Something Short and Sweet Read online

  At first there was an English clerk only, a corporal with ginger moustaches and spectacles and a blue pencil behind his right ear. She got so used to him that one day she was astonished, almost frightened, to see the glass open and the Austrian’s head appear and say:

  ‘Yes?’ The upward singing inflexion of the voice was very gentle.

  ‘I am Mrs. Lemon,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I have to report. I am just going out.’

  ‘Oh! yes. It’s all right. I know about you.’

  When she came back the Austrian’s head, a dark and rather large head, with grey gentle eyes, appeared again.

  ‘Oh! yes, Mrs. Lemon. It’s all right.’

  Subsequently she would see him every day, except on Sundays. The office was shut on Sundays and she could walk straight out. All down the stairs and along the corridors and even in the Palace grounds she could feel the sanctified Sunday air, somehow strained and curiously silent. At the entrance gates she took the tram and the penny ticket that would take her within five steps of the church. She climbed up to the upper deck and sat so that she faced backwards. The tram glided rapidly away, but for a long time she could still see the Palace, ugly and rather forlorn on the hill behind the barbed-wire fences and the young almonds and limes. On early winter evenings she would see the great gloomy mass of brick looming up sepulchrally from behind the bare trees and the house-tops as the tram swerved and glided away. She felt herself watching it each time with the same odd sensation: a completely empty heart.

  From time to time Fred Lemon came home on leave. In uniform he looked more rabbity than ever. Mrs. Lemon did not notice it. As in the old days they had fried fish and chips together, but now Lemon had to go down two streets past the tram stop to the fish-shop, and the fish was cold by the time he got back. Mrs. Lemon did not notice that either.

  But Lemon noticed something: ‘The war’s gettin’ you down, Hilda. I can see it.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘Yes, it is. And I’ll tell you what. If I was you I’d get summat to do.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You was at Pitman’s three months, wasn’t you? You know shorthand.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well, you still do. Shorthand’s like riding a bike. Once you can you always can.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Fred.’

  ‘You’ll be getting morbid howdyedo, or whatever it is.’

  Lemon went down and spoke to the corporal.

  ‘The corporal’s in the know. They’s some big changes on. He’ll keep his eyes open.’

  In the late autumn, just before the second winter of the war, the Palace echoed with days of forlorn hammering. The office was being enlarged, and in a day or two the corporal stopped Mrs. Lemon on her way out. ‘About the end of next week,’ he finished. In a little over a week she was working in the office. There were two other women besides herself in the office, with the corporal and the Austrian. The Austrian had a desk by the pigeon-hole and Mrs. Lemon sat by the window. Every time the pigeonhole opened something was startled within her and she looked up. She kept up her stare at the pigeonhole until it shut again, so that each time, as the Austrian turned round, he would see her sitting there, in what seemed to be a state of transfixed fascination.

  At first it was nothing more than that: sitting and staring, silence, a kind of day-dreamy wonder. All that she did was unconscious. Something kept her back: the war itself, her idea of patriotism, a lot of things. She did not stop to analyse them. All her emotions and reasons and even her desires went into staring. She did not really understand herself at all.

  The Austrian did not understand it either. He was a foreigner, but not a stranger. He had lived in London for fifteen years. He was a barber and, at the outbreak of war, had just set up for himself off the Brompton Road. It was a rather select quarter and, like Mrs. Lemon, he had visions. The war smashed them. He had been engaged to an English girl in Fulham. The war had smashed that too.

  Thus, in a sense, he was on common ground with Mrs. Lemon. The war, from different angles, had struck them down.

  Towards the end of the winter Mrs. Lemon began to make tea in the office, about four o’clock every afternoon. The Austrian was very thin, his natural dark pallor had begun to look unnatural. Mrs. Lemon felt tired too. She was oppressed by a lack of escape. She had become, in a sense, a prisoner herself. The Palace held her tight. Regulations were difficult; she needed special permits in order to go out at night, and in a general way she never went out after dark, except perhaps to church on Sunday. She sat upstairs, read a little, wrote letters, stared, waited. Lemon, home on Christmas leave, had bought a bottle of whisky, and about half the bottle was left. That winter she began a sip of whisky, with a little water, as a nightcap. She slept better. Then when she had finished the bottle, she bought another, drank it with rather less water, and more quickly.

