The Daffodil Sky (5 page)

‘Still at school?' he said.

‘Good Lord, no. Me? I'm in the hosiery too. Only they don't allow night shift till you're twenty. Lord knows why.'

He was all at once afraid of talking too much; he was scared that at any moment she might remember her unanswered question and ask his name.

‘I'd better push off,' he said. ‘I don't want to keep you standing here.'

‘I'll get the umbrella,' she said.

She went into the house and pulled an umbrella from a round tin stand that stood in the passage. Suddenly he remembered what her mother had said, in that quick and flashing way of hers: ‘You're as good as an umbrella on a rainy day,' and then the girl said:

‘I'll walk as far as the bridge with you. It's letting up a bit. You can get a bus there and I can bring the umbrella back.'

‘I don't like——'

‘Oh! that's all right. I got nothing to do. I get bored with both of them on night shift and me sitting there waiting for bed-time. Wouldn't you? It gives you the atmospherics—like the radio.'

She laughed as they ran out together, she holding the umbrella, into the rain, and the laugh too was much like her mother's, but lighter and softer in tone. The rain was slacking a little and they walked with heads down against it and once he peered out from under the rim of the umbrella to see if the sky was growing lighter still across the yard.

‘Keep your head under. You'll get soaked,' she said. ‘It's coming in enough as it is. This umbrella's one of mine I had as a kid. It's only half size.'

He crouched closer under the umbrella and found himself taking her arm. She said, ‘That's better. That's more like it,' and again he felt the flame of touching her go through him exactly as it had done when he had
touched Cora's arm, cold and wet with hail under a fiery burst of sunshine on a spring day.

‘That's better,' she said. ‘Isn't it?'

‘Do you like it?'

‘I like it a lot,' she said. ‘Do you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is that why you're running so hard to catch the bus?'

He had not realised that he was running. He had not grasped that excitement was driving him through the rain. He laughed and slackened his pace and she said:

‘The way you were going anybody would think you had to get the Manchester express.'

‘Perhaps I have.'

‘Oh! go on. Where are you going? Nowhere, are you?'

‘Nowhere particular.'

‘I knew it all the time.'

That was like her mother too: that queer thinking through the pores, the knowingness, the second sight about him. ‘I know when you're coming round the corner. I know when you're there.'

By the time they had reached the bridge it was raining no longer. The few peals of thunder might have been far-distant wheels of freight trains thudding heavily up slow gradients to the north. The sky beyond the black low yards was pure and empty, almost stark, a strong green-yellow, after the swift and powerful wash of rain.

She did not put the umbrella down. Its shadow almost completed the summer darkness so that when they halted and stood by the bridge he could see her face only in softened outline, under the mass of brown-red hair.
Then a bus came with its glare of strange green thundery light over the crest of the bridge and she said:

‘This is your bus. This is the one you ought to get.'

‘There's no bus. There's no train. There's no nothing,' he said.

She did not speak. They let the bus go by. It flared away, leaving behind it a darkness momentarily shot with dancing fires of green that were also like broken after-reflections of the clearing, yellowing sky.

‘It's nice being with you,' she said. ‘Do you feel that about some people? It's nice the first time you meet them. You feel it and you know.'

‘That's right,' he said.

He wanted suddenly to tell her who he was: who and why and what and all about himself. He wanted to tell her about her mother and the dream the canker had eaten and he wanted to run. He knew he ought to get out. He ought to find a little farm like Osborne's and get work on it and save money and start again. It was getting late and he ought to find himself a bed down by the station. Then in the morning he could get out and start clear, over in another county, somewhere east, Norfolk perhaps, where he wasn't known. Harvest was beginning and there was plenty of work on the farms.

Then he was aware of an awful loneliness. He felt sick with it. His stomach turned and was slipping out. It was the feeling he had known when they sentenced him. His stomach was black and he was alone and terribly afraid. He looked at the haunting yellow sky. He heard at the same time a train rushing down through the yards from the north and he began to say:

‘I suppose you——'

‘What?'

