Читать книгу Shabby Summer - Warwick Deeping - Страница 8

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Ghent’s bedroom window overlooked the river, and being both an early riser and a good sleeper he did not trouble greatly about blind or curtains, nor would anyone in the outer world be likely to show interest in the cut or colour of his pyjamas. But Mrs. Maintenance had a passion for the closing of windows. She said that a shut window kept the moths out, which no doubt was true, and Peter, feeling the room airless, went to the casement to find it closed. He was naked to the waist, and as he opened the casement, and let the fresh breath of the night in, he was moved to stay for a moment, leaning on the sill. He could hear the river tumbling over the weir, and see stars pricking the sky over Farley village, and the dark outlines of Folly Farm. The clock of Farley church struck ten, and Ghent, with his eyes on Folly Farm, remembered that it was no longer an empty house. But the place was dark, as dark as it had been during the last year, which struck him as strange. Had the lady with the frightened eyes and the honey-coloured hair borrowed his matches to no purpose? Or was it a case of love and early to bed?

He was about to turn away when he saw a single point of light blink out in the dark house. It appeared to come from one of the upper rooms. It was in movement, like a candle being carried, and flickeringly in a draught. Suddenly it grew still. It had found a resting place on table or bureau, but no blind was drawn, and the tiny flame was like a pin-prick in a dark surface. A few seconds later he saw a second little flame shining in the window of another room; it moved and became still. So, not only had she been minus matches, but Folly Farm was living on candles. Its home-produced gas installation had always been temperamental.

He stood watching the two lights, and perhaps wondering about them. And who were his new neighbours? My lady with the honey-coloured hair did not look like an Arcadian. Rather an attractive little person, and with her slimness and her hare’s eyes, and her quick, birdlike movements, mysterious and appealing. Yes, he asked for mystery in a woman. Then, one of the candle flames went out, but the other remained alight. Did that mean——? But Ghent found such conjectures leading him into troubled waters. He, too, wanted——

His own candle was burning beside his bed. He left the window, put on his jacket, and slipping into bed, blew out the candle. The uncurtained window was a pale oblong, and in it he seemed to see, not the face of a woman, but old Crabtree’s ominous mug. Damn the old bandit! He turned on his side and willed himself to fall asleep.

Ghent woke with a stiff back and shoulders and a headache, for though a young man may flout Nature, the lady will have the last word. Peter took two aspirins and no bacon for breakfast, and running out the old Morris set forth for Loddon in quest of a pump and a hose. It was not a romantic quest, and he was not feeling romantic, but he had not driven a hundred yards along the highroad before he saw ahead of him a figure in a flowery frock. For the moment he thought it was Mary Lynwood, and he was in no mood for such strong medicine, but as he overtook the figure he realized that it did not move as Mary moved, and that its hair was the colour of ripe corn.

Should he stop and offer her a lift? He knew that casual fellows who offered lifts on a country road were regarded as gay gentlemen who preferred blondes, but it seemed churlish not to dare the courtesy, nor was he feeling gay.

She was walking on the path by the left hand hedge, and as the car slowed up beside her, he saw her head turn with a startled quickness.

“Excuse me, can I be of any use?”

She looked troubled.

“Oh, I am only going into Loddon.”

“But Loddon is three miles.”

“I know, but——”

He was wondering why that lazy fellow who owned a superfine car was letting her walk to Loddon. Had he departed early on Mondayish affairs? And should he press this courtesy upon her?

“I’m driving into Loddon. You can get a bus back. There’s a bus from Loddon to Farley.”

She stood hesitant.

“Thank you so much. Yes, it will save me time.”

He leaned over and opened the near door for her. She seemed in too serious a mood to smile at him, and he wondered why. Was marriage so solemn a state? Meanwhile, he had to watch the road with care, for the Loddon road was joined by a number of country lanes out of which cattle and farm-carts and unimaginative rustics on bicycles had a way of emerging without warning. Moreover, his old car’s brakes were not what they had been.

There was silence between them. She sat with her hands in her lap, but once or twice she glanced at him with eyes that seemed to ask what manner of man he was. She had to confess that she had been rather a fool about men in estimating their inward values, but this lad who grew trees seemed to be different. His silence interested her. It was not the silence of an uncouth and clumsy self-consciousness. She felt that he was sad and worried about something; just as she was.

She asked him a sudden question.

“Do you always work on Sundays?”

The question startled him. He glanced at her gravely.

“No, not as a rule. Special circumstances.”

“Such as——?”

“Oh, it’s very dry, you know, been terribly dry ever since January. And if one’s trees die on one——”

She had met his eyes for a moment, and something in them had touched her.

“Yes, it must be rather tragic. One hates things dying.”

“Yes, when you have grown them. Besides——”

“It means—a loss.”

