The Daffodil Sky (19 page)

Yes, it was warming up, he thought. You heard it in bars and clubs and messes. ‘Warming up, old boy.' Well: he would be gone before the worst of it.

‘Never mind,' he said. ‘What about tomorrow?'

Either she was astounded or she did not seem
to understand about tomorrow; so that he had to say:

‘Won't you come? Wouldn't you like to?'

‘With you?' she said again. ‘You don't have to——'

‘The day I don't want to I shan't ask you,' he said, ‘and then you'll know.'

He said this in a jocular sort of way and she was quiet, her head averted. A few voices could still be heard from the compound and it was still as if she were listening to them.

‘All right!' he said. ‘At six again?'

‘Yes,' she said, and then in the steadiest, levellest of tones: ‘It's very sweet of you.'

He left her by the gate, under the thick arbour of vine and bignonia and hibiscus. Twenty or thirty yards up the street he stopped to light a cigarette. He could still hear the drum-beats of the pujah from down the river, like soft velvet punches in the darkness. They were curiously like the magnified echo of endless heartbeats too: a tireless throbbing in the blood-stream, warm and exciting.

After that he began to meet her almost every evening. He liked to take her home in a rickshaw; it was quieter, nicer, more intimate that way. At the completed end of the terrace a concrete seat had been built; they could sit there and watch, across the river, under a vast glow, the greater part of the city. After a few days the pujah was all over, but on the dark stream the little fishing boats were always swaying and winking, like fireflies.

‘Tell me about the foot,' he would say. His vanity that he could do something about it for her finally made her speak of it.

‘I want to ask Colonel Burnett about it,' he said. ‘He's an orthopaedic man. He's unorthodox, but what he doesn't know——'

‘The doctors have seen it,' she said.

‘What doctors?' He was quite irritated by her tone of acceptance, by the queer feeling of her tired-out complacency. ‘There are doctors and doctors. You want it to get better, don't you?'

‘It will get better.'

‘That's all very well——'

‘It is getting better already,' she said. ‘A little every day. There was a time when I couldn't move it at all. Now I can move the toes a little. It takes time.'

She spoke flatly, formally, in a little recitation; she seemed in a deliberate way to place a sort of hermetic seal on every emotion the foot might possibly arouse.

‘Could I look at it?' he said.

‘There is nothing to see.'

‘I'd like to. Please,' he said.

She stretched out her foot on the stone seat. Slowly and gently he took off the shoe with its iron and then held her foot in his hands. Drum-beats from the pujah no longer broke the air, but it was as if he could still feel them in himself distinct and exciting as ever, hammering at the core of his throat as she unfastened her stocking and rolled it down, leaving her long pale leg and the foot itself naked and free.

It was exactly as she had said: there was nothing to be seen. He was aware simply of her long naked leg, pale and smooth and beautiful.

‘Tell me about it. How did it happen?'

‘Some other night——'

All at once he lay down with her on the seat. ‘Please,' he said. She lay very quiet, answering flatly.

‘I was going to England.'

She did not go on. By the time he got to know much more it was already April. Heat, in waves of depressing humidity, was rising up from the Delta and even nights were becoming so much thicker and more suffocating that there was beginning to be no relief even by water. He began to think more and more of England. April weather, lilac wet on rainy evenings, daffodils and cherries in blossom, a cool and delicious freshness everywhere. That, above all, was what he wanted; the freshness, the sea-swept air, the changing island climate. After India's frowsy and beastly humidity it would be like plunging down between fresh clean sheets. Well, it couldn't be long now. He had written his mother to get his trout rods overhauled.

‘You see, I was to be married,' she said.

It appeared there had been a man named Kippington, or Kippingsley: some such name. Afterwards she never could remember exactly which; it might have been Kippings or Kippingsford.

‘That was a name to start with,' he said. Already he felt he detested the fellow.

‘He was a planter,' she said.

‘Tea?' He felt it must be tea; somehow they always sounded so smug in tea.

‘Yes.'

