The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (14 page)

She became more and more part of this struggle as the summer went on. By July the fronds of the rhubarb leaves had spread over the oil-drums like dark metallic canopies. Beyond the rows of potatoes, now in purple flower, the raspberries were fruiting for the first time, pink and ruby on the sugar-brown canes among the green and silver leaves. The land was dusty in the sun. After the office had closed on Saturday the girl, sometimes in Travers's car, sometimes by bus, went out to the little farm to spend first the afternoon only, then the night, then the
whole week-end. She began to do things naturally about the house and the yard: drawing water, making tea, digging and peeling potatoes, pulling weeds. When the raspberry season began she stayed over Sunday and helped with the picking of the berries that Travers would take into town on Monday. Travers and his mother and she would begin at the picking when the sun first began to go down. Across the flat bright land she would hear for a time the sound of bells ringing in the country churches for evening service, but silence would come down as flat and level as the land itself when the bells had ceased, leaving the summer air so quiet that she could hear the tap of thrushes breaking snails on the bricks of the courtyard of the house. They would go on picking the ripe, velvet berries until very late. Across the land the long valleys of evening shade and sunlight would stretch for great distances and sometimes vanish completely before half the canes were stripped. Once they worked on by the light of full moon, the ripe berries and the stains on their hands black in the cheese-yellow light, the stack of chip-baskets rising like a white paper pagoda on the earth before Travers at last draped it with a hay-tarpaulin for the night.

Travers's mother, very tired, went on into the house half an hour before Travers and the girl. ‘Git you both a mite o' summat t'eat. You'll be hungry when
you come in.' When the time came Travers and the girl walked across the silent field to the house. The moonlight lay like bright cream on the dark potato-flowers, on the raspberry-leaves, on the slate roof of the yellow house. The tired, sore hands of the girl dropped at her side.

All of a sudden Travers stopped and placed his hands on her shoulders, then against her cheeks. He stood for some time looking down at her face, upturned in the moonlight. She could smell the fragrance of the crushed raspberries on his hands and she could feel the trembling of the heavy fingers.

‘I know you're tired,' he began to say. ‘I know – '

‘No,' she said, ‘I'm all right.'

‘I wanted to say something,' he said. ‘It's important but I don't want to if you're tired.'

‘I'm all right. I'm not tired. I'm not tired really.'

She felt his hands fall and grasp her shoulders with abrupt tenderness before he spoke again.

‘I want to know when you're going to marry me,' he said. ‘No,' he corrected himself, ‘not when. I don't mean it like that. I mean if – if you will. That's all. I only mean if you will.'

She stood looking beyond him, not knowing what to do or say.

‘I don't want you to say now,' he said. ‘Not necessarily now.'

She still could not move or speak, and stood only looking at the moonlight, vacantly.

‘You know I like you,' he said. ‘You know that. And I know you like me, or you wouldn't have kept on coming. You wouldn't have kept on coming and staying if you hadn't felt something.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I like you.'

She could not now keep the tiredness and indecision out of her voice, and hearing it, he said again, ‘I don't want you to say now. You want to make up your mind.' He began to speak with a great effort, more quickly. ‘I know what it is. I know all right what it is. That's the reason I haven't said anything. That's the reason why I want you to make up your mind.'

‘Would it be all right if I told you next week?' she said.

‘Yes,' he said mechanically, ‘yes.' His hands fell away from her shoulders. ‘Yes, that'll do. Only will you promise? Will you make a promise to me?'

‘Yes,' she said, almost against her will. ‘I'll promise.' She looked away from him over the empty moonlit fields. ‘Only you go in now, by yourself. I'll come in a minute. I want to be by myself a moment, and then I'll come in.'

He walked away down the potato rows towards the house, but she did not watch him. Only, when she turned eventually and went too, eyes downcast, looking
at the brightly outlined earth in the moonlight, she could see where he had walked: where the stump of the leg had made dark holes in the dry earth by the edge of the potatoes.

