The Golden Virgin (25 page)

A glass of colourless chemical lemonade stood on the bar, with the penny bottle. Freddy stood opposite her, the Chinese expression on his face emphasised by the oval pebbles of his spectacles framed in thin gold wire.

“This young lady,” said Freddy, “wishes to 'ave a word with you,” and he went away to polish more glasses.

Phillip slid the cover over the spy-hole, and went out of the billiard room.

“Hullo,” said Lily, softly, making as if to take his hand, but stopping herself. “I knew what Keechey and his assistant were after, when I saw them following you over the bridge as I came out of the laundry. So I came after them, just in case I could help.”

“Well, that's very kind of you, but I'm quite all right, thanks.”

“You don't know Keechey as I do. It was him what set about Dr. Dashwood last night. Haven't you heard? It was after he had come in to see Mother, after a late visit to a little girl with diphtheria a few doors up. The doctor came into ours afterwards, and Mother give him a cup of tea. When he left it was getting on for eleven, and he was on his way to the Conservative Club when someone set about him in the dark as he was walking down Courthill Road and crowned him, then kicked his face while he lay in the road. Of course it was Keechey; he's as jealous as a rat, as I told you.”

“Did you know about Dr. Dashwood, Freddy?”

“A publican hears many things, sir,” said the landlord, polishing away. “I did hear he had had some sort of an accident.”

“Accident!” exclaimed Lily.

“Now, my girl!” retorted Freddy, sharply. “I know nothing, see? This is a respectable 'ouse, and what goes on outside is none of my concern, see?” Coming to be near Phillip, “A man can draw his own conclusions, so long as he keeps them to himself. You, sir, I think I am right in saying, can draw your own conclusions, too? Now will you have a drink with me? Lily, you take my advice and go back to work, and I don't mean that in any way unkindly. I'm old enough to be your father, see?”

“They're all old enough to be a father if you let them,” said Lily, to no one in particular as she sipped her lemonade, “only the nice ones like to fancy themselves as babies first.”

“That's what it's for, isn't it?” tittered Freddy.

“Go on, you're like all the rest of them!”

“Don't let the missus hear you say that,” whispered Freddy, “or she might start creatin'! You're a very pretty girl, you know. You want to get a real sweetheart, and leave the boys alone. It's time you went steady.”

“Like you did, you mean? Well, I may not be that sort of girl.”

“You know the old proverb, don't you?”

“I know your old proverb,” said Lily. “But you didn't run fast enough.”

“She's a caution, isn't she?” tittered Freddy. “So'll my wife be, if she hears her say that.”

“She knows it already,” said Lily.

When Freddy had gone to the lower bar she said to Phillip, putting her hand on his, “I'm sorry you're going away, but glad for your sake, for I know Keechey will try and pin something on you else. If he does, I know a thing or two about him which would keep him quiet.”

“Oh, it was nothing, a mere mistake on his part. It's cleared up now.”

“Please,” said Lily, swimming to him from the blue lakes of her eyes, “please take care of yourself. And don't think me too forward, will you?”

“I think you are rather nice, Lily.”

“Do you—really?” The lakes of her eyes seemed about to overflow.

When she had gone, Freddy said, “I'll say this for Lily, she pays her own way, and don't come in here to pick up what she can, as some might think.” He leaned over the bar, and whispered, “I have an idea that she fancies someone other than your friend, Desmond Neville.”

Phillip felt a pang of disappointment; then he was relieved. “I'm rather glad to hear you say that, for quite apart from other things, she is much too old for Desmond.”

Freddy looked at him peculiarly. “You don't get my meaning,” he said. Then between his teeth, “Anyway, watch your step with plain-clothes coppers.”

“Look here, Freddy, did
you
believe what Keechey thought, that I'd lost my commission, and was due to be called up under
conscription? The mistake arose simply because he'd enquired about me at the wrong unit.”

