The Daffodil Sky (11 page)

All the time I expected her to smile at me but all this time there was no sign of a smile. I had begun to wonder how long this strange exchange could go on, first the direct stare, then the stare that was like something between two apparitions on two smoky photographic plates, and then the knees uncovering themselves and her hands slowly covering them up again, when she said:

‘I think this is frightfully funny. Look at this.'

She leaned forward and gave him the evening paper. He took it with puffy casual hands and for the first time I saw her smile. The parting of her lips, revealing her teeth, produced exactly the same effect as the parting of her skirt when it revealed her knees. They were very pretty teeth and he did not notice them either.

‘Why funny?' he said.

He gave her back the paper.

‘Don't you think it's funny? I do.'

‘In what way?'

‘Well, I don't know—I just think it's funny.'

‘You mean it's funny because you think it is or you think it's funny because it really is?'

‘I just think it's funny—that's all. Don't you?'

‘No.'

The smile, as it went from her face, reminded me of a flame turned off by a tap. Abruptly she turned it on
again; and again the teeth were white and pretty and he did not notice them.

‘You can't have looked at the right piece,' she said.

She gave him back the paper.

‘It made me laugh——'

‘It's exactly like the wallflowers,' he said. ‘Just because you think they're sweet it doesn't mean to say they are. That doesn't make it a fact. Don't you see?'

‘No.'

Furiously he threw the evening paper back in her face. She caught it in silence and held it rigidly in front of her. In this painful moment there was nothing for me to do but to hide behind my own. By this time the evening was fully dark outside and in place of primroses and orchards of apple bloom, candescent in the twilight, I could see only the rolling phantom lights of little country stations.

For some time I watched these lights. Then there was a long stretch of line with no lights at all and presently from behind my paper I looked at her face again. To my astonishment the smile was still there. It was not only still there but she appeared, it seemed to me, to be nursing it. It was like a light or a piece of fire she did not want to go out.

When she caught me looking at her again she seemed to do the trick of turning the tap again. The pretty teeth were suddenly hidden behind the tight lips. Only the pretty knees remained exposed, delicate and pale and rounded, until with the dreamy absent movement she covered them up again.

Then she began to talk to him from behind her paper.

‘Did you have dinner?' she said.

He moved savagely among his books and papers and did not answer.

‘With Elaine?'

He did not answer.

‘How was Elaine?' she said.

Her voice had raised itself a little. She looked at me hard from behind the paper.

The train screamed through a little station beyond which were woods that were torn with long shrill echoes. I shaded my face with my hand and squinted out and pretended to search among the flashing little old-fashioned station lamps for a name, but darkness rushed in and tall spring woods crowded the sky.

‘Dear Elaine,' she said.

He suddenly got up and snatched a suitcase from the rack. He banged on its locks as if they were jammed and she said:

‘She's a dear. I like her. Did she have her lily-of-the-valley hat on?'

The suitcase yawned open and he began to try to press into it the brief-case with its books and papers. There was not room for it and he banged at it for some time with his podgy fingers like an angry baker pummelling dough.

‘Or was it wallflowers? or doesn't she like them?'

He wrestled with the two cases. In a moment or two he gave up the idea of putting one into the other and threw the brief-case on to the seat. Then he shut down the locks of the larger case in two swift metallic snaps and said:

‘You take the brief-case. I'll take the two suitcases. We're nearly there.'

From behind her newspaper she had nothing to say. Her knees with their delicate rounded prettiness were exposed again, with a naked effect of pure smooth skin, but he did not notice them as he leaned forward and said in a voice of slow, cold, enamelled articulation:

‘I said would you take the brief-case? Do you mind? I will take the suitcases. I have only one pair of hands.'

‘What a funny thing to talk to a woman about,' she said. ‘The scent of wallflowers.'

‘We shall be there in two minutes,' he said.

He reached up for the second suitcase. It was cumbersome, of old shiny worn leather that slipped too easily down through his hands. He prevented its fall with clumsiness and as he did so she stared at me again, full face this time, unsmiling, the dark bright eyes giving that uneasy effect of trying to transfix and penetrate me.

And when she spoke again it was again in a slightly louder voice, gazing straight at me:

‘I told you it was because men were more sentimental about them. They always are about flowers.'

From the rack he took down a large brown duffle-coat, struggling fatly into it, submerging everything of himself except the untidy mass of brandy brown hair. I could see by this time the lights of the town and I could hear the train brakes grinding on. Sharply he slid back the corridor door but she made no sign of getting up. He did not look at her either. He was unaware of the pretty knees, the uplifted face, the little tigress hat. He was consumed by the struggle to get two suitcases through the door at once. Then the train lurched over points and the sudden motion seemed to throw
himself, the suitcases and the heavy walking-stick in one clattering mass into the corridor outside.

‘Don't forget anything,' he said.

A moment later he had disappeared along the corridor. The train stopped and I heard him banging on an outer door to open it. I saw him lurch forward under the station lights, grossly out of balance, head forward, puffing.

She got up and began to gather up her things. I waited behind her so that she could leave the carriage first and it was only then that I realised how much he had left for her to carry. She was trying to gather up an umbrella, a handbag, three parcels, the brief-case and the evening paper.

‘May I help?' I said.

She stared past me coldly.

‘No, thank you.'

‘It's no trouble.'

She stared into me this time, rather as she had done so many times on the journey. For a second or two her eyes were, I thought, less chilly. I fancied there was perhaps a little relaxing in the lips. For another second or two I thought of the way she had exposed her knees and how attractive they were and how pretty. I thought too of the wallflowers, of Elaine, of the lily-of-the-valley hat and of how there were pansies on one side of the square and wallflowers on the other. Most of all I remembered how men were sentimental about them.

‘Are you quite sure?' I said.