The express came roaring down, double-engined, crashing and flaring under the bridge. She waited for it to pass in its cloud of floating orange steam before she spoke again.

‘What was that you said?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You know what I thought you were going to say?'

‘No.'

‘I thought you were going to ask me if I'd come out with you again.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No.' His entire body was beginning to shake again, so that he could hardly say:

‘No—I was going to say I wanted a drink. That's all. I was going to say I suppose you wouldn't have one with me.'

‘Well, of course I would,' she said. ‘That's easy. What could be easier than that?'

He knew that nothing could be easier than that. He waited for a moment or two longer without speaking. He looked down at her face, not very clear in the partial shadow of the umbrella, but familiar as if he had known it a long time. The train was through the yards. It was roaring now through the station, under the old closed footbridge, and behind it, in noisy flashes, the signals were lifting to red.

‘Well, what are we waiting for?' she said.

‘Nothing,' he said.

Still under the umbrella, they began to walk up the gradient, by smoke-blackened walls, towards the pub. She gave the umbrella a sideways lift so that, above the
yards, in the fresh light of after-storm, he could see a great space of calm, rain-washed daffodil sky.

‘It's all over,' she said. ‘It's fine. It'll be hot again tomorrow.'

She closed down the umbrella. She was smiling and he could not look at her face.

‘We'd better get on,' he said. ‘It's nearly closing-time.'

All the vases in Mrs Clavering's house were filled with sprays of white forced lilac and glossy pittosporum leaves. In January the lilac was almost more expensive than she could afford. But the tall leafless sprays were very distinguished and she hoped they would not fade.

She was going to give everyone white wine to drink at the party. This was partly because she had read somewhere, in a magazine or a newspaper, that that was distinguished too; partly because at the Fanshawes' party she had heard Captain Perigo's wife complaining quite loudly of the stinking drinks you nowadays got out of jugs; and partly because at another party, the Luffingtons', at the Manor, a Colonel Arber, a newcomer to the district, had started to proclaim his intention of beating things up and had done so, rowdily, on dreadful mixtures of cider and gin. That was exactly what she wanted to avoid. She did not want rowdiness and people complaining, even if they did not mean it, that the drinks you gave them were not strong enough.
She thought that nowadays everyone drank too much gin. At one time gin was nothing but a washer-woman's drink but now everyone drank it, everywhere. They tippled it down. White wine sounded so much more reserved and distinguished even if people did not like it so much. She thought too that it was bound to give tone to her attempt to get to know the Paul Vaulkhards. The Paul Vaulkhards, who were new to the county, had taken the house down the hill, and she understood that they were very distinguished too.

All day frost lingered on the trees. It drew a curtain of rimy branches, like chain armour, over the sky, shutting in the large oak-staired house, making it darker than ever, in isolation. It lingered in black ice pools about the road. At three o'clock the caterers' van should have arrived; and nervously, for an hour, Mrs Clavering paced about the house, wondering where it had got to; and it was not until after four o'clock that it arrived, with dented mudguards and one tray of
vol-au-vent
cakes smashed into crumbs, because of a skid on the frozen hill.

The three caterers' men grumbled and said the roads were worse than ever and that everyone ought to have chains. And then suddenly the western hill of beeches took away the last strips of frost green daylight too early, as it always did, and the fields became dark and unkindly, closing in. Mrs Clavering felt the awful country isolation extinguish immediately all hope about the party. She felt that no one would come. She became doubtful of the coldness of the white wine. There were people who had to come from considerable distances, such as the Blairs and Captain Perigo and the principal of the research college and his wife, very distinguished
and important people too, who would certainly not risk it. She doubted even if the Luffingtons would risk it from the Manor. With fear and coldness she felt that the Paul Vaulkhards would not risk it. Nobody of distinction or importance would dare to risk it and she would be left with people like the dropsical Miss Hemshawe and her mother, with Miss Ireton and Miss Graves, who lived together and spun sheep-wool and dyed it into shades of porridge and pale autumnal lichen, and with the Reverend Perks and his elder brother: with those people whom Mr Clavering sometimes rudely called the hencoop tribe.