“I'm not doubting your word for a moment, sir, and it's not for the likes of me to inquire into your affairs, but you know what I told you about him and Lily, and he's not the sort to stop at anything to please himself. He's not got many friends round here, I can tell you! So if you don't mind me saying it to you again, watch your step. You know what 'appened to a certain party on a dark night, don't you?”

“So you think that Keechey may have a grudge against me, as he had against Dashwood, on account of his friendship with Lily? Well, I assure you, Freddy, that there's nothing like that between Lily and me! As for my great friend, he's a bit of a boxer, and if Keechey tries any hankypanky on him, he'll get a surprise! Anyway, Desmond's going to the front after his week's leave.”

“Yes, he told me. Tunnelling, I think he said. He'll miss you, you've been like an older brother to 'im, almost a father, in fact! So you have to that Brazilian fellow.”

“Is it Eugene that Lily is keen on, Freddy?”

Freddy looked amusedly at him, and said, “Don't you know better than that?”

“I don't know what you mean, Freddy.”

“Well, they say the onlooker sees most of the game, sir, and at the same time, one can never be sure of anything where a woman is concerned, so it's really none of my business. Will you have a drink with me? It's a pleasure, I assure you!”

Freddy tipped his straw; the bar had come alive again.

*

The beautiful weather of late spring continued. Evening after evening Richard went down to his allotment, feeling the buoyant sunny air to be part of himself as he pushed his wheel-barrow, its tools wrapped in sacking against rattling, past the cemetery.

Having arrived at his rods of ground, he set about preparing for work. His Norfolk jacket, folded inside out with the cashmere lining exposed, was placed in line with his tools upon the flinty soil, all laid neatly parallel. Such alignment gave this lonely man pleasure, or rather a feeling of harmony: here he could live his own mental pattern, which almost chronically was broken for him in what he thought of as his own house. Fork, sieve, spade, hoe, line-and-winder, compost pail, two small bags holding hop manure and lime respectively, and a third smaller one containing soot—there they were in their places, keeping their distance from him.

Having rolled up his sleeves in the correct manner, two-thirds the way up the forearm from the wrist, he took up his hoe, and treading carefully, examined his small plants. He saw them suddenly as they had looked in boyhood: the lettuces so tenderly pale, the carrots like dwarf trees, while the onions and leeks were tiny twisted green poles with black seed-caps on their tips, cabbages a tottering line of tiny little fellows.

Now to let the air most carefully into their rootlets! The finer the tilth on top, the more moisture would be conserved.

As he worked, to Richard came a picture of himself hoeing as a boy, after the Home Farm had been taken in hand—the last effort of his father to stave off the inevitable collapse, before the mortgages were foreclosed and everything broke up. The picture dulled; he sighed, and rested. The sun shone; his forearms were brown; he rejoiced again. There was nothing to equal farming; he was hoeing, he was in the open air, the late spring evening was warm and glowing with the same mellow light of boyhood's evenings in field and lane and attic bedroom looking upon the Longpond at Rookhurst. In his mind he saw the steel chain of twenty-two yards dragging bright and jingling over flints upon a loamy downland field of arable, as the steward, broad-clothed and buskin'd, measured the men's plots. Here, too, were flints; but upon a gravelly soil made hard with clay, a field abandoned to building plots, reprieved by the war. It was still alive, flown over by the cuckoo; voles lived in the grassy lanchetts between the plots; the kestrel hung above, larks sang in the air.

In one corner of the allotment stood Richard's compost heap. It was rectangular, properly squared at the coigns, and level on top. Within, heating in the first process of rotting, lay grass cut with shears, hedge clippings, nettle tops, dock leaves, perishable weeds, and pailfuls of kitchen waste provided by his wife. Not all of the latest pailful had gone into the heap, for some of its contents had been what Richard had asked Hetty particularly not to include: greasy margarine wrapping-paper, which would not rot, but only make unsightly litter.

He looked up at the sound of a motor-cycle engine and saw a trail of dust behind the familiar figure of the wild boy riding, one negligent hand on throttle-controls, the other resting, theatrically, he thought, on his hip. Stopping a few yards away on the cart track, the rider propped up his machine and strolled over. Richard leaned upon his hoe.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he said affably.

