Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (7 page)

When she came back to the house late on Thursday afternoon, not wearing her cape, the air was thick and sultry. All along the stark white fringes of chalk, under the beechwoods, yellow rock-roses flared in the sun. Across the valley hung a few high bland white clouds, delicate and far away.

‘The creeper came down with a thousand empty birds' nests,' Lafarge called from a balcony. ‘A glorious mess.'

Dressed in dark blue slacks, with yellow open shirt, blue silk muffler, and white panama, he waved towards her a pink-tipped whitewash brush. Behind him the wall, bare of creeper, was drying a thin blotting-paper pink in the sun.

‘I put the heart in the kitchen,' she said.

Ignoring this, he made no remark about her cape, either. ‘The stucco turned out to be in remarkably good condition,' he said. ‘Tell me about the paint. You're the first to see it. Too dark?'

‘I think it's very nice.'

‘Be absolutely frank,' he said. ‘Be as absolutely frank and critical as you like, Mrs Corbett. Tell me exactly how it strikes you. Isn't it too dark?'

‘Perhaps it is a shade too dark.'

‘On the other hand one has to picture the rose against it,'
he said. ‘Do you know anyone who grows that wonderful black-red rose?'

She stood staring up at him. ‘I don't think I do.'

‘That's a pity,' he said, ‘because if we had the rose one could judge the effect—— However, I'm going to get some tea. Would you care for tea?'

In the kitchen he made tea with slow, punctilious ritual care.

‘The Chinese way,' he said. ‘First a very little water. Then a minute's wait. Then more water. Then another wait. And so on. Six minutes in all. The secret lies in the waits and the little drops of water. Try one of these. It's a sort of sourmilk tart I invented.'

She sipped tea, munched pastry, and stared at the raw heart she had left in a dish on the kitchen table.

‘Awfully kind of you to stop and talk to me, Mrs Corbett,' he said. ‘You're the first living soul I've spoken to since you were here on Tuesday.'

Then, for the first time, she asked a question that had troubled her.

‘Do you live here all alone?' she said.

‘Absolutely, but when the house is done I shall have masses of parties. Masses of friends.'

‘It's rather a big house for one person.'

‘Come and see the rooms,' he said. ‘Some of the rooms I had done before I moved in. My bedroom for instance. Come upstairs.'

Upstairs a room in pigeon grey, with a deep green carpet and an open french window under a canopy, faced across the valley.

He stepped out on the balcony, spreading enthusiastic hands.

‘Here I'm going to have big plants. Big plushy ones.
Petunias. Blowzy ones. Begonias, fuchsias, and that sort of thing. Opulence everywhere.'

He turned and looked at her. ‘It's a pity we haven't got that big black rose.'

‘I used to wear a hat with a rose like that on it,' she said, ‘but I never wear it now.'

‘How nice,' he said, and came back into the room, where suddenly, for the second time, she felt the intolerable dreariness of her brown woollen dress.

Nervously she put her hands in front of it again and said:

‘I think I ought to be going now, Mr Lafarge. Was there something for the weekend?'

‘I haven't planned,' he said. ‘I'll have to telephone.'

He stood for a moment in the window, looking straight at her with an expression of sharp, arrested amazement.

‘Mrs Corbett,' he said, ‘I saw the most extraordinary effect just now. It was when I was on the ladder and we were talking about the rose. You were standing there looking up at me and your eyes were so dark that it looked as if you hadn't got any. They're the darkest eyes I've ever seen. Didn't anyone ever tell you so?'

No one, as she remembered it, had ever told her so.

The following Saturday morning she arrived at the house with oxtail and kidneys. ‘I shall have the kidneys with
sauce madère,'
he said. ‘And perhaps even
flambés.'

He was kneading a batch of small brown loaves on the kitchen table, peppering them with poppy seeds, and he looked up from them to see her holding a brown-paper bag.

‘It's only the rose off my hat,' she said. ‘I thought you might like to try——'

‘Darling Mrs Corbett,' he said. ‘You dear creature.'

No one, as she remembered it, had ever called her darling
before. Nor could she ever remember being, for anyone, at any time, a dear creature.

