Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Page 9

  Mrs Pickering straightened up at last from her position of enraptured patience by the concrete wall. The sea was almost dark now, pure indigo, the sky above it a soft-washed green fading, far up, to palest night blue. The colours of the parasite orchids could not be seen in the incense trees. The palms and the big striped aloes on the hotel terrace were simply blackened shadows.

  ‘I think that’s what you should do,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘I got a sort of feeling we came here just in time,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘A year or two back you’d never have gotten the chance of this stuff. Plenty of money about. They were holding on. Now money’s getting tight. Plenty tight. So they’re unloading. It’s the ground floor.’

  They had begun to walk down the rocky path from the high point of the promontory towards the hotel and the shore. Sea and sky were now almost joined in one dark blue mass together and the mountains, with their lower fringes of enormous palms, seemed to be on the point of stumbling into the sea.

  ‘I still don’t get why all these people have got these gold dollars and sovereigns to sell anyway,’ Mrs Pickering said.

  ‘You got to pay to keep mouths shut, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘See?’

  ‘I see.’

  Mr Pickering laughed in the warm darkness. A sudden turn of wind, like the enlarged echo of his voice, woke in the brittle fronds of the hurricane-bent palms a metallic chatter that ran out towards the dark surface of the sea.

  ‘Oh! Look!’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘The fire-flies! Making their signals!’

  Lying on the sand the following afternoon, Mrs Pickering watched the crab continually emerge from its neat hole with the same sinister caution as before. Several times during the afternoon it ran from the hole as much as ten or fifteen inches before it became aware of her and scuttled back. There was something horribly repulsive, she thought, about the way a crab ran backwards. Nor did she feel easy about the grotesque, upraised periscope eyes that seemed almost to swivel on the little yellow head. Each time they left her with the chilling impression that the crab was really a monster that time had dwarfed.

  She wished all afternoon that Mr Pickering would come. She had something to tell Mr Pickering. She did not know whether it was important or whether it was one of those things women just said for the sake of saying something, but she had been talking after lunch to a Mrs Archibald, a Vermonter. She had always understood that Vermonters were queer birds—somebody had once told her that Vermonters had all the eggs and butter and cream that they wanted during war-time simply because the idea of rationing was something no Vermonter could possibly stomach. She thought that was disgraceful and also that this Mrs Archibald was the type that buttonholed you in corners and kept you there whether you liked it or not.

  It was about the Maxted murder that Mrs Archibald had spoken. She and her husband had been on the island three years before and on that occasion there was a young woman from Chicago or St Paul or somewhere who was investigating the case—not officially, Mrs Archibald said, just poking her nose in.

  ‘And her they found wrapped up on the sea-shore,’ Mrs Archibald said. ‘In a sack.’

  As she heard this Mrs Pickering felt a stab of coldness drive through the centre of her spine. She guessed it was really that same feeling, uneasy and nervous and chilling, that she re-experienced every time the crab ran backwards towards its hole.

  By five o’clock she had begun to be uneasy too about Mr Pickering; she was certain he ought to be back. She was uneasy also about being alone on the deserted shore. Most people seemed to lie on their beds in the afternoon and for nearly three hours there had been no one on the sand but herself and the crab.

  Then soon after five o’clock she saw that in the quietness two herons, a young one and its mother, had come to fish along the shaken edge of sea. They were so delicate and pretty: so graceful, so unlike the crab. The mother had a dark dove-coloured sheen on her feathers and her legs were blue. The young bird had feathers of bottle green and its smaller body seemed cast on the water like the shadow of the larger bird.

  The sight of the birds, so delicate and undisturbed, calmed all of her feelings about Mrs Archibald, the crab and the young woman who had been found in a sack: so that when Mr Pickering at last appeared she had nothing to say but:

  ‘Oh! Ed dear, look at the birds. Look at their legs—just the colour of the sea so the fish won’t see them. And look at the baby one, the way it does what its mother does. Oh! I’ve had fun watching them.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘But wait till you hear——’

  ‘Oh! that’s all right. I’ve had such fun watching the birds. What did you do?’

  ‘The darnedest thing,’ Mr Pickering said.

