The Yellow Meads of Asphodel Read online

  A sudden hot rush of emotion unfroze Miss Maitland’s tongue, so that she blurted out: ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s for you. It’s far too simple. It isn’t you at all. No, I don’t think you’d like it, not at all.’

  ‘The simpler it is, the better Jack likes it. Don’t worry!’

  From that moment the old afflictions began to return: the sleeplessness, the nausea, the pain, the inability to eat, the melancholic headaches. As the time drew nearer for the Braithwaites to depart for Ireland, Miss Maitland was in deeper and deeper distress.

  At last she telephoned Dr O’Brien. ‘I was wondering if I might have more sleeping tablets, Doctor …’

  ‘Of course. Could you call for the prescription? I’ll leave it inside the window at the front of the surgery.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Doctor.’

  The effect on her of this short simple conversation was nothing less than shattering. The reality of the actual sound of the doctor’s voice threw into harsh relief all the unreality of the letters, the absurdity of love that never existed, the painful myth of the beloved arbutus.

  Soon Mrs Braithwaite and her husband departed, Mrs Braithwaite with the cheerful words: ‘Jack’s taking his movie camera. We’ll get yards of film of your boy friend and then you can wallow in it when we get back.’

  She began to wallow, instead, in nothing but a well of self-persecution. Alone in the bedsitter, on an evening of heavy rain, she sat for hours staring starkly at the wall, trying to face the thought of the Braithwaites’ return. It seemed to her that the rain outside was black. The April evening sky, prematurely nearly dark, had about it a greenish unreality.

  At last the desire to speak once again to Dr O’Brien was too much for her. In desperation she dialled his number. ‘Might I possibly speak to Dr O’Brien please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, he’s away on holiday.’

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘What? I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Has he gone over to Ireland?’

  ‘No. To the Austrian Tyrol. He will be away for about three weeks.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  In the ensuing silence she sat down and wrote the last of her letters to herself. Having written it, she then tore it up. Then she mixed herself a long strong tumbler of Liam’s devil’s brew. Then she emptied the entire contents of the bottle of sleeping tablets into the palm of her hand and slowly, one by one, began to swallow them, washing them down with first one tumbler of whiskey and then another; then she lay down on the bed and shut her eyes.

  After only a few seconds she got up again and in her own handwriting wrote a short farewell note.

  ‘Goodbye,’ it said simply, ‘my beloved arbutus.’

  The Lap of Luxury

  ‘Still carry your rabbit’s foot? I do. Never be without it. Sort of St Christopher.’

  They were driving south through France, Roger Stiles and Maxie Forbes, in Maxie’s two-seater open job that constantly sounded like a broken down lathe and some venerable wind instrument somehow played from the wrong end. It was Maxie, a big, burly, rather swaggering type, who was driving and it was he too who carried the rabbit’s foot. The war had been over thirteen months.

  Back in 1940, during that period known as the phoney war, both had been fighter pilots, in the same squadron, flying over France. Both had been shot down within forty-eight hours of each other, Roger largely because he lost his way; both had found themselves in the same prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Maxie was the type of man who, in civil life, makes coarse jokes at weddings, sends even coarser telegrams to the bride and bridegroom and ends the wedding day by tying old buckets, salmon tins and enamel chamber pots to the back of the happy couple’s car, for ever laughing like a bellowing bull at each successive tasteless joke.

  Such characters, abruptly confined to prison walls, find themselves a new identity. They grow up, revealing themselves to be men of resource and resolution, with minds of steel, determined almost with ferocity not to be bullied either by camp commandants or guards, to assert the rights of prisoners according to the Geneva convention and to employ every possible subterfuge to escape. No longer puerile jokers, they become men of utterly new stature, inspirational leaders of men.

