Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (15 page)

‘We may have done. At one time. Now we'll have to agree to differ.'

‘Very well.'

A hard lump rose in the Colonel's throat and stuck there.
A miserable sense of impotence seized him and kept him stiff, with nothing more to say.

‘I might have shown you a few minutes of it and converted you,' Miss Wilkinson said. ‘But the aerial isn't up yet. It's coming this evening.'

‘I don't think I want to be converted, thank you.'

‘I hoped you'd like it and perhaps come down in the evenings sometimes and watch.'

‘Thank you, I shall be perfectly happy in my own way.'

‘Very well. I'm sorry you're so stubborn about it.'

The Colonel was about to say with acidity that he was not stubborn and then changed his mind and said curtly that he must go. After a painful silence Miss Wilkinson said:

‘Well, if you must I'll get the pork brawn.'

‘I don't think I care for the pork brawn, thank you.'

‘Just as you like.'

At the door of the sitting room the Colonel paused, if anything stiffer than ever, and remarked that if there was something he particularly wanted he would signal her.

‘I shan't be answering any signals,' Miss Wilkinson said.

‘You won't be answering any signals?'

An agony of disbelief went twisting through the Colonel, imposing on him a momentary paralysis. He could only stare.

‘No: I shan't be answering any signals.'

‘Does that mean you won't be speaking to me again?'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘I think it rather sounds like that.'

‘Then you must go on thinking it sounds like that, that's all.'

It was exactly as if Miss Wilkinson had slapped him harshly in the face; it was precisely as if he had proposed and been rudely rejected.

‘Goodbye,' he said in a cold and impotent voice.

‘Goodbye,' she said. ‘I'll see you out.'

‘There's no need to see me out, thank you. I'll find my way alone.'

Back in his own kitchen the Colonel discovered that the eggs had boiled black in the saucepan. He had forgotten to close the door of the stove. Brown smoke was hanging everywhere. Trying absentmindedly to clear up the mess he twice put his sleeve in the jam dish without noticing it and then wiped his sleeve across the tablecloth, uncleared since breakfast-time.

In the garden the dead gold-finch still lay on the silvery leaf of sea kale and he stood staring at it for a long time, stiff-eyed and impotent, unable to think one coherent simple thought.

Finally he went back to the house, took out the signalling flags and went over to the stile. Standing on it, he gave three difficult blasts on the whistle but nothing happened in answer except that one of two men standing on the roof of Miss Wilkinson's house, erecting the television aerial, casually turned his head.

Then he decided to send a signal. The three words he wanted so much to send were ‘Please forgive me' but after some moments of contemplation he found that he had neither the heart nor the will to raise a flag.

Instead he simply stood immovable by the stile, staring across the meadows in the evening sun. His eyes were blank. They seemed to be groping in immeasurable appeal for something and as if in answer to it the long row of great yellow sunflower faces, the seeds of which were so excellent for the hens, stared back at him, in that wide, laughing, almost mocking way that sunflowers have.

Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast. This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones. By noon breakfast had become lunch and by two o'clock the pouches under and above Mrs Eglantine's bleared blue eyes began to look like large puffed pink prawns.

‘I suppose you know you've got her name wrong?' my friend the doctor said to me. ‘It's really Eglinton. What makes you call her Eglantine?'

‘She must have been rather sweet at some time.'

‘You think so?' he said. ‘What has Eglantine got to do with that?'

‘The Sweet-briar,' I said, ‘or the Vine, or the twisted Eglantine.'

For a woman of nearly fifty Mrs Eglantine wore her blue linen shorts very neatly. Her legs were brown, well-shaped and spare. Her arms were slim and hairless and her nails well-manicured. She had pretty delicate ears and very soft pale blue eyes. Her hair, though several shades too yellow, was smooth and always well-brushed, with a slight upward curl where it fell on her tanned slender shoulders.

Her only habit of untidiness was that sometimes, as she sat at the bar, she let one or both of her yellow sandals fall off. After that she often staggered about the verandah with one shoe on and one in her hand; or with both shoes off, carrying them and saying:

‘Whose bloody shoes are these? Anybody know whose bloody shoes these are?'

Soon, when she got to know me a little better, she would slap one of her sandals on the seat of the bar-stool next to her and say:

‘Here, England, come and sit here.' She always called me England. ‘Come and sit down and talk to me. I'm British too. Come and sit down. Nice to meet someone from the old country in this lousy frog-crowd. What do you make of Tahiti?'

I had never time to tell her what I thought of Tahiti before, licking brandy from her lips, she would say something like:

‘Swindle. The big myth. The great South-sea bubble. The great South-sea paradise. Not a decent hotel in the place. All the shops owned by Chinks. Everybody bone-lazy. Takes you all day to cash a cheque at the bank. Hot and dirty. Still, what else do you expect with the Froggies running the show?'

Presently, after another brandy or two, she would begin to call me dear.

‘You've seen the travel posters, haven't you, dear? Those nice white sands and the Polynesian girls with naked bosoms climbing the palms? All a myth, dear. All a bloody swindle. All taken in the Cook Islands, hundreds of miles away.'

Talking of the swindle of white sands and Polynesian girls she would point with her well-kept hands to the shore:

‘Look at the beach, dear. Just look at it. I ask you. Black
sand, millions of sea-eggs, thousands of those liverish-looking sea-snakes. Coral island, my foot. I can bear most things, England, but not black sand. Not a beach that looks like a foundry yard.'

It was true that the beaches of Tahiti were black, that the sea, where shallow, was thick with sea-eggs and at low tide with creatures looking like inert lumps of yellow intestine. But there were also shoals of blue and yellow fish, like delicate underwater sails, with sometimes a flying fish or a crowd of exquisite blue torpedoes flashing in bluest water.

It occurred to me that something, perhaps, had made her ignore these things.

‘How long have you been here now?' I said.

‘Ever been to Australia?' she said. ‘That's the place for beaches. Miles of them. Endless. You've seen the Cook Islands? White as that. Me? Six months, dear. Nearly seven months now.'

‘Why don't you take the sea-plane and get out,' I said, ‘if you hate it so much?'

‘Long story, England,' she said. ‘Bloody complicated.'

Every afternoon she staggered away, slept in her room and re-appeared about six, in time for sunset. By that time she had changed her shorts for a dress, generally something very simple in cotton or silk that, from a distance or behind, with her brief lean figure, made her look attractive, fresh and quite young.

I noticed that, in the evening, she did not go at once to the bar. For perhaps ten minutes or a quarter of an hour she would stand in silence at the rail of the verandah, gazing at the sunset.

The sunsets across the lagoon at Tahiti, looking towards the great chimneys of Moorea, are the most beautiful in the world. As the sun dips across the Pacific the entire sky behind the
mountains opens up like a blast furnace, flaming pure and violent fire. Over the upper sky roll clouds of scarlet petal, then orange, then yellow, then pink, and then swan-white as they sail away, high, and slowly, over the ocean to the north. In the last minutes before darkness there is left only a thunderous purple map of smouldering ash across the sky.

‘It's so beautiful, England dear,' she said to me. ‘God, it's so beautiful it takes your breath away. I always want to cry.'

Once or twice she actually did cry but soon, when sunset was over and the enormous soft southern stars were breaking the deep black sky, she would be back to brandy and the bar. Once again her eyes would take on the appearance of swollen prawns. One by one her shoes would fall off, leaving her to grope bare-footed, carrying her shoes about the verandah, not knowing whose they were.

‘Sweet people,' she said once. ‘Very sweet people, you and Mrs England. Good old England. That's a sweet dress she has on. What would you say, Mrs England, if you wanted to marry someone here and they wouldn't let you?'

She laughed. From much brandy her skin was hot and baggy. Her eyes, looking as if they were still in tears from the sunset, could no longer focus themselves.

‘A Froggy too,' she said, ‘which I call damn funny. Rather a nice Froggy too.'

Her voice was thick and bitter.

‘Rather funny,' she said. ‘I come all this way from Australia to meet him here and then find they've sent him to New Caledonia. Administrative post. Administrative trick, dear, see?'

I said something about how simple it was, nowadays, to fly from one side of the Pacific to the other, and she said:

‘Can't get permission, dear. Got to get permission from the
Froggies to go to Froggy territory,' she went on. ‘Of course he'll come back here in time.'

I said something about how simple it was to wait here, in Tahiti, where she was, and she said:

‘Can't get permission, dear. Got to get permission from the Froggies to stay in Froggy territory. Froggy red tape, dear. Can't stay here, can't go there. Next week my permit expires.'

I made some expression of sympathy about all this and she said:

‘All a trick, dear. Complete wangle. His father's a friend of the governor. Father doesn't like me. Governor doesn't like me. Undesirable type, dear. Divorced and drink too much. Bad combination. British too. They don't want the British here. Leaves more Tahitian girls for the Froggies to set up fancy house with.'

There were, as my friend the doctor said, only two general types in Tahiti: those who took one look at the island, wanted to depart next day and never set eyes on it again; and those who, from the first moment, wanted to stay there for ever. Now I had a met a third.

‘Going to make my last appeal for an extension of my permit tomorrow,' Mrs Eglantine said. ‘Suppose you wouldn't like to write it for me, would you, England dear? It'll need to be bloody well put, that's sure.'

‘Where will you go?' I said. ‘If you have to go?'

‘Nearest British possession, dear. Cook Islands. Wait there.'

The Cook Islands are very beautiful. Across a long, shallow, sharkless lagoon flying-boats glide down between soft fringes of palm and purest hot white coral sand. At the little rest-house, by the anchorage, the prettiest and friendliest of Polynesian girls serve tea and cakes, giggling constantly, shaking back their long loose black hair.

‘Yes, it's very lovely,' I said. ‘You couldn't have a better place to go than that. That's a paradise.'

‘And a dry one,' she said, ‘in case you didn't know it. Worse than prohibition. They allow you a bottle of something stronger than lime-juice once a month, dear, and you even need a permit for that.'

We left her under the moth-charged lights of the verandah groping for her shoes.

‘Dormez bien
, dears,' she said. ‘Which is more than I shall do.

‘She must have been very pretty once,' my wife said.

‘She's pretty now,' I said, ‘sweet and rather pretty.'

Five days later she flew out with us on the morning plane. Half way to the Cook Islands I brought her breakfast and she said, as she knocked it back, ‘Bless you, England dear.'

In the lagoon, by the anchorage, a little crowd of Polynesians, mostly women and girls, sat under the shade of palm-trees, out of the pure blistering heat of white coral sand, singing songs of farewell to a young man leaving by the plane.

The songs of Polynesia have a great sadness in them that is very haunting. A few of the women were weeping. Then at the last moment a girl rushed on bare feet along the jetty towards the waiting launch, wringing her hands in sorrow, her long hair flying, bitterly weeping final words of goodbye.

On the scalding white coral beach, under the palms, Mrs Eglantine was nowhere to be seen. And presently, as the launch moved away, I could no longer hear the songs of sad farewell or the haunting voice of the girl who was weeping. But only, running through my head, haunting too:

‘The Sweet-briar, or the Vine, or the twisted Eglantine.'

The place where she was born was eighty miles from London. She was never to go to London in all her life except in dreams or in imagination, when she lay awake in the top bedroom of the hotel, listening to the sound of wind in the forest boughs.

When she first began to work at
The Blenheim Arms
she was a plump short girl of fourteen, with remarkably pale cream hands and a head of startling hair exactly the colour of autumn beech leaves. Her eyes seemed bleached and languid. The only colour in their lashes was an occasional touch of gold that made them look like curled paint brushes that were not quite dry.

She began first as a bedroom maid, living in and starting at five in the morning and later taking up brass cans of hot shaving water to the bedrooms of gentlemen who stayed overnight. These gentlemen—any guest was called a gentleman in those days—were mostly commercial travellers going regularly from London to the West country or back again and after a time she got to know them very well. After a time she also got to know the view from the upper bedroom windows very well: southward to the village, down the long wide street of brown-red houses where horses in those days were still tied
to hitching posts and then westward and northward and eastward to the forest that sheltered the houses like a great horseshoe of boughs and leaves. She supposed there were a million beech-trees in that forest. She did not know. She only knew, because people said so, that you could walk all day through it and never come to the other side.