Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Page 3

  ‘Didn’t you tell me once, old boy, that you came from the Nene valley? Isn’t that your native country? Evensford?’

  When I said that it was he went on:

  ‘Good show. I think I’ve got a bright idea for a powerful piece for you. The Yanks have carved out a hell of a great bomber airfield just outside Evensford. Wouldn’t it be nice if you went down and looked at it and wrote a nostalgic piece about it?—the revolution of war, the bomb that blew your childhood scene sky-high and that sort of thing? You get it? It would please the Americans.’

  I said I thought I got it and he turned with eagerness to a pile of papers.

  ‘A chap named Colonel Garth F. Parkington, it seems, is Station Commander,’ he said, ‘and H.Q. at Huntingdon say he’s the nicest sort of bloke to deal with. Spend as long as you like up there. Absorb the atmosphere. I’ll lay everything on.’

  A day later I was driving northward, up to my native country. It was early summer. Gipsies were camping about their fires outside a strawberry field that I passed and just inside the field a line of women and children in light cotton dresses were gathering the berries and putting them into white chip baskets. One of the prettier of the girls, a blonde, seeing my uniform, waved her hand to me, laughing, showing clean white teeth, her hands red with strawberry stain. Farther along the road a field of wheat had already the lovely grey-blue sheen of pre-ripeness on the stiff straight ears and I could hear, all along the hedgerows, whenever I opened the car window, the song of yellow-hammers chipping with monotony at the heart of the sunny afternoon.

  Something about the fair-haired girl waving her hand to me from the strawberry field made me remember Bertha. Seventeen years is a longish time and my hair had begun to go grey.

  Then presently, as I drove along, I found myself trying to remember the number of times I had heard her name in seventeen years. It was perhaps half a dozen. Someone, I forget who, had once told me that she was seeing a great deal of a prominent follower of the Pytchley; that she was much in the swim at flat race meetings and point-to-points. Someone else thought she was a hostess in a sea-side hotel. At least two people thought she had gone to live in London but when I mentioned this to another he said: ‘Don’t believe it. Bertha’s still there, up at Evensford. Still the same as ever. Still going strong.’

  About three o’clock I found myself in a completely strange, foreign country. Only by stopping the car, getting out and identifying, through some minutes of amazed reorientation, a slender stone church steeple I had known since boyhood, could I recognise that I had reached, in fact, the frontiers of my native land. Three great hangars, like monstrous brooding night-bats, succeeded in saving from moon-mountain barrenness an otherwise naked sky-line. In brilliant sunshine a perimeter track curled across bare grass like a quivering bruising strip of steel. Like black, square-faced owls, Flying Fortresses everywhere rested on land where, as a boy, I had searched for sky-larks’ eggs, walked in tranquillity on summer Sunday evenings with my family and gathered cowslips in exalted spring-times.

  Over everything swept the unstopped thundering prop-roar of engines warming up and dead in the heart of it a giant water-tank, like a Martian ghoul on stilts, strode colossus-wise across the sky. This was the country through which, on a July night, I had bicycled with Bertha, first put my hands with lightness on her breasts and talked to her of dreams and joy’s excesses in terms of ghost-green orchid flowers.

  A few minutes later I was with Colonel Parkington, a likeable Nordic giant with many ribbons, an immaculate tunic and trousers of expensive light pink whip-cord who felt it imperative, every few moments, to call me old boy.

  ‘Sit down, old boy.’ A telephone rang on his desk. He picked it up. ‘Be right with you, old boy.’ A voice began crackling in the telephone. ‘Hell. No. Blast. Hell, Christ no.’ A second telephone rang. The colonel did not pick it up. ‘But what the flaming hell! What does Washington know? Through channels, for Christ’s sake? Hell! It takes a century.’ The second telephone kept ringing and Colonel Parkington, not picking it up, started shouting into the first. ‘Always channels. Always channels. They think of nothing but channels. This is an operational station. Dammit, I can’t wait! Where do they think this goddam war is being fought? In Albuquerque or where?’