  Roger Stiles could scarcely have been more different. His attitude in prison became that of a quiet, caged rabbit, lost for the most part in meditation. Good looking, blue-eyed, flaxen haired, he couldn’t have looked more English, more of a gentleman. Coarse jokes, at weddings or elsewhere, occupied no place in his repertoire. He was exactly the incongruous type who seems to be the complete reverse of men of action until suddenly war blows up in their faces and they too are revealed, in their own way, to be men of steel.

  In this way, as so often happens with opposites, the two men became close friends. Maxie, the positive, fused with Roger, the apparent negative, to make friendship an harmonious entity. Roger never thought of escape; Maxie worked at it, day in, day out, night and day, as a beaver works to build its dam, never resting until the ultimate structure has been achieved. One of Maxie’s escape schemes was that Roger, looking so much the Nordic type, should dress as a girl, take part in a theatrical sketch and somehow get spirited away under the floorboards of the stage. All appeared to be going well until Maxie accidentally trod on a sleeping cat.

  Maxie had countless other schemes, some ingenious, some decidedly not, all beset with failure. Then he made the discovery that although it was immensely difficult to escape from within the compound it was comparatively easy to do so from any of the working parties sent out into the country. His chief need to set him and Roger on this particular path was a couple of pairs of trousers that looked both peasant-like and agricultural and a pair of shirts to match. The trousers were made eventually from old potato sacks and the shirts from strips of bed ticking.

  In due course, in the fading light of a September afternoon, the two men slipped the working party, hid for a time in a birch wood and then, with the fall of darkness, began walking. ‘Piece o’ cake,’ Maxie kept saying as they strode the moonless miles, ‘piece o’ bloody cake’. A piece of cake it was until, some ten miles further on, Roger paused to make water by a tree. The tree, by a stroke of sad misfortune, turned out to be a German sentry.

  Maxie walked on.

  Now, together again, they were beginning a sentimental journey. It was Maxie’s idea. His purpose was to take Roger over the route that he, Maxie, had traced to the Swiss border: no ordinary route this but one, if Maxie was to be believed, embellished every few miles with Rabelaisian adventure. The purveyor of coarse meat, laughing like a bull, was once again the life and soul of his own party. The account of conferring certain physical favours on a farmer’s wife was succeeded by conferring similar favours on the two daughters of a Mayor. It was wonderful, Maxie would have Roger know, what miracles could be accomplished in beds, woods and fields of corn. ‘Can’t go wrong, old Boy, if you keep your hand on your rabbit’s foot, or theirs.’

  As they drove on Roger Stiles found himself more and more enmeshed in a shroud of depression. The French countryside had begun to fill him with boredom. He found himself staring soporifically at the map on his knees. And suddenly it was the map that offered a key of escape from Maxie’s coarser world.

  ‘I suppose you know, Maxie, that we’re on the wrong road.’

  ‘Hell! How come?’

  ‘We’re supposed to be heading for Pontalier. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, this doesn’t happen to be the road to Pontalier.’

  ‘Don’t talk cock. I saw the sign to Pontalier only a couple of kilometres back.’

  ‘What you saw,’ Roger said, ‘was a sign to Pontaillier. Not Pontalier.’

  ‘Then why the hell didn’t you say so. You’re supposed to be reading the bloody map.’

  ‘Sorry. I was listening to the gospel according to St Maxie.’

  The air was both chill and acid. For some three or four kilometres neither man spoke a wo
rd. Then Maxie growled:

  ‘And how far is this pissing Pont-something-or-other from Pontalier.’

  ‘Probably a matter of a hundred kilometres.’

  ‘For Jesus! – no wonder you got lost over France that day if that’s the best you can do in the way of navigation.’

  ‘One more remark like that and I’ll get out and walk.’

  ‘Suit your bloody self. Walk if that’s what you want. The roads are free.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I want. Stop the car.’

  With a gesture as if he were jumping on some offensive animal Maxie put on the brakes. The machine that sounded like a cross between a rusty lathe and an ancient wind instrument blown from the wrong end shrieked to a halt.

  Roger Stiles leaned backward and seized his suitcase from the back of the car and then got out of the car and stood in the road.

