Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (17 page)

By the time she was twenty-five she had lost count of the number of men she had taken into the forest on Sunday afternoons. By then her face had broadened and begun to fill out a lot. Her arms were fleshy and her hips had begun to stand out from her body so that her skirts were always a little too tight and rode up at the back, showing the hem of her underclothes. Her feet, from walking up and down stairs all day, had grown much flatter and her legs were straight and solid. In the summer she could not bear to wear her corsets and
gradually her figure became more floppy, her bust like a soft fat pillow untidily slept in.

Most of the men who came to spend a night or two at the hotel were married men, travellers glad of a little reprieve from wives and then equally glad, after a week or two on the road, to go back to them again. She was a great comfort to such men. They looked forward through dreary days of lugging and unpacking sample cases to evenings when Thelma, pillowy and soft, with her soothing voice, would put her head into their bedrooms and say:

‘Had a good week, sir? Anything you want? Something you'd like me to get for you?'

Many of them wanted Thelma. Almost as many of them were content simply to talk with her. At night, when she took up to their bedrooms hot jugs of cocoa, tots of whisky, pots of tea or in winter, for colds, fiery mugs of steaming rum and cinnamon, they liked her to stay and talk for a while. Sometimes she simply stood by the bedside, arms folded over her enlarging bosom, legs a little apart, nodding and listening. Sometimes she sat on the edge of the bed, her skirt riding up over her thick knees, her red hair like a plaited bell-rope as one of the travellers twisted it in his hands. Sometimes a man was in trouble: a girl had thrown him over or a wife had died. Then she listened with eyes that seemed so intent in their wide and placid colourlessness that again and again a man troubled in loneliness gained the impression that she was thinking always and only of him. Not one of them guessed that she was really thinking of George Furness or that as she let them twist her thick red hair, stroke her pale comforting, comfortable arms and thighs or kiss her unaggressive lips she was really letting someone else, in imagination, do these things. In the same way when she took off her clothes and slipped
into bed with them it was from feelings and motives far removed from wantonness. She was simply groping hungrily for experiences she felt George Furness, and only George Furness, ought to have shared.

When she was thirty the urge to see George Furness became so obsessive that she decided, for the first and only time in her life, to go to London. She did not really think of the impossibility of finding anybody in so large a place. She had thought a great deal about London and what it would be like there, with George Furness, on the spree. Lying in her own room, listening to the night sounds of a forest that was hardly ever really still all through winter and summer, she had built up the impression that London, though vast, was also composed in large part of trees. That was because George Furness had described it that way. For that reason she was not afraid of London; the prospect of being alone there did not appal her. And always at the back of her mind lay the comforting and unsullied notion that somehow, by extraordinary chance, by some unbelievable miracle, she would run into George Furness there as naturally and simply as if he were walking up the steps of
The Blenheim Arms
.

So she packed her things into a small black fibre suit-case, asked for seven days off, the only holiday she had ever taken in her life, and started off by train. At the junction twelve miles away she had not only to change trains but she had also to wait for thirty-five minutes for the eastbound London train. It was midday on a warm oppressive day in September and she decided to go into the refreshment room to rest and get herself an Eccles cake, of which she was very fond, and a cup of tea. The cakes in fact tempted her so much that she ordered two.

Just before the cakes and the tea arrived at her table she
became uneasily aware of someone looking at her. She looked round the refreshment room and saw, standing with his foot on the rail of the bar, beside a big blue-flamed tea-urn, a man she knew named Lattimore, a traveller in novelty lines for toy-shops and bazaars. Lattimore, a tallish man of thirty-five with fair receding hair and a thick gold signet ring on the third finger of his right hand, was drinking whisky from a tumbler.

She was so used to the state and appearance of men who took too much to drink that she recognised, even at that distance across the railway refreshment room, that Lattimore was not quite sober. She had seen him drunk once or twice before and instinctively she felt concerned and sorry for him as he picked up his glass, wiped his mouth on the back of his free hand and then came over to talk to her.