Good guess, he thought. It seemed the man had lived in a pleasant bungalow in a country of wide snow-swollen rivers under the frontier of Bhutan. She had
spent an occasional week-end there. She had loved the tea-gardens with their slender and delicate overhead trees of shade; the butter-fat Mongolian children picking grubs from tea-bushes; the English flowers, sweet-peas and marigolds and phloxes, blooming in the garden; the mountain forests rising like dark green crust out of the high northern haze.

She would talk about this, disjointedly, almost casually, as they lay by the river. What it possibly had to do with the foot he could not imagine for some time. He gathered they had lived as man and wife at the week-ends; and then at last Kippington or Kippingsley or whoever he was had gone back to England on leave. It seemed that on this leave he was to stay with his mother in Berkshire. In due course he was to get some sort of office job, a tea-taster or something, with a firm of tea brokers in Mincing Lane. Later he would come back to India to fetch her and later they too would live in Berkshire. It was all stupendously ordinary and conventional and unadventurous.

‘She wrote to me several times. His mother,' she said. ‘I sent her photographs and things.'

He thought of his own mother. A sudden misgiving that she might not understand his instructions about the fishing-rods bothered him considerably. She would probably take them to some local wallah who would ruin them, he thought. They had to go to London: to Farlow or Hardy or somebody first-class like that. He would have to air-mail her again tomorrow. Mothers never understood about these things and had a most ghastly way of bodging things up.

He broke free of these thoughts to realise that the
girl had stopped talking. Across the river, sprinkled with shore lights and an occasional slow-swinging lantern from the boats that were fishing in midstream, all was quiet now, the air deadly, stifling and serene, after the excitement of the important pujah.

‘Go on,' he said.

‘I didn't think you were listening.'

‘Oh! I was listening.'

She stared for some moments at the fishing boats swinging lanterns in the darkness of midstream.

‘You just mentioned this chap's mother and it made me think of mine,' he said. ‘That's all.'

‘What is your mother like?'

‘What are mothers always like?' he said. ‘I've just written her about my fishing-rods. A thousand to one she'll have them repaired by the local carpenter.'

‘Would that be terrible?'

‘Oh! really——'

She said quickly: ‘I'm sorry. Women never really understand all these things.'

‘What about this Kippings fellow?' he said. ‘I still don't understand how——'

‘He was a little late coming back,' she said. ‘Two months late.'

The essence of it all began now to appear as something terrifyingly simple. She cabled him several times and there was no reply. There was always the possibility of some trivial, explicable misunderstanding; but the heat of India, corrosive and yet festering, had the effect of sharpening and magnifying every triviality in a fierce highlight of doubt.

When the cable came at last it was from his mother. ‘Pip already sailed Mooltan arriving 30th.'

She went down to the docks on an afternoon of sombre and sickening heat, just before the break of the monsoon, to meet him. Pip Kippingford, he thought; what a name. Only the true English, bowler-hatted, umbrella-ridden, citified, churchified, colossally smug, undertaking the daily great adventure from Berkshire to Mincing Lane could have fitted a name like that. A friend of his, a man in jute named Porter, had kindly driven her to the docks in his car.

That afternoon, when she arrived, she knew that everything about Kippingford, as far as Kippingford was concerned, was dead. He came through the dock-gates with the loving enthusiasm of an ironed white-duck statue. She had waited a very long time for that moment and she held out her arms to be taken. She wanted to be kissed. He did not take her; and she afterwards knew that there had never been the remotest question of kissing her.

She remembered the three of them driving home in Porter's car. Kippingford or Kippingsley or whoever he was sat at the front with Porter, leaving her alone at the back. She felt lost and insecure. She remembered framing in her mind some simple remark, flat and trivial and yet of immense importance, about the monsoon. Its importance rose from the fact that she presently discovered her tongue would not go through the simple mechanics of uttering it. That was all. A cold bar seemed to have clamped down across it, locking it down on her teeth.

She remembered nothing else but getting out of the
car and falling down. The great Kippingford was busy with his baggage, and it was Porter who picked her up and carried her into the house.

