Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Page 4

  For some distance inland, in places unprotected by the sea-white shoulders of long sand-dunes, the shore had invaded the golf-course, giving wide stretches of it a sandy baldness from which hungry spears of grass sprang wirily, like greyish yellow hairs.

  In other places the winds of old winters had thrown up pebbles, some grey, some brown, some like mauve oval cakes of soap, but most of them pure chalk white, water-smoothed to the perfection of eggs laid in casual clutches by long-vanished birds.

  It was somewhere among the eggs that Phillips had lost his golf ball. He was always losing one there. They were so damn difficult to see and when it happened over and over again it was enough to drive you mad.

  ‘They’re so hellishly expensive too,’ he said. That was why he had come back to search for the second time through the summer evening, after almost everyone else was either cheerfully gathered in the club-house or had long since gone home. ‘I mean it makes the whole thing——’

  ‘When did you lose it?’

  ‘This morning. About half-past eleven. Of course I couldn’t stop then. Still playing. I suppose you weren’t here about that time, were you?’

  ‘I’ve been here all day.’

  ‘I mean I suppose you didn’t see or hear anything about that time? I wondered if you might perhaps have heard——’

  ‘Not a sound.’

  Every Sunday morning he played eighteen holes with the same three fellows: Robinson, Chalmers and Forbes. He supposed they had played like that for ten, perhaps twelve years, at any rate ever since the war, except when they played in competitions, when of course they were paired with other people and it wasn’t quite the same.

  ‘You couldn’t have hit it into the sea, could you?’ she said.

  He looked at her sharply. She was still lying exactly where he had first stumbled across her and in the same position: curved and reclined, pale bare arms clasped at the back of her brown hair, her entire body crumpled into the white sandy lap of dune.

  On her face, in which the eyes were remarkably dark and inert, as if she were half asleep as she contemplated the sky, he thought the expression of deep indifference amounted almost to contempt. Young people often looked like that and he supposed she was only nineteen or twenty.

  He felt faintly annoyed too. Lately a lot of people had been using the golf course for any old thing: parking cars, picnics, courting in the sand dunes, exercising dogs and that sort of caper. The committee had tried hard to stop it several times but it was damn difficult with the shore and the course so often merging into one.

  Moreover it was a good fifty or sixty yards from the middle of the fairway to the dunes and then another forty or fifty to the sea.

  ‘Into the sea?’ he said. ‘Half a minute, I’m not that bad.’

  ‘I should have thought it would have been quite a feat to have hit it into the sea.’

  Quite obviously she hadn’t a clue about the game; which when you came to think of it was rather remarkable in these days, when so many women hit the ball as hard as a man.

  ‘Well, I’m going to have another look,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find the damn thing if it kills me.’

  Still contemplating the sky, still in that same half-sleepy, crumpled position, she said:

  ‘If it hasn’t killed you in five minutes I’ll help you look for it.’

  He walked away without answering. Among the hollows of the dunes the evening air was still warm. Thick white sand sucked his shoes down and from the sea came one of those liquid summer breezes that you thought were so pleasant until they tired you.

  As he walked about the shore scattered clutches of pebbles, like white eggs, continually bobbed up to deceive him, so much so that once or twice he was on the point of running to pick up his ball.

  He always hated the idea of losing a ball. Quite apart from the expense it was a point of honour. Once before he had come back three evenings running to find a ball that other fellows would have given up as a bad job. He had had the luck to find three of someone else’s too: which simply went to show that it didn’t pay to give up.

  After another twenty minutes of slogging about the dunes he suddenly felt quite tired. He was beginning to put on weight; not so much weight as either Chalmers or Forbes, both of whom had a belly, but more than Robinson, who was fifty-five, three years older than he was.

  When he got back to the dune where the girl was he found her half sitting up, her knees bent. On one knee she was smoothing with slow strokes of her hand a square of silver paper. The brilliance of the smooth tin-foil in the evening sun made him realise for the first time the exact colour of her dress. He had simply thought it to be brown. Now he saw that it was really a blend of two colours: of dark rose-brown and purple shot together.

