The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories Page 9

  Then Clarkey remembered another question. It had troubled him for a long time.

  ‘What do they call yer Uncle for? Are yer Uncle to somebody special or summat?’

  Uncle gave a sort of negative grunt, barely audible above the sound of the banjo, in answer.

  ‘Ain’t yer Uncle to nobody?’

  ‘No,’ Uncle said. The tune had ended for the third time, his voice low but audible now.

  ‘Ain’t yer got no folks then?’ Clarkey said.

  ‘No,’ Uncle said. ‘I ain’t got nobody.’

  ‘Nobody nowhere?’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said, and now the tune, which seemed to have on Uncle an almost intoxicant effect, began again, fining the raw edges of Clarkey’s impatience so that he turned swiftly in the grass.

  ‘Can’t yer give the music a rest now? I wanna get some sleep. It’s bin a hell of a hot day.’

  ‘H’mph, this ain’t hot,’ Uncle said. ‘When we was out there, in Africa, it was a hundred and ten sometimes. And still with it. Quiet. Terrible still and quiet at nights. You got so’s you slept easy and woke easy.’

  ‘You git over it later?’

  ‘No. I never got over it. I sleep as light as a kid now.’

  Clarkey lay tense, thinking. Now he had an idea. He began to unlace his boots. The sound of the banjo had ceased and it was silent and dark now, the figure of Uncle like a quiet and expressionless shadow as he moved across to put away the banjo in the pram.

  ‘I think I’ll change my mind,’ Clarkey said, ‘and go and wash my feet. They hurt like hell.’

  He shuffled across the grass in his unlaced boots, then stopped and turned.

  ‘You goin’ get some sleep now?’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said. ‘Perhaps I will.’

  Clarkey went down the track and into the field. He sat down on the edge of the small stream, low now after days of heat, and then took off his boots and socks and let his feet rest in the water. As he sat there, in the now almost full summer darkness, with the water stinging his feet, he could hear nothing at all but the occasional rush of a car passing on the road beyond the wood.

  Then he heard something else. It was the little tune being played once again by Uncle. The sound of it maddened him, and the edges of his impatience were stripped raw again as he waited for it to end.

  It ended after a moment or two and he waited tensely for it to begin again, his feet out of the water now, his sharp face turned upward, listening. He waited for three or four minutes, but there was no sound. He dried his feet on the handkerchief that he wore round his neck and then put on his socks and waited again. He knew how easily Uncle slept. He would be asleep in ten minutes, perhaps less. He put on his boots and laced them and then stood up. His feet felt light and cool and his hands were slightly stretched forward, ready to give him direction in the darkness.

  He gave Uncle twenty minutes, as near as he could tell. Then he walked out of the field and back along the track, with his habitual ladylike springing steps exaggerated by the need for quietness. He reached the place under the sloe-bushes where the solid shadows of the pram and Uncle were just distinguishable, side by side. He listened and it seemed to him that Uncle was asleep. He stood for a moment and then lifted the sacking of the pram. With the tips of his fingers he grasped the banjo and took it out. He knew that he had not made a single sound, that no single sound would now be necessary. Listening, he stood for a moment longer, and then moved away.

  As he moved, the edge of his jacket very slightly struck the pram. Unbalanced on its three good wheels, the pram rocked a little, creaking the rusty springs.

  A moment later he knew that Uncle was awake. He stirred and grunted and Clarkey, suddenly very frightened, began to run. He had not moved five yards before Uncle was lumbering after him.

  In the instant that Uncle grabbed at him by the shoulders in the darkness it seemed to Clarkey that he reached the culminative point of all the day’s impatience and anger, the extreme limit of pain. It was as if the long lines of poppies rose up again out of the darkness and struck him on the eyes. He felt his body flare up to a sort of frightened fury. Without knowing what he was doing he was swinging the knife.

