The Daffodil Sky (3 page)

‘Listen, Joe, if I ask her perhaps she'll give it to us. You remember? She gave the other away.'

‘No,' he said. ‘You couldn't have that——'

‘I could,' she said. She began smiling to herself in the darkness. ‘Tomorrow I'll ask her. We could do it properly—make it legal—so that it was ours.'

‘If you forgive me,' Joe said. ‘Only if you do that——'

‘I forgive you,' she said.

She went through the rest of the winter as if she were carrying the baby herself. ‘You mustn't do that, Elsie. Don't lift that,' she would say. ‘Take and lie down for an hour. Rest yourself—it'll do you the world of good to rest.' She looked forward to Spring with a strange acute sensation of being poised on a wire, frightened that she would fall before she got there.

When the baby was born she wrapped it in a warm blanket and succoured it like the early chickens she had once wrapped in flannel, in a basket, under the stove.

‘And I can have him?' she said. ‘You haven't changed your mind? You won't change your mind, will you?'

‘No,' the girl said. ‘You can have him. I don't want the bother. You can look after him.'

‘We'll love him,' she said. ‘We'll look after him.'

On a day in late April she took the baby and carried him down through the yard, in the sunshine, to where the fields began. Hedgerows were breaking everywhere into bright new leaf. Primroses lay in thick pale drifts under the shelter of them and under clumps of ash and hornbeam. In every turn of wind there was a whitening of anemones, with cowslips trembling gold about the pasture.

She lifted the baby up, in the sunshine, against the blue spring sky, and laughed and shook him gently, showing him the world of leaf and flower and corn.

‘Look at all the flowers!' she said. ‘Look at the corn! The corn looks good, doesn't it? It's going to be good this year, isn't it? Look at it all!—isn't the corn beautiful?'

High above her, on the hill, there was a sound of endless lark song and in the fields the young curved lines of corn were wonderfully fresh and trembling in the sun.

As he came off the train, under a sky dusky yellow with spent thunder, he turned instinctively to take the short cut, over the iron footbridge. You could cut across allotment grounds that way and save half a mile to the town. He saw then that the footbridge had been closed. A notice painted in prussian blue, blocking the end of it, saying
Bridge Unsafe. Keep off. Trespassers will be prosecuted
, told him more than anything else how much the town had changed.

It was some time, the long way, down the slope and under the other bridge, before you got clear of the coal-yards. The street was narrow and torrents of thunder-rain had flooded the granite setts with tides that left in the gutters patches of black sand that gave off oily glinting rainbows in the hot wet air.

Beyond the coal-yards, where sheds spanned strips of railway track like huge black bats in the gaping sky, there was a pub that he remembered well because, many years before, he often stopped at it as he came down from the country to market, bringing his plums
or peas or broccoli or apples or, in early spring, his daffodils. In those days he had started first of all with a horse and trap, then a motor bike with a large flat side-car that he had made himself. He had good, powerful hands. In the year he had met Cora Whitehead he had saved enough for his first car. He was twenty-two then, and that was the year he had begun to go ahead.

The brick walls of the pub were red-black with old smoke from passing trains. Just beyond it another road bridge, blackened too, spanned the tracks, and the lights of buses passing over it were a strange sharp green under the unnatural stormy glare of sky.

The lights in the pub were burning too. They touched the cut-glass pattern of foaming jug and bottle in the glass door with outer stencillings of silver that the light of sky, in turn, impressed with a stormy copper glow.

‘I'll have a double whisky with water,' he said.

Two railwaymen were playing darts in one corner of the saloon, perching pint jugs of dark beer on the mahogany curve of the counter. Another man was shooting a pin-table, making the little lights come up with jumping, yellow fires.

There had never been a pin-table in the old days. That too showed how things had changed. The barman too was a stranger.

‘Hot night,' the barman said. ‘Hot summer.'

‘How much is that?'

‘Three and six.'

‘Have something for yourself?'

‘Well, thank you,' the barman said. ‘I'll have a brown.'

‘I'm looking for a Miss Whitehead,' he said.

