The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (12 page)

Perhaps the trouble arose out of the fact that he played the piano very well, and that Lily Anderson needed an accompanist. That summer it was very hot and Lily Anderson began to be seen going into the manse two and three and sometimes four evenings a week, wearing cool light summer dresses. As these visits became known they began to assume in the minds of the Pendletons and those entrenched in the front rows of the choir a strong flavour of ripe scandal.

By the end of that summer Lily Anderson was no longer singing solos in the choir. The boy who lay awake at night, listening to the sound of feet and voices beating like small summer night-waves on the street below, hardly knew what it was all about. He did not know quite why it was scandalous for a man to play the piano in a house so that a girl could practise her singing there.

But if this was a scandalous thing, there was something much more scandalous. From things he heard his mother and father and other people say he knew that Lily Anderson was still singing. But she was no longer singing for love or in the service of God; she was no longer singing pieces like ‘Ave Maria' or ‘With Verdure Clad'. She was singing songs like ‘Let's All Go Down the Strand' and ‘Love's Old Sweet Song' in all the pubs and clubs of the town, and she was singing
them on Sundays. In those days that was a wickedly scandalous thing.

In a year a young girl can change a great deal. When he saw Lily Anderson again it was early summer. He was walking in the town park with his father and mother on a Sunday afternoon. Crowds of people were standing or walking about the grass, listening to the Rifle Band. The chestnut-trees, their leaves heavy in the sultry May sunshine, were in full blossom; the scent of many pink hawthorn trees was heavy and almost sickly on the air; the sun was bright on the silver instruments and the blue uniforms. Suddenly he saw the faces of people turning to look back at something in the crowd, and after a moment he saw a woman walking alone across the grass. She was wearing a white silk dress with a big black hat, large jet earrings, and long black open work gloves reaching to the elbows of her plump white arms. Her ripe heavy lips were pouted slightly, with proud sulkiness: it was Lily Anderson.

As she came across the grass under the chestnut-trees that were full of erect white and pink blossom it struck him that she was very beautiful. She had changed too. Now she had a deliberate and rather flashy haughtiness. Her figure had filled out, and the long white dress was cut so that when the breeze blew against the skirt the deep ripe lines of her legs were
for an instant firmly and clearly carved. Much later it struck him too that she looked rather lonely: lonely, wounded, on the defensive. At the time it seemed to him that she could not have been more spectacular if she had been smoking a large cigar.

Later, from the way his mother and father talked, he got the impression that even the smoking of a cigar was not beyond her. But it was more than a year later before he saw her again. He was lying awake one evening when about eleven o'clock he heard a scrambled shouting of voices from the street below. He heard the boisterous arguments of men split by the screams and giggles of women, and then finally a burst of singing. It was the singing, slightly tipsy and wild, which made him get up and go to the window and look out. The street was still not dark. The summer night was very quiet and the singing was so clear and close that he recognized at once whose clear soprano voice it was. It seemed to him like a voice flung in defiance at the rows of silent, lightless, respectable houses.

That was almost the last he heard of Lily Anderson before she got married. That in itself was a kind of inverted scandal. Whether all the stories of her and the kind of men she kept company with were true or not he did not know, but in the end she got married, very suddenly, to a baker.

The baker's name was Brown: a small, bony-wristed man with the flesh of a plucked hen. Long hours in the bakery had turned him prematurely bald; his ragged floury moustache fell into his mouth. They used to say that he had once been a pastry-cook in a first-class establishment, and now and then there would suddenly appear in the bakehouse window a splendid, ornate iced cake inscribed with beautiful lettering for a wedding or a birthday, with a roughly printed card beside it, ‘Made to Order'.

As the time went on there were children. The youth would see them crawling up and down the dirty stone steps of the bakery. The windows of the shop were never cleaned and the contents never really changed. Dusted with a heavy grey bloom of flour, nothing new appeared behind them except the occasional wedding cake and sometimes a greasy cooked ham with its frill of crinkled paper. Somewhere behind the dirty flour-dust, the cobwebs, the ham and the cake, Lily Anderson had shut herself away.