One day during the next week a surprising thing happened. From the windows of the office, late one afternoon, she saw a young man in a light grey flannel suit continually walking up and down the pavement on the opposite side of the street. When she left the office this young man came up and raised his hat to her. She saw with surprise that it was Austin.

‘I didn't know you. I really didn't,' she said.

Austin was very much changed. His face had lost its narrow, pimpled look; he had no longer an air of pained nervousness when he tried to look at her.

She wanted to know where he had been.

‘I'm an insurance man now,' he said. ‘I've got a small book. Takes me out into the country. I bike mostly. And you were right about the exercise. It's done me a world of good.'

As he talked they walked up the street in the sunshine. Without knowing it at first, she kept looking at his feet. Then she realized why she was doing it and why they attracted her.

‘Anything wrong with my shoes?' Austin said.

‘No,' she said. ‘No. I was just looking at them, that's all – thinking how nice they were.' But she knew that
in reality it was because it was strange to be walking with a man who had two feet. And she remembered too how she once told herself that it could make no difference whether a man were physically fine or not.

‘I wanted to ask you if you'd come out with me again,' Austin said.

‘I don't know about that,' she said.

‘Just sometimes. Weekends.'

‘I'll see.'

‘Just sometimes. I'm still mad about you. Say you'll come sometimes. Just now and then.'

‘You'll be better with some other girl,' she said, ‘not me.'

‘No, I won't.'

‘All right, but I've got to go now,' she said. ‘I really must go now.'

The impression made on her by Austin remained painfully deep for some days. It was strange to be impressed and pained not by a man's voice or his looks or by what he said, but by the simple fact that he had feet like other men. In this mood she went about for some days looking at the feet of people walking. She knew that she did not love Austin, but she felt immensely grateful towards him for showing her what the feet of people could mean. She saw feet that were huge, flat, heavy and tired; feet that were assertive and militant and possessive; feet that were slender and jaunty and
delicate; and she became aware of something very beautiful in all of them. Only when she thought of Travers she was aware also of something like terror.

When she came to the farm on the following Saturday afternoon Travers did not fetch her, because she had written to say that she would come by bus. As she walked along the road the heat of mid-afternoon seemed to strike her a series of flat sickening blows on the head. In the orchard the sheep were huddled against the hedgerows for shade and the leaves of young willows had begun to drop, curled and yellowed by heat, along the track leading to the house.

The doors of the house stood wide open, but the yard and the field were deserted. She went into the house by the front door, taking off her moist town-gloves. Her brown eyes, ordinarily kind and spirited, now seemed dull and defensive. She had made up her mind already what she was going to say, and even what she was going to do. Except for her gloves her hands were empty. For the first time for several weeks she had not brought her things for the night.

As she went into the living room she saw that it was empty too. She sat down for a moment on the piano stool by the harmonium, twisting her gloves in her hands. On the table stood an empty tea-cup and on the old-fashioned horsehair sofa lay the opened sheets of the day's newspaper. She sat for some moments looking
at this, dully reading the headlines sideways, and then finally she picked it up. As she did so she stopped quite dead. Underneath the newspaper – as if the heat had tried him very much and he had taken it off to rest – lay Travers's wooden leg.

She walked straight out into the sunlight again with a feeling of faint sickness and terror. She was not really aware of moving until she heard Travers's voice suddenly calling her quietly from a bedroom window.

‘Hullo, there you are. Wait a minute, Mother's having a sleep. I'll be down in a minute.' His voice was excited by the pleasure of seeing her. ‘Don't stand in the sun. I'm coming down.'

She walked vacantly round the back of the house, into the raspberry field. Standing looking at the canes, oppressed by an increasing sense of unhappiness, she saw that the hot weather had almost finished the crop, that the few berries looked dark and bruised, and that the leaves were very brittle in the sun.

As she stood there Travers came out of the house. She stood dully watching him hop over the ground, happy at her arrival.

