The Yellow Meads of Asphodel Read online

  ‘Did he try to escape?’

  ‘It was for that reason they shot him.’

  Once again she drank and now, after gazing into her glass, abruptly changed the subject.

  ‘Why are you so anxious to get a train? Must you go back to England to work? Have you a wife?’

  He confessed he had neither a job nor a wife.

  ‘Nor a reason.’

  No, he had to confess, nor a reason.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days? There is room. Anne Marie is a divine cook. There is wine. And if you get bored you can help me pick peaches.’

  ‘You have a way of making things sound idyllic.’

  ‘Anyway why not? Why rush? What is wrong with letting the world go by?’

  They sat drinking wine for another hour or more, a second bottle following the first. The wine was cold and light on the tongue and easy on the head and limbs. The restoration of his spirit presently became so complete that he suddenly leaned forward, put a hand on one of her knees, looked straight at her eyes and said:

  ‘I don’t even know your name. But I just feel I must thank you for all you have done for me today. I was ready to jump into the nearest lake – if there had been a lake.’

  ‘It is I who should thank you. After all I am quite alone here except for Anne Marie. It is good to have someone to talk to. My name is Louise.’

  It was nearly midnight before the excellence of Anne Marie’s dinner, more wine and a glass or two of Armagnac began to sweep him quietly but surely towards sleepiness.

  ‘You must sleep late tomorrow. If you need coffee or anything just ring the bell in your room and Anne Marie will bring it up.’

  They parted with a brief good night. She extended her hand and he shook it gently. Her eyes engaged him in a slow smile of enchantment in which there might have been the subtlest hint of invitation.

  ‘Good-night. Sleep well.’

  ‘And you. Sleep well. Dormez bien. Good-night.’

  He went upstairs. Before getting into bed he stood at the window and took a last look at the garden. A faint moon was setting, giving just enough light for him to detect odd objects here and there.

  Suddenly he saw her walking slowly along a path. Her yellow dress, bathed in the faint moonlight, had something both ethereal and unreal about it. The air contained no breath of wind and along the path the melons shone golden, like the moon’s reflections.

  He found it impossible to believe that it was past midday before he woke. He shaved, dressed himself, decided to forget about coffee and went downstairs. Neither Anne Marie nor Louise seemed to be in the house and he wandered into the garden, where the sun was already beating down with the ferocity of a torch.

  He finally detected the two women over on the far side of the garden, picking peaches from a wall.

  ‘We have so many peaches that Anne Marie is going to pickle some. Would you like breakfast?’

  ‘Thanks. I don’t think so. I’ll settle for a peach.’

  ‘What better? They are really superb. I hope you slept well?’

  ‘I spent the night in another world.’

  It wasn’t long before they were sitting in the house, again drinking the cold, fresh Rosé d’Arbois. Today she was wearing a simple blue skirt with an open-neck almost transparent blouse that made her look younger than ever. Her constant smile of enchantment captivated him even more than it had done the day before and soon he found himself slipping into the semi-coma of a daylight dream.

  ‘It’s nice to see you relaxing. That’s all you should do. It’s good for you.’

  For several days after this he obeyed her constant injunction to sleep late, take it easy and let the world go by. He luxuriated in long indolent afternoons made all the drowsier by wine. From time to time a brief thought of Maxie crossed his mind, only to be flicked away like a fly on a window pane.

  One morning, after about a week of this, he began to feel uncommonly restless. Instead of sleeping late he was downstairs before nine, to discover her, still in a dressing gown, having her café complet on the terrace in front of the house. Her pleasure at seeing him so early was expressed in a mock concern that she hoped he wasn’t getting into bad habits.

  As she poured his coffee he sat looking at the hills, not yet molten in the blistering sun as they would be by afternoon but a soft diaphanous grey that made them, for some reason, seem unusually near. And as he sat watching them he found himself assailed by an uneasy recollection of the prison camp in Germany. The hills also seemed to be imprisoning him. He was locked in. What was worse was a growing impression that he was not only locked in but that he would never get out. As in the prison camp he suddenly longed, almost painfully, to escape.