Some minutes later she was standing on the balcony outside his bedroom window, pressing the dark red rose from her hat against the fresh pink wall. He stood in the cindery wilderness below, making lively, rapturous gestures.

‘Delicious, my dear. Heavenly. You must see it. You simply must come down!'

She went down, leaving the rose on the balcony. A few seconds later he was standing in her place while she stood in the garden below, staring up at the effect of her dark red rose against the wall.

‘What do you feel?' he called.

‘It seems real,' she said. ‘It seems to have come alive.'

‘Ah! but imagine it in another summer,' he said. ‘When it will be real. When there'll be lots of them, scores of them, blooming here.'

With extravagant hands he tossed the rose down to her from the balcony. Instinctively she lifted her own hands, trying to catch it. It fell instead into a forest of sow-thistle.

He laughed, again not unkindly, and called, ‘I'm so grateful, darling Mrs Corbett. I really can't tell you how grateful I am. You've been so thoughtful. You've got such taste.'

With downcast eyes she picked the rose out of the mass of sow-thistle, not knowing what to say.

Through a tender August, full of soft light that seemed to reflect back from dry chalky fields of oats and wheat and barley just below the hill, the derelict house grew prettily, all pink at first among the beeches. By September, Lafarge had begun work on the balconies, painting them a delicate seagull grey. Soon the canopies were grey, too, hanging like half sea-shells
above the windows. The doors and windows became grey also, giving an effect of delicate lightness to the house against the background of arching, massive boughs.

She watched these transformations almost from day to day as she delivered to Lafarge kidneys, tripe, liver, sweetbreads, calves' heads, calves' feet, and the hearts that he claimed were just like goose-flesh.

‘Offal,' he was repeatedly fond of telling her, ‘is far too underrated. People are altogether too superior about offal. The eternal joint is the curse. What could be more delicious than sweetbreads? Or calf's head? Or even chitterlings? There is a German recipe for chitterlings, Mrs Corbett, that could make you think you were eating I don't know what—some celestial, melting manna. You must bring me chitterlings one day soon, Mrs Corbett dear.'

‘I have actually found the rose too,' he said one day with excitement. ‘I have actually ordered it from a catalogue. It's called
Château Clos de Vougeot
and it's just like the rose on your hat. It's like a deep dark red burgundy.'

All this time, now that the weather had settled into the rainless calm of late summer, she did not need to wear her cape. At the same time she did not think of discarding it. She thought only with uneasiness of the brown frayed dress and presently replaced it with another, dark blue, that she had worn as second-best for many years.

By October, when the entire outside of the house had become transformed, she began to feel, in a way, that she was part of it. She had seen the curtains of creeper, with their thousand birds' nests, give way to clean pink stucco. The canopies had grown from bowls of rusty green tin to delicate half seashells and the balconies from mere paintless coops to pretty cages of seagull grey. As with the fields, the beechwoods, the
yellow rock-roses running across the chalk and the changing seasons she had hardly any way of expressing what she felt about these things. She could simply say, ‘Yes, Mr Lafarge, I think it's lovely. It's very nice, Mr Lafarge. It's sort of come alive.'

‘Largely because of you, dear,' he would say. ‘You've inspired the thing. You've fed me with your delicious viands. You've helped. You've given opinions. You brought the rose for the wall. You've got such marvellous instinctive taste, Mrs Corbett dear.'

Sometimes too he would refer again to her eyes, that were so dark and looked so straight ahead and hardly moved when spoken to. ‘It's those wonderful eyes of yours, Mrs Corbett,' he would say. ‘I think you have a simply marvellous eye.'

By November the weather had broken up. In the shortening rainy days the beeches began to shed continuous golden-copper showers of leaves. Electric light had now been wired to the outer walls of the house, with concealed lamps beneath the balconies and windows.

She did not see these lights switched on until a darkening afternoon in mid November, when Lafarge greeted her with an intense extravagance of excitement.

‘Mrs Corbett, my dear, I've had an absolute storm of inspiration. I'm going to have the house-warmer next Saturday. All my friends are coming and you and I have to talk of hearts and livers and delicious things of that sort and so on and so on. But that isn't really the point. Come outside, Mrs Corbett dear, come outside.'

