Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Found it yet, boy?’

  ‘Is it where it says Petty Sessions?’

  ‘That’s it, boy. That’s it. You got it now.’

  Uncle Joe blew contented smoke. He found it increasingly hard to read in the twilight and Aunt Nancy was always slow, even obstinate, about lighting the lamps. No sense in wasting light, she said. If you couldn’t see you could always feel.

  ‘Elizabeth Emma Brown, 42, housewife, of 12 Pond Cottages, Little Harlow, was charged with stealing two quartern loaves, the property of Charles Mayhew, and further charged that on or about——’

  ‘And put half on ’em in the swill-tub I’ll bet,’ Aunt Nancy said. ‘I see three half loaves in the swill-tub only yesterday. Enough bread to keep a family.’

  ‘What’d she get?’ Uncle Joe said.

  ‘If they had to bake it, like me, they’d think twice about wasting it. Nicking bread—that’s a fine thing.’

  ‘It says fined ten shillings or in default seven days.’

  ‘They’ll be lettin’ ’em off scot free soon,’ Aunt Nancy said. ‘It’s enough to make your blood rise.’

  ‘Lot o’ cases this week, boy?’

  Uncle Joe, puffing smoke, smacked his lips and juicily sucked at his moustache. He loved a lot of cases. The boy loved it too. A lot of cases meant that he could stay up long after the lamps were lighted. He could help to sort the oranges and make up bunches of violets surrounded with fresh collarettes of leaves. Strange blue eyes of mould shone from the rotting oranges under the golden lamplight and curious winey odours filled the night air.

  ‘Charged with indecently assaulting a girl of fifteen, George Henry Parker, 42, said to be——’

  ‘Read us the next bit, boy, read us the next bit.’

  Aunt Nancy attacked with a powerful poker the frontal bars of the stove, making fire leap out. The black tip of the poker reeked with smoke and she said:

  ‘They want this down their gullets, some on ‘em. That’d cool ’em down. Well, I’m going to start them oranges, if nobody else ain’t.’

  ‘Read us a bit more, boy. Read us a bit more.’

  It was getting harder and harder to read in the twilight. A dark April wind clattered against the leaves of a laurel tree in the garden outside and suddenly a cold spate of rain, almost hail, beat on the kitchen window.

  ‘Charles Albert Baxter, of no fixed abode——’

  ‘Who was that again, boy? Read that bit again.’

  Uncle Joe sat with mouth open, pipe expectantly poised aloft, face glowing in the stirred light of the stove. A moment later Aunt Nancy started noisily dragging a crate of oranges into the kitchen from outside the door, at the same time letting in even sharper sounds of April wind and rain. A bang of the door and a ripping of orange box wood twice drowned all words, so that Uncle Joe actually peered over the paper himself and said:

  ‘Baxter? No fixed abode? Is that what it says?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s what it says. Charles Albert——’

  A look of great marvelling came over the face of Uncle Joe. An illumination far brighter than the mere reflection of firelight gave it a transcendental, beaming glow. A long silence wrapped him away for several minutes in reflective mystery and on the stove the little loaf that was sometimes like a mouse, at others like a pincushion but most of all like a squatting toad, seemed to be watching, waiting and listening.

  ‘That’s Shady all right,’ Uncle Joe said. The sudden rustle of the first of the orange papers was like the impatient striking of a match. ‘That’s old Shady. What’s he back for?’

  ‘Shady Baxter?’ Aunt Nancy said. ‘Not him?’ She stopped putting oranges into a big brown skip basket and sat merely twisting an orange paper into a spill with her fingers. ‘Not Shady?’

  ‘That’s Shady,’ Uncle Joe said and drew sharp moist air through his moustache in an uncanny whistle. ‘Old Shady—that’s old Shady boy.’

  ‘The last time I saw him,’ Aunt Nancy said and now her voice had stopped sounding like hissing steam and was low and quiet, hardly more than a whisper, ‘was that day they took him away. I seen him handcuffed on the train.’

  ‘He was a big handsome chap,’ Uncle Joe said, ‘more’n six foot tall. Hair black as a rook. Bin a-soldiering in India some time and when he got back he’s got one o’ them big curly black moustaches. Like a pair o’ bull’s horns.’

