Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (6 page)

He listened again for a sound of her voice or her footsteps coming back. But all he could hear was the sound of wind and tide rising and halting and falling in little bursts along the darkening shore.

It was exactly as if the sea sometimes held its breath and then broke into a little fragile, broken song.

Clara Corbett, who had dark brown deeply sunken eyes that did not move when she was spoken to and plain brown hair parted down the middle in a straight thin line, firmly believed that her life had been saved by an air warden's anti-gas cape on a black rainy night during the war.

In a single glittering, dusty moment a bomb had blown her through the window of a warden's post, hurling her to the wet street outside. The wind from the bomb had miraculously blown the cape about her face, masking and protecting her eyes. When she had picked herself up, unhurt, she suddenly knew that it might have been her shroud.

‘Look slippy and get up to May field Court. Six brace of partridges and two hares to pick up——'

‘And on the way deliver them kidneys and the sirloin to Paxton Manor. Better call in sharp as you go out. They're having a lunch party.'

Now, every rainy day of her life, she still wore the old camouflaged cape as she drove the butcher's van, as if half fearing that some day, somewhere, another bomb would blow her through another window, helplessly and for ever. The crumpled patterns of green-and-yellow camouflage always
made her look, in the rain, like a damp, baggy, meditating frog.

Every day of his life, her husband, Clem, wore his bowler hat in the butcher's shop, doffing it obsequiously to special customers, revealing a bald, yellow suet-shining head. Clem had a narrow way of smiling and argued that war had killed the meat trade.

Almost everyone else in that rather remote hilly country, where big woodlands were broken by open stretches of chalk heathland covered with gorse and blackthorn and occasional yew trees, had given up delivering to outlying houses. It simply didn't pay. Only Clem Corbett, who doffed his hat caressingly to customers with one hand while leaving the thumb of his other on the shop scales a fraction of a second too long, thought it worth while any longer.

‘One day them people'll all come back. The people with class. Mark my words. The real gentry. They're the people you got to keep in with. The pheasant-and-partridge class. The real gentry. Not the sausage-and-scragenders.'

Uncomplainingly, almost meekly, Clara drove out, every day, in the old delivery van with a basket or two in the back and an enamel tray with a few bloody, neatly-wrapped cuts of meat on it, into wooded, hilly countryside. Sometimes in winter, when the trees were thinned of leaves, the chimneys of empty houses, the mansions of the late gentry, rose starkly from behind deep thick beechwoods that were thrown like vast bearskins across the chalk. In summer the chalk flowered into a hill garden of wild yellow rock-rose, wild marjoram, and countless waving mauve scabious covered on hot afternoons with nervous darting butterflies.

She drove into this countryside, winter and summer, camouflaged always by the gas-cape on days of rain, without much
change of expression. Her meek sunken eyes fixed themselves firmly on the winter woods, on the narrow lanes under primroses or drifts of snow, and on the chalk flowers of summer as if the seasons made no change in them at all. It was her job simply to deliver meat, to rap or ring at kitchen doors, to say good morning and thank you and then to depart in silence, camouflaged, in the van.

If she ever thought about the woods, about the blazing open chalkland in which wild strawberries sparkled, pure scarlet, in hot summers, or about the big desolate mansions standing empty among the beechwoods, she did not speak of it to a soul. If the mansions were one day to be opened up again, then they would, she supposed, be opened up. If people with money and class were to come back again, as Clem said they would, once more to order barons of beef and saddles of lamb and demand the choicest cuts of venison, then she supposed they would come back. That was all.

In due course, if such things happened, she supposed Clem would know how to deal with them. Clem was experienced, capable and shrewd, a good butcher and a good business man. Clem knew how to deal with people of class. Clem, in the early days of business, had been used to supplying the finest of everything, as his father and grandfather had done before him, for house parties, shooting luncheons, ducal dinners, and regimental messes. The days of the gentry might, as Clem said, be under a temporary cloud. But finally, one day, class would surely triumph again and tradition would be back. The war might have half killed the meat trade, but it couldn't kill those people. They were there all the time, as Clem said, somewhere. They were the backbone, the real people, the gentry.

‘Didn't I tell you?' he said one day. ‘Just like I told you. Belvedere's opening up. Somebody's bought Belvedere.'