The barman drew himself an overflowing small ale in a glass. He set it on the counter and then picked it up again and wiped away, with a cloth, the circle of froth it had made.

‘You mean in here?'

‘No. She used to come in here. She used to live in Wellington Street.'

‘Wellington Street? When would that be?'

‘Before the war. She used to work in the stocking factory.'

‘That's been a minute,' the barman said. ‘They built a new one ten year ago. Outside the town.'

‘She was a big girl. Brown hair—a lot of it. Turning red. She used to come in here in Jack Shipley's time.'

‘Jack Shipley—that's been a minute,' the barman said. ‘Jack's been dead eight year—nine year. That's been a minute.'

The shorter of the two railwaymen stood with a dart in his hand, poised forward on the balls of his feet, in readiness to throw.

‘You mean Cora Whitehead?' he said.

‘That's her.'

‘She's still in Wellington Street. Her old dad works at the furnaces. He was a plate-layer once—then he went to the furnaces when they started up again.'

‘That's been a minute,' the barman said.

‘Thanks,' he said.

He drained his glass and set it down. There was no point in waiting. He went outside and heard, almost immediately, from beyond the coal-yards, a new peal
of thunder. It seemed to roll back, in an instant, the entire discoloured space of sky above him, leaving it pure and clear as it had been on the morning he had first called in, many years ago, with the idea of giving his horse a bucket of water and having a pint of Black Boy for himself. He remembered that day as if, in the way the barman said, it had been a minute ago. His cart was piled with daffodils. Like the sky where the storm had ripped it open in the west they were fresh and brilliant, shot through with pale green fire. The morning was one of those April mornings that break with pure blue splendour and then are filled, by ten o'clock, with coursing western cloud. A spatter of hail caught him unawares on the bridge. He had no time to put the tarpaulin up and he gave the horse a lick instead and came down into the pub-yard with the hail cutting his face like slugs of steel. He drove the cart under a shed at the back and then ran through the yard to the saloon door and by that time the hail was big and spaced and glistening as snow in the sun.

‘Don't knock me flat,' she said. ‘Somebody might want me tomorrow.'

Running with head down, he had reached the door at the same time as she did. He blundered clumsily against her shoulders. She had a morning off that day and she had started out in a thin dress with no sleeves, thinking that summer had come. The funny thing was that he couldn't remember the colour of the dress. It might have been anything: black or white or blue or cream. He didn't remember. He remembered only the
shoulders and the bare arms, the big fleshy arms cold and wet with splashes of hail, the big soft lips, the masses of heavy red-brown hair and the brown eyes set into whites that were really a kind of greyish china-blue.

Then the door stuck and he could not open it. A final whip of hail lashed along the pub-wall as he tried to twist the loose wet brass knob. She began laughing and the laugh was strong and friendly and yet low in key. A moment later the sun flashed out. The glare of it was white and blinding after the shadow of hail and he felt it hot on his face and neck, burning the skin where hail had cut him.

‘You're as good as an umbrella on a wet day,' she said.

Then the door opened and they were inside the pub. It was simpler in those days: just a beer-house where railwaymen called as they came up from the yards and a farmer or two like himself from across the valley. There was a big triangle of cheese under a glowing brown cheese-dish on the counter and a white round spittoon on the sawdust floor. You could smell steam-coal smoke and stale beer and cheap strong cheese, but she said almost at once:

‘There's a smell of flowers or something. Can't you smell it?' and he saw her nostrils widen and quiver as she breathed at the scent of daffodils.

‘I got a load of 'em,' he said. ‘Been gathering them since six this morning. It's the scent on my hands.'

Almost unconsciously he lifted his hands and she took them and held them against her face.

‘That's it,' she said. ‘That's lovely.'

She smiled and drank Black Boy with him. It was early and there was no one else in the pub. Once as she lifted the black foaming glass of stout she laughed again and pretended to wince and said:

‘I believe you bruised my arm. My drinking arm at that.'

‘I always been big and clumsy,' he said. ‘I can't help it.'