Several years later, grown up, he went into the shop for the first time. Visitors had dropped in late and unexpectedly one summer evening at his mother's house, and she wanted to cut sandwiches. Though it was late he went out in order to try to buy a sandwich loaf and some ham. It was too late for most of the shops and it was some time before he thought of the baker's.

As he walked down the streets of houses he could smell the heavy odour of may-blossom from the surrounding gardens; he could see the white spires of chestnut bloom faintly luminous in the twilight air.

In the window of the bakehouse the shelves of board covered with dirty oil-cloth were empty. He pushed open the half-glass door and the spring-bell rang in the silence. The bakehouse was almost in darkness except for a blue jet of gas-flame by the doors of the closed ovens. The fires were low but in the air there remained a warm close smell of bread.

Some moments after the bell had stopped ringing he heard footsteps. Coming along the passage from the house they slopped on bare brickwork. He waited by the dusty counter. The brass latch of the door leading to the house was lifted at last, and in came Lily Anderson.

She put her tired dirty hands on the counter and looked at him. ‘Well, what for you?'

‘I wondered if you could let me have a sandwich loaf and some ham. I know it's late, but – '

‘I got a loaf, but I dunno about ham.'

She walked across the bakehouse to get the loaf from a batch that stood on a closed kneading-trough. She walked slowly, slopping, as if her feet hurt her, and as she came back, saying, ‘How much ham did you want then?' he recalled the day, fifteen years
before, when he had seen her walking proudly and defensively under the chestnut trees in the park. He recalled how much he thought she had changed in one year and how beautiful she was. Now he looked at her face. It had the sullenness of dough beaten into incomplete submission. The dark hair had partially fallen down, the dark eyes had no light or beauty or uprightness in them. The heavy lips were sour.

‘Well, there's your loaf.' She put the loaf down and then reached under the counter. ‘This is about all the ham I got,' she said. ‘It ain't much.'

She set down on the counter a meat dish containing the end of a ham-bone still decorated with its pink frill of paper.

‘How much did you say y' wanted? It ain't much I know. But it's all I got.'

‘About a pound,' he said.

She wiped her hands on her dirty pinafore and then picked up the ham-bone by the frill, turning it over.

‘I tell you what,' she said. ‘Whyn't you take the bone as it is? You'll get a lot o' meat off it yet.'

‘How much?' he said.

‘A shilling won't hurt, will it?' she said.

‘No,' he said. ‘I'll take it.'

As she wrapped up the ham-bone, she lifted her face. ‘Keep the frill on?' she said, ‘or don't you want it?'

‘I don't know. Keep it on,' he said.

The sullen shoulders drooped again over the wrapping of the parcel. The dark eyes were lifted no higher than the palm of his hand as he held out the money.

‘That's just right,' she said.

He thanked her, and said good night.

‘Thanks,' she said.

She stood with her heavy, shapeless body pressed against the counter, and then with a sort of sullen indifference, but without another movement or a word, watched him go.

Outside, slightly pausing, he turned and glanced back at the fly-blown windows, the cobwebs and their light grey powdering of flour. But the woman had gone now and beyond the windows there was visible in the falling darkness only the great closed doors of the oven and the small light of the almost extinguished flame.

Accidentally, almost against her will, Lilian Jordan fell in love one spring time with a man named Harry Travers. Sometimes she could not imagine how it had come about, unless perhaps it was because Travers had a wooden leg.

At that time she was working from nine to five in the offices of a wholesale garment factory: a girl with a sensitive oval face, creamy brown skin and extremely kind, trustful brown eyes, a girl of brave and gentle temperament, who kept much to herself. In another room, on a lower floor, there worked a young man named Arthur Austin, who suffered from pimples on his face, and who from time to time, when she was out of the room, brought her notes which he laid on her desk with casual and painful secrecy. Like all the girls she laughed at Austin, and for some time it did not occur to her that he too might be in love.