  Under the dress the shape of her knees was graceful. The tips of her toes were buried in the sand. The way she smoothed the silver paper was merely mechanical. She was not really looking at it at all.

  ‘Found it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably have to come back tomorrow. It’s enough to drive you to drink, or suicide, or both. I don’t know.’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘Irritating. Maddening.’

  She was still smoothing the silver paper and yet not looking at it. A breeze caught the paper and crackled it upward, like the flutter of a wing, and she pinned it down on her knee again with one finger, quite casually, as if bored.

  ‘Mind if I ask you something?’ she said.

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘How would you go about it?’

  For a moment he was mystified and then realised, with abrupt surprise, what she was talking about.

  ‘Oh! here, wait a minute,’ he said, ‘it hasn’t got quite as far as that.’

  ‘Oh! hasn’t it? I thought you said it had.’

  ‘Well, hardly. I mean it’s one of those things everybody says——’

  ‘But supposing it did?’

  He felt a chill of distaste run over him. Abruptly he looked at the western horizon and thought that there might be still another hour in which to search for the ball before twilight came down.

  It was then that she said:

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

  Got to find that damn ball somehow, he thought. He had been on the point of sitting down for five minutes’ rest but now he found himself prickling with impatience instead.

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t help me look?’ he said. ‘There isn’t a lot more daylight——’

  ‘If you like. I don’t mind.’

  As she got to her feet he saw that her dark brown hair, very ruffled, was starred everywhere with dry white sand. She seemed not to notice it. Nor did she even bother to shake it out.

  Suddenly, as she climbed up to the grassy crest of the dune, he was captured by the grace of her bare legs, the skin a fine pure cream under the brown-purple skirt. With astonishment he found himself really looking at her for the first time. She was rather tall, shapely and no longer crumpled.

  She was what the fellows at the club would call nifty; she was what Freddy Robinson, in his heavy, waggish way, would refer to as a petite morçeau de tout droit.

  Suddenly from the top of the dune she turned, looking towards the sea. For some moments her eyes looked quite hollow and there was no answer for him when he said:

  ‘You’ll have to watch out for the pebbles. Especially the white ones. They’re the ones that trick you.’

  He was never more than ten or a dozen yards from her as they walked about the dunes. The sun, falling as a coppery-orange disc into a rippled milk-blue sea, gradually stained sand and grass and pebbles with a flush of fire. The marine blue thorns of sea-thistle were touched with sepia rose. Her dress turned a sombre purple against her bare cream legs and arms.

  ‘Have to give it up,’ he called at last. ‘Afraid it’s no go. Just have to come back tomorrow, that’s all.’
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  Once again there was no answer. She was simply walking with unbroken dreamy indifference across shadowy, smouldering sand.

  ‘Can I give you a lift or something?’ he said. ‘My car’s at the club-house. No distance at all.’

  Again there was no answer; but suddenly he saw her stoop, straighten slowly up again and then hold up her hand.

  ‘Is this it?’

  He actually started running. When he reached her she was holding the ball, exactly like a precious egg, in the palm of her hand.

  ‘My God, it is,’ he said. ‘My God, what a bit of luck.’

  He felt extraordinarily excited. He had a ridiculous impulse to shake her by the hand.

  ‘My God, what a bit of luck,’ he kept saying. ‘Nearly dark. What a bit of luck.’

  In the excitement of grasping the ball he was unaware that she had already started to walk away.

  ‘Are you off?’ he said. ‘Where are you going? Which way?’ She walked along the beach without pausing or looking back.

  ‘Just back to where I was sitting. I dropped my piece of silver paper.’

  He found himself almost running after her.

  ‘Saved me a shilling too,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Is that all they cost?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh! Good God, no. Didn’t mean that. I meant we have a sort of kitty—the four of us, I mean, the chaps I play with. Every time we lose a ball we put a bob in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Sort of fine. Amazing how it adds up.’