  ‘On Cat Cay?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Right along the coast here.’

  ‘Oh! Look at the herons. Just look. The young one’s trying to catch something——’

  ‘Met a fellow named Wilson. Quite a piece of dark blood in him—you can see that. Just a nobody. Torgsen says his mother kept a house on the waterfront—this Wilson fellow was the result of some damn Glasgow deck-hand dropping in one time. Just scum.’

  ‘The young one is so pretty,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Incredible,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘He’s living like Croesus. Like Rockefeller. He’s got a palace along the coast here with onyx bathrooms and Louis Quatorze toilets and God knows what. He owns three sugar mills and two banana plantations and a steam yacht—Oh! and that reminds me, I knew there must be a woman in this somewhere.’

  ‘Why?’

  The two herons had paraded far along the shore and now had turned and were dreamily coming back.

  ‘Because Maxted was mad on them. He ran five or six at a time. You know what?—he’d hang about the harbour until he saw some popsie in on a cruise-ship that he fancied and then he’d take her home and give her a house and set her up. Not satisfied with one or two—but five or six. The big possessor.’

  ‘And is Mr Wilson fond of the ladies too?’

  Mr Pickering laughed.

  ‘You’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Mrs Pickering?’

  ‘I just thought.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mr Wilson is fond of the ladies. And it seems Mr Wilson and Mr Maxted were once fond of the same lady. A girl named Louie. In fact the week before Maxted was murdered they all spent a weekend on Maxted’s yacht. And now Louie is Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘That’s no surprise. Did you see her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And what made you go to see Mr Wilson anyway instead of going to Cat Cay?—Oh! look, the little heron is lost. It’s turned around the wrong way and can’t see its mother.’

  ‘Seems he’d heard of me, that’s all,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘He’s got big connections in insurance—and seems he’d even heard of us. Said he’d like to see me.’

  ‘And just you think, there are people who kill and stuff those lovely things and put them in glass cases—Oh! look at them!——’

  ‘You know what I think?—and I told Torgsen so. I think Louie killed Maxted.’

  Along the shore the parent heron, gazing down with dreaminess at the blue-green evening sea, seemed to be waiting for its young, and Mrs Pickering gave a quick cry of maternal delight.

  ‘They’re so intelligent too,’ she said. ‘You see, she knows!’

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Of course it might not be. But before Maxted was murdered Wilson hadn’t a bean. Just a hanger-on. But Louie had—Maxted had seen to that. And now Wilson has all the beans he needs and Louie too.’

  Suddenly along the shore the herons were flying. Mrs Pickering gave a cry of dismay and saw that two bathers were running down, carrying white and scarlet wraps, from the hotel to the sea.

  ‘They’ve frightened them away!’

  ‘That reminds me,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘I meant to have had my swim.’

  ‘Oh! it’s too late
now. Let’s walk instead. You can have your swim before breakfast.’

  ‘I guess the morning’s better,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Anyway I need more time—I got to practise with the new diving outfit Wilson lent me.’

  ‘Wilson lent you?’

  ‘It’s the latest thing,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Cost the earth and it’s pretty complicated. But you can stay under for a couple of hours. You should come diving, you know, it’s a beautiful new world down there. The colours are out of this world——’

  ‘I don’t swim that well,’ she said. ‘By the way, what about the gold? Where does that fit in?’

  The first breeze from landward, a mere breath, seemed to creep down the mountain slopes as Mr and Mrs Pickering turned to walk across the sand.

  ‘It could be Louie again,’ Mr Pickering said, ‘couldn’t it? Louie was the favourite girl when the gold was salted down. I’ll bet Louie knows where it is. And now and then, as I say, a little comes in handy for palm-oil.’

  ‘It’s too fantastic.’

  ‘I guess life is too,’ Mr Pickering said, ‘isn’t it? Those dollars and sovereigns have got to come from somewhere. And it’s smart for these boys to sell them when they can.’

  Mrs Pickering, hardly listening, turned to see if the herons had come back to the shore, but the two delicate figures, no more than stringless kites, were sailing seaward past the edge of the promontory.

  ‘By the way,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Did you see my friend the crab?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and in the humid evening she felt once again the quick cold stab of repulsion go thinly down her spine. ‘He was there. The ugly thing.’