One day, before she met Travers, she was persuaded by Austin to go out to lunch with him. At the small cafe round the corner they had a course of meat and vegetables, followed by tapioca pudding. At first she
hardly noticed that Austin did not eat much; then she saw his pale grey eyes begin to turn a watery yellow and his lips become gradually dry and nervous, and suddenly she sensed that he was about to declare his love for her over the tapioca. For some moments she went on eating as if she had not noticed anything, unable in reality to look at the nervous pimpled face, the eyes sick with an emotion they could not otherwise express and the red bony hands hovering with painful inertia above the already cold white pudding.

Suddenly, with great abruptness, Austin began to say what he felt about her. She heard a rush of earnest, entangled words that left her cold. ‘Can't you come out with me sometimes, please, just for a walk, come to the pictures, I know I'm not much, I know I'm not much, but you can come sometimes, can't you please, can't you?'

‘No,' she said at last. ‘I can't. I'm sorry. I can't.'

‘Why not? Please, why can't you?' He kept smoothing his dark straight hair fiercely with the palm of his hand; in the hope, evidently, of looking stronger and more determined. ‘Please, why not?'

She did not answer.

‘Please,' he said again, wiping his hair, ‘why not? Tell me straight out what it is. Don't you like me? Don't you want to?'

‘No,' she said. ‘At least, not enough.'

‘Why not?' he said. ‘Why don't you like me? Tell me straight out. Go on, tell me straight out. Is it because I'm not good enough?'

‘I don't know.' She sought desperately to find an excuse that would finish it all. ‘I don't know.' She suddenly looked straight at his weak, unhealthy face. ‘You don't take enough exercise.'

‘Is that the honest truth?' he said. ‘Is that what you feel? Is that all?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's what I feel. You don't take enough exercise. You go to the pictures too much.' She tried to speak with conviction, not really believing all she said. ‘You eat too many sweet things. You smoke too much. You don't take care of yourself physically. That's what's the matter.'

Then suddenly, before she could finish speaking, Austin got up and went out of the café.

After this incident she sometimes went to have lunch at the café alone. Austin gave up speaking to her, and then a week later she heard that he had given in his notice and had left the factory. No one knew why it was. It was now early springtime, and as she looked out of the windows of the café she saw tender green mists, deep olive and sometimes almost yellow, skeined across the sunlit branches of the street trees. Lilacs were now budded with dark red knots in the surrounding gardens and daffodils were shaking
brightly against the sun in the window-boxes of the café. Looking at them and thinking of Austin, she felt that perhaps it had been foolish to speak to him as she had done. Foolish and perhaps pointless too. Because it could make no difference, as she well knew, whether a man were physically fine or not. Looking at the daffodils and thinking of Austin, she knew that she wanted something more.

It was soon after this that she began to notice Travers; or rather she began to notice how Travers noticed her. She saw that he was in the café every Tuesday and Friday. He was a man of thirty-five or six, with bushy brown hair and rather heavy, kindly features. He seemed to her to be a man of certain fixed ideas because of his habit of coming to the café on certain days, of always sitting at the same corner table, and of remaining for a long time with his face tenderly supported by one hand, not moving, heavy blue eyes transfixed, watching her.

One Friday she noticed that he was not there. It was as if she had looked out of the window to find, suddenly, that the branches of the trees were bare again. As she went out of the café she began to feel oppressed by an overpowering sense of emptiness.

It vanished suddenly as she came out into the sunlight. She saw then that Travers was sitting in an old blue saloon car drawn up with a trailer at the edge
of the kerb; and she knew for some reason that he was waiting for her. She stopped involuntarily on the pavement, and then he spoke. He said simply, ‘We're always looking at each other. I thought we might meet for a change,' and she said, ‘Yes', and felt in a moment very friendly and liberated and glad.

For another five minutes she stood on the pavement, in the warm spring sunlight, talking to him. She saw his hands resting on the wheel of the car. She noticed that they were fleshy, muscular, expansive hands, the hands of a working man. Watching them, she drew the conclusion that they were part of someone of calm, conclusive temperament. It did not occur to her until afterwards that they seemed too large for the rest of his body.