  She kept a medicine bottle of it down in the office. It was nice to have a little in the afternoon tea. Then one afternoon the Austrian saw her pouring it into the tea-cup.

  ‘What is it? What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s brown milk,’ she said.

  ‘Brown milk?’

  ‘You have some – it’s nice, it’ll do you good.’

  ‘No, no. In tea?’

  ‘It’s nice. It’ll do you good. You look run down.’

  He smiled. ‘Not in the regulations, you know.’

  ‘A lot of things are not in the regulations. You have some. Please. With me.’

  ‘All right.’

  She poured the whisky into the cup, a mere sip, and then a little more for herself. The office overlooked the terraces. It was March, the days were lengthening, and here and there the almond trees were out, blowing in the wind like balloons of pink lace.

  ‘I’m going to have a garden,’ the Austrian said.

  ‘Oh!’ She was quite startled. ‘Why? When?’

  ‘In April. In two weeks. In two weeks I will get my potatoes in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to be out of here. Outside. I don’t like it inside. Not in summer.’

  ‘You won’t be in the office then?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Not often?’

  ‘I don’t want to be.’

  She began to understand herself. She knew, at once, for the first time, what was the matter with her. She made no effort to conceal it, from herself at least. That night she drank no whisky at all. She went out, walked about the streets, up and down, going nowhere. It was something which seemed to be quite purposeless but which had, for her, quite a definite and almost terrifying purpose. It was as though she were half-way up a precipice and had to decide for herself whether to climb up or down. That night she could have let go without a murmur, irrevocably.

  In the morning the need for a decision had gone. There was now no going up or down. She knew, somehow, clearly and very bitterly, that there was and never could be anything so definite. There was no getting out of it, no solution, no compromise. She was there, stretched out, between one thing and another. And she was broken up with the terror and knowledge of it.

  The Austrian saw it. He took it that she was ill, run down. He did not connect it with himself until she said, quite as though it were some passionate concern of her own:

  ‘You’re not strong enough to do the garden. You’re not strong enough!’

  ‘But that’s why I want to do it. To get strong. It is bad for me in here. I don’t feel half alive. I want to do it.’

  ‘Don’t do it. I don’t want you to do it.’

  It was a kind of confession. She was so strung up that she could not have concealed it now if she had wanted to conceal it. And, for the first time, the Austrian was upset.

  ‘You mustn’t …’ he did not know what to say, ‘you can’t …’

  Then the corporal came in with order papers, and temporarily at least they were saved from themselves. She went back to her desk. She was in a state of stupid anguish. She could not work. The s
un on the papers, blinding white, created a blank of despair in her mind and when she wrote on a sheet of paper ‘I want to say something to you. Be on the east side stairs at 9 o’clock to-night,’ she hardly knew what she was doing.

  It was a stupid request, but anguish turned it for her into a reasonable one, imperative. There was never any question of his obeying it. When she put the note on his desk he looked up at once and shook his head violently. Even then she was quite certain that he would come.

  At nine o’clock she waited in darkness on the stairs for almost an hour. The Palace was in darkness. It surrounded her sepulchrally. For the first time she hated it. She had nothing on but her underclothes and a dressing gown, and the cold and her worked-up feelings gradually set her shivering.

  Finally she went back to her room. Her hatred turned from the Palace to the war, from the war to Lemon, from Lemon to the Austrian, and finally upon herself. She sat and drank a great deal of whisky.

  In the morning she was in bad shape. Excessive whisky had produced in her something of the effect of excessive tears and excessive debauchery. She looked wild and ill. The Austrian was quite shocked. He wanted to do something for her. It was an almost polite solicitude, negative, foreign, meaning nothing to her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I asked you to come. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Regulations. You know. You know. This isn’t a hotel. You want to get me shot?’