‘Where are you going, Mr Lattimore?' she said.

‘Down to the old
Blenheim,'
he said. ‘Where are
you?'

She did not say where she was going. In the few moments before her cakes arrived she looked at Lattimore with keen pale eyes. The pupils of his own eyes were dusky, ill-focused and beginning to water.

‘What is it, Mr Lattimore?' she said.

‘Blast and damn her,' he said. ‘Blast her.'

‘That isn't the way to talk,' Thelma said.

‘Blast her,' he said. ‘Double blast her.'

Her cakes and tea arrived. She poured herself a cup of tea.

‘A cup of this would do you more good than that stuff,' she said.

‘Double blast,' he said. He gulped suddenly at the glass of whisky and then took a letter from his pocket. ‘Look at that, Thelma. Tell us what you think of that.'

It was not the first time she had read a letter from a wife
to a husband telling him that she was finished, fed up and going away. Most of that sort of thing, she found, came right enough in the end. What she chiefly noticed this time was the postmark on the envelope. The letter came from London and it reminded her suddenly that she was going there.

‘Have one of these Eccles cakes,' she said. ‘You want to get some food inside you.'

He fumbled with an Eccles cake. Flaky crumbs of pastry and loose currants fell on his waistcoat and striped grey trousers. To her dismay he then put the Eccles cake back on the plate and, after a pause, picked up her cake in mistake for his own. Something about this groping mistake of his with the cakes made her infinitely sad for him and she said:

‘You never ought to get into a state like this, Mr Lattimore. It's awful. You'll do yourself no good getting into this sort of state. You're not driving, are you?'

‘Train,' he said. ‘Train.' He suddenly drained his whisky and, before she could speak, wandered across the refreshment bar to get himself another. ‘Another double and what platform for Deansborough?' he called. He banged his hand on the counter and there was a sudden ring of breaking glasses.

Ten minutes later she was sitting with him in the train for Deansborough, going back home, his head on her shoulder. It was warm and oppressive in the carriage and she opened the window and let in fresh air. The wind blowing on his face ruffled his thinning hair and several times she smoothed it down again with her hands. It came to her then that she might have been smoothing down the hair of George Furness and at the same time she remembered London, though without regret.

‘What part of London do you come from?' she said.

‘Finchley.'

‘That isn't near the parks is it?' she said. ‘You don't ever run across a man named George Furness, do you?'

The little local train was rattling slowly and noisily between banks of woodland. Its noises rebounded from trees and cuttings and in through the open window so that for a moment she was not quite sure what Lattimore was saying in reply.

‘Furness? George? Old George?—dammit, friend of mine. Lives in Maida Vale.'

She sat staring for some time at the deep September banks of woodland, still dark green from summer, streaming past the windows. The whisky breath of Lattimore was sour on the sultry air and she opened the window a little further, breathing fast and deeply.

‘When did you see him last?' she said.

‘Thursday—no, Wednesday,' he said. ‘Play snooker together every Wednesday, me and George.'

Within a month the leaves on the beeches would be turning copper. With her blood pounding in her throat, she sat thinking of their great masses of burning, withering leaf and the way, a long time before, George Furness had held out his hand while she peeled nuts for him and then watched him toss them into the air and catch them on his moist red tongue.

‘How is he these days?' she said.

‘Old George?—same as ever. Up and down. Up and down. Same as ever.'

Once again she stared at the passing woodlands, remembering. Unconsciously, as she did so, she twisted quietly at the big signet ring on Lattimore's finger. The motion began to make him, in his half-drunk state, soothed and amorous. He turned his face towards her and put his mouth against her hair.

‘Ought to have married you, Thelma,' he said. ‘Ought to have put the ring on you.'

‘You don't want me.'

‘You like the ring?' he said. ‘You can have it.' He began struggling in groping alcoholic fashion to take the ring off his finger. ‘Have it, Thelma—you put it on.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No.' And then: ‘How was George Furness when you saw him last Wednesday?'

