Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (3 page)

And presently, the following summer, she was even dancing with me.

It was a very hot sultry evening in early July and some of the men, after the habit of the twenties, were wearing blazers and white flannels. Most of the girls were in light silk or satin frocks and the doors and windows of the dance hall were all wide open and you could see the blue brilliant evening beyond.

I had just decided to disentangle myself from the hot sea-crab embraces of a
Paul Jones
when suddenly the music stopped and I found myself, by pure accident, facing Bertha, almost isolated on that corner of the floor.

She smiled and at once raised her bare golden arms towards me. Both the smile and the gesture might have been those between two old friends, though we had in fact never even spoken before.

She was dressed, that evening, in striking oyster-coloured silk. The dress was short and sleeveless, in the fashion of the day, and she had matching gloves and shoes. Her eyes, naturally very blue, seemed to catch in reflection all the
brilliance of the evening outside, so that they appeared to be deep violet in colour. Her hair looked as if she had spent most of the day brushing it and she had now begun to let it grow a little longer again, so that it hung down in the shape of a casque.

She danced superbly. But what really struck me, in that hot, saxophonic scrum of pounding feet, was not her dancing. It was her coolness. Sweat was pouring heavily from the faces of all the men and now and then you could see across the back of a girl's dress the huge wet ham-print of a hand.

Bertha's arms and hands were, by contrast, as cool as porcelain cups dipped in spring water.

‘Enjoying it?' I said.

‘Oh! awfully,' she said, ‘aren't you?'

I confessed I felt it rather warm and then she said:

‘I hear you've started to become a writer.'

‘Oh?' I said. ‘Who told you that?'

‘As a matter of fact I read an article of yours the other day,' she said. ‘About flowers. I cut it out because I liked it so much.'

After that it was impossible not to be happily at ease with her, friendly and greatly flattered. To my dismay the music stopped almost immediately. The dance had ended. She immediately gave me a wonderful smile of thanks and I had the presence of mind to ask her if she would like some ice-cream and if she would have the next dance with me.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘How nice of you.'

Over the ice-cream, which we took outside to eat, she said:

‘About those flowers. They weren't from our part of the country, were they?'

‘Most of them.'

‘But the orchids?—I didn't know we had orchids in this
country. Do they grow here—the wild ones you said were like greeny white butterflies?'

‘In Longley Spinneys,' I said, ‘just outside the town.'

‘Honestly?'

She licked the last of her ice-cream from the spoon and looked at me with, I thought, an air of disbelief.

‘You don't believe it,' I said.

‘Oh! I don't want you to think that,' she said. ‘Please.'

I have always found that women are frequently most incredulous when you tell them the truth. I have also always been, all my life, a person governed by the swiftest, if sometimes the most foolish, impulses.

‘If you don't believe me I'll take you to see them,' I said. ‘They're in bloom now.'

‘Oh! that's lovely,' Bertha said. ‘When should we go?'

‘Now,' I said.

The wide dark blue eyes did not look in the least surprised. It was only when I suddenly remembered that I was talking to a girl whose late habit had been to ride both in landaus and in cars of fast sporting design that I was aware of a stupid object standing in the way of what I had just proposed.

‘Damn,' I said. ‘I forgot I'd only got my bicycle.'

Her reply was typical.

‘What's wrong with a bicycle?' she said. ‘I haven't got mine but I could ride on the back of yours.'

Suddenly I knew I had made the first of several new discoveries about Bertha. I knew now that she was not merely beautiful, sumptuous, companionable and physically delightful. She had an altogether wonderful innocence about her.

‘Come on, let's go,' she said. ‘Before we change our minds.'

‘All right,' I said, ‘but you ride the bike and I'll step it on the back. In case you soil your dress or tear your stockings.'

There are an infinite number of ways of making love to a girl for the first time but the approach from the back of a bicycle, on a hot half-dark summer night is, I suppose, not among the most common of them.

The road to Longley Spinneys is a fairly flat one and the actual business of bicycling was not hard for Bertha. It was I who had the difficult job of keeping my balance on the back and at first I rode with my hands on her bare cool shoulders.

