Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (22 page)

‘Don't move. It's all right. I'm coming back.'

She did not answer. As he began to climb down he thought of what he must do. It was absolutely essential to put her on the train tomorrow; he must even put himself on a train. He must do anything to end it all as swiftly as possible. It was an absolutely ghastly business and he had to say so firmly and be free.

‘I'll be down,' he called. ‘Just stay there.'

There would, he thought, be awful scandals and things of that sort if he did not get her back. He did not want the scandals of a little town any more than he wanted the former Miss Shortland, and suddenly the unpleasant, unwanted mess of it clotted his throat so thickly that when he looked down and saw her stuck to the rock-face like a pale blind limpet he found he could not call.

She remained there for another thirty seconds, eyes shut, her face drained of blood, before she swung stiffly outwards, in a slow fainting arc, and fell. Her mouth, unconscious already, did not even open to cry. She fell like a pale dummy, bumping twice against the crag-face, and then finally downwards, seventy or eighty feet below.

For a few seconds his horror was shot through, cool and clear, exultantly, with a piercing sensation of being free. He felt suddenly oblivious of the fact that the former Miss Shortland had never had any intention of bringing her husband to the Oberland; that she had come away with the simple intention of being alone with Arthur and for a time, also, like him, of being free. He was also oblivious of what, soon, they would be saying back in the little town: of how that was the sort of thing that came from living abroad too long and from old lovers trying to get together. And presently tears began to flow through him: not tears for the former Miss Shortland,
but tears for his mother and the young blue-eyed Parkman, dying needlessly on a snowless crag.

He became fully aware of these things only as he climbed down. And climbing down he dipped rapidly into shadow. The afternoon was later than he thought. The sun had gone from the dark rock; and the air blew bitterly on his face from beyond the snow-line.

Miss Manktelow, who in desperation had begun to tint her hair a shade of unobtrusive brown, never openly expressed her opinion that the profession of millinery was better than any other. But in her heart she had always known it was.

From her small back sitting-room, where chairs and tables and even the mantelpiece were hung about with grey skulls of buckram and rolls of coloured ribbon and frayed strips of trimming, she looked out on an asphalt yard in which two cut-down beer-barrels supported the dead frames of a pair of rhododendrons. She did not quite remember when the rhododendrons had been planted; she knew only that they had never flowered and then had died. But one day, when she had time, she was going to take the brown skeletons of them out and in their places she was going to plant something brighter. Perhaps nasturtiums or geraniums or even tobacco plants—they would smell beautifully when the yard was dark and hot on summer evenings. She was very fond of flowers, but the constant trouble with flowers was cats. You planted something and immediately, next day, cats scratched it up again and killed it. That was the worst, she thought, of living in a neighbourhood like East Street. All its earth was asphalt.
All its back-yards were alive with cats and there were never any flowers.

Mrs Daley, a customer who had a large crusty head with a depressed forehead and pale ears that were something like pieces of uncooked pastry pricked at the bottom with skewers, looked uneasily at a hat Miss Manktelow was finishing on a wooden block.

She was not quite sure what to think of this hat. It did not seem, she thought, to suit her character. It appeared to be rather loud for her and she said:

‘I had in mind something rather in the way of a plain velour.'

‘Velour?' Miss Manktelow said. ‘I wouldn't think velour was you.'

‘What Joe said was——'

‘Joe?' Miss Manktelow said. She pricked her bottom lip as she took out of it, too hastily, one of the pins she was using for the hat. ‘How is Joe?'

The flower she was pinning on Mrs Daley's hat was something like a cross between a trampled peony and an over-blown crimson poppy. It was a little dusty in the heart but that would brush off and in the completed hat it would never be seen.

‘You know Joe,' Mrs Daley said. ‘You know what Joe is. Joe's always the same.'

Her voice was flat with indifference about Joe. She reached out and touched the hat. Her feeling that it was not right for her made her mouth drop loosely. A narrow gap appeared above the upper set of her false teeth and gave her a look of disjointed vacancy.

‘I've had the velour in my mind all winter,' she said.

