Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (14 page)

Having given himself another moment to get into correct position, the Colonel presently signalled to Miss Wilkinson that he was frightfully sorry to trouble her but would she very much mind telling him what day it was?

To his infinite astonishment Miss Wilkinson signalled back that it was Thursday and, as if determined to leave no doubt about it, added that it was also August the second.

August? the Colonel replied. He was much surprised. He thought it was July.

No, no, it was August, Miss Wilkinson told him. Thursday the second—the day he was coming to tea.

The Colonel had spent the morning since ten o'clock in a rush of perspiring industry, cleaning out the hens. The fact that he was going to tea with Miss Wilkinson had, like the precise date and month, somehow slipped his mind.

‘You hadn't forgotten, had you?'

‘Oh! no, no, I hadn't forgotten. Had an awfully long
morning, that's all. Would you mind telling me what time it is now?'

In the clear summer air the Colonel could distinctly see the movement of Miss Wilkinson's arm as she raised it to look at her watch. He himself never wore a watch. Though altogether less pernicious than telephone, television and radio, a watch nevertheless belonged, in his estimation, to that category of inventions that one could well do without.

‘Ten to four.'

Good God, the Colonel thought, now struck by the sudden realisation that he hadn't had lunch yet.

‘I was expecting you in about ten minutes. It's so lovely I thought we'd have tea outside. Under the willow tree.'

Admirable idea, the Colonel thought, without signalling it. What, by the way, had he done with the eggs? Were they on the boil or not? He couldn't for the life of him remember.

‘Do you wish any eggs?' he asked. ‘I have heaps.'

‘No, thank you all the same. I have some.' It might have been a laugh or merely a bird-cry that the Colonel heard coming across the meadows. ‘Don't be too long. I have a surprise for you.'

As he hurried back to the house the Colonel wondered, in a dreamy sort of way, what kind of surprise Miss Wilkinson could possibly have for him and as he wondered he felt a sort of whisper travel across his heart. It was the sort of tremor he often experienced when he was on the way to see her or when he looked at the nape of her neck or when she spoke to him in some specially direct or unexpected sort of way. He would like to have put this feeling into words of some kind—signalling was child's play by comparison—but he was both too inarticulate and too shy to do so.

Half an hour later, after walking down through the
meadows, he fully expected to see Miss Wilkinson waiting for him on the bank of the stream under the willow-tree, where the tea-table, cool with lace cloth, was already laid. But there was no sign of her there or in the greenhouse, where cucumbers were growing on humid vines, or in the kitchen.

Then, to his great surprise, he heard her voice calling him from some distance off and a moment later he saw her twenty yards or so away, paddling in the stream.

‘Just remembered I'd seen a bed of watercress yesterday and I thought how nice it would be. Beautifully cool, the water.'

As he watched her approaching, legs bare and white above emerald skim of water-weed, the Colonel again experienced the tremor that circumvented his heart like a whisper. This time it was actually touched with pain and there was nothing he could say.

‘Last year there was a bed much farther upstream. But I suppose the seeds get carried down.'

Miss Wilkinson was fair and pink, almost cherubic, her voice jolly. A dew-lap rather like those seen in ageing dogs hung floppily down on the collar of her cream shantung dress, giving her a look of obese friendliness and charm.

‘The kettle's on already,' she said. ‘Sit yourself down while I go in and get my feet dried.'

The Colonel, watching her white feet half-running, half-trotting across the lawn, thought again of the surprise she had in store for him and wondered if paddling in the stream was it. No other, he thought, could have had a sharper effect on him.

When she came back, carrying a silver hot water jug and tea-pot, she laughed quite gaily in reply to his query about the surprise. No: it wasn't paddling in the stream. And she
was afraid he would have to wait until after tea before she could tell him, anyway.

‘Oh! how stupid of me,' she said, abruptly pausing in the act of pouring tea, ‘I've gone and forgotten the watercress.'

‘I'll get it, I'll get it,' the Colonel said, at once leaping up to go into the house.