‘Are my hands heavy for you up there?' I said. ‘Say if they are.'

‘Just a little heavy.'

I put my hands round her waist.

‘Is that better?'

‘Much better.'

As we rode I could smell the fragrance of hay from summer meadows, the lightest of scents from hedge-roses and from somewhere farther off, in the hot darkness, the deeper, thicker breath of limes. By the time we were coasting down the last small incline to the spinneys, in that soundless intoxicating air, my hands were holding her breasts. They were firm and corset-less and my mouth was resting against her bare smooth shoulder.

It was the most exquisite bicycle ride ever undertaken, but as we stood by the wood-side she made no comment on any of these happenings. They were perfectly natural to her. Soon I started to kiss her. I let my hands run over the cool sumptuous skin of her shoulders. In exquisite suspense, with closed eyes, I forgot the orchids. I thought she had forgotten them too but at last, in a low voice, she aroused me from a daze.

‘What about these flowers? These orchids?' she said. ‘Or did you just invent them?'

I took her into the spinneys. It was still not fully dark; but
presently, under the ashlings, we came upon the first of the orchids, rare, fragile, milk-green winged, the ghostliest of flowers. The scent of them was overpoweringly sweet, too sweet, un-English, almost tropical, on the calm night air. ‘You must have extraordinary eyes to see them in the dark,' she said. ‘Or does the scent guide you?' I had no answer to make to her and for the second or third time, with trembling intoxication, I stopped under a tree, took her in my arms and kissed her. The acquiescence of her body was sensational in its quietness. There was not a murmur in the spinneys, the fields, the sky or the hedgerows about us. I could hear only in my own mind the echo of some words of a poem that had been haunting me since waking and that the later saxophonic pounding cries, the bicycle ride and the orchids had driven temporarily away:

Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream
.

She stood, dream-like herself, for a few moments as insubstantial as the flowers she was holding, while I quoted to her with ardent quietness Donne's words about excess of joy. She listened not only as if she had been used all her life to hearing young men quote verse to her at night, in summer woods, but also as she must have listened to those other accents, the accents of James William Sherwood, Tom Pemberton, Ormsby-Hill and the rest, charmingly ready to take on their pattern of speech, just as she was ready, now, to take on mine.

When at length I finished with the last line I could remember,

Enter these arms, for since thou thoughtst it best
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest
,

she laughed softly, throatily, and said:

‘Did you write all that? It's lovely.'

‘No,' I said and I told her who had written it. ‘Three hundred years ago.'

‘He was a man who knew about things,' she said. ‘Like you with your flowers.'

We rode home, hours later, in a darkness no less sultry for the pink, breaking light in the east, the paling stars and a thin rising dew. Towards the end of the journey a few birds had already begun a light July chorus and once a leveret skimmed across in front of the bicycle, almost throwing us, so that I clutched harder, half in self-preservation, at her body. She was even then so acquiescent, so friendly and so full of her own apparent excess of joy that she actually half-turned her head a few moments later and kissed me as we rode.

Presently I took her as far as The Pit in order to say, in the rapidly rising dawn, the tenderest of goodbyes.

‘Tomorrow night?'

‘I'm awfully sorry. I can't tomorrow,' she said. ‘I'm going out with George Freeman.'

I felt as if I had been hit rudely and ferociously with the bicycle.

‘But Bertha——'

‘I'm going out with George three nights a week,' she said, ‘but I'd love to come with you on the others. I would—I love the way you talk. I loved that poetry. I want to hear all about you and your writing.'

It was hard to believe she was still in her early twenties. It was harder still to believe that she could forsake my own particular excess of joy, the verse, the summer woods and the green-ghost orchids for George Freeman, a muscular flat-capped skittles player who drove a brewers' dray.

A few days later my father started to admonish me.

‘I hear you've been seen with that Bertha Jackson girl.'

I started to protest.

‘Oh! yes, I know,' he said. ‘I daresay she
is
all right. She may be.
But that sort of girl can easily trap you
. You understand?'

There was really not much need to understand.

‘Probably a good thing,' my father said, ‘that you're going to live in London soon.'

