Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (2 page)

Then suddenly, when she was twenty, James William Sherwood slipped from a ladder while pruning a pear-tree, fell to a concrete path below and died of a haemorrhage two days later.

‘Now watch her,' everybody said. ‘She's got what she wanted. Now watch her let it rip. Now watch her slide.'

Sherwood died in January. One very hot oppressive evening in the following July I was walking slowly through the town, up to the tennis club, when a low green open sports car cut a corner as I was crossing, almost killed me and then roared away through rapid changes of gears and the guttural grind of twin exhausts. I had just time to catch sight of a man named Tom Pemberton at the wheel, and a very fair, bare-headed girl with one arm round his neck, before the car cut another corner and disappeared.

It was some minutes before it came to me that the girl was Bertha, and the fact that I hadn't recognised her instantly was due to an interesting thing. Bertha had bobbed her hair. Twenty minutes later I walked into the tennis club and found her playing tennis with Pemberton and a man named Saunders and another girl whose name I can't remember. Saunders was a rather surly, dark-eyed man of great virility who played tennis well above the local average and Pemberton, though a fool in all other respects, was as polished and fluent a player as you ever get in an ordinary club.

I was still trying to recover from my astonishment that Bertha was playing as well as any of them—in fact from my astonishment that she could play tennis at all—when I saw that Tom Pemberton had been drinking. Though not actually drunk, he threw the ball in the air several times and missed it and once, missing a smash, he fell headlong into the net and
lay underneath it cursing and giggling. Every time he did something of this kind Bertha started giggling too.

It was plain, presently, to see that Saunders was tiring of this and soon they were exchanging, hotly, some words about a ball being on the wrong side of the line. Pemberton, I thought, was less drunk than stupid. But Saunders was not the kind of man who took any kind of argument very lightly and presently, surly as a mongrel, he hit a ball deliberately high over the shrubberies and into the street beyond.

The next thing I realised was that Pemberton was walking off the court, followed by a cool, racy, slightly haughty Bertha who looked, I thought, more striking than ever. But this was not what impressed me, at that moment, most powerfully.

What impressed me so much was that she had trained herself to Pemberton's pattern. She no longer looked like a woman nestling down into the contentment of her middle thirties. Though she was now a widow she looked, with her close-bobbed hair, severe twentyish tennis frock, her low waist and short skirt that showed her magnificent legs to superb advantage, like a careless wild-headed girl of seventeen.

Five minutes later they were roaring away in Pemberton's sports car and older members of the club began to say, prophetically as it turned out, that Pemberton would kill himself before he was much older. And I actually heard her scream—with delight, not fear—as the car skidded round a bend.

I never cared much for Pemberton or indeed for men of Pemberton's upbringing, outlook and class. Tom was the only son of a wealthy boot-manufacturer who lived in a house of hideous chateau-like design surrounded by large conservatories with occasional diamonds of coloured glass in them. He had no need to be anything but empty headed and the father encouraged
the condition by ceaseless indulgence with sports cars, open cheques, expensive suits and the ready payment of court fines whenever, as so often happened, Tom ran the sports car into lamp-posts, trees or even other sports cars. Drunk or sober, he always looked pitifully handsome, vacant, vain and without direction.

It occurred to me—I don't know why—that Bertha, who had married so unexpectedly and quietly into the gentility of James William Sherwood's septuagenarian household behind the pear-trees, was the very person to dispossess him of these unlikeable characteristics. I was wrong.

It was many years indeed before I grasped that Bertha never dispossessed anybody of anything. The truth about Bertha was in fact very slow in coming to me. All I thought I saw in the incident of the tennis club was a girl who, consorting with an idiot, had caught a rash of idiocy. It was too early for me to know that the same characteristics that had turned her temporarily into a decorous wife for an elderly gentleman were the very same as those that were now turning her into a flapper of loud clipped speech, skirts above her knees and a taste for wild parties at dubious clubs on riversides. Grieflessly, swiftly and with not the slightest pressure on the nerves of conscience she had slipped out of the part of widow as easily as she might have slipped out of one of her petticoats, taking on the new tone, new pattern and new outlook of another man.