“Oh, I thought I would come and see how you were getting on, Father. I'm off to Devon tomorrow.”

“Well, give the Lyn and the sea my love. And of course Aunt Dora.”

“Yes, Father.”

Richard watched him casting his eyes around, until they rested on two small pieces of grease-proof paper, neatly folded into squares, and held down by a stone, near the compost heap.

“Yes, you may well look in that direction,” he said, with a light laugh. “However, we must count our blessings. At least so far no broken glass or sardine tins have been included in my compost pail.”

“You ought to see the heaps of rubbish in an army camp, Father. Tons of loaves piled high, with rotting carcases of meat.”

Richard thought this an exaggeration, but he said, “Oh, the great mass of English people are the untidiest on earth, we all know that. Do you remember the litter covering the Hill after a band night? Well, how's the motor-cycle? Running well?”

“Yes thanks. I thought of going out to Reynard's Common to look at the Fish Ponds, and see if the carp and rudd are still basking on the top of the water.”

“Desmond, I suppose, is coming home from Waltham Abbey tonight?”

“Yes, Father, if there isn't an air-raid warning.”

“He told me, when you were in Millbank Hospital, and the Irish Rebellion broke out, that they had an invasion scare. I mention this because you always tended to scorn any idea of an invasion, I think.”

“We've got a navy, Father.”

“Well, yes, I give you that point,” said Richard, reluctantly. Then in a lowered voice, “Strictly between you and me, I can now tell you that, on the night following the murder of British officers as they lay in bed in Dublin hotels, we knew down at the Station that the eight Zeppelins which came over, led by Mathy, were working with the German High Seas Fleet. We Specials were on duty until two o'clock in the morning. The invasion alarm fizzled out, thank the lord, and I was able to spend some of my evenings getting on with my cultivations here. Well, tell me what you think of my little holding?” Richard swung out the hoe to encompass his sixteen rods.

“It looks very good, Father.”

“We want some rain badly, and I fancy some is on the way.” He looked up at the sky, where a pack of white cumulus cloud was moving slowly towards the north-east. “They may be getting rain in the West Country now. If so, it will bring the salmon up the Lyn for you. They use worm there, you know, in the boiling pools between those huge boulders. Are you off now? Well, thanks for looking me up. Tell Mother I'll be home about nine o'clock, will you? I want to put in my runner beans, they should have been in long ago. I have to go on duty at ten tonight, so if I don't see you before you go to Devon, I'll wish you a very pleasant holiday, now.”

“Thank you, Father. Would you like me to take the greasy paper back for you?”

“Oh, no thanks, I shall burn it before I leave.”

Now what did the wild boy mean by that, thought Richard, as the motor-cycle thudded softly down the flinty cart-track.

Phillip, right hand on the single lever of the Binks 3-jet carburettor, was driving by ear, listening to the soft slow beat of his engine, as though, he said to himself, to the heart-beat of the beloved. This was a familiar phrase from magazine stories; but the engine beat was nearer to his love than any human heart had ever been. He listened with concern: there was inclined to be a rough spot between the pilot and second jet; and he did not want the engine to choke as
Helena
made her easy, lackadaisical departure. The flywheel was turning about two hundred times a minute: a heavy flywheel, so the pulley did not snatch at the belt. Gently now, open the throttle: his ear delighted in the very sensitive response to the extra gas, and at little more than walking pace, and still with almost silent heart-beats,
Helena
bumped over the pavement and the kerb to the road, and continued along by the cemetery railings until her rider was out of sight round the corner by the iron gates … then, with nickel-plated lever pushed wide, she gratefully drummed away down the road to the village of Randis-well, her rider now feeling that he was flying through sunshine in pursuit of the angular shadow racing effortlessly before him, as he
rose up and down over the bridge, retarded the spark to make the loudest burst of machine-gun fire past the police station, and then slowing, turning into the High Street, driven by the idea of seeing Lily again, to find out, he told himself, the true position between her and Eugene, for Desmond’s sake. Why, if she cared for Eugene, was she also pretending to be Desmond’s genuine lover?