‘I've been having a bit of a sleep too,' he said, ‘on the sofa.' For some reason he noticed her empty hands. ‘Where've you put your case? I didn't see it in the living room.'

She stood quite still.

‘I didn't bring my case.'

‘You didn't bring it?'

‘No.'

He hopped sideways on one leg, as if about to lose his balance.

‘You're not going to stay?' he said, ‘is that it?' His eyes began to tremble with pain.

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm not going to stay. I'm not coming any more.'

‘What we talked about last week – you mean you can't?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘I know how you feel,' he began to say, ‘but if you – '

‘I just can't!' she said. ‘That's all. I just can't.'

Afraid of crying, and suddenly wanting to end it all completely, she began to walk away across the field. She had walked about a dozen yards in the hot sun when she heard him call something after her.

‘I know how you feel,' he said, ‘I know. But why did you keep on coming? Why did you keep on coming if you didn't feel anything? Why did you? Why did you keep on coming?'

Hearing what he said, she could not go on. She stopped and slowly turned and saw him standing against the rows of shrivelled canes in the beating sunlight. She saw him standing like someone struck into
inertia by heat and pain, his huge hands apathetically held at his side.

She stood for a moment longer watching him before she ran back to him. The tears were rising bitterly in her eyes and she made a slight cry of pity and terror as she beat her hands on his arms and shoulders.

‘Oh! I will. I will. I do love you. I do love you. I do really love you. Please believe me. I do really love you. Please believe that I do. Please, please believe me now.'

‘We'll begin with “Drink To Me Only”,' George Abrahams said.

As he spoke Miss Appleby and Mrs. Williams took up their places beside him at the piano, with Tom Willis on the far left hand. Miss Appleby, a rather plain, dry-humoured girl who wore gold spectacles and a plum-coloured velvet frock, sang contralto, and Tom Willis tenor. As for Dora Williams, there was not a more beautiful soprano in the town, perhaps in the county, than this tall reserved girl with silky yellow hair and large meditative eyes.

George Abrahams gave a chord on the piano, waited a moment, and then counted one, two, three. At the given moment the quartette broke into singing that filled the small front room of George Abrahams's house, where they met two and sometimes three or four nights a week for practice. On the top of the piano copies of part songs, some in manuscript that George Abrahams had himself arranged for four voices, were carefully laid out in neat piles. On the table by the fire there were the usual piles of ham and cheese sandwiches that his wife had prepared, the usual two bottles of elderberry wine, the usual cut wineglasses
that the bright firelight seemed already to have filled with dancing sherry.

As they sang, George Abrahams listened critically to each individual voice. Last week Tom Willis had had a slight cold, but now both he and Miss Appleby were in first-rate voice. Miss Appleby was a singer who never varied – always the same splendid, warm attack, the same deep brown colour in her voice. She was an excellent reader too, and would have done herself justice in the best choirs anywhere. And in a district that had never been noted for tenors Tom Willis was a very good one, if a trifle on the light side. His great weakness was that he was a slow reader. He was a tall man with unaccountably gentle manners. He did not speak much, was not married, and did not seem to trust himself with women. He sometimes gave the impression of being too much of an idealist and always sang best in pieces, such as lullabies, that demanded the greatest tenderness of feeling.

One of George Abrahams's objects, on forming the quartette six months before, had been to aim for perfect balance of tone, but he could not help noticing that to-night Dora Williams was singing in far finer voice than the rest. There was a slight lift in her voice that disturbed the final balance of harmony. It was almost as if she were singing too beautifully for the others.

At the end of the piece he did not say anything, and they went on to try out two pieces of Schubert which he himself had arranged for mixed voices, ‘Standchën' and ‘Who is Sylvia?' In both songs the clear beauty of her voice seemed to stand out more plainly than ever. He detected something bright and nervous in her delivery, and once when he glanced up at her she was staring with very large disquieted eyes at a picture on the wall, lost in feelings completely remote from the song.