“Very much so.”

He glanced at her hands. They were beautiful hands, slim and long fingered, but they were not the hands of a worker. He was supposing so many things about her, that she was married, that she was well off, that even the clothes she wore came from Paris or London. Yes, she was somewhat exotic, and yet, she suggested innocence. She was not like Mary Lynwood, full of a kind of crass, vigorous splendour. She looked fragile, sensitive, bothered about life. She appealed.

She said: “I hope you will have rain.”

She too was looking at his hands, big and brown, resting on the wheel.

“It’s on the knees of the gods.”

Her eyes widened.

“You don’t believe it isn’t just chance?”

“No, somehow not. Life seems rather too miraculous for such a preposterous, blind, blundering theory.”

And then he smiled.

“God or no God, I’m buying a pump and a hose.”

They were silent again, and each was thinking that it was rather strange that in five minutes they should have met at those cross-roads where the sign-post points nowhere. You just groped intuitively. And for months her gropings had led her into blind country where you saw no sign of that other, mysterious presence. He attracted her. She seemed to divine other strengths in him, the compassionate vision which, as a woman, she craved for.

Her voice came suddenly.

“One does want to believe that there is some sort of meaning——”

Her voice died away. She felt him looking at her in a way that was different.

“Yes, I know. Otherwise, there’s bitterness. One feels that a nasty sort of joke is being played on us.”

“Yes, one does.”

So, they came through the Barham beeches to Loddon bridge, and crossing it he asked her where she would like to be put down. Oh, anywhere in the main street. And where could she catch the Farley bus? Just by the market-hall. When the car stopped, he got out quickly and opened the door for her. They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment.

“Thank you so much.”

He smiled.

Peter bought his pump and his hose at the local ironmonger’s, and putting them in the back-seat, drove home, and on the way he found himself thinking more of the woman who had sat beside him than of the drought. Strange how close they had come to each other in so short a time! But her eyes and her hands and her hair were, what was the word? Rather exquisite! Yes, she was not a Mary Lynwood. Her delicate texture appealed to him as did the shape, colour and perfume of a flower. She was mysterious. Her eyes had a fey look, as though they looked both back and into the future, and were troubled by what they saw.

Ghent and the men spent the rest of the morning driving an old oak post into the river bed close to the bank, and attaching the pump to it, and Peter, who had taken his turn with the beetle, found that a headache can be more bothersome than heartache.

Said George, who was given to splurging into engaging candour:

“You look a bit yaller, sir.”

Ghent felt it. He grinned at George.

“Not hang-over, my lad. Too many cans of water yesterday, not beer.”

“No such luck,” said Garland. “Fancy azaleas given a bucket of beer. Get up, dance, would they?”

“No, go off bloom, more like,” said Bob.

Ghent could not do justice to Mrs. Maintenance’s dinner. He took two more aspirins, and the afternoon off, retreating to the shade of the Camperdown elm and a deck-chair. It was here that he spent the lazy hours of his Sunday afternoon, and the only difference was that his Sunday had become Monday.

Instead of going to sleep he found himself lazily regarding the garden of Folly Farm across the river, and suddenly his two problem people appeared there as on a stage. They were bound for the hammock under the shade of the limes, the man walked ahead, like the king beast, the woman following, carrying cushions and a rug. The man got into the hammock, and had the cushions arranged for him, and was covered with the rug. The hammock oscillated gently. Ghent saw the woman place a garden table close to the hammock. She returned to the house and reappeared with a glass which she set on the table so that the man could reach it.

Their voices came to him faintly in the summer stillness, but he could not distinguish the words.

“Do try that, Max.”

“I don’t want the damned stuff.”

A meal that should have been romantic had, apparently, given him acute dyspepsia. Her cooking, of course! Or had those confounded people poisoned the pie before leaving? He had been sick in the night, and had eaten no breakfast, and a glass of gin before lunch had not acted as a charm. He was peevish and irritable and talking about ptomaine poisoning. Everything had tasted of paraffin! He had told her to throw that damned pie away, though it was quite a good pie, and she had eaten of it without disaster.

“Feel warmer now?”

“Yes, just a bit.”

She tucked him up, and Ghent was of the opinion that she was spoiling the fellow. Gross egoist.

“Would you like a doctor?”

“No. It wouldn’t be very good policy, would it, when we had decided against social complications?”

She stood observing him, one hand to her cheek. Poor dear, he did look very yellow, and the little baldish patch on the crown of his head which he took such trouble to camouflage showed beneath streaks of thin black hair. And suddenly, she found herself considering him dispassionately, and with a ruthlessness that shocked her when she realized its significance.

She gave the hammock a gentle push, and he snapped at her.

“Don’t do that. Makes me feel more squeamish.”

“Sorry, Max.”