  ‘Well, I think this is the day,’ he said.

  ‘Day? What day? The day for what?’

  ‘The day to shake myself out of myself and get going.’

  ‘For what reason? You have no job. You have no wife—’

  ‘And, you forget, no money.’

  ‘I have money.’

  ‘I don’t sponge on my friends.’

  The hardening look on her face reproached him far more than any chorus of words could have done. In fact she made no attempt to speak again, the tension in the air all the time growing to such a pitch that finally he had to break the silence by saying:

  ‘Yes, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and pack.’

  She had no word to offer about this and he went upstairs. He had been sorting out his few belongings for something like five minutes when he heard a tap on the bedroom door and she came in.

  ‘I came to apologise for what I said about money.’

  ‘It’s I who should apologise.’

  ‘No, no. But I have money. Lots. My husband’s family were car manufacturers. He left oceans of shares.’

  ‘You see, I don’t need money. I have enough to get back.’

  ‘I was very, very tactless. I can never forgive myself for that.’

  To his infinite astonishment he realized that she was on the verge of tears. He took both her hands in his, looked straight at her tear-wet eyes and said:

  ‘But you’re crying. It surely wasn’t as tactless as all that.’

  In answer she released her hands and held his face in them. The gesture was so abrupt that the neck of her dressing gown fell apart, revealing her night-dress underneath. A moment later she started kissing him. The desperate nature of this took him so much by surprise that he was momentarily unprepared for another gesture from her. She seized his hands and held them against her breasts.

  ‘Lie on the bed with me,’ she said. ‘I will lock the door.’

  Some long time later, how long he hadn’t the capacity to calculate, she gave a long exultant sigh, pressing her breasts against him.

  ‘Have you loved many women?’

  ‘Very few.’

  ‘The fortunate few. The very fortunate few.’

  ‘Does that mean you want me to love you again?’

  ‘Of course. Naturally. Can you think of anything lovelier?’

  As summer cooled into autumn and then autumn to the edge of winter he found that they spoke to each other more and more in French. Often she praised his French. He was beginning to speak it well. His accent was good. She felt it brought them closer together.

  For him it forged a new sort of bondage. The sense of imprisonment was all the stronger but now there was no thought of escape. Life was now a Lotus Land of mornings in the garden, half-playing, half-working at trivial tasks, long wine-coloured afternoons and evenings of music prolonged by wine.

  ‘It’s beginning to get cold. We should go into Besançon and get you a good big warm overcoat.’

  ‘Do you get snow here?’

  ‘Oh! the Juras will be covered in snow.’

  The arrival of the first snow, late in November, was another instrument of bondage. Now he scarcely ever left the house. The habit of sleeping late renewed itself with consummate ease. Now that snow covered the ground
such little initiative as he had once had dissipated itself altogether and work in the garden came at last to a standstill. He found himself drinking more and more heavily and in consequence putting on weight. His mind began to feel fatty too.

  Was he happy? she would ask him from time to time.

  Yes, he would say. A more truthful answer would have been that he was not happy but possessed. The fact that he was a mere possession of hers wasn’t to be brought home to him for some long time yet, but meanwhile who was he to argue against the life she had chosen for him to lead?

  Spring started at last to melt the snows. Fragile, magic carpets of crocus appeared, white and mauve and gold.

  ‘We should take the car one afternoon and drive up into the Juras and walk in the woods and see the wild flowers.’

  ‘Is it necessary?’

  ‘It will do you good.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to be done good to.’

  ‘Funny boy. You make me laugh sometimes.’

  There were times when he, by contrast, felt very far from laughing. Sometimes in the mornings, after some heavier session of wine and cognac, he would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and try to address himself dispassionately.