‘That's how the foot began.'

He did not know what to say. He sat rather stupidly watching the swaying lanterns of the fishing boats groping about the dark stream.

‘At first it was both feet,' she said. ‘I couldn't speak either, and there was one arm——'

‘There's a name for it,' he said. ‘A proper medical expression.'

‘Really?'

‘I know there is. I just can't think of it,' he said. ‘I shall ask old Burnett about it tomorrow.'

The next evening he said, ‘I got old Burnett to write down on a piece of paper what your foot was. Now I've gone and left the paper in my other kit. Anyway he was damn funny about the whole thing——'

‘Yes?'

‘He's terrifically unorthodox and has practically no use for these ordinary medical wallahs.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Damn funny, really.' Tonight many more fishing boats, like a cluster of fireflies, were swinging about in midstream, making an island of winking dancing gold on the dark water. ‘He said that since something very emotional caused it something emotional would eventually cure it. Rather difficult to explain.'

‘What sort of thing?'

‘Like falling in love,' he said, ‘and so on. Emotional shock—like the man who picked up his bed and walked——'

She sat with her lips parted: as if perhaps she had been about to say something, to follow up his remark, to ask whatever it was he meant about that casual so on. He saw the soft far-off light of the little boats fall on her open lips. Quivering and delicate, the reflection of them swam about in the blackness of her eyes.

It was more simple to kiss her than to speak again. Heat had parched like a stretch of concrete the attempted lawn of new grass along the terrace and it was so hot that he had taken off his bush-jacket and folded it into a pillow so that she could put her head on it where they lay together. She lay looking at the stars. The extraordinary pale fragility of her face gave it the effect of a single large white petal. He kissed her several times again and presently her long thin arms came up to wind about him and inexorably, like tight thin wires, to hold him down.

Something about it made him uneasy and he remembered Burnett. ‘He said of course that treatment would help too——'

‘Don't talk about it any more,' she said. ‘I don't want you to talk about it.' For the first time he could hear little fretting fires of anger in her voice. ‘I'm so bored about it—I'm so bored, so bored, so tired of it. I can't bear it any more.'

He stared away from her, not speaking, quite baffled.

‘Don't go away from me,' she said. ‘Come here. I want you——' and once more he felt the thin inexorable arms reach up and hold him. He remembered how when he had first seen her the arms, with their pitifully fragile buds of pink nails, had seemed almost too delicate; he remembered her astonishing sick frailty and how, as she
held up the silks for him, he felt she would be blown away.

A long way down the river a ship blew a deep low blast on a siren and he said:

‘God, this heat's terrible. It gets worse every day. Thank God I'm——'

‘It's Sunday tomorrow,' she said. ‘Would you take me to the pool?'

‘But could you——?'

‘I think I'd like to swim,' she said. ‘It's been such a terribly long time——'

For about a week after that he began to meet her most days at the Swimming Club, and after the first shock of seeing her swimming, easy and graceful, there was nothing by which you could tell the foot was not exactly like any other. You could not tell, he thought, watching the long slim golden legs in the water, that it was not already healed.

Some days later there were wild rumours of embarkation and Sergeant Puddefoot began to rush about Headquarters frantically packing impossible bags with skins of water-lizard and python and cotton carpets bought in bazaars. ‘Mr Sedgwick,' he kept saying, ‘Mr Sedgwick, we're bleeding well going home.'

Sedgwick cabled his mother an affectionate and ominous hint about fishing-rods.

A week later, when he saw the girl along the riverside, beyond clumps of hibiscus that heat was already stripping of all flower, it was for the last time.

‘I'm sure the swimming has done the foot good,' he said. ‘Am I right?'

‘It's much better,' she said.

For some time he lay on the grass, on his back, staring at the stars. He wanted to say something that would express what he felt for her. He was leaving, going to England, and he wanted her to know that he would remember her. As he lay there he heard, some distance down the river, a few native voices crying in excitement, a wail of staccato singing, and then a single drum beating softly, murmuring, almost droning, across the stream.