Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (13 page)

Cath Johnson, with little screams, fired cherry-stones that fell about the tractor without touching him. He surveyed the seven women with glinting hungry eyes that reflected the white
and blue of cloud and sky, settling at last on Phebe Harlow, lying with body now wind-flattened on the bank, blonde and sleepy in the sun.

‘Dancing tonight, Harry?' Poll said.

‘Poll wants you to go with her, Harry!' Cath Johnson said. ‘She wants you to take her!'

‘Not me. I don't want splinters in my knees,' Poll said.

‘Don't mind sittin' out,' Harry said.

‘Nor anywheres else!' she said and when all the women had laughed again Harry cocked his hat farther on the back of his head, letting his eyes stop roving for a moment or two, and said:

‘I think I'll take Janey. Eh, Janey? Janey's my drop.

Nobody knew how old Janey was. Janey looked tired. Her forehead, foreshortened and flattened, was screwed into monkey-like wrinkles above which her straight dark hair was cut low and angular.

‘Eh, Janey? Come dance with me, Janey?'

Janey smiled.

‘Janey's not your type,' Poll said. ‘Janey's slimming. You want something with a bit more meat on. You don't want lean girls like Janey. Does he, Janey?'

Janey smiled.

‘If they're too fat it ain't so well,' Harry said. ‘And if they're too lean it ain't so well. I like a bit o' lean and then a bit o' fat and then a bit o' lean and then a drop o' gravy.'

‘You don't want much do you?' Poll said.

‘No,' Harry said, ‘but it don't stop me lookin' in the shop window.'

‘Gawd, man, you talk enough for fifty,' Ma Hawkins said. ‘You're allus wound up.'

‘Got seven on y' t' answer back,' Harry said, ‘that's why.'

‘That hay'll be cooked afore you git up to that field, that's
a sure thing,' Liz Borden said. ‘But that don't matter, does it? You're in no hurry, are you?'

‘I wadn' born in 'urry,' Harry said.

Down the track, beyond the gently sputtering tractor, at the edge of the hazel copse, a girl appeared with a green and yellow scarf tied over her head, young and prettily dark and pushing a pram.

‘It's Pauline,' Cath Johnson said. ‘It's Pauline with the baby.'

Ma Hawkins said to Harry, with dry tartness:

‘And she don't want it poisoned, neither. Not with tractor stink. Git back to work.'

‘Work, they call it,' Liz Borden said. ‘Sittin' on their backsides all day.'

Harry faced the women squarely, masculine, perky-eyed, undefeated and with roving curiosity, and said, Ah! well, he supposed he'd better be thinking of getting on.

‘Thinkin'!' Liz Borden said. ‘Don't fer Gawd's sake start thinkin'.'

‘See y' at the dance then, Poll?' he said.

‘Not me,' Poll said. ‘I got lumbago in both knees now.'

‘I'll rub 'em for you,' Harry said. ‘What about Phebe? Ain't bin a word out o' Phebe.'

‘Phebe's having her beauty sleep,' Poll said.

‘There's people who ought to git more o' that,' Harry said.

‘They ought,' Poll said. ‘But it's one thing to go to sleep and another to wake lookin' no different.'

‘You ought to know,' Harry said.

‘Git back to work,' Liz Borden said. ‘For Gawd's sake. I'll be burned if you don't jaw wuss'n all the women.'

‘Yes, git back!' they all said to him. ‘For Heaven's sake. And let them work as want to work.'

Harry, as if at last he caught a change, a chill or a sourness in the air, let in his gears and moved slowly away up the track, the orange tractor trailing a light blue cloud. As he did so he cast one final look at the women, the rows of beet and the weeds dying about the field and called:

‘Don't reckon there'll be much sugar in the beet this year.'

‘Ain't likely, is it?' Ma Hawkins yelled after him, ‘with you breathin' on it?'

Cath Johnson ran to meet the baby and what Harry said was never heard.

‘Oh! here's my man!' Poll Sankey said. ‘Let me have him. This is the one for me. He's not down to sleep, is he?'

‘He's sitting up,' Cath Johnson said.

‘There's a man for you,' Poll Sankey said. ‘Look at him. There's a man. There's my beauty.'