  He slammed down the telephone. The second telephone stopped ringing for ten seconds and then, as if taking breath, started again. Colonel Parkington picked it up, put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to me with polite, genuine sorrow:

  ‘Look, old boy. This goes on all day. Every day. It’s hell. I tell you what. Go get yourself fixed up with a room. The lieutenant out there will fix you up. Then show up at six o’clock at my house down the road. We’re having a little party—about fifty folks, cocktails. I want you to meet my wife. She’s English too. OK? See you then, old boy.’

  Thunder was muttering ominously along the eastern skyline as I walked down the road soon after six o’clock but its gathering rages were like the squeakings of sick mice compared with the already raucous bawlings coming out of the big Victorian red-brick house that the Colonel had taken for himself about a mile from the bomber station.

  Inside, in the big lofty Victorian rooms, it seemed that an army of giant locusts had settled. The species was mainly a laughing one. Between its laughter it sucked at glasses, ate ice-cream, blew smoke, gnawed at small brown sausages and yelled.

  In this maelstrom I sought refuge behind an ancient hat-rack, where a young lieutenant with many ribbons, pale flight-weary eyes and a glass beer-mug in his hand, had already forestalled me. The beer-mug was filled with what seemed to be port wine and the lieutenant, staring up from it, started calling me Bud.

  ‘Hullo, Bud, what’s the uniform?’

  ‘Royal Air Force.’

  ‘Is it? For Christ’s sake.’

  Drinking deeply at the port, he wiped his mouth across the back of his hand, staring the uniform up and down.

  ‘Forgot to put your ribbons on, Bud.’

  I explained that I had not only no ribbons to put on but that, so far, I had done nothing whatever to deserve any ribbons.

  ‘Hell, that’s terrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t look right without ribbons.’

  He drank again. I surveyed the smoky locust scene, looking for Colonel Parkington. As I searched unsuccessfully through the crowded gnawing faces the young lieutenant, mouth wet with port, spoke with terse, unsober bitterness of the day’s events above Stettin.

  ‘Damn dirty trip,’ he kept saying. ‘A helluva damn stinking dirty trip.’

  ‘Do you know if Colonel Parkington is here?’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  He too surveyed the scene, peering with difficulty from under lids that were closing down on the eyes’ weary dilations.

  ‘Don’t see him though.’

  ‘Which is Mrs Parkington?’

  Before he could answer a girl came up. She had the fair small-featured elegance that is so common to girls in that part of England and she heard my question.

  ‘That’s her,’ she said. ‘Over at the top end of the room. In the black and silver dress. By the fireplace.’

  ‘Probably the colonel’s there too,’ the lieutenant said. ‘How’s things? How’s the shape?’ he said to the girl, catching her by the shoulder, and I moved away.

  Half way across the room I stopped. The colonel’s personal lieutenant, the one who had arranged my room, stupefied by the sight of a guest without a drink in his hand and thinking perhaps that I had halted in stupefaction too, as in fact I had, dragged me solicitously aside to a long table where mess orderlies were serving drinks from a barricade of ice-buckets.

  ‘Please have what you like, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see you come in. The colonel’s not here yet. He had a rush call to HQ at five.’

  An orderly poured me a drink. I bore it away through the crowd of faces and stood by a wall. I stood there a long time, alone, sipping the drink, watching Mrs Parkington.

  There was no
mistaking that fine yellow hair. Bertha was wearing it rather long now, almost down to her shoulders, in the war-time fashion, and it matched with its curled brushed smoothness the long close line of the black and silver dress that made her appear even taller than she was. The dress, as always, was low-cut, showing the strong smooth bosom, and she was wearing rather large pear-shaped earrings, black, probably of jet, that quivered every now and then like shining berries as she tossed back her head, laughing.

  She was surrounded, on all sides, by young officers in uniform. There were, I noticed, no other women near. With native good sense they had clearly retreated, fearful of being overshadowed by a sumptuous, glittering, popular mountain.

  At intervals her laugh rang out clear, merry and golden. I hesitated for a long time about moving over towards her but at last I started, setting down my empty glass on a window sill outside which I could see the far blue violence of summer lightning striking the sky above the black hangars on the hill.