  He had not swung it more than once or twice before he felt the enormous cumbersome arms of Uncle close round him from behind. He had already dropped the banjo. Now he tried desperately to drop the knife. He could not do it because of the strength of Uncle’s arms, which seemed to be crushing in his ribs, and suddenly he felt the knife force its way into his chest.

  The huge powerful arms of Uncle went on squeezing him until he dropped, his breath choked so that he could make only a queer falling dribble of sound. As he fell and lay in the grass, Uncle stood away from him, bewildered, not fully knowing what had happened.

  It occurred to him after a time to light a match. In its light he saw Clarkey lying at his feet. He did not know what to do. He stood with his heavy mournful eyes fixed on Clarkey and his slow tortoise hands suspended with dumb bewilderment and pain.

  Finally he moved. He shuffled heavily forward. The match had gone out and in the darkness his feet struck against the banjo, lying in the grass.

  As he did so he heard it give out a little mournful and ghastly twang of sound, like a dying complaint, that recalled for him the voice of his dead friend.

  A Scandalous Woman

  In the days when he lived with his father and mother in the little Midland town, among the chapels and the factories, he would lie awake on hot summer nights and listen to the sound of late voices beating on the streets below like an uneven tide. In those days, before the wars, life was more robust, more physical, and yet in a sense more serene.

  One summer, while he was still a boy, there was a great scandal about a woman named Anderson. He first knew that she was a scandalous woman because people, and also his father and mother, talked of her as if she had no name. They did not call her Lily Anderson or even Miss Anderson, but always her or she. She was a soprano singer. When she was about eighteen or nineteen she would take a solo every Sunday in the chapel choir: something very heavily moving like ‘Ave Maria’ or ‘Abide with Me’, or very tender, like ‘With Verdure Clad’. But in a little provincial choir it is not singing that takes first place. In those days there was a great struggle among the female singers to get, and keep, a place in the front row of the choir stalls, so that sometimes the choir looked, from the pews below, like a great barricade of entrenched bosoms defending their hard-won positions. The arrival of Lily Anderson in the middle of the front row was an assault on those positions that created a great jealousy.

  Up to that time there had been nothing very remarkable about Lily Anderson except that she was a nice singer. She was still only a girl, with black-brown eyes and hair and a rather solid little figure. Only her mouth seemed mature: heavier and riper than the rest of her body.

  Then the scandal began. The minister of that day was a young man named Hadfield who was unmarried. He lived all alone in the manse with no help except a daily woman who came in to cook his breakfast and left in the early evenings. In a little provincial town it is a good thing for a minister to know, and cultivate, the right kind of people. The Reverend Hadfield ate the dull cold suppers of the local leather merchants and manufacturers and avoided treading on the toes of the Church Council. There was a family named Pendleton, a leather factor and his wife and their one daughter, who as standards went in the district were very rich. The daughter had pale green flabby eyes like grapes that have lost their texture, and she wore brown stockings. It had been taken for granted, in an inconclusive kind of way, that in time he would marry her, but things turned out rather differently.

  Perhaps the trouble arose out of the fact that he played the piano very well, and that Lily Anderson needed an accompanist. That summer it was very hot and Lily Anderson began to be seen going into the manse two and three and sometimes four evenings a week, wearing cool light summer dresses. As these visits became known they began to assum
e in the minds of the Pendletons and those entrenched in the front rows of the choir a strong flavour of ripe scandal.

  By the end of that summer Lily Anderson was no longer singing solos in the choir. The boy who lay awake at night, listening to the sound of feet and voices beating like small summer night-waves on the street below, hardly knew what it was all about. He did not know quite why it was scandalous for a man to play the piano in a house so that a girl could practise her singing there.

  But if this was a scandalous thing, there was something much more scandalous. From things he heard his mother and father and other people say he knew that Lily Anderson was still singing. But she was no longer singing for love or in the service of God; she was no longer singing pieces like ‘Ave Maria’ or ‘With Verdure Clad’. She was singing songs like ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand’ and ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ in all the pubs and clubs of the town, and she was singing them on Sundays. In those days that was a wickedly scandalous thing.