  With neither word nor gesture of farewell Maxie, no longer looking the part of joker, slammed in the clutch and drove furiously away.

  The hot mid afternoon sky was like a shimmering steel scythe. Roger Stiles’ fingers, first of the right hand, then the left, were as sticky as melted butter. Always the road ahead was dead straight and, again like a sharpened scythe, severed the far quivering horizon. Scorched to the colour of straw, the roadsides were as hard on the eyes as burnt cinder tracks.

  Roger Stiles’ mind offered a surface no less dead. Having left the map in the car he hadn’t the remotest idea of where he was or, worse still, where he was going. His sudden explosion of temper had left him alternately seething and sick. When a coherent thought rose to the surface of his mind it was always the same. This, he would tell himself, might well have been his lot, back in 1940, if he hadn’t mistaken a man for a tree.

  Presently the countryside grew hillier. Its contours were like the carcases of dead animals under the blistering sun. A kestrel, hovering over a shallow basin shut in by withered bracken, looked for all the world like some nervous, shimmering slice of heat haze.

  The only other sign of life was a stone farmhouse in the middle distance, at the end of a dusty white track, where a few black hens, themselves looking as if scorched, pecked at a heap of straw. By now his thirst was of such excruciating pain that he was just about to succumb to the impulse of asking for water at the farmhouse when the double hoot of a car horn made him half turn his head.

  A black Citroen passed him, continued for forty or fifty yards along the road and then stopped. An impulse to run after it merely brought home to him the fact that his legs, like his fingers, were made of butter too.

  When at last he caught up with the car the hatless head of a woman, fiftyish, blonde, her arms bare to the shoulders, was leaning out of the window. She spoke in French.

  Had he far to go? Did he desire a lift? She herself was going about twenty kilometres farther on.

  His fatigued mind had gone so far in weariness that his answering few words of French melted too. He begged to know if she spoke English.

  ‘But yes. Certainly. Are things all right with you? It is very hot. You look tired.’

  ‘I–I–’

  ‘You had better get into the car.’

  A series of half conscious movements resulted in his sitting, like a collapsed sack, in the seat next to the driver. He was vaguely aware of his suitcase being taken from him and put into the back seat of the car. An involuntary gasp for air, somewhere between a deep sigh and a stifled groan, made her say:

  ‘This heat is killing. Have you come far?’

  ‘You haven’t, I suppose, something to drink?’

  ‘I always carry a flask of cognac.’

  A gulp of cognac convinced him that the afternoon had distilled itself into liquid fire.

  ‘Take another drink. It is good cognac. It can do you no harm.’

  He drank again. Fire scoured his belly and his mind swayed. He discovered now that his buttery fingers were trembling. A moment or two later she discovered it too and suddenly seized both his hands in hers and gripped them with great firmness.

  ‘Are things all right? You could have heatstroke, walking in this sun without a hat. You should know that, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But I left my brains at home.’

  ‘Take one more drink.’

  He drank again from the cognac, still dazed, her hands still holding his.

  ‘Better?’

  Yes, he said, he felt better.

  ‘You wish we should drive on?’

  ‘Please. Yes. I will be all right now.’

  She had sense enough not to speak again for another five kilometres or so. She also had sense enough to drive slowly, so that the car was almost silent. By now his brain had begun to work with some coherence and it was he in fact who was the first to speak.

  ‘How far is the nearest town? I should really find myself a hotel.’

  ‘Here there are not many towns. Or hotels. It is all rather isolated. Sometimes I call it Indian country.’

  ‘Perhaps I could get a train?’

  ‘Well, we shall see about that.’ She turned and gave him a steady, searching look. ‘Why don’t you close your eyes for a few moments? It will rest you. It will do you good.’

  The closing of his eyes was as involuntary as his earlier gasp for air had been. Within a few seconds weariness and cognac together had put him into a deep-breathing coma from which he woke, how long later he never knew, to realize that the car was travelling, as he thought, through a tunnel. This tunnel, he presently realized, was a shadowy avenue of chestnut trees.