He succeeded suddenly in taking the ring from his finger and began pressing it clumsily on one of her own.

‘There y'are, Thelma. You put it on. You wear it. For me. Put it on and keep it, Thelma. For me.'

The ring was on her finger.

‘How was George?' she said.

‘Getting fat,' he said. ‘Can't get the old pod over the snooker table nowadays. Rest and be thankful—that's what they call George.'

Half sleepy, half drunk, Lattimore let his head slip from her shoulder and the mass of her thick red hair down to the shapeless comforting pillow of her bosom and she said:

‘What's he travel in now? The same old line?'

‘Same old line,' he said. ‘Furniture and carpets. Mostly carpets now.'

She realised suddenly that they were talking of quite different things, quite different people. She was listening to a muddled drunk who had somehow got the names wrong. She stared for a long time at the woods rushing past the rattling little train. There was no need to speak. Lattimore was asleep on her bosom, his mouth open, and the ring was shining on her finger.

Next day Lattimore did not remember the ring and she did not give it back. She kept it, as she kept a great many other
things, as a memento of experiences that men liked to think were services she had rendered.

A drawer in the wardrobe in her bedroom was full of these things. She hardly ever used them: handkerchiefs, night-dress cases and bits of underwear from travellers in ladies' wear, bottles of perfume and powder, night-dresses and dress-lengths of satin, necklaces of imitation pearl and amber; presents given for Christmas, her birthday or for a passing, comforting weekend.

Some of the men who had given them came back only once or twice and she never saw them again. They changed jobs or were moved to other districts. But they never forgot Thelma and travellers were always arriving to say that they had seen Bill Haynes and Charlie Townsend or Bert Hobbs only the week before and that Bill or Charlie or Bert wished to be remembered. Among themselves too men would wink and say ‘Never need be lonely down at
The Blenheim
. What do you say, Harry? Thelma always looks after you,' and many a man would be recommended to stay there, on the edge of the forest, where he would be well looked after by Thelma, rather than go on to bigger towns beyond.

By the time she was forty she was not only plumper and more shapeless but her hair had begun to show the first cottony signs of grey. There was nothing she disliked more than red hair streaked with another colour and from that time onwards she began to dye her hair. Because she could never shop anywhere except in the village or at most in Chippingham, the junction, twelve miles away, she never succeeded in getting quite the right shade for her hair. The first dye she used was a little too yellow and gave her hair the appearance of an old fox fur. One day the shop in the village ran out of this dye and sold her something which, they said, was the
nearest thing. This shade made her hair look as if stained with a mixture of beetroot and bay rum. It was altogether too dark for her. Later when the shop got in its new supplies of the yellow dye she uneasily realised that neither tint was suitable. The only thing that occurred to her to do then was to mix them together. This gave a strange gold rusty look to her hair and something in the dye at the same time made it much drier, so that it became unnaturally fuzzier and more difficult to manage than it had been.

The one thing that did not change about her as she grew older was the colour and appearance of her eyes. They remained unchangeably bleached and distant, always with the effect of the mild soft lashes being still wet with a touch of gold paint on them. While the rest of her body grew plumper and older and greyer the eyes remained, perhaps because of their extreme pallor, very young, almost girlish, as if in a way that part of her would never grow up.

It was these still pale, bleached, unnaturally adolescent eyes that she fixed on a man named Sharwood more than ten years later as she took him a tray of early morning tea and a newspaper on a wet late October morning, soon after she was fifty. During the night torrents of rain had hurled through the miles of beeches, bringing down great flying droves of leaves. Through the open bedroom window rain had poured in too on the curtains and as Thelma reached up to shut the window she said:

‘Not much of a morning to be out, sir. Which way are you off today?'

‘London,' he said.

There was no need for him to say any more. Purposely she fussed a little with the curtains and then casually, in the same slow, upward-singing voice, asked the inevitable question: