Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (18 page)

‘London? I suppose you never run into George Furness up there?'

Sharwood, a middle-aged man who travelled mainly in woollen goods, put three lumps of sugar into his tea, stirred it and then said:

‘As a matter of fact I was thinking of asking you the same question.'

‘Me?'

‘Funny thing,' Sharwood said, ‘it was George who recommended me here.'

Her heart began racing, fast and heavily, as it had done on the warm afternoon with Lattimore, drunk in the train.

‘Ran across him up in Glasgow about a month ago,' Sharwood said. ‘You knew he was up there, didn't you?—I mean had been. Been up there for thirty years—settled there. Even got himself a bit of a Scotch accent on the way.'

‘No, I didn't know,' she said. ‘I never only saw him the once.'

She did not know quite why she should admit, for the first and only time, that she had seen him only once, but by now she was so transfixed and overwrought that she hardly knew what she was saying.

‘I know,' Sharwood said. ‘He told me. It's been all those years ago, he said, but if you go to
The Blenheim Arms
ask if Thelma's still there. She'll look after you.'

She locked her hands together to prevent them quivering too hopelessly and he said:

‘That was the last time he was ever down this way. He moved up to Glasgow the next week. Heard of a good job there with a big wholesale firm of cloth people and there he stopped.'

Sharwood paused, drank his tea and stared over the rim of the cup to the October rain slashing on the window beyond.

‘He'd have been up there just thirty-five years if he'd lived till November.'

Her heart seemed to stop its racing.

She did not know what to say or do. Then after a moment Sharwood said:

‘Hand me my wallet off the wash-stand, will you? I've got a cutting about him. Clipped it out of
The Glasgow Herald.'

She stood staring for a few moments longer at the newspaper cutting that Sharwood handed her across the bed. The face of George Furness stared back at her from a photograph and she said simply:

‘I don't think he's changed a lot, do you?'

‘Same as ever,' Sharwood said. ‘You'd have known him anywhere.'

That afternoon, although it was a mid-week afternoon, she left
The Blenheim Arms
about three o'clock, walked up the road and into the forest. The rain had stopped about noon and now it was a day of racing sea-bright cloud, widening patches of high blue sky and a wind that broke from the beeches an endless stream of leaves.

She walked slowly down the long riding. She stopped for a few moments at the place where she and George Furness had eaten beech-nuts and where, some years later, she had tried for the first of many times to recapture the moment with another man. She picked up a few beech-nuts and made an attempt to peel them but the summer that year had been rainy and cool and most of the husks she broke were empty.

Finally she walked on and did something she had never done before. Slowly, in brightening sunlight, through shoals of drenched fallen leaves, she walked the entire width of the
forest to the other side. It was really, after all, not so far as people had always led her to believe.

By the time she reached the open country beyond the last of the enormous beeches the sky had been driven almost clear of cloud. The sun was warm and brilliant and as she sat down on a bank of leaves at the forest edge she could feel it burning softly on her face and hands.

After a time she lay down. She lay there for two hours, not moving, her frizzed foxy hair blown against wet leaves, her bleached pale eyes staring upwards beyond the final rim of forest branches to where the sky, completely clear now of cloud, was almost fierce with high washed blue light in the falling afternoon.

That night she did not sleep much. The following night she was restless and there was a sharp, drawing pain in her back whenever she breathed a little hard. The following afternoon the doctor stood by her bed and said, shaking his head, joking with her:

‘Now, Thelma, what's all this? What have you been up to? It's getting cool at night this time of year.'

‘I sat down in the forest,' she said. ‘That's all. I lay down for a while.'

‘You know, Thelma,' he said, ‘you're getting too old for lying down in the forest. You've got a good warm bed, haven't you?'

‘I like the forest.'

‘You're really getting too old for this sort of thing,' he said. ‘Now be a good girl and take care of yourself a little better. You've had your fling—we all know—but now you'll have to take care a little more. Understand?'

She made no sign that she understood except for a slight flicker of her thin pale gold lashes.

‘There comes a time,' the doctor said.

She died five days later. On the coffin and on the graveside in the church-yard that lay midway between the village and the forest there were a great many wreaths. Many gentlemen had remembered her, most of them individually. But someone had had the idea of placing a collecting box on the bar of
The Blenheim Arms
so that casual callers, odd travellers passing, could put into it a few coppers or a shilling or two and so pay their last respects.

A good deal of money was collected in this way and because so many people, mostly men, had contributed something it was impossible to indicate who and how many they were. It was thought better instead to put on the big round wreath of white chrysanthemums only a plain white card.

‘Thelma. R.I.P.,' it said. ‘Loved by all.'

Arthur Browning lived unadventurously for the first thirty years of his life with his mother, in a little corner shop selling sweets and newspapers and looking across to the branch line railway station of a small boot-manufacturing town. What a fine position it was, they all said, unopposed and without competition, with so many people arriving and departing and wanting their newspapers as they came and went: one of the best you could find in the world.

Regularly and unambitiously Arthur met the morning and evening trains with their loads of newspapers. All day as he served in the shop he heard the clap of dray-horse hooves on the granite sets of the station yard; the slide of wheel-skids as drays came down on wet or frosty mornings from goods warehouses, loaded with packing cases, new machinery, and vast bundles of cracking belly-leather. Every day he breathed the same combined smells: a sulphur fustiness of coal and train smoke, a harsh dog-like odour of sole leather, a sort of drab sweetness in the little shop. There seemed nothing about all this to make him dissatisfied, simply because for all these years his mother had directed his purposes. It was always ‘Arthur will see to it; Arthur will find out; Arthur will be
only too pleased; Arthur will attend to you.' And in fact Arthur did see, he did find out, he was only too pleased and always in his woollen, undemanding and unadventurous way he made it his business to attend.

Soon after he was thirty his mother died. For six or seven years before that he had been talking, awkwardly, shyly, mostly over the shop counter, to a Miss Shortland: a pale-faced schoolteacher with tight lips and a tight black bun of hair knotted rather like the tails of some of the dray horses that came down from the station yards. Most of the time he wore a Norfolk jacket of pepper and salt tweed with wide vents at the back, varied in summer, in hot weather, by one of cream alpaca. On Sundays he wore suits of thick herring bone tweed and a bowler hat. From the cuffs of these suits his red hands, rather large for a small man, always managed somehow to stick out, like lumps of underdone pork. His head too was rather large and his eyes, in keeping, gleamed roundly like the blue glass marbles he sold to boys.

‘Mother has left me a little money,' he said.

He had made it his business to attend to Miss Shortland almost exactly as he attended to other customers; there was a feeling that his affection for her was simply a careful ounce or two of sweetness, wrapped up in a paper bag.

‘Rather a lot of money,' he said. ‘Rather more than I thought.'

Miss Shortland did not say anything; some day there would be an inevitable end to school-teaching and now, at last, she began to tell herself, perhaps that time had come.

‘Rather over six thousand pounds,' he said. ‘And the shop of course.'

To Miss Shortland it was an incredible and wonderful surprise; but before she could speak he went on:

‘I don't know quite what I'll do yet, but I thought of going for a little holiday somewhere. Abroad.'

‘Abroad?'

‘I thought of Switzerland,' he said. His large glass-like eyes, protuberant and boyish and blue, took on a queer myopic sort of vacancy. He seemed held by a far-off dream: ‘I've always had a fancy to see the mountains.'

To Miss Shortland the project did not appear at all impressive. Mountains, as she was afterwards to discover, were not among the things that most attracted her. But in his polite, shop-like, eternally attentive sort of way Arthur said:

‘Of course I'd like you to come with me. Would you? It would be nice in August. Just the two of us for a week or two.'

It was that simple phrase, ‘just the two of us,' one of the most intimate he had ever spoken to her, that finally won her over; it opened, or appeared to open, innumerable and incalculable doors beyond the life of a schoolmistress teaching a class of forty pig-tailed girls in a red-brick factory town. She felt the door of stuffy and spinsterish drudgery closing at last behind her; a world of intimacy and comfortable possession opening out beyond.

Three weeks later, in August, they went off to a small village called Heiligenswendi, among hills of drying hay-cocks, in the Bernese Oberland. Up there,—he had looked it all up in a map—he somehow fondly imagined edelweiss would be growing in accessible crevices and he would be able to taste something of the world above the snow line, filling himself with the stimulating splendour of high places. Instead he found a sub-alpine countryside, under a humid August sun, heavy as damp green spinach. Sweating peasants scythed
solidly through fields of lucerne and then, having finished them, mowed twice as solidly back again. The
pension
he had chosen was one of those large wooden houses, painted a dull red, in the style of Swiss Gothic, and his own room and Miss Shortland's looked out on a barricade of sunless pines. Out of this black hill forest there appeared from time to time groups of shambling men wearing yellow straw hats shaped like topees. They shuffled out of shadow into sun with haunted eyes. They came from the asylum further up the hill.

To Miss Shortland, after two days, they became part of the general obnoxiousness; they became linked with the smell of peasant cigars that mingled harshly with odours of sauerkraut and boiled garlic sausage provided by Frau Roth in the dining room below.

‘But what made you
choose
this place? What made you think——'

‘The guide book said it was very beautiful.'

‘Did it say anything about the lunatic asylum? Not a word, I'm sure, did it?'

‘Well, no—but I think it
is
beautiful—I think the mountains——'

‘Yes, but what do we
do?
For three weeks—what do we
do?'

‘We can walk,' he said.

Afterwards, for two days, they walked about humid spinach-like fields that lay shut in between black slopes of pines. Against enchanting glimpses of a lake below, where white sails and steamers glided past, apples were ripening on wind-bowed trees and a few slender autumn crocus were flowering, pink-mauve, in the long grass beneath them.

But Miss Shortland, tired of school-teaching, had not come on holiday for lakes or apples or autumn crocus or lunatics
in straw hats. She did not like walking. She wanted something of Arthur, alone. Her determined chin and her black rather horse-like hair, coarse and tightly bound, were distinctive parts of a face that had almost no colour. Her skin looked pallid and bloodless. Her cold dark eyes concealed entirely the fact that she was burning inside.

The second afternoon, after long silences over the hated lunch-time sausage, they walked for two or three miles above the lake-side before she gave up and lay down exhausted in the grass.

In a peckish and oblique sort of way they had been near to quarrelling all morning and now the deep heat of the August day, concentrated and steamy, pressed up through lush alpine grass and through her thin cotton dress and on to her body. In the pine-laden air, rich and stifling, she felt she could not breathe. She unbuttoned the neck of her dress and threw her arms outwards, palms down, on the grass.

Arthur sat with hands locked over his knees, staring away.

‘Why don't you come and lie down?'

‘I'm looking at the mountains,' he said. ‘I can't take my eyes off them.'

She gave a choking sound of impotent anger into the grass, unable to speak. He was still wearing, as he had worn for years in the little shop, the thick tobacco-brown jacket with its wide vents in the back. These vents had always infuriated her. Now, more than ever, they seemed to need ironing out. They made him look curiously old-maidish, dowdy and out of place, rousing in her an enraged and possessive desire to take him in hand.

‘How do you get up there, I wonder?' he said.

‘You take a train,' she said; and he in turn said the worst possible thing in reply:

‘As a matter of fact there is a train. It goes up through the Jungfrau.'

Angry and tired, she felt nothing but the hot throb of her feet after the long walk; and after some moments she said:

‘My feet hurt terribly. Take off my shoes, will you? Be a dear and undo them for me.'

In his slow, woollen and uncomplaining way he took off her shoes. For years he had made it his business to attend to such things. She felt his hands and then the cool air on the hot soles of her feet. It was delicious and she said: