The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (6 page)

He felt that she no longer belonged to him. Why was it? For years he himself had been independent, with good money, proud, able to please himself. Now it was her turn. What did she do with herself at nights? How had he come to let her get like this? It seemed to him that she was growing into a common woman, a stranger, swinging her earrings and her hips along the street. How had it come about?

She was right. Who was he? How did she come to talk like that? His thoughts unconsciously beat him to a standstill.

A moment later he was no longer thinking. He found himself looking at many flowers blooming with shadowy brilliance under the light canvas of a stall. Behind cool wax pagodas of pink and mauve hyacinth and blue stars of cineraria and bowls of little lemon tulips a woman was sitting silently knitting by the light of an incandescent lamp. He stood looking at the flowers with immobile eyes. The damp wintry air
had now become suddenly fragrant and light. He heard for a moment nothing but the softest click of the bone needles as the woman knitted, and gradually his interest concentrated itself on a single flower, a small pink and white fuchsia in a pot, which he picked up in his hands.

For two or three minutes he held the flower in his large crab-like hands and looked at it. The slender upper petals, of clear cherry-red, were turned backwards. The lower petals were gathered thickly together like a skirt which swung lightly under the vibration of his unsteady hands.

At last he was aware of the woman looking up from her knitting, watching him. He made as if to hold the flower nearer the light, peering at it more closely. The woman remarked at last that it was a pretty pot, and he nodded.

‘Ballet Girl,' she said.

‘Eh?' He raised grey, unreceptive eyes.

‘Ballet Girl,' she said. ‘That's the name of it.'

‘Ah,' he said.

He stood holding the flower for almost a minute longer, without a change of expression or another word.

‘Ninepence,' the woman said. ‘If you look at it closely you can see it's just like a girl. Like somebody dancing.'

He did not speak. He held the flower in his hands a little longer before moving again. When he did move, putting the pot down on the stall at last, the flowers swung briefly beneath the leaves in the quiet air.

And even then he still stood watching, his eyes lowered in the gas-light. It was only when he moved away from the stall and the flowers and the woman watching him over her poised needles that the expression in his eyes became quite clear.

He was looking straight before him into space, his eyes alight for a moment with happiness, with a momentary illusion it was clear they could not sustain.

Richardson drove his car down to the river, and there a woman of sixty or more ferried him and the car across. The water, chopped by the motion of the crossing, flapped against the low mud banks, the piles of the disused wharf and mournfully against the clumps of dying reed. The sky was dirty over the interminably flat land, very low, with breaks of wintry evening sunlight that were here and there reflected in the dark water of the dykes. When the ferry hit the opposite bank the big woman lumbered off, caught the rope and pulled on it, digging her great gum-booted feet into the turf.

‘You can drive off now!'

At that moment something made him turn and look back. He saw on the bank, standing back, the low mud-plastered pub that had perhaps been the ferry-house for more than a hundred years. Three boats were drawn up in the yard. It was November, but they were still not covered for the winter, and on one side the wind had piled up against them like a golden shoal a great drift of fallen willow-leaves.

‘Any fishing here?' he said.

‘About as much here as anywhere,' she said. ‘Pike-fishing mostly. Some tidy roach though.'

‘I've been trying all day farther up,' he said. ‘Nothing doing at all.'

‘Over-fished,' she said. ‘When it ain't that it's poison from the tanneries. Nothing left but water-rats and gudgeon.'

She still stood braced on the rope, her heavy feet dug into the earth, while he took one more look at the pub, the boats and the shoals of leaves on the wooden jetty.

‘Ain't you coming off?' she said.

‘I just wondered if you let rooms,' he said. ‘I might stay the night and try a day here tomorrow.'

‘We got a room or two,' she said. ‘We get a fisherman or two here most weekends.'

Without surprise, as if it were something that had happened very often before, she began to ferry him back again. On that return journey he noticed the great strength of her thick legs and arms, straining on the rope. Her jaw had the square set of a boat broad and clumsy in the bows. Most of the lines of her face ran vertical, like dry seams opened by weather. Her mouth was thin and fine but not bitter, fixed with a kind of dry smile that she did not know was there.

It began to rain as they went together across the yard. The wind sprang up across the dykes in a sudden dirty burst, and the ferry rocked on the slopping water, banging the chain.

‘I'll give you the back room,' she said. ‘If there's a mite o' wind you'll hear things slapping about all night.'

‘You think it'll set in?' he said, ‘the rain?'

‘The wind's about right,' she said. ‘It's bin raining off and on for two days now.'

She took him straight through the small front passage and up the narrow varnished stairs. It was growing darker every moment. Suddenly, as he followed her, he got for an instant the impression of a movement behind him. He turned round and saw at the foot of the stairs a thin pale woman of sixty or so watching him. As he saw her she began to move away, slowly but dead silent. She had in her hands a candle that was not lighted, and for a moment he thought she had the air of someone who resented something but had forgotten what it was.

He went up into his room. The brass bedstead shone cold in the wintry light. The big woman ran her great brown hands across the white quilt, smoothing it, saying she hoped it was all right for him. ‘And what about your tea? You'd like something to eat now?' He said he would, and she said she would cook whatever she could, eggs and ham or fish if she had it. ‘Sometimes we get a boat coming up from Lynn and they drop in with a little sea-fish. But gen'lly we don't see nobody much, only weekends.'

She went out of the room, but from the passage outside she called back: ‘You can go down and sit in the parlour. There's a fire there. The bar ain't properly open till six.'

Rain beat desolately on the windows while he unpacked his things. Looking out, he saw it raking the air far across the endlessly flat landscape of already blackened earth. The bones of willow-trees alone broke the skyline, and stacks of brown reed the empty desolation of fields bound everywhere by dark lines of water.

Going downstairs, he found the parlour by the glow of the fire coming through the open door. He went in, and was startled to see the thin pale woman sitting by the fire, her hands in her lap, her head turned away from him.

‘Good evening,' he said.

She did not answer; as far as he could tell she did not move at all.

‘Wretched weather,' he said.

She coughed slightly into her hands, once or twice, dryly, almost without a sound. Then she drew in her breath, as if to cough again, but nothing happened. Her body retracted slowly and her hands fell into her lap. He saw then that they were long, bony, inanimate hands, beside which the hands of the other woman now seemed exceeding powerful. For some time he
stood there waiting for her to do or say something, but nothing happened and at last he went out of the room.

He stood for a time in the darkening bar, looking seawards through the heavy rain. By the time the voice of the other woman called that his tea was ready he could no longer see even the nearer fields; he could see the ferry rocking and slapping against the bank and the water of the river wildly broken by the bullet hail of rain, but the pub seemed now to be standing on the edge of a vast dark plain that had no end.

He thought as he went in for his tea that no one would come in there that night, and for a long time he was right. He ate his meal of eggs and ham and sausages slowly, by lamplight, alone except at the beginning of it, when for a few moments the big woman stood by, telling him how there was no fish, that the boats had not been by all day. ‘I don't know whether you see the papers,' she said, ‘but the water's pretty high on the Level. It'll be a high tide to-night with the wind where it is too. We had a big break across here two year back.'

‘How far away?' he said. ‘How big?'

‘Three or four mile down. Big enough to flood a farm or two out. We had everybody working at it as could work. Had seven feet of water here in the cellars.'

‘I remember reading about it,' he said. ‘It was bad.'

‘It was bad, but you get used to it. You're born with your feet in water here. You live on water and you die on water.'

She left him to eat alone and when he saw her again, in the bar, it was as he had expected. She too was alone; no one at all had come in. The continuous crash of rain from far across the immense flat space of land on all sides struck the house with a force that shattered them both, at intervals, into silence. Small tin oil-lamps lighted with a deep yellow glow the varnished walls of the little bar, and the scales of a twenty-pound pike shone with savage beauty in a glass case above the low back-room door. As he looked at this pike, meaning to ask her who had caught it and when, he noticed something else. The spirit bottles on the bar shelves were marked with many small horizontal white lines: the chalk marks of successive drinks. He asked her then if it was a tied house or a free house, and she said, rather proudly but a little wearily too he thought, ‘A free house. We own it. We've kept the ferry for thirty years.'

‘We?'

‘Me and my sister.'

‘Was it your sister,' he said, ‘that was sitting in the parlour?'

‘That was her.'

‘I spoke to her,' he said, ‘but she didn't seem to hear me.'

‘No.'

‘You're not much alike,' he said.

‘No,' she said. ‘No.'

Directly afterwards the door opened and the wind battered into the bar a man in a heavy reefer jacket and high gum-boots. Behind the bar the woman reached for the whisky. ‘Evening,' Dave,' she said.

‘Evenin', evenin',' he said. He looked at Richardson. ‘Evenin'.'

‘Evening,' Richardson said. ‘Have it on me. And you,' he said to the woman. ‘Let's all have one.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No. No thanks.' She poured two whiskies and set them on the bar. ‘What's it like Dave?'

‘Water's riz a foot,' he said. ‘And still rising. Busted the bank a bit on th' old river. I just bin up there. Fast as they bung it up one place it starts in another. They'll want all the help they can get.'

‘You'll be getting water in the cellar again,' Richardson said.

The woman did not answer. The man set the empty whisky glass on the bar, looking at Richardson. ‘Another? I got to go.'

Richardson said thanks, and they had another whisky. ‘You're going back to help?' Richardson said.

‘Yeh.'

‘Any good if I came?'

‘You don't want to go, sir,' the woman said. ‘Slopping about in that Fen clay up to your eyes. You be ruled by me, don't you go sir. Don't you go.'

She seemed almost frightened: not for him, but for herself, as if not wanting to be alone.

‘I'd like to go,' he said. ‘I won't get any fishing anyway.'

‘But it's a dirty night. You'd be better here. There's nothing like a dirty Fenland night.'

‘I'll just go up and look,' he said. ‘I'll go up for an hour and come back. What time do you close up?'

‘Ten, sir,' she said. ‘But I'll be up until you come.'

It was strange, he thought, that she had suddenly begun calling him sir. He went upstairs to his room and put on his mackintosh and his fishing boots and sou-wester. As he came back through the passage behind the bar he saw a light shining upward from the open door of the cellar. He passed quickly, and did not see if anyone was there. In the bar the big woman watched him go without another word except a low ‘Good night.'

Outside, the rain struck with a succession of heavy blasts across the yard above the jetty, smashing the ferry with eternal melancholy janglings of the chain against the wooden piles. He groped his way to the car,
blinded by darkness, calling the other man. The reply was snatched up and hammered away by the lash of wind, but finally he reached the car and got in, switching on the headlights. In the interior calmness he heard the voice of the other man now shouting beyond the black glass of the windows and saw a pair of yellow gesticulating hands, the voice and hands both like those of a person trapped and trying to escape. He opened the side-window of the car and shouted ‘Get in!'

‘You won't get far with a car,' the man shouted. ‘There'll be water on the road.'

‘Never mind, we'll try. Go as far as we can. How far is it?'

‘Two mile or more.'

‘All right. Get in.' He started the car and switched on the wind-screen wipers, peering ahead through the arc of smoothed black glass. ‘Keep a look out for water.'

Driving away from the ferry, travelling for a time in low gear, not nervous but simply tense, not yet used to the light, he felt on both sides of the narrow dyked road a great solidity of darkness out of which wind and rain hammered with heavy violence on the car, beating it like a drum. In this atmosphere there was not much he could say. He slowed down once or twice, imagining he saw water lying ahead, but the
man beside him would say, ‘It's all right, it's all right. You won't git no water here. I'll tell you when you'll git water.' He saw a light: a moment later a house floated past like a white-washed boat, swiftly drifting away. And then something about the solitary house reminded him of the pub, solitary too by the river edge, and the big woman back there leaning her muscular and yet uneasy body on the bar, suddenly calling him sir and not wanting him to go. It reminded him too of the other woman sitting alone in the parlour, not speaking, thin, strange, inanimate and yet in a way alert. It reminded him of the light in the cellar.