  ‘You degenerate-looking sod. She’s right. You should take a walk in the woods sometimes. Bloody bloated, that’s what you look.’

  From time to time he thought of England, of his mother and father. It was the time of year when his father would be potting up his chrysanthemums. He wondered what his parents’ thoughts were and told himself that he ought to write to them.

  What would he say? ‘I am in prison. On Easy Street. Lap of luxury. Marvellous food and wine. Nothing to do. Beautiful country. Plenty of money. Passionate woman. What more can a man ask than that?’

  A conscience stifled by wine and indolence relieved him of the task of writing even a single letter. It was, as Louise so often said, so much simpler to let the world go by.

  One warm spring day Louise drove home from the nearest town and presented him with a green baize apron.

  ‘And what the devil is this for?’

  ‘It’s for you, the gardener. Now you can really look the part.’

  ‘You’re damn right I can.’

  After putting on the apron he did in fact look the part. ‘Bloody hired servant,’ he told himself, ‘that’s what I look like. Perhaps that’s what I am.’

  Hired? Possessed? In bondage, out of bondage? Did it matter? The days were rapidly growing warmer. There were little downy green peaches on the garden walls.

  A few mornings later she met him in the garden, along the path where big orange-yellow melon flowers were already flaunting themselves wide open in the sun.

  ‘Would you like a nice, pleasant, easy task for today?’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘The peaches need thinning. Unless we do that the fruit will be too small. It’s very easy. You can take your time.’

  He put on his green apron and turned his attention to the peaches while she went back into the house. It was exactly as she had said: a pleasant, unarduous task. The sun was not yet torrid although the hills, seeming to brood near again, held promise of heat for the afternoon.

  He had been working at the peaches for an hour or so when he was aware of a figure walking towards him along the path by the wall: a tallish, good looking man of fifty or so in a light-weight cream suit, his face deep bronze under his still black hair.

  ‘Ah, I am looking for madame. She is here?’

  Caught unawares and momentarily forgetting himself he replied in English.

  ‘I think she is in the house.’

  ‘In that case I will go and search for her. You are English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, madame is lucky to have an English gardener. I have always heard how good the English are at gardens. Have you been with her long? I have been away in Martinique for a year. Ah! there is madame now. Louise!’

  Louise was coming up the path that ran alongside the melon flowers. Seeing her visitor she gave an excited exclamation, ‘Pierre! Oh! Pierre,’ threw her hands high and wide in the air and started running. Her visitor started running too and a moment or two later they met by the melon flowers, locked in embrace, she kissing him openly on the lips as she might have kissed some long-lost lover.

  Oblivious of Roger Stiles she and Pierre joined arms, both laughing with excitement, and then turned and went into the house. Even as they disappeared he could still hear their ringing, excited laughter.

  For some time he stood by the peach wall without moving, simply staring at three or four downy immature green peaches lying in the palm of his hand. When he finally did move and look up it was to be assailed once again by the imprisoning effect of the brooding hills.

  In an effort to rid himself of the stifling notion of being locked in he walked along the path to where the wall ended. There he stopped and locked his hands together and held them against the top of the wall. They were trembling violently, so much so that he could no longer hold the little peaches and let them fall to the ground.

  In a daze through which he could scarcely see the imprisoning hills he started talking to himself.

  ‘What’s that damn poem? No, not the one about everything comes to him who waits. Not that one. No, another. I learnt it at school. Can’t remember who wrote it now. “Stone walls do not a prison make”. Stone walls – stone walls – do not a prison—’

  Loss of Pride

  My uncle Silas, all his life, was very fond of a baked potato. Whenever I walked over to see him on cold midwinter nights, when roadsides were crisp and white with hoarfrost and you could hear cold owl-cry haunting the woods, his first words were almost always: ‘You git the taters, boy, while I git the wine.’

