Dance and Skylark (5 page)

“Exactly. But we had to accept that in order to export at all.”

“Then why export?”

“To earn dollars. It seemed a good thing to do.” And indeed he had done so for the same unformulated reason that in 1939 he had joined the Army.

But Miss Foulkes clicked her tongue. She disapproved of dollars.

“And look where it's got us,” she said. “We missed the home market when the home market was good, and now the Americans don't want our stuff any more. So we've made the worst of both worlds.”

“Yes, I've been a mug, I dare say.” He grinned wryly. “I'll have to tackle the dear old Bank again.”

“The Bank!” That was another thing she disapproved of. Every Monday she had to go to the Bank to pay in; every Friday she went there to draw the money for the wages: and on these occasions she entered the place with the air of a teetotaller who is compelled to visit a pub or a very Low Churchman whose painful duty of sightseeing takes him into Saint Peter's at Rome. As such a one would
sniff the incense, so sniffed Miss Foulkes at the odour of high finance. Disdainfully she stood at the counter with her sharp nose in the air, disdainfully and without a word of thanks she received the packets of notes and the paper bags of coins, deliberately counting them three times as if to demonstrate her mistrust of the whole capitalist system.

“The Bank!” she repeated, in that superior and dismissive tone which she reserved for the objects of her ideological disapprobation. John had once amused himself by mentally making a catalogue of them: Banks and Yanks, foxhunting, debutantes,
Punch
, Boy Scouts, beefsteaks, Saint George.… He suspected that she secretly disapproved of balloons also, since it was frequently their destiny to be popped by drunken revellers at night-clubs, and of beach-balls, since the Idle Rich were apt to play with such idle toys when they disported themselves on the Riviera.

And yet, oddly enough, he liked her. The complexities and nuances of character, which he didn't understand, always puzzled and disquieted him; so he would pick out from a person's make-up some simple virtue and cling to his belief in it for dear life. In Miss Foulkes' case the virtue was loyalty. It was a loyalty, he knew, which he shared with the Communist Party; and this amused him, since he didn't take politics very seriously. If at some time in the fantastic future the Communist Party should take it into its crackpot head to order Miss Foulkes to blow up the factory, then poor Miss Foulkes, he imagined, torn asunder, schizophrenic, would probably go mad. Meanwhile he found a strange comfort in her loyalty, and now that things were going badly he relied upon it more and more.

“Bank or no Bank,” he said, “we'll carry on, shall we, until we're down to that last halfpenny in the Petty Cash?”

She nodded, unsmiling, for she didn't think there was anything funny about the halfpenny.

“We'll make a few thousand elephants on spec,” he said. “Elephants always do go well at Christmas. Or shall it be pigs?”

“Pigs were more in demand last year.”

“Shall we put a squeak in them?”

“It adds to the cost, but they go better with a squeak.”

“Our last dying squeak.” Still she did not smile. “Now I'll go and tell Jim to change the formas. You'd better put those roses in water,” he said.

The salmon-pink blush rose like a tide up her neck and arms and he hurried to the door, aware once again of her vulnerability, puzzled and embarrassed by it because it didn't fit in with the rest of her, it was one of those complexities which he didn't understand.

The Committee Meeting, that typically and terribly English thing, had been going on for nearly two hours, and Stephen's wounded knee, cramped under the table, was nagging him like a toothache. The end was not yet in sight.

Originally the Committee had consisted of eight; but its membership had been doubled by the co-option of people who were said to have “felt hurt.” To-day there were several new members whom Stephen did not even know. The deliberations of this multitude, as it seemed to him, followed a course as tortuous as that of the town's own river. They meandered, they ran in circles, they tied themselves in knots; unpredictable cat's-paws of wind rippled them and uncharted currents stirred their depths. A proposal to insure against rain had just given the Vicar an excuse to deliver a considerable sermon on the subject of anticyclones. Stephen, who had heard it several times before, let his mind wander away while the voice of the Vicar bumbled on and a distant cuckoo mocked the whole proceedings through the open window.