  I did not get very far. For a second time the horrified lieutenant, alarmed by the sight of a single drinkless guest, stopped me and begged:

  ‘Let me get you something, sir. They’re not looking after you. The colonel said to be sure to look after you. We don’t get so many visits from you boys.’

  He disappeared and I stood for three or four minutes longer within hearing distance of Bertha, waiting for the drink. She spoke, I now discovered, with a slight American accent, just clipped enough to be charming.

  ‘Oh! it’s all channels, channels,’ I heard her say. ‘Nothing but channels. It’s like Garth says—you’d think they were fighting the war in Albuquerque or somewhere. For goodness’ sake what does Washington know?’

  The young officers about her laughed with that particular brittle brand of laughter that young officers reserve for occasions when brass-hats, governments or cabinet officials are mentioned and one, younger, more good-looking and more tipsy than the rest, gazed with fondness at her bosom, as if almost ready to plant a kiss there, and said:

  ‘Good for Bertha. My God, we should send Bertha back home as special envoy. She’d knock ’em dead.’

  A moment later my drink arrived. I listened to her laughing and talking for a few moments longer, watching the earrings quiver like black berries against the long yellow hair and then at last, feeling unarmed for the encounter, I moved away.

  As I walked back up the road lightning struck with explosive blue tributaries, fierce and jagged, all about the woodless skyline. I walked slowly in the hot air, carrying my cap, and if I was sad it was not so much because of Bertha, gay and sumptuous as ever, but because, remembering James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton, I feared that the night’s ominous storminess might contain in it the fires of other premonitions.

  I need not, as it happened, have worried at all.

  The war was hardly over before I was filled with unbearable longings to travel again, to feel what France smelled like and to see flowers blooming about the classical stones of Italy, in fierce sunlight, about the vineyards, high above the lake-sides.

  These things were still not easy and it was already a year later when I met a man who promptly scorned them, told me of experiences that had given him equal, easier pleasures and said:

  ‘France? Why bother with France. You’ve got it all in Jersey. No currency nonsense. Everybody speaks English. Pretty good food. And this hotel—I’ll write the name of this hotel down for you.’

  Jersey is not France; nor are the Channel Islands the hills of Tuscany. I listened with unenraptured patience and with that glassiness of eye that, my friends tell me, draws down over my pupils whenever I grow dreamy or bored.

  ‘There. That’s it. You can mention my name if you like—but the great thing is to get hold of this woman. The hostess there.’

  I am, I am bound to confess, afraid of hotels with hostesses.

  ‘I’d better write her name down too,’ he said. ‘Because she’s the one. She’ll do anything for you. You mustn’t forget her. Mrs Jackson Parkington.’

  Over my eyes two little blinds of boredom had drawn themselves down. Suddenly, with explosive revelation, they snapped up again.

  ‘What’s she like?’ I said.

  ‘Terrific,’ he said. ‘Blonde. Long hair. Early forties, I should say, but it’s hard to tell. Figure of a young girl. Gorgeous dancer. Beautiful clothes. Easy with everybody. Able to talk to anybody, on any level, about anything, at any time.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Well, actually yes, I suppose. She was married to an American Air Force Colonel, they say, but it’s all over now. Usual story. Divorced. Came out of it pretty comfortably, I understand. Just does the hostess thing for fun.’

  I tried to think of one or two more questions I might possibly ask about Bertha, but my friend swept me away on waves of greater eagerness, saying:

  ‘You go there. You’ll never regret it. That’s the way to make a hotel go—get a woman like that in. If there’s anything she can possibly do to make you happy she will. Somehow she’s got the knack of making everybody happy.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  I did think about it; and for the first time there was, about Bertha, something I found not easy to forgive. It was not like Bertha to be pompous. Her body, her mind, her ways and her generosity were those of an enthralled innocence. I could not see her growing grand; I could not think of her, somehow, as rising too high in the world, half way as it were to being a duchess, calling herself Mrs Jackson Parkington. But it was a little thing; and I was glad, really, she was still making people happy.