“I’ll try a nap.”

“Yes, darling, do.”

She left him, and taking a chair, sat down at a little distance from him, with her head in the shade and her feet in the sun. If the river suggested anything to her, it symbolized the way life drifted on and past you, inevitably and with a fallacious tranquillity that lured you into hoping that your storms and floods had ceased. But life, like the river, had its change of levels and its weirs, some crisis in its course over which the water tumbled. Life, as she knew it, had been a series of crises, of shipwrecks from which she had escaped, wet and dishevelled and exhausted. She was very tired. Married at twenty she had become a widow at three and twenty, and tragically so. With the little money that had been left her she had opened a hat-shop in Kensington, and facing disaster, had found a sympathetic friend. He had taught her that she should remain the mistress of her shop, provided—— But confronted by that elderly sensualist, she had let both shop and intrigue go. Yes, it had all been very shabby and sordid, and she happened to be fastidious, and if that was adventure she had prayed for, she preferred clean dullness.

But placid and eventless days had eluded her. She had become a secretary, only to find hat her looks did not allow such a relationship to remain unemotional. Then, she had met Max, a man who went about complaining that his wife did not understand him, and who had been comforted by half a dozen successive sympathetic women. That she had come somewhere about the seventh in the list had not been revealed to her, for, in spite of her experience, life had left her surprisingly innocent. She wanted to give. She wanted to sit down in a comfortable chair and stay put, and not to have to play the amateur pretty lady to the promiscuous male. Max had talked sententiously of divorce. He had dangled the apple of divorce before a number of women. She had not suspected it. But now, she was beginning to understand that when the sense magic pales, and a man becomes petulant and rude—— Yes, her stretch of tranquil water had proved elusive. She was sliding inevitably towards one of those wet crises from which she might again emerge breathless and dishevelled. A poor, pretty jade’s progress!

Max was asleep in the hammock. She heard him snoring. No man is impressive when he snores, and Max Broster, brilliant worldling though he was, was ceasing to be impressive. Was this flaccid-mouthed, stertorous male one of the city Olympians who set companies afloat, and backed plays, and was a golden noise in the cinematograph world? She left her chair and went to stand beside the hammock, and realizing that she could look upon this sleeping babe without compassion, was shocked and nauseated. If you loved a man adequately and completely, you could love him when he snored, and when he had a boil on his poor neck, and when his ridiculous trouser-buttons were being temperamental. You loved him in any sort of trouble. He whimpered, and you ran to comfort him as you rushed to console your own small child that had fallen down and bloodied its little knees.

She hated herself, despised herself.

She accused herself of bearing with Max Broster, not because she loved him, but for the material things he represented. Yes, she was just a kept woman who sold her smiles and a suborned sympathy for frocks and a house and servants and a bank account. Hers was a business concern, a sex-shop, a relationship that was as old as time, and yet, somehow, strangely and flagrantly new to her. She, who had always been so fastidious about her hair and her face and her finger-nails, felt soiled.

Ghent, who was watching her instead of going to sleep, and who, being a creature of sentiment, was misconstruing her hoverings about the sleeping figure in the hammock, saw her wander away towards the boat-house. The punt emerged from its kennel of shadow and slid out into the sunlight. She poled it into mid-stream, and then stood with the pole trailing in the water. She looked about her, and saw a green and empty world, nor was she aware of the man concealed under the drooping elm. She had left the paddles in the boat-house. Three hundred yards or so away the weir maintained a rolling underchant. The stream was flowing sluggishly but with inevitableness towards that curve of water and the turbulent weir pool above the bridge.

She could not swim. Strange but true in these days when the whole world takes to the water.

Ghent sat up sharply in his chair.

She had dropped the punt-pole into the river.

He stood up. Surely there were paddles in the boat?

He saw her kneel down, and fold her hands, almost like a figure surrendering to fate.

He was up and running. He reached the bank.

“I say, the weir. Haven’t you a paddle?”

He was aware of her face turned towards him. It had a kind of vacancy. She did not move or answer.

He had his shoes off in five seconds. He was in shorts and shirt. He waded in and swam to where the pole was floating, and recovering it, turned downstream in pursuit of the punt. It was drifting broadside across the river. She was kneeling there, facing him as though paralysed by life’s interventions.

She saw his head drawing nearer. It seemed to her that his face had a young fierceness, and she wanted to weep.

He reached the punt, gripped the gunwale with his free hand, stared.

“I say, you know, the weir’s only just down there.”

She stared back at him.

“Yes, I know.”

“Can you manage? I might climb in, but I’m rather wet.”

“Yes, I can manage. Thank you, so much.”

She leaned over and took the pole from him, and again their eyes met.

“How did you manage to drop it?”

Her eyes fell.

“Oh, I just dropped it. Thank you so much.”