She knew about Belvedere. Belvedere was one of those houses, not large but long empty, whose chimneys rose starkly, like tombs, above the beechwoods of winter-time. For six years the army had carved its ashy, cindery name on Belvedere.

‘See, just like I told you,' Clem said two days later, ‘the gentleman from Belvedere just phoned up. The right people are coming back. We got an order from Belvedere.'

By the time she drove up to Belvedere, later that morning, rain was falling heavily, sultrily warm, on the chalk flowers of the hillsides. She was wearing the old war-time cape, as she always did under rain, and in the van, on the enamel tray, at the back, lay portions of sweetbreads, tripe, and liver.

High on the hills, a house of yellow stucco frontage, with thin iron balconies about the windows and green iron canopies above them, faced the valley.

‘Ah, the lady with the victuals! The lady with the viands. The lady from Corbett, eh?' A man of forty-five or fifty, in shirtsleeves, portly, wearing a blue-striped apron, his voice plummy and soft, answered her ring at the kitchen door.

‘Do come in. You are from Corbett, aren't you?'

‘I'm Mrs Corbett.'

‘How nice. Come in, Mrs Corbett, come in. Don't stand there. It's loathsome and you'll catch a death. Come in. Take off your cape. Have a cheese straw.'

The rosy flesh of his face was smeared with flour dust. His fattish soft fingers were stuck about with shreds of dough.

‘You arrived in the nick, Mrs Corbett. I was about to hurl these wretched things into the stove, but now you can pass judgment on them for me.'

With exuberance he suddenly put in front of her face a plate of fresh warm cheese straws.

‘Taste and tell me, Mrs Corbett. Taste and tell.'

With shyness, more than usually meek, her deep brown eyes lowered, she took a cheese straw and started to bite on it.

‘Tell me,' he said, ‘if it's utterly loathsome.'

‘It's very nice, sir.'

‘Be absolutely frank, Mrs Corbett,' he said. ‘Absolutely frank. If they're too revolting say so.'

‘I think——'

‘I tell you what, Mrs Corbett,' he said, ‘they'll taste far nicer with a glass of sherry. That's it. We shall each have a glass of pale dry sherry and see how it marries with the cheese.'

Between the sherry and the cheese straws and his own conversation she found there was not much chance for her to speak. With bewilderment she watched him turn away, the cheese straws suddenly forgotten, to the kitchen table, a basin of flour, and a pastry board.

With surprising delicacy he pressed with his fingers at the edges of thin pastry lining a brown shallow dish. Beside it lay a pile of pink peeled mushrooms.

‘This I know is going to be delicious,' he said. ‘This I am sure about. I adore cooking. Don't you?'

Speechlessly she watched him turn to the stove and begin to melt butter in a saucepan.

‘Croûte aux champignons,'
he said. ‘A kind of mushroom pie. There are some things one knows one does well. This I love to do. It's delicious—you know it, of course, don't you? Heavenly.'

‘No, sir.'

‘Oh, don't call me sir, Mrs Corbett. My name is Lafarge. Henry Lafarge.' He turned to fill up his glass with sherry, at the same time fixing her with greyish bulbous eyes. ‘Aren't you terribly uncomfortable in that wretched mackintosh? Why don't you throw it off for a while?'

The voice, though not unkindly, shocked her a little. She had never thought of the cape as wretched. It was a very essential, useful, hard-wearing garment. It served its purpose very well, and with fresh bewilderment she pushed it back from her shoulders.

‘Do you think I'm a fool?' he said. ‘I mean about this house? All my friends say I'm a fool. Of course it's in a ghastly state, one knows, but I think I can do things with it. Do you agree? Do you think I'm a fool?'

She could not answer. She felt herself suddenly preoccupied, painfully, with the old brown dress she was wearing under the gas-cape. With embarrassment she folded her hands across the front of it, unsuccessfully trying to conceal it from him.

To her relief he was, however, staring at the rain. ‘I think it's letting up at last,' he said. ‘In which case I shall be able to show you the outside before you go. You simply must see the outside, Mrs Corbett. It's a ravishing wilderness. Ravishing to the point of being sort of almost Strawberry Hill. You know?'

She did not know, and she stared again at her brown dress, frayed at the edges.