His thoughts went back through time and space to a spring morning in 1944, that had been full of unseen cuckoos too, and to an olive-grove in Thessaly. The occasion was the only one in his life when he had been really important; and his importance was due to the fact that a crumpled parachute lay in folds at his feet and he held a tommy-gun in his hands. Until that moment he had been a very ordinary person: in peace-time a history master at second-rate prep schools eking out his miserable pay by conducting archæological tours to Greece every summer holidays, in war-time a clerkly intelligence officer, one more dogsbody among all the dogsbodies on the swollen staff at Cairo. Then, quite suddenly, he had been translated—there was no other word for it—into a sort of Prometheus; for he brought fire from heaven, in the shape of grenades and
mortar shells, to the men who had fought for years with old rifles and their bare hands. For thirteen months he had lived like an Olympian; until on VE-day a bone-shaking lorry had carried him back to Athens with a shattered knee, back to the ordinariness of hospital, demobilisation, unsuccessful bookselling, and small-town Committee Meetings at which the subject under discussion at the moment was, of all things, horse-manure.

“A dollop of muck,” Mr. Handiman was saying, “from the Council's stables would do 'em a world of good.”

Nearly two years ago, when the Festival was first mooted, Mr. Handiman the ironmonger had received a poetic inspiration, although at the time he was fishing with maggots for eels. Born of the sunshine and the buttercups, it had concerned flowers: let every cottage garden at Festival-time put on a special display, let every street corner blossom its welcome to the visitors from afar! When he began to elaborate this pretty notion, his thoughts naturally turned to roses, red roses and white, the favours of Lancaster and York. The ancient borough should be embowered in roses! The Council, in a mood of midsummer madness, had approved the idea and passed a resolution asking every gardener to plant roses where they could be seen from the streets. More daring still, it had even voted a halfpenny rate as a contribution towards the cost. The imaginative gesture had earned the town a good deal of free publicity, including a neatly-turned fourth leader in
The Times;
and the only protests had come from Miss Foulkes, who wrote to Mr. Runcorn pointing out that the workers couldn't eat roses, and from Mr. Gurney, who unkindly drew
attention to the fact that Councillor Noakes was in business as a nurseryman and florist.

But now Mr. Handiman's innocent suggestion about a free dollop of muck for the roses seemed to cause some embarrassment to the Mayor, who at last had to admit that Councillor Noakes regularly took away the horse-manure “under a long-standing arrangement.” Stephen was aware of deep currents stirring as Mr. Gurney demanded “What does he pay for it?” and Councillor Noakes shouted “I protest!” The argument went on for quite a long time, with the Mayor patiently explaining that there were only two old horses which pulled the dust-carts “so the amount involved is really very small,” and Mr. Gurney muttering something about “wheels within wheels.”

“The next item on the agenda,” said the Mayor swiftly, “is headed ‘Sideshows.'” And at once there rose up a large lady in furs and feathers who observed—and Stephen could hardly believe his ears—that she was the President of the Fur and Feather League, and what about an exhibition of chinchilla rabbits? During the subsequent silence Stephen took pleasure in watching the expression on Lance's face; for the young poet, whose bright new world was brimming over with fascinating absurdities, was delighting in the discovery of a new one, and had plainly taken the furry lady to his heart. He stared at her in an ecstasy of wonder, oblivious of Robin, who had a simpler sense of fun and was poking him in the ribs with a pencil.

“I'm not absolutely certain,” murmured the Mayor, “although of course we want to encourage all local activities, whether
rabbits
… But perhaps you'll have a
word with Mr. Tasker about it afterwards?” And with a kindly glance at Stephen he passed on to the next item, which concerned the unveiling of a statue of Dame Joanna, poetess and prioress, in the Pleasure Gardens.

Stephen, who had been growing steadily more apprehensive about the Festival for several weeks, felt that the prospect of a rabbit show justified his worst fears. Already it had been decided that the Women's Institute would be allowed to tell fortunes, that the Rowing Club should bring Bloody Mary ashore in a decorated barge, and that the Master of Foxhounds should gallop with his pack past the grandstand tally-hoing an imaginary fox. “What am I but a hack?” Stephen asked himself miserably. “The Town Hack, and a poor, ineffectual, useless one at that?” He was sick and tired of the whole business already; it could end only in ridicule, of which he would be the principal butt. There would be four more of these dreadful Committee Meetings before the Festival achieved its consummation in farce or shame or a ghastly mixture of the two; and this one was by no means over. His knee was hurting so badly that he was quite unable to concentrate on the proceedings; but fortunately he had no responsibility for the statue of Dame Joanna (it was practically the only thing he wasn't responsible for) so he allowed his wayward mind to stray again, and like a homing bird it flew straight to the olive-groves.