  It was already past midday. The little cart was clattering about the outskirts of the town. The last of the violets, in purple water-sprinkled bunches, had long since been sold. A dry April wind was blowing dustily about the street, swaying unopened buds of lilac trees in gardens and whipping into the pony’s snowy mane.

  ‘Could run like a hare. Like lightning. Once he run from here to Caxton Gibbet in a mite over one hour.’

  ‘How far is Caxton Gibbet?’

  ‘Twenty miles or more. Might be twenty-five. I never bin there. I only heerd talk of it.’

  The wind was behind them now. It seemed to be driving pony and cart along. It blew into the pony’s tail, so that it fanned out sometimes, peacock-wise.

  ‘A big man with his fists too. A big fighter. Champion o’ this county. He won a belt once. They had it hanging up for weeks in The George and Crown. In a glass case. All gold.’

  The pony, scenting home, seemed to be running away with itself. Uncle Joe pulled on the reins. The pony fell into a sort of walking trot and in the cart the brass scale-pan fell over.

  ‘Are we going home now? I’m hungry.’

  ‘If you’re hungry chew on this apple. It’s got a scab or two on it but that won’t poison you.’

  ‘Real gold?’

  The apple was a sweet, russety one. It had a dry cold flavour.

  ‘Real gold. He had his man like dead mutton from the start. They fought it out for twenty rounds. You should ha’ seen his muscles. You know the big walnut tree? His arms were just like that.’

  Uncle Joe pulled on the reins again. The pony fell into a walk and Uncle Joe started to light his pipe, blowing strong blue smoke clouds.

  ‘Aren’t we going home?’

  ‘If you ain’t in a tearaway hurry,’ Uncle Joe said, ‘I was going to show you summat.’

  ‘About Shady?’

  ‘Well, it ain’t jistly like it used to be, but——’

  Uncle Joe pulled on the left rein. The pony reared a fraction, tossing its head, and went resentfully past a row of cottages, a duck pond and a field of sheep into a lane of budding hedgerows where speckled thrushes flew.

  ‘You see that there rick-yard?’

  The rick-yard was hard by a little spinney, a triangular one, of oak and hazel. There were no leaves on the oaks yet. Four or five straw stacks stood about the yard and the wind blew into them with swishing sea-sounds. It blew too at the branches of hazel catkins, already dying and dusty, the colour of old straw.

  ‘This,’ Uncle Joe said, ‘is where they catched up with him.’

  Beyond the stacks was a low cow-hovel, brick-walled, with a roof of faggots.

  ‘He was in the hovel. He was sort of half-layin’, half-hangin’ up in the roof, so they said. Bin there for days. Like a bat—you know.’

  ‘What had he done? Why was he there?’

  The pony was at a standstill now; it was puffing a little from running.

  ‘Done a murder.’ Uncle Joe took his pipe from his mouth and looked at the stem. A piece of string was tied round the end of the stem. It gave his front teeth something extra to bite on. ‘Well, fust they said it was murder.’

  ‘He killed somebody? A man?’

  ‘You got to remember,’ Uncle Joe said, ‘that he was a very proud feller, Shady. Proud as a turkey cock. You should ha’ seen him walking up the street, dressed up, straight as a ram rod, them big shoulders back. He had a wonderful head of hair too. You know what a bull looks like? It was like that—all massed and curly.’

  ‘The man—who was he? Did he kill him with a gun?’

  ‘No,’ Uncle Joe said. ‘
Fightin’. A man named Willis, Archie Willis. He said to Shady he was finished, no good no more, said he was a wash-out. Shady made no more to do but offered him out and they started fightin’. In the finish Shady picked him up and throwed him up again a wall. It broke his skull open. What would you have done, boy?’

  ‘Why is he here now? In the police court?’

  The pony was proving more than ever restless. It chipped with an impatient front hoof at the road.

  ‘Perhaps he’s been sleepin’ rough. Very likely he ain’t got the price of a bit o’ bread or a night’s doss on him. They can pull you for that.’

  ‘Couldn’t he ask somebody for a piece of bread? Aunt Nancy says there’s bread in the swill-tubs.’