The women, crowding about the baby as if he were some sort of idol, securely bound by straps, on an altar of pillows, made sounds like pigeons. His mother unstrapped him and Poll Sankey took him up. She too made pigeon noises into his face and carried him away to the bank with her, sitting down there and putting him on her lap.

‘My man's growing, isn't he?' she said softly. ‘Oh! he grows—he grows every time I see him. I think I'll wait for him—I can wait for you, my beauty, can't I? It won't be long.'

‘How's his teeth?' Ma Hawkins said.

The young mother smiled and said his teeth were beautiful. They were coming through fast now, she said, and Phebe Harlow sat up at last, drowsy-eyed, looking at her. Everybody knew there was a soldier in it somewhere, she thought, and she began combing her hair again with soft long thoughtful strokes, as if wondering who the soldier was.

Then Ma Hawkins said: ‘He's a handful now, I'll be bound. You'll have your hands full now, this summer.'

‘I had seven afore I turned thirty,' old Mrs Godden said.

‘If you want to talk about handfuls——' Her mouth, open to speak for the first time, was specked at its quivering edges with fragile crumbs. Her hands held the air like gentle claws grasping to regain something that had been snatched away from her. Against the young mother and the cherry-ears of Cath Johnson she was stony and dry, like a scarred rock hewn a long time from earth.

‘You beauty!' Poll Sankey said. ‘Oh! you sweet beauty!'

Cath Johnson came to dangle cherries before the baby's face, bewildering him, and then Poll Sankey lay on her back, letting him lie and crawl across her big fat breast, laughing at him with enormous rolling-eyes, shaking him gently against the sky.

‘You're my man, aren't you?' she said. ‘You're the man for me.'

In the hot sun a crackle of broom-pods woke Liz Borden, dozing on the grass. Old Mrs Godden began to sharpen the edge of her hoe with short keen strokes of a file, her hands crabbed over like claws that had fossilised. Ma Hawkins and Janey got up to fetch their hoes, Janey staring at the baby, eyes unsmiling under low brows. Phebe Harlow finished combing her hair at last and tied it up with a big handkerchief of spotted blue, tying it from the back, as none of the other women did, with the knot on the crest of her forehead, and then spreading it out in wings.

‘I'll be burned if they ain't growed while we bin sittin' there,' Ma Hawkins said. She stared down the rows of beet, weed-choked, and prepared to attack them with a sort of despairing savagery. ‘That's come out hot, too. I can feel it burn the seat o' me breeches.'

‘You go hot and cold quick for an old ‘un,' Liz Borden said.

One by one the women stood waiting with their hoes, until at last Poll Sankey, lying on the bank with the baby on her chest, remained the only one not ready.

‘Ain't you comin', Poll?' they said. ‘Be tea-time afore we know where we are.'

‘One more minute with my man,' Poll said. ‘My beauty.'

‘I'll put him in his pram and sit him up,' Pauline said, ‘and then he can watch us coming up the rows.'

Poll Sankey held the baby for a few seconds longer, dancing him against her breast and then against the sky, laughing.

‘You'll git the child spoilt,' Liz Borden said.

‘Ah! let's spoil him. Who wouldn't?' Poll said. ‘That's what he's for.'

‘Give him to me now,' his mother said.

When she had taken him up and he was sitting in his pram again the women began at last to hoe down the rows of beet, in light wind and sun, towards the hollow of flax that waved like water. Clouds rose like pure white smoke over the sweet-chestnuts, casting brushes of running shadow. In the clear air there was a sound of hoes beaten on stone and earth and from beyond the hazel-wood the sweep of a hay-turner in another field.

And sometimes the child would lift his voice in the afternoon, crowing at the summer air. And as they heard it the women would stop in their hoeing and laugh, and Poll Sankey would stop and laugh louder than the rest, with her voice that was like a trumpet, and wave her hand.

‘There's my man!' she would say. ‘You can hear him from here! There's my man—my beauty!'

Colonel Gracie, who had decided to boil himself two new-laid eggs for lunch, came into the kitchen from the garden and laid his panama hat on top of the stove, put the eggs into it and then, after some moments of blissful concentration, looked inside to see if they were cooking.