Lately he had often caught himself looking back upon his year in Greece as if it were an experience in a frame, a sort of illuminated picture, or a theatrical interlude played within the arch of a proscenium. It glowed in his memory
with an unnatural brightness; the sky was a painted cyclorama, extravagantly blue, the snow was whiter than white, the glaucous olives seemed carved in relief on tawny hillsides, the anemones were projected in technicolor on to emerald alpine meadows. Against this incandescent background moved figures larger than life, and in particular one figure, gigantic among giants, that of his friend and companion Polycarpos. Huge and heroic, laughing at the sky, a bottle of wine in one hand, a grenade in the other, Polly stood outside their headquarters on VE-day. “Let's have a good bang,” he said, “to celebrate. …”

Suddenly the Mayor's voice (“Our 'ome-made Pageant, our 'ome-made 'istory”) brought Stephen back to the present with a jerk. There was an argument going on about the vexed question of an extra episode, and Mr. Gurney had just remarked that in his humble opinion the town had been going from bad to worse for three centuries, and that the trivial doings of its wretched population during this period were of no conceivable interest to anybody. The Mayor ignored this and proceeded to make a suggestion of his own. He was not, he said, like Councillor Noakes a literary man; he was not like Mr. Gurney a scholard. But Pageants were meant for ordinary chaps, and what could appeal more to ordinary chaps than the paragraph he had chanced upon in the
Intelligencer
only last week under the heading “Seventy-Five Years Ago”? He fumbled in his pocket for the cutting, put on his spectacles, and solemnly declaimed the following passage from Mr. Runcorn's predecessor's extraordinary prose:

“Last Saturday upon our hallowed greensward the
wielders of the willow included among their number one whose fame resounds far beyond the confines of this his native county, nay, throughout the whole civilised world. In the course of scoring 172 Dr. W. G. Grace kept the leather-chasers on the run for nearly two hours ere his seemingly impregnable citadel fell; and towards the close of his innings he smote the spheroid three times in succession into the willow-girt river. …”

The Mayor looked up.

“I don't know,” he said modestly, “whether you'd call that 'istory?”

There was a murmur of applause. Everybody seemed delighted with the idea except Lance, who was appalled at the prospect of having to write a Chorus about cricket, and Stephen, whose already enormous cast would be increased by twenty-two. “Mr. Tasker will see to it, then,” said the Mayor, flushed with triumph. “No doubt the Cricket Club will co-operate. And now it only remains for me to thank you for your attendance and to say how safe we feel our arrangements all are in Mr. Tasker's capable hands. …” He got up to go.

Stephen had scarcely taken three steps to ease his throbbing knee before the furry lady was on to him, babbling of chinchillas. Why did it seem so much worse, he wondered, to wear your own rabbits than to eat them? She terrified him, and mumbling some excuse, he made his escape from her, hurrying down the stairs although all the nerves in his left leg seemed to be dancing an infernal jig together. At the bottom of the stairs something like panic overtook him as there flooded into his mind the full realisation of what
lay ahead: W. G. Grace and chinchillas superadded to Odo and Dodo and the Beauty Queens. He had an impulse to turn back, intercept the Mayor, and hand in his resignation on the spot; but he lacked the courage to do so, and he limped on down the slumberous street, past the offices of the
Weekly Intelligencer
outside which Virginia, on her way home, favoured him with an Enigmatic Smile, past the Mayor's shop, JNO. WILKES, LADIES' OUTFITTER, displaying grey bloomers, dreadful pink corsets, and peculiar garments called spencers, past the poor little dusty window of Mr. Handiman's ironmongery with its fishing-floats, its mousetraps, its rusty garden trowels, and its bundle of skates which had hung there ever since the great frost of 1946—Mr. Handiman having routed them out from his store-room just in time for the thaw. Festival Committee Meetings always had a curious effect on Stephen: they implanted in his mind a rebellious disbelief in history; and now as he paused outside Mr. Handiman's to rest his knee, he found it quite incredible that great events had ever happened here —that the knights had clattered down the street on their heavy chargers, striking sparks from the cobbles, pennons bravely flying, a red rose or a white one worn for a challenge in their shining helmets—that a Prince had been slain but half a mile away, and a King hunted like a fox had given the slip to his foes—that Shakespeare himself, if Mr. Gurney was right, had set foot here, had trodden where Stephen now trod! Yet these were the ancient glories he must somehow bring to life: with Councillor Noakes the literary man dressed up as Shakespeare, with a foxhunting squire in armour as Prince Edward of Wales.