  He was always very particular, I noticed, about how the potatoes were cooked. ‘Course they’re better in a twitch fire,’ he often said, ‘when it’s died down a bit and you can poke ’em into that hot ash. You git that burnt taste in ’em then and it teks a bit o’ beatin.’

  But in the absence of twitch fires he did the next best thing. At the side of his kitchen fireplace there used to be one of those big baking ovens, large enough to hold a side of mutton, where in the old days faggots were lit for baking bread. When the fired faggots had died down the big pink-and-white kidney potatoes, pricked all over with a fork, went into the bed of ash and soon the little kitchen was sweet and warm with the smell of their cooking.

  ‘Ever tell you about Pouchy Reeves and the baked taters? Bin a minute – very like I never did. The smell on ’em allus brings it back.’

  In winter time we almost always drank elderberry wine, sometimes slightly mulled if the nights were very cold, and it was generally at about the third or fourth glass that some reminiscence, far out of the past, began.

  I said I didn’t think he had; nor, I thought, had I ever heard of Pouchy.

  ‘Shoemekker. Hand-craft. Bit of a dab hand, I’ll grant him that. But knowed it – bit of a toff in a way, what shoemekkers used to call notch-above-a-tapper. Very cocky. Fancy westkits and walking sticks and big button-holes of a Sunday. Too high and mighty for the rest of us chaps.’

  Here he licked a drop of wine from his lips with what I thought was no innocent relish and I proceeded to remark that it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to hear that Pouchy, with such a splendid array of attractions and accomplishments, was also a great one with women.

  ‘Never ’eerd nothing else. Wimmin mornin’, noon and night. He wur a-gittin’ on ’em into hayfields and stackyards and straw-barns and stables and I don’t know wheer so fast you’d a thought he never had a minute fer shoemekking left. Young and old. Let ’em all come. Used to reckon he had two sisters in the same bed one turn over at the old mill-house at Shelton Cross.’

  I at once remarked that this seemed to be a matter of very serious rivalry and in return he gave me a look, over the top of his wine-glass, that was almost pious in the bland severity of its rebuke.<
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  ‘Now, hold hard. I’ve had a few gals in me time, one way an’ another, but like I allus tell you – I wur never arter them, they wur allus arter me.’

  ‘A very subtle difference.’

  He said never mind about a very subtle difference, but when you got a man boasting he had two gals in bed at the same time and another up in the church belfry while the Sunday evening service was on and another in one corner of a wheatfield while her husband was mowing and bonding in another then you started to wonder.

  ‘Another thing. Like I say, I’ve had a gal or two in me time and some fair samples among ’em too but I never done no poachin’. But Pouchy – he wur different. He liked nickin’ on ’em from other chaps. It wur more fun.’

  He then went on to ask me if I knew The Swan with Two Necks at Nenweald and the two old tits who kept it? When I said I did he said:

  ‘Never think they was sisters, would you? Nell, she’s like a damn great bean-pole and arms like a man. Lucy looks like a bit dropped off her, a real dillin. Course they’re gittin’ on a bit now but in my day Nell’d chook a man outa the bar as easy as spit in your eye. I seed her chook a man named Butch Waters out once, big labourin’ man, fists like legs o’ mutton. He never ony bounced once but it wur enough. He wur out cold as a gravestone fer a night and a day.’

  After what was really an uncommonly long speech for him he took a good long draught of elderberry, refilled the glasses, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and then opened the oven door to see how the baked potatoes were coming on. A hot delicious fragrance floated through the open oven door and he gave a great smacking sniff at it and then pressed first one potato and then another with his thumb.

  ‘Give ’em another ten minutes. Git the butter and the salt, boy, then we’ll be ready for ’em. Plenty o’ butter.’

  And what, I now wanted to know, having found the salt cellar and a big brown crock of butter, had the old tits to do with Pouchy?

  ‘Well, they wad’n old then. I’m talkin’ abut fifty year back. Very like more. In them days Lucy wur an uncommon good-lookin’ gal, but freckly, like a thrush’s egg.’