In the garden, under the dark, baring trees, he switched on the lights. ‘There, darling!'

Sensationally a burst of electric light gave to the pink walls and the feather-grey canopies, doors, windows, balconies, a
new, uplifting sense of transformation. She felt herself catch her breath.

The house seemed to float for a moment against half-naked trees, in the darkening afternoon, and he said in that rapturously plummy voice of his, ‘But that isn't all, dear, that isn't all. You see, the rose has arrived. It came this morning. And suddenly I had this wild surmise, this wonderful on-a-peak-in-Darien sort of thing. Can you guess?'

She could not guess.

‘I'm going to plant it,' he said, ‘at the party.'

‘Oh yes, that will be nice,' she said.

‘But that's not all, dear, that's not all,' he said. ‘More yet. The true, the blushful has still to come. Can't you guess?'

Once again she could not guess.

‘I want you to bring that rose of yours to the party,' he said. ‘We'll fix it to the tree. And then in the electric light, against the pink walls——'

She felt herself catch her breath again, almost frightened.

‘Me?' she said. ‘At the party?'

‘Well, of course, darling. Of course.'

‘Mr Lafarge, I couldn't come to your party——'

‘My dear,' he said, ‘if you don't come to my party, I shall be for ever mortally, dismally, utterly offended.'

She felt herself begin to tremble. ‘But I couldn't, Mr Lafarge, not with all your friends——'

‘Darling Mrs Corbett. You are my friend. There's no argument about it. You'll come. You'll bring the rose. We'll fix it to the tree and it will be heaven. All my friends will be here. You'll love my friends.'

She did not protest or even answer. In the brilliant electric light she stared with her dark diffident eyes at the pink walls of the house and felt as if she were under an arc-light, about to
undergo an operation, naked, transfixed, and utterly helpless.

It was raining when she drove up to the house on Saturday evening, wearing her cape and carrying the rose in a paper bag. But by the time she reached the hills she was able to stop the windscreen-wipers on the van and presently the sky was pricked with stars.

There were so many cars outside the house that she stood for some time outside, afraid to go in. During this time she was so nervous and preoccupied that she forgot that she was still wearing the cape. She remembered it only at the last moment, and then took it off and rolled it up and put it in the van.

Standing in the kitchen, she could only think that the house was a cage, now full of gibbering monkeys. Bewildered, she stood staring at trays of glasses, rows of bottles, many dishes of decorated morsels of lobster, prawns, olives, nuts, and sausages.

As she stood there a woman came in with a brassy voice, a long yellow cigarette holder, and a low neckline from which melon-like breasts protruded white and hard, and took a drink from a tray, swallowing it quickly before taking the entire tray back with her.

‘Just float in, dear. It's like a mill-race in there. You just go with the damn stream.'

Cautiously Mrs Corbett stood by the door of the drawing-room, holding the rose in its paper bag and staring at the gibbering, munching, sipping faces swimming before her in smoky air.

It was twenty minutes before Lafarge, returning to the kitchen for plates of food, accidentally found her standing there, transfixed with deep immobile eyes.

‘But darling Mrs Corbett! Where have you been? I've been telling everyone about you and you were not here. I want you to meet everyone. They've all heard about you. Everyone!'

She found herself borne away among strange faces, mute and groping.

‘Angela darling, I want you to meet Mrs Corbett. The most wonderful person. The dearest sweetie. I call her my heart specialist.'

A chestless girl with tow-coloured hair, cut low over her forehead to a fringe, as with a basin, stared at her with large, hollow, unhealthy eyes. ‘Is it true you're a heart specialist? Where do you practise?'

Before Clara could answer a man with an orange tie, a black shirt and a stiff carrot beard came over and said, ‘Good lord, what a mob. Where does Henry get them from? Let's whip off to the local. That woman Forbes is drooling as usual into every ear.'

Excuseless, the girl with hollow eyes followed him away. Lafarge too had disappeared.

‘Haven't I seen you somewhere before? Haven't we met? I rather fancied we had.' A young man with prematurely receding, downy yellow hair and uncertain reddish eyes, looking like a stoat, sucked at a glass, smoked a cigarette, and held her in a quivering, fragile stare.