  ‘What do you do with it when it adds up?’

  ‘Buy more balls.’ He laughed again. ‘That’s where the fun starts.’

  ‘Fun?’

  She was walking more slowly now. The folds of her purplish skirt were touched with copper. The sea burned with small metallic waves.

  ‘You see we have a draw. Sort of lottery. Lucky number. Chap who gets the lucky number gets the balls.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Suppose it’s the old thrill—the kick you get out of any gamble. Something for nothing.’

  She started to look about her, as if not quite certain about the exact place where she had left her silver paper on the beach.

  ‘You see what I mean, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You might never lose a ball for a couple of months and then wham! you hit the jack-pot. That’s when it’s fun—when you see the faces of the other chaps.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Of course it might be you next time.’ He laughed again. ‘But so far I’ve been damn lucky. Struck it three times out of five. Fred Chalmers is the one—never had it once. Worth anything to see his face—livid, I tell you. Livid isn’t the word.’

  He laughed yet again and suddenly she let out a quick startled cry.

  ‘Oh! my silver paper’s gone.’

  He didn’t bother to answer. A vivid picture of Fred Chalmers’ furious face lit up the air between sea and beach with a heartening glow.

  ‘The wind must have taken it,’ she said. ‘I’d had it all day.’

  In the failing light she stood staring thoughtfully down at the hollow her body had made in the sand.

  ‘It isn’t so important, is it?’ he said. The ball felt hard and secure as he pressed it in his hand and put it in his pocket. ‘I’m afraid I must be going. What about you? Coming along?’

  ‘No. I think I’ll stay a little longer.’

  ‘Getting dark.’

  ‘It always does some time.’

  She took a few light half-running steps down the beach, as if she had seen the silver paper. A fragment of dying light bounced from a breaking wave. A few spreading phosphorescent tongues of foam lapped the sand.

  ‘Sure you won’t change your mind and come and have a drink?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll stay a bit longer. I want to find my piece of silver paper.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  She was walking away now, face towards the sunset but slightly downcast.

  ‘I just do. I’ll just cover the water-front a few more times. You know that song? I Cover the Water-front?’

  He thought he heard her sigh; she might suddenly have been holding her breath.

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘Nice song. “I cover the Water-front. I’m watching the sea. Oh! When will my love come back to me——”’

  She was already too far away for him to hear the rest of the song. Her figure was black against the last thin running bars of copper above the sea.

  ‘Afraid you won’t stand much chance of seeing anything now, will you?’ he called.

  He got no answer. He looked briefly at her figure, the darkening sand and the lapping phosphorescent tongues of foam and then started to walk up the slope of the beach towards the dunes.

  The evening wind was fresher there. The grey-yellow hairs of dune-grass were pressed close against smoothed ridges of sand. A leaf or two of sea-thistle rattled sharply.

  Caught among hairs of grass, the square of silver paper rattled too.

  ‘Wrong way,’ he started saying aloud. ‘Looking the wrong way!’

  He was half-way down to the beach, waving the silver paper, before he realised suddenly what he was doing.

  ‘Here, I’ve got your piece of paper,’ he was already saying. ‘I’ve found it——’

  A second later he stopped speaking and pulled up sharp, glancing round at the same time as if someone might possibly be listening.

  Then suddenly he realised what an awful damn fool he was making of himself—absolute damn fool. He looked hastily along the shore in the gathering darkness to make quite sure that the girl had not heard him running back with that ridiculous piece of paper. Why the hell could it be all that important to her? What on earth could anyone possibly want with that?

  It was time he stopped fooling around and got back to the club-house and talked to the chaps and bought himself a whisky, he thought—perhaps two.

  He started up the slope towards the dunes again, screwing up the silver paper into a little ball as he went. At the ridge he turned for a second time and looked back.