  ‘I want you to come, that’s all.’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Come to-night.’

  ‘Oh! no. We’re prisoners. It can’t be done.’

  ‘It’s quite dark. No one can see.’ She was speaking with a rising hysteria, still under the whisky. ‘You must come. You must come. If you don’t come I shall do something.’

  ‘Mrs. Lemon! Please!’

  That night, in the big living room, she got a table, set a chair on it and climbed up through the skylight. She was going to throw herself down to the terrace. She had reached a point of extreme distraction, a point where the wildest act seemed credible and right. It seemed quite right and natural that she should end her life there. The night was quite clear and dark and windy. It seemed a fitting end to her life that she should go off the roof of the place in which she had lived so much of it. She felt quite clear-headed, almost elated. In the sky the searchlights were playing and swinging about in great fans of light. She stood and clung to the skylight, bracing herself, almost ready, and watched them. They seemed like the beckoning signals from the other world.

  Then, quite suddenly, she went far beyond the need for decisions and the necessity for sacrifice. Her nerves crumpled suddenly into a mass of entangled wool. She stood in a half-faint, cold shivers of hysteria running up her back, her mouth whimpering. It was all she could do to climb down through the skylight and lower herself on to the table without falling.

  As she sat in the chair in the room below it was as though she had jumped off the Palace, not in a physical way, but mentally and spiritually. She felt that she had committed another kind of suicide, that the best of her, the sweet core of all her feelings, had gone off the roof into an eternal disaster.

  The next morning the Austrian was not in the office. She showed no surprise, no distress at all. She did not ask either for him or about him. She worked on without feeling. In the afternoon the corporal said ‘Künsberg has good weather for his first day in the garden. I wonder if he’ll miss his tea?’ but she did not answer. The fact of the Austrian’s departure evoked no feeling in her at all. It was as though the centre of feeling in her were irrevocably smashed. Her only sign of distress was that she drank her tea with a little more whisky than usual.

  She worked on in the office all through the war. After the war Lemon came home to a strange Palace: deserted, filthy, a derelict prison whose prisoners had departed.

  He did not like it at all. The Palace had been his pride. He had kept it beautiful. Now the soul seemed to have gone out of it. He did not understand it. He did not understand Mrs. Lemon either. She seemed so strangely attached to the Palace. She never went out. Drinking her whisky, she sat in an unemotional stupor in the room with the skylight.

  And often Lemon would say to her:

  ‘It isn’t right, Hilda. You shouldn’t do it. Pull yourself together. You never used to be like it. You’ll be getting me sacked. I don’t know what’s come over you, Hilda. It’s not right.’

  She in turn would try to convey, by a look, a gesture, by silence or a little more whisky, that it was not right at all.

  Finger Wet, Finger Dry

  My uncle Silas was a man who could eat anything. He could eat stewed nails. He had lived on them, once, for nearly a week. He told me so.

  I was a boy then. At that time we used to drive over to see him, in summer, about one Sunday a month, arriving in time for dinner, tethering the white horse about noon in the shade of the big Pearmain overhanging the lane outside. It was always what were we going to eat and what were we going to wet with? At dinner, once, we had pheasant, which was something very special, and I asked him if he had shot it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it just fell down the chimney.’ Another time we had a goose and I asked him if that fell down the chimney. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was sittin’ on eighteen eggs in the winter oats and I cut its two legs off wi’ the scythe. Cut ’em off and never broke egg. Ain’t that right, George?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Well it ain’t then,’ Silas said, cocking his bloodshot eye at him. ‘Don’t you go tellin’ the kid such blamed lies. Cut the goose’s legs off wi’ the scythe! – tck! tck! tck! tck! Don’t you believe it, boy. It’s just his tale. He’s just stuffin’ you. The goose went to sleep in the well-bucket and I went to draw some water one night and let it down unbeknownst and it got drowned.’