  It was another five years, nearly six, before I saw my Italian mountains, deep-fissured and burnt by late August heat, the lakes below them oiled in blue-rose calm, the little cream clustered towns melting like squat candles into the water, the pink and pale yellow oleanders blooming below the vines.

  Even this, after a few days, was too much for me. I found I could not sleep in the fierce, hot, mosquito nights of the lakeside and presently I moved to a village up a valley, half way to the mountains.

  In cooler exquisite mornings I walked about the rocks, stopped at little caffès for glasses of cold red wine and looked at the mountain flowers. In August there were not many flowers but sometimes on the paths, on the roads and outside the caffès little girls would be selling bunches of pink wild cyclamen, like small rosy butterflies, full of fragile loveliness before they drooped in the heat of noon.

  ‘But what flowers are they? Could you tell me what flowers they are?’

  At the corner of a mountain road I came, one morning, on a man and a woman buying bunches of the small pink cyclamen from a mute Italian child.

  ‘But don’t you know what flowers they are?’ The man spoke in Italian, the woman in English. As I passed them the man gave the child a hundred lire note, but she stepped back, still mute, black eyes wide, like a dog frightened. ‘Are they violets?’ the woman said. ‘Don’t you know?’

  In the white dust of the road the child started shuffling her bare feet. The woman opened her handbag, felt in it and started to offer the child another hundred lire note but suddenly the child, dropping her mouth with a cry, was away down the dust of the hillside.

  ‘Sweet,’ the woman said. ‘What a pity.’

  She closed her handbag. It was white, shaped like a little elegant drum. Her costume, of thinnest silk, was white too. Her shoes, earrings and necklace were also white and she was carrying white gloves in her hands.

  I turned from some four yards up the hillside.

  ‘The flowers are wild cyclamen,’ I said.

  ‘Oh! really?’ she said. ‘Thank you. How clever of you to know.’

  The man, who was dressed in a thin Italian suit of lavender with darker stripings, raised a white hat in my direction. Underneath it the head was handsome, distinguished and nuttily bald.

  ‘Cyclamen,’ she said to him. ‘Wild cyclamen.’

  ‘Ah! yes,’ he said. ‘Ah! yes.
That is so. That is the word I was trying to think of.’ He spoke now in English. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  In a suspense I found I could not break with words I stood trying to take in the immaculate picture, all white and gold, the legs perfectly exquisite, the bosom firm and uplifted, the eyes of intensely clear, hyacinth brightness, of Bertha framed at the age of fifty against the mountainside. If from that distance she gave me any sign of recognition I did not detect it and presently, with a short wave of the hand, I turned and walked up the road.

  Ten seconds later a figure came panting up behind me.

  ‘Sir. Signor. It was most very kind of you to say the name of the flower. My wife is delighted. She thanks you very much.’ He took off his hat again, revealing the sun-browned head, smiled in a distinguished way and shook hands. ‘We are in the Hotel Savoia. By the bridge. If you have time will you take an apéritif with us, perhaps, this night?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ I said, ‘but I’m leaving this afternoon.’

  ‘Ah! too bad,’ he said. ‘Too bad. Too much pity. If you should change your mind my name is Count Umberto Pinelli. Please ask for me.’

  He turned, lifted his hand and in a few seconds had joined her down the hillside. There, for a moment, she too lifted her hand.

  ‘Thank you so much!’ she called. ‘Very, very kind of you. I do appreciate it. I never know about flowers.’

  She smiled. Her hair shone with brilliance, with no trace of grey, against the fierce Italian sky. Her shoulders were as firm, sloping and impressive as the mountains. The cyclamen were pink and delicate in her hands.

  And since I was in Italy and since I could think, as I stood there remembering a gaunt, yellow-eyed, prematurely ageing woman feverishly treadling at a sewing machine, of no reason to do otherwise, I smiled back to her and bowed in answer.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Enchanted.’

  Lost Ball

  ‘I often wonder if you couldn’t do it by holding your breath for five minutes,’ the girl said. ‘I suppose that would be the most painless way.’