  Uncle Joe, pulling on a rein, started to turn the pony round in the road, its hooves harsh on the dry metal.

  ‘You never knowed Shady, boy. Shady’d be too proud to ask a thing like that. He was a terrible proud man, Shady. I’ll be damned if he hadn’t got summat to be proud about an’ all. You know what? After he won that belt they’d have crowned him king if he’d let ‘em. They would, boy—crowned him king.’

  A king with a crown and a belt of gold—Shady, the great runner, the great fighter, the great proud man.

  ‘Gittup there,’ Uncle Joe said, making the pony break into impetuous cantering past the spinney of blowing oak and hazel. ‘Aunt Nancy’ll be mad if we ain’t there for pudden time.’

  By early evening the April wind was dying down. It no longer struck at the hay-stacks with swishing sea-sounds. The hazel catkins drooped, still and perpendicular, by the spinney side.

  In his pocket the boy had the little loaf that was sometimes like a mouse, at others like a pincushion but most of all like a toad with a pair of bright currant-black eyes.

  It would be nice, he thought, if Shady, with nowhere to sleep, decided to come back to the hovel. The bread was just an idea. He hadn’t eaten the loaf the night before because Aunt Nancy, in her shrilling, steamy way, kept saying it was too hot to eat at bed-time. New bread was bad for little boys at bed-time. It made them dream. It gave them nightmares.

  The bread was quite cold now. It was also very hard and he didn’t want it very much.

  There was no Shady in the hovel. There was nothing there but a broken corn-drill, a pile of chaff and a rusty length of corrugated iron. A mere whisper of wind blew now and then at the chaff, but that was the only sound.

  It was silly, perhaps, to think that Shady might be there, but it was just an idea. He would like to have seen, just once, for a moment, the great Shady, the uncrowned king with a belt of gold.

  Turning away from the hovel, across the rick-yard, he paused for a moment to stare at a pile of sacks laid at the foot of the third of the straw stacks. There was something odd about the sacks. They had a big yellow swede-turnip lying in the centre of them. There was something odd about the turnip too. It sprouted pale elderberry-coloured shoots and the shoots, in turn, were held by a discoloured hand.

  He wanted to say ‘Hullo’ to Shady. He wanted to say something about bringing him bread. But Shady, it seemed to him, was asleep. He was heavily embalmed under numbers of ragged sacks: two on his legs, another across his feet, two across his shoulders and another, like a hood, about his head. Wads of thick brown paper made a sort of waistcoat across his chest and several lengths of string held them in place there.

  Two familiar objects stood out from this paralysed heap of rags and bones: the moustache, grey now, that was like a bull’s horn and the frontal mass, matted and yellowish, of the curly, bull-like hair. There was no way of seeing the rest of the face. The head was drooped low, motionless either in sleep or thought, and the eyes were deep in shadow. It might have been, he thought, that a dead man was lying there.

  At the gate of the rick-yard he turned to look back. There was now nothing to tell, in the falling twilight, that a man was lying there at all. The wind made up the smallest of motions, mere whispers, in the straw.

  After some moments he put the little loaf on the top rail of the gate and left it there. It looked more than ever, he thought, like a waiting, watching, listening toad.

  When he turned again to look back from the side of the spinney the loaf too had become invisible in the April twilight. The sky was blue and clear and chilly. The wind had dropped completely and the straw stacks, so much the shape of the loaves that Nancy baked, stood as motionless as stones in a graveyard: marking in his mind, for ever, the place where Shady lay.

  The Yellow Crab

  Mr Pickering watched the crab emerge with sinister caution from its hole in the sand for the fourth time in fifteen minutes. It was quite unlike any other crab he had ever seen.

  The first time it had almost frightened him. He had not been prepared for the strange black periscope eyes that suddenly lifted themselves up on a pair of inquisitive feelers above the little yellow spider body. At one moment the hot white sand was deserted. The next the crab was there, fifteen inches away from his hand, watching him exactly as if it had trundled up at that precise spot to keep an engagement with him on the shore of the little bay.

  ‘Did you see the sun rise?’ Mrs Pickering said and carelessly he said, ‘Yes, over there,’ pointing due north-westward at the same moment as he whispered.