With this good intention he looked in at Freddy’s, then at the Black Bull, to find her eventually in the Gild Hall, sitting alone before a thick glass cup from which the twopenny blob of vanilla ice had disappeared. She wore a new pale yellow straw hat, with a blue velvet riband fastened under her chin, the colour of her eyes.

She smiled when she saw him, and when he went to her table she said “Hullo!” almost inaudibly, as she lowered her eyes and began to play with the spoon on the plate in front of her.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said, avoiding the shiny blue of her eyes. “How about another ice?”

He gave an order for two, and when they were set down on the table he met her glance and asked if she were expecting anyone.

“Oh no!”

“Excuse my asking, but do you like Eugene very much?”

“He’s all right,” she said, dreamily drawing a smoothed spoonful of ice between her lips and sucking it slowly.

“But do you like him awfully?”

“He’s a nice-looking boy, and knows it, but he thinks every girl can’t resist him.”

“Then it
is
Desmond you—care for most?”

“Don’t you know?” said Lily, with an unsteady smile. He felt disturbed by the pulse beating in her throat.

“Well, as a matter of fact, Desmond and I really haven’t talked much about it.”

She stopped sucking her ice and was looking on the table, so that for the first time he saw what long lashes she had, and the curve of her cheeks. Perhaps she was disdainful of him asking questions like that. Awkwardly he rose to his feet, stammering, “Well, I think I’ll go for a run on my bike. I’m sorry if I seemed inquisitive.” When the azure limpidity of her eyes was upon him he said, “I want to see if there are still carp basking among the lily-pads of the Fish Ponds out by Reynard’s Common. See those gold-fish down there? They’re carp, but poor little tame things. The carp in the Fish Ponds, some of them, are nearly as long
as my arm, and a sort of bronzy brown. Have you ever been out there?”

“Oh please, why are you so angry with me?”

“But I thought you were angry with me!”

“Angry with you,” she said, as though he were far away. She gave a little laugh. “Is that where the bluebells come from?”

“Where they
used
to come from, before all the lou——I mean the fellows on bicycles pulled them up. No, that’s not quite fair. They lived in, well——” he checked himself in time from saying
poor
streets
— “—away from the countryside, and wanted to take some of the beauty home, I suppose. Haven’t you ever seen bluebells growing?”

She shook her head slowly, as though nursing him in her eyes.

“I’m afraid they’re over now,” he said, thinking that her eyes were the same misty blue. “What flowers are left will be ripening into little pods, rather like papery skulls, filled with shiny black seeds. I had an idea to collect some, and throw them out of the carriage window, on the way to London Bridge, just before the war came.”

“Aren’t you funny?” she said, her head on one side. “You’ve got the most beautiful eyes. Did you know it?”

He was embarrassed, thinking that she was trying to get off with him, when she was Desmond’s girl.

“Do you mind me saying that? I didn’t mean to say it. Dr. Dashwood told me it was bad manners to make remarks about anyone, or to ask personal questions. Do you believe that the eyes are the windows of the soul?”

Dr. Dashwood had obviously said that about Lily’s eyes, thought Phillip.

“Dr. Dashwood likes you—Middleton. Do you mind if I call you Middleton?”

“I think it’s rather a compliment to have a nickname.”

“He calls me Bluebell.”

“How is he getting on?”

“His housekeeper has left him.”

“Why, because of what happened to him last night?”

“No, she left before that. He’s been doing for himself for nearly a month now.”

“He won’t last long as a doctor, will he, with no one to see to his house.”

“He has asked me to marry him.”

Phililp felt a jolt. He was unable to ask if she had accepted, or not.

“He cried, and said nobody wanted him. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Of course not. Poor old chap. Are you—no, I mustn’t ask that.”

“He cried because I told him I could not marry him.”

“Because of Desmond?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, Lily, let us be as we were in the churchyard. Please tell me something. Do you love Desmond?”