  Next morning when Mr Pickering came down to the shore, about six o’clock, nothing moved there except the two herons gracefully wading along the bright shallow edge of sea. They flew up at his approach and settled farther along the white sea-flattened sand as Mr Pickering sat down to put his flippers on. Out on the expanse of rose-blue sea nothing moved except a small out-island fruit boat, slowly tacking with full white sail in the breathless air across the gold-pink path of rising sun.

  When Mr Pickering had fixed his flippers he once again had the appearance of a semi-naked, balding, upright frog. It took him some time to adjust the breathing apparatus, with its long curved tube and its big protuberant face mask, and to fix the oxygen bottle comfortably to his chest. He put on the mask and took it off again several times before it fitted.

  ‘The trouble is it’s so damn buoyant,’ Wilson had said. ‘You may find difficulty in stopping under. But you can get over that by carrying a weight or something. Put a basket on your back for your fish and put a rock in the bottom. That’ll hold you down.’

  ‘I never keep my fish with me,’ Torgsen said. ‘Spear ’em and bring ’em up—that’s what I say in these waters. I don’t want no shark sniffing for me.’

  ‘This thing’s different,’ Wilson said. ‘It’s designed for stopping down. You can stay down a couple of hours with no bother. There’s no point in keep coming up.’

  Just before Mr Pickering succeeded in fixing his oxygen breathing apparatus the long curved boat of the craw-fish boys drew smoothly past the end of the promontory. Mr Pickering waved his hand, but the two brown-skin boys, rowing quickly, were too far away to reply. When the boat had disappeared the sea was completely empty between the long dark reef and the curious half-frog, half-warrior figure of Mr Pickering, entering the water with his blue water-spear upraised in his hand.

  Soon, as the sun rose higher, it struck the black edge of the promontory of rock, heightening the startling yellow band of high-water mark. It flared too on the incense trees, lighting up the trailed butterfly ribbons of the rosy parasite orchid flowers. After nearly two hours it spread with full harsh whiteness on the entire shore, deserted except for the two herons daintily walking in the sea, the young one so like a green shadow of the other. It burned down on Mr Pickering’s bright-flowered abandoned dressing wrap and on his empty crimson shoes.

  And presently it fell too on the black eyes of the yellow crab, emerging with sinister caution from its hole in the sand—once again as if it had an appointment with Mr Pickering that Mr Pickering had not, for some reason, been able to keep after all.

  Daughters of the Village

  At noon the seven women stacked their hoes by the fence and sat on a bank of grass and broom, at the end of the sugar-beet field, where the track came up by a wood of hazels.

  ‘I’m goin’ a-sit more in the lew o’ the wood today,’ Ma Hawkins said. ‘I sat out there yesterday and the wind cut holes in me breeches.’

  ‘Puzzle it to cut through mine,’ Poll Sankey said. ‘I got two pair on. Me thick ’uns and me thin ’uns.’

  ‘Hark at old Poll!’ they all said. ‘Hark at Poll!—Poll’s off again.’

  Blue as water, pale and never still, a field of flax stirred with limp and tender waves below the field of sugar beet, cool green and glittering in the midday sun. Columns of sweet chestnuts in fresh dusty yellow flowers were piled high beyond it, crested with breezy summer cloud that swept big brushes of shadow across the long blue hollow.

  ‘I’ll git me joint out,’ Poll said. ‘Who wants a cut off me joint? Don’t all speak at once—and them as open their mouths don’t say nothing!’

  In the breezy air, cool for July, the laughing voices of the women were scattered like a crackle of crows.

  ‘Hark at old Poll!’ they said. ‘Hark at old Poll! Hark at her!’

  Ma Hawkins filled her mouth with beetroot until her lips were scarred with purple. ‘You can see where we bin today,’ she said. ‘We made a mark on ’em today.’

  ‘Jist as well,’ Liz Borden said. ‘A mite higher and they’ll strangle us.’

  Thistle and bind-weed and dock and fat-hen lay curled like a grey cast of snake-skins down the rows of beet, dying in the sun.