‘Then somebody will have to teach you better, won't they?' she said. ‘Can you see any bruise?'

He looked down at her arm, the upper part soft and fleshy and bruiseless, and he felt the flame of her go through him for the first time.

‘Farmer?' she said, and he told her yes, sort of, hardly knowing what he said, feeling only the racing flame running hot through his blood and choking his thinking. She asked him a lot of questions, all about himself, how he was getting on, how many acres he had, what his plans were, and she seemed somehow to talk with the enormous glistening brown eyes rather than with her lips. At least that was how he remembered it: the big brown eyes always widening and transfixing him, bold and warm and apparently still and yet not still, drawing him down in fascination until he could hardly trust himself to look at her.

He had wanted to be early at market that day. The trade in Midland market-squares did not begin till afternoon but he had reckoned on being there by twelve o'clock. He stayed drinking with her until nearly two. They ate most of the cheese from the big dish on the bar counter and he began to feel his eyes crossing and rolling as he looked at her. He thought several times of
the daffodils in the cart and the drink of water he ought to be giving to his horse. He worried about it for a time and then it did not matter. Hail seemed to spring and lash at the windows every time he made up his mind that he ought to go, and then the fierce, flashing daffodil sun was out again and the railyards were steaming in the cutting below.

‘You'll be all right,' she said. ‘Nobody gets up to market-hill yet awhile. It's Friday. Take it easy. You'll catch folks as they come from the factories. You'll be lucky.'

‘I ought to go—I got a lot to unpack——'

‘You'll be lucky,' she said. ‘You're the sort. You'll get on. Your sort always does.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I'm lucky for them,' she said. ‘I always am.'

Presently that was how it turned out; all that day and other days the luck was with him. Hail closed in again that afternoon, rattling white bullets across the black setts of the market square, but the evening was clear and fine, with a bright yellow-green frosty April sky. People came late to buy under the orange paraffin flares. The daffodils shone a deeper yellow in the oily glow. Everything was good and the luck was with him.

The motor-bike followed the cart. He had thought about it already and decided he couldn't afford it. Then it turned out she knew a man named Frankie Corbett who had a Beardmore combination that he was willing to sell very cheap and that she could even get for less than that, she thought. He made the side-truck himself from packing cases, with a detachable tarpaulin hood
for wet days. It was a natural step from that to the car.

‘You see I'm lucky for you,' she would say. ‘Like I told you. I'm lucky. I always am.'

That summer he began to go to the house in Wellington Street. Her mother was dead and her father worked a night-shift at the furnaces. That made it easy to spend the nights with her. Her body was like her face: big and frank and bold, running against him like a brassy flame. In exactly the way that she always seemed to speak to him through her large brown eyes rather than her lips so all her thought about him did not come from her mind but through the pores of her skin.

‘You know what?' she would say. ‘I know when you turn the corner by the bridge. I feel it. That's how I feel. I can tell you're there.'

He rented his land, five acres of it, from an elderly man named Osborne who kept chickens and geese on an adjoining ten acres, most of it an orchard of apples and plums where the daffodils grew thick and almost wild in spring. ‘I'm gittin' old,' Osborne would say. ‘I'm gittin' past it, boy.' He had a room with Osborne in a square wooden bungalow surrounded by a cart-hovel and a few disused pig-sties and a stack of hay that was taken every year from the orchard. Osborne pottered about the place with a scythe or a feed-bucket or a basket of eggs. At certain times of the year the house seemed full of geese-feathers. In wet weather the yard was sloppy and green with web-flattened droppings.

‘I'm gittin' past it,' Osborne said. ‘If you could raise
the money I'd git out and be glad on it. I'll go and live with my sister. Raise part on it, boy. You'll git on. Raise part on it and pay me later.'

He remembered the day, most of all the evening, Osborne had told him that. Suddenly all his life seemed to pull him forward like a bounding dog on a leash. It seemed to tear at the socket of his mind with a terrible excitement. He was going to own his own land, his own house, his own poultry or heifers or bullocks or whatever it was he wanted. He was going to have his feet on his own piece of earth.