  In a year a young girl can change a great deal. When he saw Lily Anderson again it was early summer. He was walking in the town park with his father and mother on a Sunday afternoon. Crowds of people were standing or walking about the grass, listening to the Rifle Band. The chestnut-trees, their leaves heavy in the sultry May sunshine, were in full blossom; the scent of many pink hawthorn trees was heavy and almost sickly on the air; the sun was bright on the silver instruments and the blue uniforms. Suddenly he saw the faces of people turning to look back at something in the crowd, and after a moment he saw a woman walking alone across the grass. She was wearing a white silk dress with a big black hat, large jet earrings, and long black open work gloves reaching to the elbows of her plump white arms. Her ripe heavy lips were pouted slightly, with proud sulkiness: it was Lily Anderson.

  As she came across the grass under the chestnut-trees that were full of erect white and pink blossom it struck him that she was very beautiful. She had changed too. Now she had a deliberate and rather flashy haughtiness. Her figure had filled out, and the long white dress was cut so that when the breeze blew against the skirt the deep ripe lines of her legs were for an instant firmly and clearly carved. Much later it struck him too that she looked rather lonely: lonely, wounded, on the defensive. At the time it seemed to him that she could not have been more spectacular if she had been smoking a large cigar.

  Later, from the way his mother and father talked, he got the impression that even the smoking of a cigar was not beyond her. But it was more than a year later before he saw her again. He was lying awake one evening when about eleven o’clock he heard a scrambled shouting of voices from the street below. He heard the boisterous arguments of men split by the screams and giggles of women, and then finally a burst of singing. It was the singing, slightly tipsy and wild, which made him get up and go to the window and look out. The street was still not dark. The summer night was very quiet and the singing was so clear and close that he recognized at once whose clear soprano voice it was. It seemed to him like a voice flung in defiance at the rows of silent, lightless, respectable houses.

  That was almost the last he heard of Lily Anderson before she got married. That in itself was a kind of inverted scandal. Whether all the stories of her and the kind of men she kept company with were true or not he did not know, but in the end she got married, very suddenly, to a baker.

  The baker’s name was Brown: a small, bony-wristed man with the flesh of a plucked hen. Long hours in the bakery had turned him prematurely bald; his ragged floury moustache fell into his mouth. They used to say that he had once been a pastry-cook in a first-class establishment, and now and then there would suddenly appear in the bakehouse window a splendid, ornate iced cake inscribed with beautiful lettering for a wedding or a birthday, with a roughly printed card beside it, ‘Made to Order’.

  As the time went on there were children. The youth would see them crawling up and down the dirty stone steps of the bakery. The windows of the shop were never cleaned and the contents never really changed. Dusted with a heavy grey bloom of flour, nothing new appeared behind them except the occasional wedding cake and sometimes a greasy cooked ham with its frill of crinkled paper. Somewhere behind the dirty flour-dust, the cobwebs, the ham and the cake, Lily Anderson had shut herself away.

  Several years later, grown up, he went into the shop for the first time. Visitors had dropped in late and unexpectedly one summer evening at his mother’s house, and she wanted to cut sandwiches. Though it was late he went out in order to try to buy a sandwich loaf and some ham. It was too late for most of the shops and it was some time before he thought of the baker’s.

  As he walked down the streets of houses he could smell the heavy odour of may-blossom from the surrounding gardens; he could see the white spires of chestnut bloom faintly luminous in the twilight air.

  In the window of the bakehouse the shelves of board covered with dirty oil-cloth were empty. He pushed open the half-glass door and the spring-bell rang in the silence. The bakehouse was almost in darkness except for a blue jet of gas-flame by the doors of the closed ovens. The fires were low but in the air there remained a warm close smell of bread.

  Some moments after the bell had stopped ringing he heard footsteps. Coming along the passage from the house they slopped on bare brickwork. He waited by the dusty counter. The brass latch of the door leading to the house was lifted at last, and in came Lily Anderson.