  The shore was quite empty. He threw down the silver ball among the pebbles that were so like clutches of eggs laid by long-vanished birds and didn’t even bother to watch where it fell.

  Looking finally towards the last copper straws of sunset cloud, he started suddenly to congratulate himself. ‘Just as well not to chase your luck too far,’ he thought. ‘Might get caught up with something funny. Anyway, you got your ball back, old boy. Be satisfied.’

  He listened again for a sound of her voice or her footsteps coming back. But all he could hear was the sound of wind and tide rising and halting and falling in little bursts along the darkening shore.

  It was exactly as if the sea sometimes held its breath and then broke into a little fragile, broken song.

  Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

  Clara Corbett, who had dark brown deeply sunken eyes that did not move when she was spoken to and plain brown hair parted down the middle in a straight thin line, firmly believed that her life had been saved by an air warden’s anti-gas cape on a black rainy night during the war.

  In a single glittering, dusty moment a bomb had blown her through the window of a warden’s post, hurling her to the wet street outside. The wind from the bomb had miraculously blown the cape about her face, masking and protecting her eyes. When she had picked herself up, unhurt, she suddenly knew that it might have been her shroud.

  ‘Look slippy and get up to May field Court. Six brace of partridges and two hares to pick up——’

  ‘And on the way deliver them kidneys and the sirloin to Paxton Manor. Better call in sharp as you go out. They’re having a lunch party.’

  Now, every rainy day of her life, she still wore the old camouflaged cape as she drove the butcher’s van, as if half fearing that some day, somewhere, another bomb would blow her through another window, helplessly and for ever. The crumpled patterns of green-and-yello
w camouflage always made her look, in the rain, like a damp, baggy, meditating frog.

  Every day of his life, her husband, Clem, wore his bowler hat in the butcher’s shop, doffing it obsequiously to special customers, revealing a bald, yellow suet-shining head. Clem had a narrow way of smiling and argued that war had killed the meat trade.

  Almost everyone else in that rather remote hilly country, where big woodlands were broken by open stretches of chalk heathland covered with gorse and blackthorn and occasional yew trees, had given up delivering to outlying houses. It simply didn’t pay. Only Clem Corbett, who doffed his hat caressingly to customers with one hand while leaving the thumb of his other on the shop scales a fraction of a second too long, thought it worth while any longer.

  ‘One day them people’ll all come back. The people with class. Mark my words. The real gentry. They’re the people you got to keep in with. The pheasant-and-partridge class. The real gentry. Not the sausage-and-scragenders.’

  Uncomplainingly, almost meekly, Clara drove out, every day, in the old delivery van with a basket or two in the back and an enamel tray with a few bloody, neatly-wrapped cuts of meat on it, into wooded, hilly countryside. Sometimes in winter, when the trees were thinned of leaves, the chimneys of empty houses, the mansions of the late gentry, rose starkly from behind deep thick beechwoods that were thrown like vast bearskins across the chalk. In summer the chalk flowered into a hill garden of wild yellow rock-rose, wild marjoram, and countless waving mauve scabious covered on hot afternoons with nervous darting butterflies.

  She drove into this countryside, winter and summer, camouflaged always by the gas-cape on days of rain, without much change of expression. Her meek sunken eyes fixed themselves firmly on the winter woods, on the narrow lanes under primroses or drifts of snow, and on the chalk flowers of summer as if the seasons made no change in them at all. It was her job simply to deliver meat, to rap or ring at kitchen doors, to say good morning and thank you and then to depart in silence, camouflaged, in the van.

  If she ever thought about the woods, about the blazing open chalkland in which wild strawberries sparkled, pure scarlet, in hot summers, or about the big desolate mansions standing empty among the beechwoods, she did not speak of it to a soul. If the mansions were one day to be opened up again, then they would, she supposed, be opened up. If people with money and class were to come back again, as Clem said they would, once more to order barons of beef and saddles of lamb and demand the choicest cuts of venison, then she supposed they would come back. That was all.