‘Winter—yes, that's all right,' Miss Manktelow said. ‘In
winter I grant you. But you want a bit more colour now spring is here.'

In the yard and beyond it, in East Street, there was no sign of spring. On the tarred fence a brown cat was crouching and the wind of February prickled its fur. A fog of black smoke hung about the bakery. The bakery was also an outdoor beer-house and there were all sorts of sounds that came from it that Miss Manktelow knew well. Beer barrels rolling in the side jetty. Men's voices. Shovels scraping on the bakehouse floor.

She was familiar also with the sound of Joe Daley, laughing with the baker.

‘The thing to do is to try it,' she said. She took the last of the pins from her mouth. Under the flabby flower of crimson and dusty black the entire hat on its wooden skull was submerged. ‘That's the only way.'

Joe Daley was a large man with fierce pink flesh and light dancing blue eyes that because of their vivacity seemed to stick out, like a shrimp's, from the front of his head. In summer the beer-house was cool. In winter the bakehouse was always fiery and snug and nearly always Joe was there. People were not permitted drink in the beer-house because it had an off-licence only, but there was nothing to prevent the baker and Joe Daley having bottles of beer in the bakehouse at the back. They had many bottles of beer there and sometimes Joe stayed for the night-baking. He and the baker laughed over the beer while the bread was cooking and Miss Manktelow, waking, could hear them from her room.

‘This is temporary,' she said, ‘nothing is fixed.'

When she put the hat on Mrs Daley's head the large dough-like ears supported it uncertainly. In a strange fashion the flower made Mrs Daley look heavier, older, more misshapen than before.

‘I fancy the flower wants to be further up,' Miss Manktelow said. ‘That will give you a bit of height. That's what you need.'

Mrs Daley was small in all ways except for her head and ears. Miss Manktelow did not understand how a large healthy boisterous man like Joe Daley came to fall for a woman so undersized. She did not know how people fell for each other anyway. It was a mystery how one person got into the way of being entranced or familiar with another.

‘Let's try it there.' The flower, fixed high on the crown of the hat, seemed as big as a train signal. ‘I'll just pin it and you can see what you feel.'

Joe was extraordinary, always laughing. Miss Manktelow was fond of having new bread and cocoa at night. And sometimes, about ten o'clock, when she went into the bakehouse to fetch bread fresh and hot from the oven, Joe would be there. That would be the first baking. The air would be strong with the heat of the bakehouse, the smell of bread and the laughter of Joe. There would be a yeasty smell of baking and beer, the loud boisterous blowing laugh of Joe as he sprawled in a floury chair.

‘I feel as if I'm going to over-balance,' Mrs Daley said, ‘with the flower all that much on one side——'

‘I don't think so,' Miss Manktelow said. ‘Don't let that worry you——'

When Mrs Daley peered into the mirror above the mantelpiece she saw the critical face of Miss Manktelow rise above her shoulder.

‘Now forget that it's you,' Miss Manktelow said. ‘Try to imagine it's someone else. Detach yourself and look at the hat.'

Mrs Daley looked at the top-heavy familiar reflection of herself with an expression of troubled uncertainty. She could not imagine she was anyone else and her mouth fell open
again. She felt insecure and touched the side of the flower, pushing it up a little, and Miss Manktelow said:

‘No, no. Not too much. I think it's right as it is.'

‘I fancy it ought to go more in the middle——'

‘Well, let's try in the middle then. We can but try.'

The flower, set in the middle of the hat, seemed to pull down the entire front of Mrs Daley's face into a puzzled scowl. Mrs Daley's hair was spidery and grey. Pieces of it stuck out from under the hat like straying sheep's wool, making her look as if she wore a wig that did not sit correctly.

Miss Manktelow said she thought the flower in the middle of the hat looked marvellous. She felt it was just the thing. ‘It gives balance,' she said. ‘And yet there's just that touch.'

Mrs Daley fingered the hat, the flower and bits of her hair uncertainly, as if wondering exactly what that touch could be. Miss Manktelow thought of Joe.