  She put her tired dirty hands on the counter and looked at him. ‘Well, what for you?’

  ‘I wondered if you could let me have a sandwich loaf and some ham. I know it’s late, but – ’

  ‘I got a loaf, but I dunno about ham.’

  She walked across the bakehouse to get the loaf from a batch that stood on a closed kneading-trough. She walked slowly, slopping, as if her feet hurt her, and as she came back, saying, ‘How much ham did you want then?’ he recalled the day, fifteen years before, when he had seen her walking proudly and defensively under the chestnut trees in the park. He recalled how much he thought she had changed in one year and how beautiful she was. Now he looked at her face. It had the sullenness of dough beaten into incomplete submission. The dark hair had partially fallen down, the dark eyes had no light or beauty or uprightness in them. The heavy lips were sour.

  ‘Well, there’s your loaf.’ She put the loaf down and then reached under the counter. ‘This is about all the ham I got,’ she said. ‘It ain’t much.’

  She set down on the counter a meat dish containing the end of a ham-bone still decorated with its pink frill of paper.

  ‘How much did you say y’ wanted? It ain’t much I know. But it’s all I got.’

  ‘About a pound,’ he said.

  She wiped her hands on her dirty pinafore and then picked up the ham-bone by the frill, turning it over.

  ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘Whyn’t you take the bone as it is? You’ll get a lot o’ meat off it yet.’

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  ‘A shilling won’t hurt, will it?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it.’

  As she wrapped up the ham-bone, she lifted her face. ‘Keep the frill on?’ she said, ‘or don’t you want it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Keep it on,’ he said.

  The sullen shoulders drooped again over the wrapping of the parcel. The dark eyes were lifted no higher than the palm of his hand as he held out the money.

  ‘That’s just right,’ she said.

  He thanked her, and said good night.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She stood with her heavy, shapeless body pressed against the counter, and then with a sort of sullen indifference, but without another movement or a word, watched him go.

  Outside, slightly pausing, he turned and glanced back at the fly-blown windows, the cobwebs and their light grey powdering of flour. But the woman had gone now and beyond the windows there was visible in the falling darkness only the great closed doors of the oven and the small light of the almos
t extinguished flame.

  Love is not Love

  I

  Accidentally, almost against her will, Lilian Jordan fell in love one spring time with a man named Harry Travers. Sometimes she could not imagine how it had come about, unless perhaps it was because Travers had a wooden leg.

  At that time she was working from nine to five in the offices of a wholesale garment factory: a girl with a sensitive oval face, creamy brown skin and extremely kind, trustful brown eyes, a girl of brave and gentle temperament, who kept much to herself. In another room, on a lower floor, there worked a young man named Arthur Austin, who suffered from pimples on his face, and who from time to time, when she was out of the room, brought her notes which he laid on her desk with casual and painful secrecy. Like all the girls she laughed at Austin, and for some time it did not occur to her that he too might be in love.

  One day, before she met Travers, she was persuaded by Austin to go out to lunch with him. At the small cafe round the corner they had a course of meat and vegetables, followed by tapioca pudding. At first she hardly noticed that Austin did not eat much; then she saw his pale grey eyes begin to turn a watery yellow and his lips become gradually dry and nervous, and suddenly she sensed that he was about to declare his love for her over the tapioca. For some moments she went on eating as if she had not noticed anything, unable in reality to look at the nervous pimpled face, the eyes sick with an emotion they could not otherwise express and the red bony hands hovering with painful inertia above the already cold white pudding.

  Suddenly, with great abruptness, Austin began to say what he felt about her. She heard a rush of earnest, entangled words that left her cold. ‘Can’t you come out with me sometimes, please, just for a walk, come to the pictures, I know I’m not much, I know I’m not much, but you can come sometimes, can’t you please, can’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.’

  ‘Why not? Please, why can’t you?’ He kept smoothing his dark straight hair fiercely with the palm of his hand; in the hope, evidently, of looking stronger and more determined. ‘Please, why not?’