  ‘Couldn’t it swim?’ I said.

  ‘Oh! it was asleep. Never woke. It just went a belly-flopper and was done for.’

  Another time we had venison. I knew what that was. ‘A deer,’ I said. ‘Did that fall down the well?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I shot it. With a bow and arrow.’

  ‘With what?’ I said. ‘How?’

  ‘Bow and arrow. One o’ these days I’ll show you.’ And he did. I badgered and bothered him until, one summer Sunday afternoon, he made an ash-bow standing as high as himself and cut arrows out of flower-canes. ‘You don’t believe me. Do you?’ he said. ‘Well. I’ll show you.’ He tipped the arrows with old shoe-awls and bits of filed wire and anything handy. ‘’Course they ain’t no venisons about,’ he said. ‘But I’ll show you.’ Then we went into the field beyond the house and Silas stalked an old cow. Finally he stood about ten yards away from her and shot her in the backside. The cow leapt up about ten feet in the air and tore about the field as though she were heat-crazy. ‘That’s how I done the venison,’ Silas said. ‘Only it was a bigger bow and a bigger arrow and I hit it a bit harder.’

  ‘Now you know when Silas tells y’ anything it’s right, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You know Silas don’t tell lies, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know Silas don’t stuff you with any old tale?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know now.’

  It must have been some time after this that he told me the story of the nails, the stewed nails, because it was at some time when I had extra faith in him. I forget how it came up. Perhaps it was duck eggs; it may have been the sow. I know he said: ‘You kids – blimey, hair and teeth! – you don’ know what it is to go without grub. Look at me. I can eat anything. Had to. Look at that time I lived on stewed nails for a week.’

  I just stared.

  ‘That’s one for you, ain’t it? That makes your eyes pop, don’t it? Stewed nails. For a week. And glad too.’

  ‘Didn’t they … didn’t they … weren’t you bad?’ I said.

  ‘Oh! they was just old nails. I had pepper and salt on ’em too.’

  I asked h
im how it happened, and when. I remember having no fear at all that he would tell me. We were alone, sprawling under the elders beyond the bean-rows, in the shade. He could tell me anything if we were alone. It was only in the presence of others that, sometimes, he was not so sure.

  ‘Oh, about fifty year ago. I was only a kid. About thirty.’ He stopped, eyed me seriously, squinted. ‘You ain’t goin’ tell nobody about this if I tell you?’

  ‘No. Oh, no!’

  ‘Thass right. There’s a policeman at the bottom o’ this. I don’t want to git into trouble. You cork it in.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Sure? You promise?’

  ‘Finger wet, finger dry,’ I said.

  ‘Thass right. And cut my throat if I tell a lie. This what I’m telling y’ is true.’

  He took a quick look round, spoke lower, dropped an eyelid at me, and said: ‘I’d gone up to Sam Tilley’s to take the old sow to the boar. Sam was a policeman. His wife was a young gal about twenty. She was fiery an’ all. Nice gal. I knew her. Sometimes Sam was on night and sometimes he was on days. That time he was on days. Well, it was hot day and after the boar had finished she said: “If you’re tired come in and sit down a bit.” So I went in and she said she was tired too. So I made no more to do. “Don’t wear a chair out,” I said. “Sit on my knee.” So she did. She was as light as a chicken, lovely.’ He paused, recollecting, licking his loose red lips, going off into a momentary trance. ‘Oh! and then – dall it, what happened then? Where was I?’

  ‘She was tired … she was resting on your knee,’ I said.

  ‘Ah! Thass it. And then … oh! I know. We started playing with her duck eggs.’

  ‘What duck eggs?’

  ‘Oh! She kept ducks. Didn’t I say that? She had some lovely ducks. And she used to let me have eggs sometimes. I forget how it was, but we started fooling about with her duck eggs. She kept hiding ’em and I had to find ’em … you know. Just fooling about.’