  The car stopped. A house of considerable size, embellished with turrets and towers so typical of French country châteaux, stood beyond the end of the avenue.

  ‘This, if you wish, is your hotel.’

  ‘Oh! but I couldn’t impose—’

  ‘At least you can rest for a while.’

  She took his suitcase from the back of the car, opened the door for him to get out and then started to walk to the house. He followed. By now his senses had so far recovered that he saw that her legs were refined, her figure upright and rather full at the top.

  He was however still too dazed to realize that so far everything had been done at her instigation. Now he had a further example of her insistence.

  ‘I think you should take a bath and then lie down for a while. Then I will make iced coffee.’

  He started to say something about telephoning for a taxi and then catching a train when she cut him short with some abruptness by saying:

  ‘Why do you speak of trains? Have you an appointment somewhere?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well. What does one of your English poets say? “Everything comes to him who waits.”’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Then you should wait. It will be good for you.’

  He duly went upstairs and bathed, luxuriating in tepid, fragrant water, some of his weariness draining away. When he went downstairs again he found her listening to a movement of a Brahms’ symphony on a gramophone. Seeing him arrive she shut it off, greeting him with the most enchanting of smiles.

  ‘Ah! that is better. Now you look like a new boy.’

  He noted the word boy. He noted too that she had changed her dress and was now wearing one of the lightest yellow material, rather low-cut at the neck and with neither embellishments nor pattern. The effect was to make her look much younger. Whereas in the afternoon, in the oppressive heat of the day, she had seemed to him a woman of fifty or more she now looked no more than forty.

  ‘You see, I told you a little relaxation would be good for you. Would you like iced coffee or perhaps a little cold wine?’

  He confessed he preferred wine and she said: ‘Good. I’m inclined to agree with you. I will ring for Anne Marie.’

  There presently came into the room a rather dumpy woman wearing one of those dainty white lace caps that are survivals from another era. She in fact actually curtsied with gentle restraint as her mistress gave her order.

  When she had departed he
found himself looking out of the window at the garden beyond. It was rectangular in shape, enclosed by limestone walls capped by orange tiles. He could see golden balloons of ripe melons growing by a path and then, on the walls, scarlet-crimson peaches.

  ‘I see you are looking at the garden. Please don’t. My gardener died two weeks ago and here it is impossible, impossible, impossible to get another to replace him. Do you like gardens?’

  ‘I quite often help my father in his from time to time.’

  ‘I only wish you could help in mine.’

  A few moments later Anne Marie came back with a tray of glasses, a bowl of sweet biscuits and a bottle of wine. The wine had already been uncorked and she poured out a small measure for her mistress to taste.

  ‘Excellent. Merci.’

  The wine as it filled the two glasses was of a clear deep tan-rose. Its coldness misted the sides of the glasses.

  ‘Ah! rosé,’ he said. ‘Pelure d’oignon perhaps. From here?’

  ‘Not from here. Not pelure d’oignon. No, it is from Arbois. I hope you will find it good.’

  He drank and raised his glass to her. In return she gave him the frankest and most charming of smiles.

  ‘It is good. In fact marvellous.’

  ‘I am pleased you like it. Well, we celebrate your arrival here.’

  He drank again, rolling the cold wine round on his tongue. ‘As you said, everything comes to him who waits.’

  ‘Yes. And perhaps he who waits longest receives more of everything. Tell me about yourself. How did you come to be walking along that road? Are you en vacances?’

  ‘In a way, yes. In a way, no. It was the beginning of a sentimental journey.’ He proceeded to explain, briefly, about Maxie and himself. For some reason it all sounded improbably ludicrous.

  ‘It was all too, too stupid. The trouble was we were trying to recapture something that was never there.’

  ‘In other words “never go back”.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She poured more wine, stared thoughtfully for some moments at her glass and then said:

  ‘My husband was in the French Air Force. He too was taken prisoner. I never saw him again.’