About a year later Tom Pemberton, driving his car home very late and very fast one night in a thunderstorm, with Bertha at his side, crashed into a roadside tree for the last time.

By one of those strange tricks that surround violent and accidental death Pemberton was terribly mutilated while Bertha, thrown clear, landed with miraculous gentleness on
grass, dazed but unbruised, as if she had slid gently down a helter-skelter at a fair.

Only a few weeks later a great scandal broke out in the town.

Bertha, by this time, had gone back to live with her mother in The Pit. It might have been supposed that the few hundred pounds James William Sherwood had left her would have revolutionised life behind the dark little front window and the treadle sewing machine. Nothing of the kind had happened. The sick, yellow-eyed figure went on treadling as desperately as ever; in
The Waterloo
the ex-pug unfolded to all who would listen his tale of light-weight triumphs; and Bertha, splendid and well dressed as ever, went back to the factory.

Two or three days after the death of Tom Pemberton a young curate named Ormsby-Hill called to see Bertha in The Pit, bearing the conventional condolences of the clergy and hoping, after the crash and its mutilations, that all was well as could be expected. Clergymen have a strange habit of calling on their sheep at awkward times and Ormsby-Hill, getting no answer at the front door of the house, which no one ever used anyway, went round to the back, among the miserable naked yards, just after six o'clock. The ex-pug, by that time, was already in
The Waterloo
, and Bertha's mother, free for a few minutes after the long day of treadling, was out doing shopping.

Bertha, big arms and chest bare in a sleeveless chemise, was at the kitchen sink, washing away her factory grime.

‘Oh! come in if you can get in,' she said. She clearly remembered the young curate at Tom Pemberton's funeral. ‘I'm afraid the kitchen's in a mess. Can you find a chair in the living room?'

Ormsby-Hill sat down in the little living room while Bertha, entirely unaffected, finished washing and drying herself in the kitchen. It was never very clear to me, nor I think to anyone else, why Ormsby-Hill had entered the church. He was in all ways the complete opposite of the young curate of convention. Big, bovine, sensuous-lipped, fond of beer and rugby football, he belonged to that class of clergymen, not I think so common now, who thought godliness should be muscular and the way to heaven a hearty free for all. He thought the gospel went down much better from clergymen who offered it while dressed in tweeds rather than dog collars, with pints of foaming ale in their hands rather than crucifixes and by means of sportsmen's services, sometimes actually held in pubs, where the congregation was roughly addressed as ‘chaps.'

That evening he had gone to The Pit in trepidation, with some idea that Bertha was a wild bad girl. Nobody liked going down to The Pit if they didn't have to and Ormsby-Hill had been deliberately sent there on a distasteful errand by a vicar too squeamish to stomach the sordid alleyway of privies, louts playing crown-and-anchor on the asphalt and the deaf-mute keeping guard for a stray policeman at the top of the yard.

His surprise at seeing Bertha was very great. His surprise at hearing her voice for the first time was even greater.

With Tom Pemberton it had become a shrill, empty, fun-at-any-price sort of voice; during her marriage to James William Sherwood it had been a decorous, sympathetic toned-down voice of charm and understanding.

When Ormsby-Hill heard it for the first time it was a smooth, throaty voice, easy and rather casual: as if she had already decided what voice he would like her to have.

‘I'll slip upstairs and put on a dress if you don't mind
waiting,' she said. ‘I won't be five minutes. I have to be at the dressmakers by seven anyway.'

When she came down, about five minutes later, she was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress with a low neck and a very short skirt and with it white cotton gloves and white high-heeled shoes. She was very fond of white and yellow clothes and once or twice later I used to see her in this dress. It was tight and smooth across her thighs and so short that it showed her pretty rounded knees to great advantage. She hardly ever wore a hat in those days—she really didn't need to because the fine close-trimmed blonde hair was shaped exactly like a hat itself—and the low-cut neck of the dress, in the fashion of the time, showed a deep curve of soft low breast, the skin clear, unblemished and wonderfully smooth.