A few weeks afterwards, bearing a sheaf of torn, tender memories that already seemed as delicate and hauntingly insubstantial as the milk-green orchids, the ghostliest of flowers, I went to live away from home.

Seventeen years later I stood before the desk of my commanding officer, who had sent for me with some urgency and now said:

‘Didn't you tell me once, old boy, that you came from the Nene valley? Isn't that your native country? Evensford?'

When I said that it was he went on:

‘Good show. I think I've got a bright idea for a powerful piece for you. The Yanks have carved out a hell of a great bomber airfield just outside Evensford. Wouldn't it be nice if you went down and looked at it and wrote a nostalgic piece about it?—the revolution of war, the bomb that blew your childhood scene sky-high and that sort of thing? You get it? It would please the Americans.'

I said I thought I got it and he turned with eagerness to a pile of papers.

‘A chap named Colonel Garth F. Parkington, it seems, is Station Commander,' he said, ‘and H.Q. at Huntingdon say he's the nicest sort of bloke to deal with. Spend as long as
you like up there. Absorb the atmosphere. I'll lay everything on.'

A day later I was driving northward, up to my native country. It was early summer. Gipsies were camping about their fires outside a strawberry field that I passed and just inside the field a line of women and children in light cotton dresses were gathering the berries and putting them into white chip baskets. One of the prettier of the girls, a blonde, seeing my uniform, waved her hand to me, laughing, showing clean white teeth, her hands red with strawberry stain. Farther along the road a field of wheat had already the lovely grey-blue sheen of pre-ripeness on the stiff straight ears and I could hear, all along the hedgerows, whenever I opened the car window, the song of yellow-hammers chipping with monotony at the heart of the sunny afternoon.

Something about the fair-haired girl waving her hand to me from the strawberry field made me remember Bertha. Seventeen years is a longish time and my hair had begun to go grey.

Then presently, as I drove along, I found myself trying to remember the number of times I had heard her name in seventeen years. It was perhaps half a dozen. Someone, I forget who, had once told me that she was seeing a great deal of a prominent follower of the Pytchley; that she was much in the swim at flat race meetings and point-to-points. Someone else thought she was a hostess in a sea-side hotel. At least two people thought she had gone to live in London but when I mentioned this to another he said: ‘Don't believe it. Bertha's still there, up at Evensford. Still the same as ever. Still going strong.'

About three o'clock I found myself in a completely strange, foreign country. Only by stopping the car, getting out and identifying, through some minutes of amazed reorientation, a
slender stone church steeple I had known since boyhood, could I recognise that I had reached, in fact, the frontiers of my native land. Three great hangars, like monstrous brooding night-bats, succeeded in saving from moon-mountain barrenness an otherwise naked sky-line. In brilliant sunshine a perimeter track curled across bare grass like a quivering bruising strip of steel. Like black, square-faced owls, Flying Fortresses everywhere rested on land where, as a boy, I had searched for sky-larks' eggs, walked in tranquillity on summer Sunday evenings with my family and gathered cowslips in exalted spring-times.

Over everything swept the unstopped thundering prop-roar of engines warming up and dead in the heart of it a giant water-tank, like a Martian ghoul on stilts, strode colossus-wise across the sky. This was the country through which, on a July night, I had bicycled with Bertha, first put my hands with lightness on her breasts and talked to her of dreams and joy's excesses in terms of ghost-green orchid flowers.

A few minutes later I was with Colonel Parkington, a likeable Nordic giant with many ribbons, an immaculate tunic and trousers of expensive light pink whip-cord who felt it imperative, every few moments, to call me old boy.

‘Sit down, old boy.' A telephone rang on his desk. He picked it up. ‘Be right with you, old boy.' A voice began crackling in the telephone. ‘Hell. No. Blast. Hell, Christ no.' A second telephone rang. The colonel did not pick it up. ‘But what the flaming hell! What does Washington know? Through channels, for Christ's sake? Hell! It takes a century.' The second telephone kept ringing and Colonel Parkington, not picking it up, started shouting into the first. ‘Always channels. Always channels. They think of nothing but channels. This is an operational station. Dammit, I can't wait! Where do they
think this goddam war is being fought? In Albuquerque or where?'