The Golden Oriole Read online

  ‘This one does.’

  ‘They fascinate me terribly. I dreamed one night that I was walking about bare-foot in the snow, looking for the key of our old house, the one where I was born. Then another night I dreamed I was the wife of a sort of tax collector in Persia, in the year 400 B.C. You see, you couldn’t know it was 400 B.C., could you, in the first place? How do you explain dreams of that sort?’

  He hadn’t the faintest idea, he said, any more than he could explain this one.

  ‘There’s a strange line I remember about dreams. I read it in a poem at school. It stuck in my mind.’ She lifted her right foot from the water. Something about its pure whiteness, dripping clear beads of water in the shadow, pricked sharply at his veins, making the blood start racing. ‘“Thou art so truth that thoughts of thee suffice to make dreams truths; and fables histories.” Do you know that?’

  No, he didn’t know that, he said. It was very beautiful but he had never heard it before. He was really watching the naked curve of her leg, uplifted from the water. It was pretty and smooth and elegant and again he felt his blood start racing.

  Suddenly he thought: ‘Was it a dream that made you call me Clarkson yesterday?’ and the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

  ‘It was just a silly mistake. It was just one of those odd things—’

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said, ‘will you?’

  She turned at once and transfixed him with her wide deep brown eyes and half-extended a hand as if about to touch him.

  ‘Get to know me a little better first,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘How do I get to know you better?’ He turned impulsively and pressed his mouth lightly against her throat. He could feel it throbbing quickly and he drew back and said ‘Like this?’

  ‘If you like. Whichever way you like. You see I’ve been through a bad time and—’

  Suddenly she put her arms round his neck in a gesture of intolerable longing. He started to kiss her but with a twisted movement, almost in anguish, she broke away.

  ‘Tell me what made you come up here,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ve tried to tell you—’

  ‘How did you know about me? Did your father ever say anything to you about me?’

  No, he said, not once. His father had never said a word.

  ‘But how on earth could you know? – I mean – how on earth, that’s what I keep asking.’

  He ran his hands slowly across her bare shoulders. The first fish of the afternoon rose with a sharp plop in the centre of the pool, startling her. ‘What was that?’ she said and he caressed her slowly again, trying to calm her, this time smoothing the downy hair in the nape of her neck.

  ‘You were fond of my father, weren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very fond?’

  ‘Very fond. In fact you could call it more than that.’

  He was holding her face in his hands now, turning it fully towards him.

  ‘Was he fond of you?’

  ‘In a sort of way. Yes.’

  ‘In a sort of way?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t explain now. I’ve told you I’d rather not talk about it now.’

  He was looking full into her face, full into the deep brown eyes, troubled again now.

  ‘You ask me to get to know you better,’ he said, ‘and all the time you go farther away.’

  ‘Oh! don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘That’s cruel. Don’t you know how like your father you are in some ways? You’ve got those same clear blue eyes. Don’t you see that’s why I made that mistake about you yesterday?’

  A moment later she flung her arms impulsively about him again and he drew her down in the grass. He ran his hands from her neck to her shoulders and down to her arms and then finally across her breasts, firm and free under the thin cotton frock. In return she kissed him with searching passion, without a word, for a long time, the chorus of grasshoppers beating without rest, in a prolonged throbbing murmur, through the hot afternoon.

  Clarkson, his mind kept repeating, Clarkson. Why did she call me Clarkson? Who the devil can Clarkson be? Caught up between passion, the tender feel of her breasts under his hands and the old confusion about half-truths, he found his mind full of the most mocking surmises.

  Was that Clarkson with that blasted umbrella? Could that have been Clarkson boarding the train?

  After that it began to seem strange and uneasy to speak of his father. By the end of the hot restless afternoon he had become merely an embarrassing ghost, thrust away into the background, half-forgotten. Incredibly it seemed that she actually wanted to forget him and it was some days before he was back in the conversation. And then inconsequentially she said:

  ‘What sort of woman is your mother?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know. Fairly ordinary, I suppose.’

  ‘Nobody is fairly ordinary.’

  ‘Well, she’s got a devil of a difficult temper sometimes. She has days.’

  It was shortly past eleven o’clock in the morning. She was doing her turn of duty in the bar. George Pickard, drinking beer, was her only customer. She herself, as she had several times explained, never drank on duty.

  But suddenly, to his great surprise, she started to pour herself a double whisky, saying at the same time:

  ‘I’m going to take you up on that drink you’re always offering me. Hope you don’t mind?’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Of course. But why the sudden change of heart?’

  She drank, stared for some time into the glass, drank again and finally looked up at him.

  ‘I suppose it would shock you awfully if I said I loathed and hated your mother?’

  It shocked him so much that he was completely without a word of any kind to say.

  ‘I thought you’d be shocked. I’m sorry. But I’ve got to get it off my chest some time.’

  ‘But you’ve never met my mother.’

  ‘That makes no difference.’

  As he watched her drinking it seemed to him once again that they were playing with half-truths: and this time dangerously.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell me about this. You’ve been putting it off too long.’

  ‘Not now. Tonight.’

  ‘Why tonight?’

  A moment later she reminded him of his remark about the night being merciful. She felt all mixed up now, she said, and she would find it easier to talk in the dark.

  ‘You could come into my room,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you about it then.’

  It was almost midnight before he went into her room. The night was another close, sultry one and she lay in her nightgown on the bed, waiting.

  It was nearly another hour before she started talking. She talked with her mouth close to his face, in a continuous whisper that at first he hardly ever interrupted. First of all she must tell him, she said, why she had called him Clarkson. It was simply that that was the name she’d always known his father by; she never knew him by any other. She was not much more than twenty-two when Mr Clarkson, the traveller in slippers, first booked a room one very cold night in November. She always remembered it vividly because, ashen and half crippled with cold and dyspepsia, he had asked for a glass of peppermint and hot water. After that he began to come to the hotel regularly: about once a month, she thought. In the usual way with regular guests she got to know him quite well. They chatted in an ordinary sort of way in the lounge or the bar. He was quiet, gentle, unassuming and unvindictive, a really nice man, and she felt sorry for him because he seemed lonely and because of the stomach pains.

  ‘Why on earth do you suppose he should tell you his name was Clarkson?’

  She’d never asked herself, she said. At that time she hadn’t any need. Anyway it all went on in that ordinary sort of way until about a year later. Then on another cold wet night he walked in with his bags from the station, half-exhausted, and started drinking good and hard.

  ‘But my father never drank,’ he said. ‘He
never touched it.’

  She was afraid he did, she said, and that night especially. The barman actually refused to serve him in the end and then, about eleven o’clock, as she herself went up to bed, she stopped on the landing because she could hear a strange sound from Number 7. It was the sound of his father, bitterly weeping. If there was one sound in the world that made her heart bleed, she said, it was the sound of a grown man crying like that. And that night it upset and haunted her so much that she didn’t sleep for more than an hour or so. She had one of those horrible white nights, she said, when the mind ranges starkly, or dreams badly, making sleep a mockery.

  ‘It was that night I dreamed I was wandering bare-foot in the snow,’ she said, ‘trying to find the key of our old house.’

  Next day she felt terribly on edge and restless, half exhausted herself now, and she knew, somehow, that she had to ask him about it. By an unexpected chance he came in extra early for lunch that day and she was alone in the bar, doing her turn of duty. Over a glass of steaming peppermint he began slowly to tell her all about it: how he had gone home unexpectedly, a week before, and had found Mrs Clarkson – no, of course it would be Mrs Pickard – busily entertaining a man friend upstairs. It wasn’t exactly this circumstance itself that grieved him so much; it was the fact that it had happened before.

  The first occasion, it seemed, had had a good deal of publicity. It had been pretty awful, it seemed. His father had beaten the man up badly, quite savagely in fact, inflicting shocking injuries with a walking stick; he sort of went berserk and there was a prosecution. The man came from rather a wealthy family, who briefed a crack counsel, and his father was finally found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm and sentenced, she thought, to two months in gaol. It was the prison sentence, coupled with the worry, the misery and the utter humiliation of it all, that first started those awful dyspeptic attacks that finally dragged him down.

  In absolute astonishment he managed to say: ‘But I can’t believe it. I never missed my father at any time.’

  ‘It happened when you were away at boarding school,’ she said. ‘They kept it from you. It was a winter term. He told me that. It was the thing that nearly drove him mad, of course – the idea that you might get to know somehow and it would be a terrible stigma on you and so on. And then his own awful shame.’

  ‘That was why he called himself Clarkson when he took the traveller’s job,’ he said. ‘I remember him taking that job now. He used to be top man in a rather good gentlemen’s outfitters and then all of a sudden he had this new job, travelling about the country.’

  Suddenly her voice stopped being merely warm and reflective. It flared up, dry with anger.

  ‘I suppose you know he adored your mother? Adored and absolutely worshipped her? He carried pictures of her about with him. That was why he forgave her and went back to her – and you, of course. He had to think of you. That was what made it such hell. He was terribly fond of you too.’

  ‘I was terribly fond of him,’ he said. And then, inconsequentially too, he found himself with a strange question to ask: ‘Did my father ever make love to you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I wanted him to. Very much. I even suggested it. But it wasn’t that sort of love he wanted. He didn’t want it that way.’

  She supposed, she went on to say, that it was really that refusal of his that was responsible for her own affection for him continually getting stronger and stronger.

  ‘You see it wasn’t me he wanted. It was your mother – always, all the time. I was just someone he was fond of and could talk to. And after a time – it was a long time too and I was very young – I realised that’s all I ever would be. And then it started being hell for me too.’

  After that he kissed her for a time and then asked her if she were sleepy. No, she wasn’t sleepy, she said; she wanted to talk some more.

  ‘Let me talk for a bit,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you one or two more things. About that second time – the time my father found a man in the house. Was it the same man?’

  ‘It was,’ she said. ‘That was the bitter part of it.’

  ‘I suppose he never told you what sort of man he looked like? Did he ever describe him at all?’

  ‘He called him a handsome bastard. I remember that. He had the money to dress well too. And to spend on your mother. Your father was very bitter about that.’

  He lay for some time in silence, ruminating, his mouth against her cheek, and then said:

  ‘That dream I told you about. There was a man in that.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He was a handsome bastard too.’ Slowly he told her of the ulster, the malacca cane umbrella, the bowler hat, the brown handsome moustache. ‘How the hell does he come to be in this dream? I’ve never seen him in my life before.’

  ‘I suppose you could have seen a picture in the paper at the time of the case.’

  ‘We weren’t allowed daily papers at school. I don’t know if it’s the same man anyway.’

  In a whisper he could hardly hear she said it was all very strange: just as strange as her own dreams about Persia and wandering in the snow and the way he himself knew there was a place called Skelby Moor and a Midland Hotel there. There was no knowing how the mind worked; there was no rational way of explaining these things.

  ‘The Skelby Moor part isn’t so strange,’ he told her. ‘I already told you. I found that post-card about it in an old album. My father had drawn a fish on it, in red. I suppose it was the fish that made it stick in my mind.’

  A recollection of the album took his thoughts back home. He started to think of the other album, the one he could only half remember. He recalled how greatly irritated his mother had been at the mention of it. He remembered her sarcastic impatience at his mention of Skelby Moor, her confession about her morning brittleness.

  A few moments later a night goods express ran through the station, whistling as it passed. The reflected glow from the fire box came up through a slit in the window blind and slid slowly across the ceiling like a crimson bar.

  Some time after the sound of the train had passed completely into the distance he said suddenly:

  ‘Good God, I’ve just remembered something.’

  ‘About your father?’

  ‘No: about my mother.’

  For the second time a recollected incident of his boyhood sprang as sharply across his mind as the reflection of the firebox across the ceiling.

  ‘I’ve just remembered a day when she threatened to thrash me within an inch of my life.’

  For fully a minute of astonished silence he propped himself up on one elbow, staring down at her naked body, hardly believing what he had remembered.

  ‘I’d been playing tennis,’ he said. ‘It came on to rain and we gave it up and I went back home. My mother was out somewhere. I was disappointed about the tennis and I was bored with having nothing to do. I started wandering about the house, poking into drawers and cupboards. We had a linen cupboard on the stairs and I found another album in it, hidden under a pile of sheets – one I hadn’t seen before. It was covered in bright red suède.’

  He remembered that album with great vividness now. It was full of photographs: one to a page. He remembered taking it downstairs, spreading it on the kitchen table and turning over the thick card-board leaves.

  He remembered too his mother coming home.

  ‘Why are you always meddling with things? The way you behave sometimes is enough to make a saint swear.’ She was shouting in the most brittle, livid of voices. ‘Keep your hands off my property. Do you hear? Keep your hands off my property. I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life if it happens again. Do you hear?’

  He felt sweat breaking out all over his body at the recollection of the scene. Half exhausted, he lay down in the bed, his head against her bare shoulder.

  ‘That was where I saw him first,’ he said. ‘There were seven or eight pictures of him and he’d scrawled across every one of them. Good God, why didn’t I rememb
er it before?’

  Sometimes the mind had a funny way of covering up unpleasant things, she said. Sort of putting a callus over them. Healing the sore.

  ‘His name was Harry,’ he said. ‘I remember now. He’d scrawled on every damn picture. “To my sweetest darling Babs, with everlasting love, Harry.”’

  ‘There was a place your father liked very much to go to,’ she said next morning. ‘It’s high up. You can see across several counties on a clear day. I’d like to take you there.’

  They drove up, that afternoon, to a treeless hill of almost sugar-loaf shape high above the dales. Among white limestone crags the dry turf was as short and fine as if pared off with a razor; harebells in blue crowds fluttered about it in a light wind like delicately suspended fragile butterflies. In the low nearer distances patches of heather stained the slopes a peculiar smoky shade of red.

  ‘He always loved to come up here,’ she said, ‘even in winter. He said it made him feel released from something – I suppose sort of free.’

  The breeze, even at that height, was quite warm and after looking down at the immense wide view for a few moments he took off his jacket and spread it over a rock. She sat down and leaned her back against it and he sat with her, one arm across her shoulders.

  ‘He said an awful thing to me just before we came up here for the first time,’ she said. ‘It was the thing that really made my heart start breaking for him. He said “I feel as if my soul’s all locked up in chains.” It was a terrible thing for a man to say and I never got over it. I never got it out of my mind.’

  Suddenly his heart started aching for his father; he was aware of being uncomfortably close to him again. The lean fissured figure, struggling against pain, took on a new and biting reality.

  ‘It put my soul in chains too,’ she said, ‘and then I don’t know quite what made me think of it but one afternoon I suggested we took a bus and came up here. He loved it. For the first time I actually realized he was happy. His eyes even started dancing.’

  He felt utterly unable to speak. He was abruptly aware that if he didn’t force himself into some sort of sudden physical action his eyes would fill with tears. Without a word he got up and walked away from her and stood for nearly ten minutes on the edge of the hillside, staring blindly down.