When Ormsby-Hill saw her come downstairs into the dingy little living room he forgot almost at once what he had come to say to her. She was already drawing on her gloves and she said:

‘I'm awfully afraid I shall have to go. My dressmaker closes at half-past seven and I have to have this fitting. I don't know which way you're going back, but it's only in the High Street, this shop, if you'd like to walk that way.'

Walking down the yard, out of The Pit, he managed to repeat a few words of conventional condolence about Tom Pemberton, asking her at the same time how she herself was.

‘It was very sad,' she said, ‘but I don't remember much about it.'

‘I believe you also suffered another unfortunate bereavement,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Some time ago.'

By the time they were out in the street she was talking easily,
lightly and readily of something else, quite unperturbed and sometimes laughing. She had a laugh that had a kind of spring to it. It uncoiled suddenly and lightly, ending in a series of high shimmering notes, merrily, like repeated echoes.

And as he walked with her that evening through a High Street still crowded with late shoppers Ormsby-Hill could hardly bring himself to believe that he was with a young woman who had lost a husband and a lover in so short a time. Nor was there the slightest sign of the wild, bad girl he had expected. He felt indeed that he had never met anyone quite so pleasant to talk to, to look at or to listen to. Above all he couldn't believe—it was simply incomprehensible—that she had been born, bred and shaped in The Pit. It made his head rock with wonder that she had come, so golden and impeccable and pleasant, from that sordid rat-hole.

He fell in love with her at once, with abandonment, quite blindly, and she let him fall in love for precisely the same reason as she had let James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton fall in love: because it was natural, because it was pleasant and because she liked it.

The scandal warmed and mounted quickly. It was one thing for a young curate to be seen in occasional conversation with a good-looking girl or even to dance with her at one of those decorous functions by which the church, in the nineteen-twenties, had begun to try to lure youth back into the grace of the fold; but it was quite another for Ormsby-Hill to be seen waiting for her at the factory door, often at the dinner hour and almost always at night, and then walking home to The Pit with her through the rushing crowds of shoemakers hungrily herding homewards on foot or on bicycles.

‘He comes of such a good family. He went to Oxford. His mother lives in a big house in Wiltshire. And Bertha—from
The Pit. From
there!
What do you suppose the vicar thinks? And his mother? He doesn't wear the dog-collar very often, does he? I suppose he's ashamed.'

Ormsby-Hill, strangely, was not ashamed. He existed boldly, for an entire autumn, a winter and part of the following spring, in a state of suspended enchantment. And Bertha in turn rewarded him as she had rewarded James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton: with the sort of affection that moulds itself on the pattern of the receiver. If it is possible to imagine her as being sensuous in well-cut tweeds that was how she looked that autumn, winter and spring. And she looked like that and dressed like that for a sound simple reason: because Ormsby-Hill loved her and because he wanted her to. She also went to church, though her mother was a Methodist and went to chapel, and watched him take part in the services and listened to him preaching and reading the lessons. She took on also some of his accent, slightly Oxford, his phrases and his muscular mannerisms. She was sometimes to be seen in country pubs outside the town, drinking from large tankards of draught ale, laughing with ravishing heartiness and saying such things as:

‘Darling, how could you? You're too, too awful. You're really shame-making, honestly you are. Really shy-making. All right, pet, let's have another. Why not?'

Suddenly, in the June of that year, there was no longer a Rev. Ormsby-Hill in the town, though down in Cornwall, in a remote rocky village isolated on the coast, a new congregation was getting ready to welcome a new curate in September.

‘One dead. One killed. One disgraced,' people said. ‘Who's she going to ruin next?'

Nobody seemed to understand that, down in The Pit, it was not Bertha's place to give an answer.

I, in part, gave it instead.

She was now, like the century, in her twenties. It was the bright, gay, desperate time. There was much dancing.

She was always the central figure at dances, seldom wearing the same dress twice, always strikingly golden, elegant, friendly, in demand. Perhaps the friendliness was the nicest thing about her. She never refused the clumsiest lout a quick-step. She waltzed on equal terms with youth, age, undergraduates, shoe-hands, golfers, shooting men, clerks, masters of fox-hounds, always beautifully companionable, at ease, talking whatever language they spoke to her.