‘Oh! no, you don't,' she said. ‘Not on your life. My surprise is in there.'

Later, drinking tea and munching brown bread and butter and cool sprigs of watercress dipped in salt, the Colonel found it impossible to dwell on the question of the surprise without uneasiness. In an effort to take his mind off the subject he remarked on how good the sunflowers were this year and what a fine crop of seeds there would be. He fed them to the hens.

‘I think it's the sunflowers that give the eggs that deep brown colour,' he said.

‘You do?' she said. ‘By the way did you like the pie I made for you?'

‘Pie?'

With silent distress the Colonel recalled a pie of morello cherries, baked and bestowed on him the day before yesterday. He had put it into the larder and had forgotten that too.

‘It was delicious. I'm saving half of it for supper.'

Miss Wilkinson, looking at him rather as dogs sometimes look, head sideways, with a meditative glint in her eye, asked suddenly what he had had for lunch? Not eggs again?

The Colonel shyly confessed it had been eggs.

‘I've told you before. You can't live on eggs all the time,' she said. ‘I've been making pork brawn this morning. Would you care for some of that?'

‘Yes, I would. Thank you. I would indeed.'

From these trivial discussions on food it seemed to the Colonel that a curious and elusive sense of intimacy sprang up. It was difficult to define but it was almost as if either he or Miss Wilkinson had proposed to each other and had been, in spirit at least, accepted.

This made him so uneasy again that he suddenly said:

‘By the way, I don't think I told you. I've given up
The Times.'

‘Oh! really. Isn't that rather rash?'

‘I don't think so. I'd been considering it for some time actually. You see, one is so busy with the hens and the garden and all that sort of thing that quite often one gets no time to read until ten o'clock. Which is absurd. I thought that from time to time I might perhaps borrow yours?'

‘Of course.'

The Colonel, thinking that perhaps he was talking too much, sat silent. How pretty the stream looked, he thought. The purple loosestrife had such dignity by the waterside. He must go fishing again one day. The stream held a few trout and in the deeper pools there were chub.

‘Are you quite sure you won't feel lost without a paper? I think I should.'

‘No, no. I don't think so. One gets surfeited anyway with these wretched conferences and ministerial comings and goings and world tension and so on. One wants to be away from it all.'

‘One mustn't run away from life, nevertheless.'

Life was what you made it, the Colonel pointed out. He preferred it as much as possible untrammelled.

Accepting Miss Wilkinson's offer of a third cup of tea and another plate of the delicious watercress he suddenly realised that he was ravenously hungry. There was a round plum cake
on the table and his eye kept wandering back to it with the poignant voracity of a boy after a game of football. After a time Miss Wilkinson noticed this and started to cut the cake in readiness.

‘I'm thinking of going fishing again very soon,' the Colonel said. ‘If I bag a trout or two perhaps you might care to join me for supper?'

‘I should absolutely love to.'

It was remarks of such direct intimacy, delivered in a moist, jolly voice, that had the Colonel's heart in its curious whispering state again. In silence he contemplated the almost too pleasant prospect of having Miss Wilkinson to supper. He would try his best to cook the trout nicely, in butter, and not burn them. Perhaps he would also be able to manage a glass of wine.

‘I have a beautiful white delphinium in bloom,' Miss Wilkinson said. ‘I want to show it you after tea.'

‘That isn't the surprise?'

Miss Wilkinson laughed with almost incautious jollity.

‘You must forget all about the surprise. You're like a small boy who can't wait for Christmas.'

The Colonel apologised for what seemed to be impatience and then followed this with a second apology, saying he was sorry he'd forgotten to ask Miss Wilkinson if she had enjoyed the long visit to her sister.

‘Oh! splendidly. It really did me the world of good. One gets sort of ham-strung by one's habits, don't you think? It's good to get away.'

To the Colonel her long absence had seemed exactly the opposite. He would like to have told her how much he had missed her. Instead something made him say:

‘I picked up a dead gold-finch in the garden this morning.
It had fallen among the sea kale. Its yellow wing was open on one of the grey leaves and I thought it was a flower.'

