you’re nice all the time.’

  ‘Sweet boy, but a girl likes to be conscious when these things are going on.’

  It never once occurred to her that such remarks could be construed as both affectionate and torturing. Completely changing the subject she suddenly said:

  ‘I’ll make some coffee. Oh! by the way I suppose you didn’t get the lobster?’

  No, he hadn’t got the lobster. It had been too late for that. Tomorrow perhaps, he thought.

  Painfully he stood staring at her with too-clear, too-brilliant eyes so that once again she was sorry for him and said:

  ‘All right, you can kiss me if you like. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s how it began last night.’

  ‘Yes, but this is morning. This is just friendly.’

  He attempted to kiss her. She was amused, half-averted her face and suddenly turned away to make coffee.

  ‘The snow’s melting quite fast,’ she said, ‘I wonder if your skylark is singing again?’

  He said he thought so; he’d heard it as early as nine o’clock as he came to the cottage.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have coffee after all,’ she suddenly said. ‘I’ll have a drink instead. Just a sustainer.’

  From that time until one o’clock she had several more sustainers. Gin after gin gave her a rosy, shallow, prattling air of affection. She became more and more warm and talkative, all trace of her normally querulous brittle manner gone.

  ‘Are you coming in to see me every day? I wish you would, darling. I’ll go crazy with one damn thing or another if I don’t have you to talk to. What about the lobster? You promised the lobster. Would you cook it for me?’

  Yes, he would cook the lobster for her, he said. But first, to get it, he’d have to run down on his mo-ped to the coast early in the afternoon. It would be too late when it got dark. He’d be gone an hour or two.

  ‘Deserting me, are you? Leaving a girl in the lurch. Here am I all warm and cosy and you go off lobster hunting.’

  ‘The man I get them from picks his pots up about half past two or three. If I don’t get there—’

  ‘I know, darling, I know. Choose two nice smallish ones, won’t you? I think they’re so much sweeter than the big fat ones.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Bartholomew.’

  ‘And not Mrs Bartholomew, dear. My name’s Stella.’

  The very mention of her Christian name fired him into another attempt to kiss her. Again she half-averted her face.

  ‘You must learn not to be so eager, darling. There’s a time and place for everything. You hardly get the right atmosphere with a distemper brush in your hand.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs – I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh! don’t be sorry. It’s just that – like I say – there’s a time and place for everything. Will it be dark by the time you get back?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘I’ll have a bath and put my house-coat on and make a nice big fire up. That’s what I meant by time and place.’

  His bewildered reception of all this was like that of a dog tormented by a bone cunningly flaunted just beyond his reach. The blue taunted eyes quivered with a degree of devotion that she found half-amusing, half-flattering.

  ‘If I give you the money,’ she said, ‘will you bring some wine?’

  ‘Oh! anything you like, Mrs – anything—’

  ‘You’re the sweetest lamb. You can kiss me now if you like. Just a little, little one.’

  Spring came slowly and reluctantly to the marsh. By the very end of April certain stretches of the long grey dykes were at last gold with kingcups, with light feathery sweeps of lady-smock mauve between. An impassioned ceaseless song of skylarks filled the air. There came a day when she saw, for the first time, the blue and copper arrow of a kingfisher.

  If her pleasure in seeing this transformation in a landscape she had once hated was great, that of
Bartholomew was even greater. Every weekend he came down from town filled with fresh appetite for the pure marshland air, delighted at her conversion, at last, to the pleasures of the simple life. Her praises of Roger, the gem of a boy who could cook, wait at table, clip hedges, train roses, clean drains and generally impose transformations on the cottage she had once hated too, were doubly reflected in his own. It never occurred to him that he might be something more than a super manservant, youthfully eager to do nothing but serve.

  ‘Oh! but so painfully shy,’ she would say. ‘Sometimes I hardly dare look at him it’s so embarrassing. You know what he did one day? He picked up a thrush’s egg that had fallen in the garden and brought it in to show me. You might have thought it was a jewel, a sapphire or something. It positively trembled in his hand.’

  ‘He’s done a great job on the garden,’ Bartholomew said. ‘I could hardly believe he’d mown the lawn. And I tell you what – I had an idea we’d paint the cottage walls white, you know with that cement-cum-paint stuff. You think he could do that too?’

  ‘Oh! anything. You only have to ask him. He worships you.’

  ‘Me?’ This, Bartholomew thought, was engagingly funny. ‘I thought it was you he worshipped.’

  ‘Oh! not me. Or if he does it’s from far, far off.’

  ‘Well, worship or not, the great thing is that you’ve really started to like the place. Every week I expect to hear you’re bored with it all and every week you seem to like it more.’

  ‘I must confess I was a bit hard on the marsh. In fact I loathed it. But now that summer’s practically here – Oh! there’s a funny, mysterious thing about the marsh. You don’t get it for a long time.’

  A big old rose, long-neglected and suffocated by grass and nettles, had by now been trained against the white west wall of the house and by late June was covered with many flowers of a rich, mellow creamy-rose.

  On fine warm days she lay under this tree, on a foam mattress, in a bikini, sheltered from the almost unused track beyond the garden by a privet hedge neatly clipped to a height of five or six feet. By this time sun and sea-air had begun to work a certain transformation in her too. Her skin had started to soften, to lose at least some part of its uneasy, alcoholic snake-like texture. She was not only drinking less but had also grown out of the habit of re-dyeing her hair every week or so in shades of anything from yellow to a kind of brandy-rose. Its return to natural colour also brought with it a comparable softness, so that she looked much younger, very like a soft, furry, amber cat.