There had once been an evening when Joe had been extra boisterous in the bakehouse, full of extraordinary larks.

She often thought of that evening. Joe was sitting on the dough-board in his shirt sleeves. You never knew what Joe was going to say to you next and that evening he had kept on calling her Miss Mangeltoe. It was the way he said it that was so funny and every few moments he roared with laughter. For a time she did her best not to laugh. Her name after all was rather an exceptional one; she was in a profession; she did not want to lower herself at all. She had once heard someone say too that her name was French and that it was possibly a corruption of something like
Manque de l'eau
, whatever that meant.

But after Joe had called her Miss Mangeltoe several times she could not help herself and began laughing. At first she tittered and then Joe gave a shriek of laughter, the beginning
of which she saw plainly, a series of stirring tremulous flutters, in the great strong belly above the tops of his trousers.

After that she could not keep her face straight. Joe roared and kept slapping his fat tight thighs with both hands. There were beads of yeasty beer on his mouth, a tipsy flare in his blue eyes and a smell of fire and baking in the air. She felt the laughter, the warmth and the way Joe called her Miss Mangeltoe having a strange effect on her. It fired her, although she laughed so much, into a curious sadness that became an ache above her heart.

Then another disturbing and in fact almost terrifying thing had happened. All at once Joe, swinging his legs excitedly under the dough-table, said he would take her home.

‘Could we try it plain?' Mrs Daley said, ‘without the flower?'

Miss Manktelow stuck pins into her mouth and again she felt one of them sharply prick her lips.

‘It's nothing without the flower,' she said. ‘The flower is
it
. It's the whole point of the hat. You can see for yourself if we put it on the block.'

On the block, that was so like a bony and skinless skull, the hat did not look more ugly than when it sat on Mrs Daley's flabby, paste-like ears. Mrs Daley stared at it with open mouth, in dismay, her false teeth dropping weakly. She said that Joe had all the time fancied her in a velour, that all the time that had been Joe's idea.

‘Men never know about hats,' Miss Manktelow said.

Mrs Daley had cut her hair in an old-fashioned bob that had the effect of shortening her stature still further now that she had taken off the hat. Looking at it, Miss Manktelow wondered again how on earth a man like Joe could fall for
a person who looked so dwarf and crushed and then she said:

‘I think I've got it. I think I've got the answer. We'll put the flower at the back.'

She had thought again and again of that evening when Joe had said he would take her home. She wondered what might have happened if she had taken him into the house. She had never been able to make up her mind whether he meant it or not. Joe was always larking of course. Perhaps he was drunk? You never quite knew with Joe. But he had in fact actually jumped off the dough-board; he had actually taken her by the arm and pretended he was ready.

‘At the back,' she said to Mrs Daley. ‘I'm perfectly sure that that's the answer.'

She remembered Joe roaring with laughter and winking at the baker and saying: ‘We're ready. Eh, Fred? We're ready. Only got to get Miss Mangeltoe ready now, Fred, and then we're all set. That right, Fred? Always got to get the lady ready.'

She did not think it could have been a joke; but then again, she often told herself, it could have been and perhaps it was. All the same she wondered what might have happened. Joe in the dark house, Joe having another glass of beer and a plate of bread and cheese, Joe talking and laughing among the trimmings and hats and skulls. Joe alone with her. Joe saying he was ready and pulling her leg and calling her Miss Mangeltoe. She could never be quite certain that what she imagined might not have been real. There was no way of saying it might not have happened.

The hat, without the flower at the front, sat on Mrs Daley more hideously than ever; but when Mrs Daley looked into the mirror again she was aware only of a sense of relief because she could not see the flower.

‘I think that's better,' she said. ‘Heaps. I like it better like that.'

‘It's always a question of trying things one way and the other until you get the thing that fits the personality,' Miss Manktelow said.

She had learnt all that during her years with Curtis and Co. You had to make the personality fit the hat. Naturally customers resisted and had their own ideas but they never really knew what was best for them. That was why they were always rushing back and changing hats because they did not fit their change of mood. Women were stupid about hats. They simply never knew.