‘The cat, I suppose?'

‘No, no. There was no sign of violence at all.'

Away downstream a dove cooed, breaking and yet deepening all the drowsiness of the summer afternoon. What did one want with world affairs, presidential speeches, threats of war and all those things? the Colonel wondered. What had newspapers ever given to the world that could be compared with that one sound, the solo voice of the dove by the waterside?

‘No, no. No more tea, thank you. Perhaps another piece of cake, yes. That's excellent, thank you.'

The last crumb of cake having been consumed, the Colonel followed Miss Wilkinson into the flower garden to look at the white delphinium. Its snowy grace filled him with an almost ethereal sense of calm. He couldn't have been, he thought, more happy.

‘Very beautiful. Most beautiful.'

‘I'm going to divide it in the spring,' Miss Wilkinson said, ‘and give you a piece.'

After a single murmur of acceptance for this blessing the Colonel remained for some moments speechless, another tremor travelling round his heart, this time like the quivering of a tightened wire.

‘Well now,' Miss Wilkinson said, ‘I think I might let you see the surprise if you're ready.'

He was not only ready but even eager, the Colonel thought.

‘I'll lead the way,' Miss Wilkinson said.

She led the way into the sitting room, which was beautifully cool and full of the scent of small red carnations. The Colonel, who was not even conscious of being a hopelessly untidy person himself, nevertheless was always struck by the pervading neatness,
the laundered freshness, of all parts of Miss Wilkinson's house. It was like a little chintz holy-of-holies, always embalmed, always the same.

‘Well, what do you say? There it is.'

The Colonel, with customary blissful absent-mindedness, stared about the room without being able to note that anything had changed since his last visit there.

‘I must say I don't really see anything in the nature of a surprise.'

‘Oh! you do. Don't be silly.'

No, the Colonel had to confess, there was nothing he could see. It was all exactly as he had seen it the last time.

‘Over there. In the corner. Of course it's rather a small one. Not as big as my sister's.'

It slowly began to reach the blissfully preoccupied cloisters of the Colonel's mind that he was gazing at a television set. A cramping chill went round his heart. For a few unblissful moments he stared hard in front of him, tormented by a sense of being unfairly trapped, with nothing to say.

‘My sister gave it to me. She's just bought herself a new one. You see you get so little allowed for an old one in part exchange that it's hardly worth——'

‘You mean you've actually got it permanently?'

‘Why, yes. Of course.'

The Colonel found himself speaking with a voice so constricted that it seemed almost to be disembodied.

‘But I always thought you hated those things.'

‘Well, I suppose there comes a day. I must say it was a bit of a revelation at my sister's. Some of the things one saw were absorbing. For instance there was a programme about a remote Indian tribe in the forests of South America that I found quite marvellous.' The Colonel was stiff, remote-eyed,
as if not listening. ‘This tribe was in complete decay. It was actually dying out, corrupted——'

‘Corrupted by what? By civilisation my guess would be.'

‘As a matter of fact they were. For one thing they die like flies from measles.'

‘Naturally. That,' the Colonel said, ‘is what I am always trying to say.'

‘Yes, but there are other viewpoints. One comes to realise that.'

‘The parallel seems to me to be an exact one,' the Colonel said.

‘I'm afraid I can't agree.'

There was now a certain chill, almost an iciness, in the air. The ethereal calm of the afternoon, its emblem the white delphinium, seemed splintered and blackened. The Colonel, though feeling that Miss Wilkinson had acted in some way like a traitor, at the same time had no way of saying so. It was all so callous, he thought, so shockingly out of character. He managed to blurt out:

‘I really didn't think you'd come down to this.'

‘I didn't come down to it, as you so candidly put it. It was simply a gift from my sister. You talk about it as if I'd started taking some sort of horrible drug.'

‘In a sense you have.'

‘I'm afraid I disagree again.'

‘All these things are drugs. Cinemas, radio, television, telephone, even newspapers. That's really why I've given up
The Times
. I thought we always agreed on that?'