‘Quite sure.'

‘It's absolutely no trouble. I have nothing to carry and if——'

‘Good night,' she said.

Outside, in the station yard, a light rain was falling. As I stood unlocking the door of my car a sudden wind seemed to throw her out of the station. She came out without dignity, as if lost, clutching parcels and briefcase and umbrella and newspaper, and she could not put up the umbrella against the rain.

Thirty yards ahead he was striding out, oblivious, still grossly out of balance, brandy-coloured head down against the rain.

When she saw him she gave a little cry and began running. I could see her pretty legs flickering under the lights of the station yard, white against the black spring rain.

‘Darling,' she called after him. ‘Darling. Couldn't you wait for me?'

Every Sunday evening in summertime she sat at the front window and watched until he came up the hill. Her hands on the horsehair rests of the chair were like pieces of stone-grey paper painted with thin lines of water-colour, palest blue, the skin transparent and the fingers crabbed over the little palms. She always wore a straw hat that had once evidently been purple with black trimmings, but now there were no trimmings: only the shadows of the trimmings, dark grey, on the mildew grey of the faded, remaining straw.

She sat surrounded by a mass of greenery in brass and china pots, set about on bamboo stands. The curtains in the big bay window were like blankets of red chenille bearing fruitings of soft bobbles down the sides. The old-fashioned gas-brackets over the mantelshelf bore opaque globes of pink and under them were ornaments of twisted yellow glass from which sprouted dead stalks of feathery brown reed and bunches of paper spills. She made the spills for Luther, with her own hands, every Saturday.

Whenever he came round the corner of the long steep hill she always thought that he looked, in his black suit and carrying the black fiddle case, so much like a doctor. Even from that distance the big rough-angled body dwarfed the fiddle case so that it did not look much larger than a doctor's bag. She had in mind particularly Dr Farquharson's bag because it was the bag she had known best. It had brought her the twelve children, beginning with Luther.

The illusion of bag and doctor remained with her through his journey up the hill. He walked with a slight groping roll, big feet splayed out as if he wanted to grip the hill with his toes. She knew he did not roll like that because he was drunk but only because his feet were bad. His feet had always been bad. They had been bad ever since the time he was a child and had grown so fast that she could never afford to buy shoes to catch up with him. In those days he had had to suffer a lot of things in that way because he was the first and times were desperate. She felt keenly that she had never been able to do her best for him. The others had been luckier.

When he came into the room at last it was always with a series of bungling noisy clashes as he tried to find a resting-place for the fiddle case somewhere among the many little tables, the piano, the bookcase and the chairs. He could never find room for the damn fiddle, he thought. The bookcase and the piano were both locked up, polished as glass, and she kept the keys on a chain. He groped among the chairs with bull-like stupor but she never at any time took a great deal of notice of it. He had always been clumsy on his feet. He had been
a day or two short of nineteen months before he had started walking at all. She always remembered that, of being so afraid that he would never walk: an awful thing, to have a child so fragile that it never walked.

If she was aware of feeling that the enormous body still enshrined the fragile child she did not reveal it. She turned on him with little grunts of peevish affection that had no effect on him at all.

‘It'll be dark before you get up here one of these days.'

‘Had a rush job on. Wonder I got finished at all.'

When he had at last disposed of the fiddle he liked to sit by the piano, in the dark patch caused by one end, so that she could not see his face.

‘Who was it?' she said. ‘Thought you said trade was so bad.'

‘So it is. Man in Canal Street. Burying tomorrow.'

‘What man?'

‘A man named Johnson.'

‘Who's he? What name?'

‘Johnson. Call him Polly Johnson. Kin to Liz Johnson——'

‘Nobody I know.'

The lines of her face would crease themselves in deeper ruts of disapprobation. Her mouth would go on muttering without sound for some moments longer while he settled himself by the piano with hot discomfort and perhaps a belch or two.

‘You can take your coat off.'

She liked him better with his coat off. It reminded her of the Sundays when all of them were at home, a
dinner, all the little boys with clean white aprons on, so that the gravy from the Yorkshire pudding did not drop on their chapel suits.

The absence of the coat revealed a man of gross, crusty width, with watery blue eyes starting beerily from a face fired by summer to lines of smouldering bruisy red. His collar-stud pressed brassily on his thick throat and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up above arms massive and blackly haired.

His voice had a yeasty thickness:

‘All of 'em gone chapel?'

‘Rose and Clarice and Will have gone. Lawrence and Nell went this morning.'

Lawrence and Will were good boys: steady boys, fellows with enough ambition to get good jobs and enough sense to hang on to them when they got them. They were solid, pin-stripe men. She had never had any bother with Will and Lawrence; they never troubled her. They did not approve of Luther, but then, they did not understand him.

‘Ain't bin out nowhere this week, I reckon? Too hot for you.'

‘Went up to Rose's Thursday,' she said.

‘Git the bus?'

‘Bus! What d'ya think my legs are for?'

‘You wanta git the bus,' he said. ‘One o' these days you'll be doing that traipse up there once too much and you'll be dropping down.'

‘If I do you'll be there measuring me out ‘fore I'm cold,' she said swiftly, ‘I'll warrant that.'

‘Ah, don't sit there horse-facing so much. You horse-face too much by half.'

‘Don't you tell me I horse-face,' she said.

He did not answer. It pained him when she horse-faced at him. He dreaded the day when he would be measuring her out, he thought. His only compensating thought about that was that he would make her something very nice; something really high-class and lovely; something fitting and worthy of the old lady.

She sat there for some time looking like a bone carving, and at last he broke the silence by saying:

‘Anything to eat? I could do with a mite o' something.'

‘I'll be bound you never got your dinner again, did you?'

‘Never had time. Bin at it since daylight.'