  ‘Gawd!—she must think I’m slimming!’ Poll said. ‘Look at it—one bit o’ bacon and half a yard o’ rind. Just like our Ma. Grabs up the first thing she sees and puts it between two bits o’ bread and calls it dinner. One day she’ll pack the cat up.’

  Liz Borden, grey and straight as a slit fence rail, said in a smeary voice that Poll had enough on her to last till Michaelmas if she never had another mite in her lips.

  ‘Me?’ Poll said. ‘There’s no fat on me. It’s what I’m saving up to get married with.’

  She slapped her hands on the tight broad front of her body, running them over the great curves of her hips and down the taut bulge of her thighs. Her eyes were fresh and black as berries in a big happy face of burnt rose colour, with strong white teeth and masses of tangled blue-black hair. When she laughed the sound came up from down in her throat like a coarse burst of brass, a deep fleshy trumpet call.

  ‘I’m just ripening off,’ Poll said. ‘That’s all. That’s how they like it.’

  ‘It ain’t all fruit as’ll keep,’ Liz Borden said.

  ‘No, and it ain’t all fruit as wants to.’

  ‘Good old Poll,’ they said. ‘Poll’s off again!’

  ‘Where’s Phebe?’ Ma Hawkins said. She was like a bag of sun-brown leather with a few windy bristles of grey sticking out from under the apron she had tied over her head.

  ‘In the wood,’ they said.

  ‘Pauline’ll soon be here,’ Cath Johnson said. ‘It’ll soon be time for Pauline to be here with the baby.’ She, the youngest, was eating pale red-orange cherries and hanging others, in pairs, on her small delicate ears, under close brown cushions of side hair.

  ‘Anybody dancing tonight?’ Poll said. ‘I think I’ll go. Help to fill the floor up.’

  Phebe Harlow, a tall high-cheeked girl with long fine legs and pale brown arms, came out of the wood and sat on the bank and began to comb her hair. The hair was blonde-yellow and smooth and she combed it down with slow fine strokes until it fell in a curtain over her lowered face.

  ‘Dancing tonight, Phebe?’ Poll said.

  ‘I might.’

/>   ‘I think I will if Harry’ll take me,’ Poll said.

  All of them except Phebe Harlow laughed about Harry. Everybody knew about Harry. Harry came across by the field once a day, perhaps twice, a gnome on an orange tractor, a little man with a flat black head and piercing doleful blue eyes that searched the skirts of the women and roved along the line of bodies bowed against cross-winds as they hoed the fields.

  ‘Harry’ll come if I ask him,’ Poll said.

  ‘Ask him!’ they said. ‘Go on—ask him!’

  ‘See me with Harry,’ she said.

  ‘Ask him—go on, Poll, ask him!’ they said. ‘He’ll be by at one o’clock. He’ll be coming by to the hay-field.’

  ‘See me dancing with Harry,’ Poll said. ‘His head wouldn’t come up to me belt. I’d laugh like a drain.’

  ‘See what he says—ask him,’ they said.

  Pairs of cherries danced deep orange on Cath Johnson’s ears and Phebe Harlow shook back her hair from her face and fingered pale gold strands of it left shining on the comb. Wind caught her hair and separated it suddenly into transparency, letting sunlight through it, turning it more white than yellow. She looked as if about to be blown away on skeined soft wings.

  ‘You want to be careful about laughing at men,’ she said. ‘That’s the way it starts.’

  ‘Not with me,’ Poll said. ‘I’m laughing all the time and it’s never started yet.’

  ‘My sister’s gal up at Ulcumbe laughed at a chap,’ Liz Borden said. ‘Met him in a pub and laughed at his neck-tie. She and two more gigglin’ bits o’ work stood and laughed at his neck-tie. Afore she knew where she were she married him and now she’s got four.’

  ‘That’s what I want to do,’ Poll said. ‘Laugh and have thousands of kids. Thousands of ’em. I’ve got to have kids. I’ve got to have a man.’

  ‘Harry!’ they said.

  ‘He’s so little I’d lose him in bed,’ she said.

  ‘Hark at Poll!’ they said. ‘Poll’s off! Poll’s off again.’

  ‘You be careful about laughing,’ Phebe Harlow said.