‘Because they cluck and fuss and scratch and make dirt and pull each other's feathers out,' Mr Clavering said.

Mrs Clavering had not succeeded in curing her husband, in thirty years, of a habit of accurate flippancy, to which he sometimes added what she felt was deliberate forgetfulness.

Mr Clavering too, like the caterers, was late coming out from his office in the town.

‘You said you would be here at four!' she called from the first-floor landing. ‘Wherever have you been? Did you remember the pecan nuts? But they were ready! They were telephoned for! All you had to do was to pick them up from Watsons'——'

‘Nobody ate the damn things last time.'

‘Of course they ate them. They were much appreciated.'

In the hall, where Mr Clavering stood taking off his homberg hat and overcoat, the telephone rang and she called:

‘That's the first one. Answer it! I can't bear to——'

Mr Clavering, answering the telephone, called that it was Mrs Vaulkhard. ‘She'd like to speak to you,' he said.

‘This is it, this is it, this is it,' she said. In a constraint of coldness and fear she scurried downstairs and picked up the telephone, trembling, but Mrs Vaulkhard said:

‘I did not want to trouble you. Oh! it was not that. It was simply to ask you—we have my niece here. We thought it would be so nice—No: she is young. Quite young. Seventeen—could we? Would it be any kind of inconvenience?—I did not want you to think——'

With joy Mrs Clavering forgot the absence of the pecan nuts and a haunting fear that the white wine was, after all, not a suitable drink for so dark and freezing a day.

‘Well,
they
will come at any rate. If no one else does——'

‘Everybody will come,' Mr Clavering said. ‘And a few you never thought of.'

‘I'm sure no one would ever think of doing that sort of thing,' she said.

‘Everybody will be here,' Mr Clavering said. ‘The hen-coop tribe. The horse-box tribe. The wool-spinning tribe. The medical tribe. The point-to-pointers. You didn't ask Mrs Bonnington and Battersby by any chance, did you?'

‘Of course I did.'

‘And Freda O'Connor?'

‘Of course.'

‘Charming, very charming,' he said.

‘I don't know what you mean. I chose everybody very carefully.'

Mrs Bonnington, who was dark and shapely and in her thirties, kept house for a retired naval commander who amused himself by fishing and sketching in water colour; Mr Bonnington came down from somewhere at week-ends. The naval commander had a silvery piercing beard, commanding as a stiletto, and ice-blue handsome passionate eyes. Freda O'Connor, a long brown-haired hungry-looking girl with a flaunting bust that was like two full-blown poppy-heads, had left her husband and gone to live, while really preferring horses, with a Major Battersby. In a pleasant way Major Battersby, brown and shaggy and side-whiskered and untidily muscular, was rather like a large horse himself. Miss O'Connor had succeeded Mrs Battersby. In the furies of separation Mrs Battersby, a woman of broad-hipped charm who wore slacks all day, had taken refuge with Mrs Bonnington. On a horse she looked commanding and taller than she was. It seemed sometimes to Mr Clavering that Mr Bonnington arrived at week-ends simply for the purpose of seeing Mrs Battersby, later departing only to leave Mrs Bonnington free for the naval commander. He did not know. You could never be quite sure, in the country, about these complicated things and he said:

‘You didn't invite Major Battersby too, did you?'

‘I invited all the people I thought ought to be invited. After all one has to keep
up
,' she said, ‘one has to keep
in
——'

Mr Clavering, who would have preferred to live in town, where you could have a leisurely game of snooker
or bridge in the evenings at the Invicta Club over a quiet glass of whisky, out of reach of women, gave a sigh of pain and said something about not caring whether one was up or in and then added that Mrs Clavering was wonderful.

Mrs Clavering replied that she thought Mr Clavering ought to go and change.

‘Change what?' he said.