She went on shaking her head.

“Is there someone else?” Seeing her downheld eyes, he went on, “I don’t understand. Can you like many—people—at once. then?”

The head was shaken once more.

“I suppose I ought to go,” he said unhappily.

“Why?” she said, with such appeal in her eyes that, despite the hat she wore, he said, “It’s such a lovely evening. I suppose you wouldn’t care for a ride on the back of my bike to the Fish Ponds?”

“Oh, I would!” she said, her face lighting up.

*

In 1916 it was not easy to start on a motor-cycle driven by a rubber belt and a fixed pulley, when you were on level ground, unless you could run and spring on when the bike was in motion. But when you had a flapper on the bracket it was impossible. The way to start was to go to the top of a sloping street, wait for your passenger, let her seat herself on the bracket over the rear wheel, while you straddled from the saddle; then, all being balanced, you stood up and pushed off with your feet, the handlebars taking all the forward thrust. It was a precarious few moments while you wobbled forward, ready to drop the valve-lifter; and when you did so, and the engine fired, a quick adjustment of weight was necessary, for you who had pushed were now pulled. If your flapper was calm, you were all right; your strong forearms kept the bike straight, as you sat back on the saddle, trailing your feet a moment to show your easy mastery of the situation.

“Sit tight!” said Phillip, straddling the level cobblestones. “Here we go!” as he shoved off. “This three-jet Binks is marvellous!” as he dropped the valve-lifter.
Helena
fired with beats
slower than those of his heart. He sat back, and opened the throttle. “Top hole!” he cried.

Safely past Freddy’s, fire station, St. Mary’s church, he told her to put an arm round his waist and hold to his jacket, relieved that she sat so steadily. Desmond of course used to sit astride; Lily sat at right angles to the frame, her back to the rubber belt, which otherwise might have caught her skirt. She saw the polished tramlines rushing away behind her, she felt unsafe and fixed as it were upon nothing except bumps; she felt all was unreal, she glowed with pride. Gran’ma, she thought, again and again, Gran’ma, I am with you at last.

They passed Cutler’s Pond, and got up Brumley Hill without falter, and through the town, along Shooting Common, and turned up the long gradual incline to the Fish Ponds, arriving without mishap.

“Were you very uncomfortable? I tried to avoid the pot-holes as much as I could.”

“It was lovely! Thank you ever so, for asking me.”

The pines around the upper and lower ponds were reflected in the water; and there, among the floating lily-leaves, were the brown dorsal fins of the great carp which were said to be a hundred years old.

“The carp is the fox of the water. No angler has ever been known to lose his bait of a small boiled potato, bean, or bread-paste, to these piscatorial wiseacres.”

“They must be quite happy without what the fishermen want to give them,” said Lily.

It was strange, he thought, how she seemed to fit into the countryside, accepting it as though she had known it all her life, while not knowing the names of anything—stonechat, linnet, and willow wren, wagtail flitting for water-flies around the verge of the pond, or running on the lily leaves, to take flies for its young somewhere. They walked through the heather, while she stopped to touch the bells coming into colour, and the white bark of a birch tree, while he wondered about it, for in the past he had done the same thing, but always secretly, lest someone see, and know that he was, in Father’s words from earliest memory, a sort of throw-back.

“Oh, isn’t it lovely?” she said, as slowly, slowly she followed behind him, ribbon of hat in hand trailing the heather and bracken, her mouth loose and her eyes dreaming. He began to assess her: she was strongly built, her skin was very soft and white, her breasts were high and level, slightly moving up and down in her white
silk blouse as she walked. Their movement kept him mentally apart from her, while the silk softness of the blouse was alluring, and sweet to see. He thought of her as a woman, older than himself; not that she was seventeen.

They came to the wooden steps through the oak paling fence of Knollyswood Park, and opened the swing gate into what he said used to be his preserves. It was the first time he had been there since the war, though he and Desmond had passed the fence on the way to Crowborough, more than a year ago, he remembered, when he was going to try to get a commission from the second battalion. How long ago it was, a world gone for ever.