Presently he sensed that something was vaguely wrong about all this and began to search for a saucepan. Having found it, a small blue enamel one much blackened by fire, he gazed at it with intent inquiry for some moments, half made a gesture as if to put it on his head and then decided to drop the eggs into it, without benefit of water. In the course of doing this he twice dipped the sleeve of his white duck jacket into a dish of raspberry jam, originally put out on the kitchen table for breakfast. The jam dish was in fact a candlestick, in pewter, the candle part of which had broken away.

Soon the Colonel, in the process of making himself some toast, found himself wondering what day it was. He couldn't be sure. He had recently given up taking
The Times
and it was this that made things difficult. He knew the month was July, although the calendar hanging by the side of the stove actually said it was September, but that of course didn't help
much about the day. He guessed it might be Tuesday; but you never really knew when you lived alone. Still, it helped sometimes to know whether it was Tuesday or Sunday, just in case he ran short of tobacco and walked all the way to the village shop only to find it closed.

Was it Tuesday? The days were normally fixed quite clearly in his mind by a system of colouration. Tuesday was a most distinct shade of raspberry rose. Thursday was brown and Sunday a pleasant yellow, that particularly bright gold you got in sunflowers. Today seemed, he thought, rather a dark green, much more like a Wednesday. It was most important to differentiate, because if it were really Wednesday it would be not the slightest use his walking down to the shop to get stamps after lunch, since Wednesday was early closing day.

There was nothing for it, he told himself, but to semaphore his friend Miss Wilkinson. With a piece of toast in his hand he set about finding his signalling flags, which he always kept in a cupboard under the stairs. As he stooped to unlatch the cupboard door a skein of onions left over from the previous winter dropped from a fragile string on the wall and fell on his neck without alarming him visibly.

One of the flags was bright yellow, the other an agreeable shade of chicory blue. Experience had shown that these two colours showed up far better than all others against the surrounding landscape of lush chestnut copse and woodland. They were clearly visible for a good half mile.

In the army, from which he was now long retired, signalling had been the Colonel's special pigeon. He had helped to train a considerable number of men with extreme proficiency. Miss Wilkinson, who was sixty, wasn't of course quite so apt a pupil as a soldier in his prime, but she had nevertheless been overjoyed
to learn what was not altogether a difficult art. It had been the greatest fun for them both; it had whiled away an enormous number of lonely hours.

For the past five weeks Miss Wilkinson had been away, staying on the south coast with a sister, and the Colonel had missed her greatly. Not only had there been no one to whom he could signal his questions, doubts and thoughts; he had never really been quite sure, all that time, what day it was.

After now having had the remarkable presence of mind to put an inch or two of water into the egg saucepan the Colonel set out with the flags to walk to the bottom of the garden, which sloped fairly steeply to its southern boundary, a three foot hedge of hawthorn. Along the hedge thirty or forty gigantic heads of sunflower were in full flower, the huge faces staring like yellow guardians across the three sloping open meadows that lay between the Colonel and Miss Wilkinson, who lived in a small white weatherboard house down on the edge of a narrow stream. Sometimes after torrential winter rains the little stream rose with devastating rapidity, flooding Miss Wilkinson, so that the Colonel had to be there at the double, to bale her out.

In the centre of the hedge was a stile and the Colonel, who in his crumpled suit of white duck looked something like a cadaverous baker out of work, now stood up on it and blew three sharp blasts on a whistle. This was the signal to fetch Miss Wilkinson from the kitchen, the greenhouse, the potting shed, or wherever she happened to be. The system of whistle and flag suited both the Colonel and Miss Wilkinson admirably, the Colonel because he hated the telephone so much and Miss Wilkinson because she couldn't afford to have the instrument installed. For the same reasons neither of them owned either television or radio, the Colonel having laid it down in
expressly severe terms, almost as if in holy writ, that he would not only never have such anti-social devices in the house but that they were also, in a sense, degenerate: if not immoral.

Miss Wilkinson having appeared in her garden in a large pink sun hat and a loose summery blue dress with flowers all over it, the Colonel addressed her by smartly raising his yellow flag. Miss Wilkinson replied by promptly raising her blue one. This meant that they were receiving each other loud and clear.

The day in fact was so beautifully clear that the Colonel could actually not only see Miss Wilkinson in detail as she stood on the small wooden bridge that spanned the stream but he could also pick out slender spires of purple loosestrife among the many tall reeds that lined the banks like dark green swords. Both he and Miss Wilkinson, among their many other things in common, were crazy about flowers.