Presently the rain slackened and stopped and only the great beeches overshadowing the house were dripping. The sauce for the
croûte aux champignons
was almost ready, and Lafarge dipped a little finger into it and then thoughtfully licked it, staring at the same time at the dripping summer trees.

‘I'm going to paint most of it myself,' he said. ‘It's more fun, don't you think? More creative. I don't think we're half creative enough, do you? Stupid to allow menials and lackeys to do all the nicest things for us, don't you think?'

Pouring sauce over the mushrooms, he fixed on her an inquiring, engaging smile that did not need an answer.

‘Now, Mrs Corbett, the outside. You must see the outside.'

Automatically she began to draw on her cape.

‘I can't think why you cling to that wretched cape, Mrs Corbett,' he said. ‘The very day war was over I had a simply glorious ceremonial bonfire of all those things.'

In a cindery garden of old half-wild roses growing out of matted tussocks of grass and nettle, trailed over by thick white horns of convolvulus, he showed her the southern front of the house with its rusty canopies above the windows and its delicate iron balconies entwined with blackberry and briar.

‘Of course at the moment the plaster looks frightfully leprous,' he said, ‘but it'll be pink when I've done with it. The sort of pink you see in the Mediterranean. You know?'

A Virginia creeper had enveloped with shining tendrilled greed the entire western wall of the house, descending from the roof in a dripping curtain of crimson-green.

‘The creeper is coming down this week,' he said. ‘Ignore the creeper.' He waved soft pastry-white hands in the air, clasping and unclasping them. ‘Imagine a rose there. A black one. An enormous deep red-black one. A hat rose. You know the sort?'

Again she realised he did not need an answer.

‘The flowers will glow,' he said, ‘like big glasses of dark red wine on a pink tablecloth. Doesn't that strike you as being absolute heaven on a summer's day?'

Bemused, she stared at the tumbling skeins of creeper, at the rising regiments of sow-thistle, more than ever uncertain what to say. She began hastily to form a few words about it being time for her to go when he said: ‘There was something else I had to say to you, Mrs Corbett, and now I can't think what it was. Terribly important too. Momentously important.'

A burst of sunshine falling suddenly on the wet wilderness, the rusting canopies and Clara's frog-like cape seemed abruptly to enlighten him. ‘Ah—hearts,' he said. ‘That was it.'

‘Hearts?'

‘What's today? Tuesday. Thursday,' he said, ‘I want you to bring me one of your nicest hearts.'

‘One of my hearts?'

He laughed, again not unkindly. ‘Bullock's,' he said.

‘Oh! Yes, I see.'

‘Did you know,' he said, ‘that hearts taste like goose? Just like goose-flesh?' He stopped, laughed again, and actually touched her arm. ‘No, no. That's wrong. Too rich. One can't say that. One can't say heart's like goose-flesh. Can one?'

A stir of wind shook the beech boughs, bringing a spray of rain sliding down the long shafts of sunlight.

‘I serve them with cranberry sauce,' he said. ‘With fresh peas and fresh new potatoes I defy anyone to tell the difference.'

They were back now at the kitchen door, where she had left her husband's basket on the step.

‘We need more imagination, that's all,' he said. ‘The despised heart is absolutely royal, I assure you, if you treat it properly——'

‘I think I really must go now, Mr Lafarge,' she said, ‘or I'll never get done. Do you want the heart early?'

‘No,' he said, ‘afternoon will do. It's for a little evening supper party. Just a friend and I. Lots of parties, that's what I shall have. Lots of parties, little ones, piggy ones in the kitchen, first. Then one big one, an enormous house-warmer, a cracker, when the house is ready.'

She picked up her basket, automatically drawing the cape round her shoulders and started to say, ‘All right, sir. I'll be up in the afternoon——'

‘Most kind of you, Mrs Corbett,' he said. ‘Goodbye. So kind. But no “sir”—we're already friends. Just Lafarge.'

‘Goodbye, Mr Lafarge,' she said.

She was halfway back to the van when he called, ‘Oh, Mrs Corbett! If you get no answer at the door you'll probably find me decorating.' He waved soft, pastry-white hands in the direction of the creeper, the canopies, and the rusting balconies. ‘You know—up there.'