They sat down on the grass in a glade bumpy with anthills. A green woodpecker dived out of the trees in the near distance and in sloping flight approached them, and knowing the gallypot’s feeding habits he pressed her hand and whispered, “Don’t move!”

After an abrupt flop down the bird lifted a crimson head to stare at them. Then with a wild cry it sloped off in wavy flight.

“Oh, what a funny bird. And what a funny noise it made!” said Lily, chewing the sugary knot of a grass stem.

“Did you see that sharp mad eye of the violent wood-hammerer? That’s the woodpecker which haunts the family that owns this park, and foretells the death of a member of the house.”

“Go on,” said Lily, her eyes big.

“It came here as a rest from its eternal task of having to strike furiously at half-rotten trunks and branches of trees in the forest. The crest of the family coat of arms of the Earl of Mersea is a wood-pecker, hence the legend. Its laugh, what is called a yaffle, sounds insane, doesn’t it? Well, it comes here to rest, as I said, from slavery. It has a long tongue, which uncurls like a watch spring, and flips up ants. It saw us, and cried out of its broken heart. Back to hammering wood, striking furiously with its neck muscles, which must be terrifically strong; even so, it must get awful headaches.”

“Are you joking?” asked Lily.

“Only if the whole world is a joke. For consider a moment: for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, special forces have been caged in that frame of bone and flesh and sinew, and all inherited from tiny specks of life in a fluid inside a white shell of lime! Other birds, too, inherit special forces and actions; they can’t escape their fates; the hawk must tear flesh, the owl must fly in darkness, the wren make its nest like a ball with a hole in the side, and persecute spiders. Spiders must give hell to flies, fish must eat nymphs. The chalk downs, farther on towards the Saltbox and
Biggin Hill, are but shells of trillions of little sea-animals, all gone, who have all yielded up their obscure little ghosts. Every dew drop which falls has been drunk by something, which has lost its life. Perhaps when death comes, that is freedom for a while, to get away from the destined will and task upon the earth.”

He sat before her with bowed head, feeling alone and void. She put out a hand and stroked his head; he did not draw back, nor did he yield; but when he looked up and saw her eyes which had brimmed over he did yield, for a moment, and allowed her to take his head on her breast. Without thinking what he did, as he lay there, he nipped a part of the white silk blouse between his lips, gently, and closed his eyes.

“Oh you are sweet,” said Lily, a deeper tone in her voice. “How your mother must have loved you when you were a baby.”

He thought he could have her if he wanted to: he had impressed her. The moment was lost as he thought of Helena: that this was not Helena. She divined what he was thinking, and said gently, “You love that girl, don’t you? I always knew you did. But don’t mind me, Middleton! I always knew you were different from the other boys, as I said when we talked beside the cemetery. It is wonderful, I think, what education can do. I never got beyond standard four at Carlow Road School.”

“Oh, one learns nothing at school, Lily.”

“But you must have studied lots of books.”

“I got most of them from the Free Library, years ago. Others were at home, they belonged to my father’s father, such as Darwin’s
Voyage
of
the
Beagle,
and books like that. But out in a place like this, thoughts come to one, somehow. I think it is the spirit of the earth, which is hidden under pavements. I had a wonderful time out here when I was a boy, it was so wild and so quiet, the beautiful colours of the leaves and ferns, and if you sat still, you saw the life going on around you, all in beautiful shapes and forms. I saw a fox over there, once, suddenly looking at me beside some brambles. It seemed to shine with its fur, all russet, and its teeth so white, its tongue-tip pink, and its eyes, they were yellow gems. Then with a completely silent flick, it was gone. How or where it went, I didn’t know. The bush was small; it just flicked out, like a camera shutter closing. Tell you what, let’s creep down to the Lake Woods! They are very secret, and by the water we may hear a nightingale. They used to sing there when they had stopped elsewhere; perhaps it was the liquid echo they heard, coming back from the rhododendrons around the water, and they sang to it.”