  ‘It was marvellous, quite marvellous,’ Mrs Pickering said, ‘All orange and rose,’ and in a moment the crab, marching backwards, swifter than any spider, was gone again in the sand.

  ‘Now you’ve frightened him away,’ he said.

  ‘Frightened who?’

  ‘He’s never been really right out yet,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘He comes so far and then he sees me. I always wondered what the little holes in the sand were and now I know. He’s got eyes like shoe-buttons on the top of sticks.’

  ‘Who are you talking about——’

  ‘Not so loud!’ Mr Pickering said. ‘I want him to come out again.’

  While he waited for another six or seven minutes, lying sideways on his face, watching the hole where the crab lay, Mrs Pickering made herself more comfortable in a shallow burrow in the sand. She stretched there plumply in a white silk bathing dress, her heavy legs and chest and shoulders a raw carmine red from the heat of sun and trade winds. Mr Pickering was much leaner, almost scraggy, and his taut skin had a neutral leathery sallowness that would not tan.

  ‘You ought to get your swim if you’re going to,’ Mrs Pickering said.

  He said, ‘Damn,’ in a whisper not loud enough for Mrs Pickering to hear. He had been perfectly sure the crab was coming up again at that moment. He felt sure he had caught the first glimpse of its sinister seedy eyes. Now it would be another five minutes, at least, before it made another try.

  ‘I think we should get an early lunch and then take the car and do the drive to Fern Gully,’ Mrs Pickering said.

  She was sitting upright now, fatly squabbed, rubber-fleshed, brushing white-pink crystals of sand from her arms and calves and shoulders.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t chatter,’ he said. ‘I want the crab to come out.’

  ‘Oh! it’s a crab,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I’ve seen hundreds of them.’

  ‘Not like this one.’

  ‘Is it yellow like a spider with sort of knitting needles on its head and it looks at you?’

  When Mr Pickering began to say that it was and how did she know? Mrs Pickering idly flicked shining particles of sand from her body, gazing at the parallel bars of blue and white made across the sea by the steady motion of trade winds beyond the sheltered basin of the bay.

  ‘I sat here all afternoon yesterday looking at them while you were over at the island. Rock Island or wherever it was. They come out when it’s quiet. What were you doing there?’

  Mr Pickering too sat up.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.

  He put his hand into the pocket of his cream gabardine trousers and threw over to Mrs Pickering something which fell without a sound into the powdery san
d.

  ‘Well, for heaven’s sake what is it?’ she said.

  ‘I bet you never saw one of those before.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘Look at it,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Take a good look at it. I bet you never saw one before.’

  Mrs Pickering gave a surprised fleshy laugh and said:

  ‘Well, my goodness, it’s some sort of dollar coin. Five!’ she said. ‘Five dollars.’

  ‘Gold,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘American.’

  ‘But we don’t have gold——’

  ‘And take a look at that,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Guess what that is.’

  He threw over to Mrs Pickering once again something which fell into dazzling soft sand without a sound.

  ‘This isn’t a dollar,’ she said. ‘This has got an animal or something on it. Sort of crocodile.’

  ‘Dragon,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘St George killing the dragon. You know—St George of England.’

  ‘You mean to say this is English?’

  ‘English sovereign,’ he said. ‘Gold. Used to be worth about five dollars. Now it’s worth double—treble, maybe.’

  With careful indifference Mr Pickering got up and began to take his trousers off. Underneath them he was wearing loose-fitting crimson swimming trunks on the left leg of which was embroidered a picture in blue and white of a diving girl. Mr Pickering folded the trousers neatly and then carefully walked across to his wife and laid them in the broad lap made by her pink-skinned thighs.

  ‘Look in the pocket,’ he said. ‘Go on. Take a look in the pocket.’

  Across the sand, beyond a line of hurricane-twisted palms, in front of the blue-walled hotel, a coloured boy in a white jacket was serving rum-punches to a group of sun-bathers lying under a vast orange umbrella. The sun flashed on the amber glasses, the tray and the silver tongs of the ice container as the boy lifted them.

  Mr Pickering pretended to watch all this with an absorbed but casual interest. In reality he was watching his wife slowly take from the pocket of his trousers seven dollar pieces and thirteen sovereigns.