The Daffodil Sky (21 page)

‘I'm afraid she's rather worse if anything,' he said. ‘You see, it's sort of progressive—an accumulative condition if you understand what I mean. It's rather hard to explain.'

He bent his face to the rose in his buttonhole and seemed to draw from it, sadly, a kind of contradictory inspiration about his wife and her painfully irremediable state of health.

It was rather on the lines of what diabetics had, he said. The circle was vicious. You got terribly hungry and terribly thirsty and yet the more you took in the worse it was. With the heart it was rather the same. A certain sort of heart bred excitement and yet was too
weak to take it. It was rather like overloading an electric circuit. A fuse had to blow somewhere and sometime.

Perhaps my failure to grasp this was visible in my stare at the railway cutting.

‘You see, with electricity it's all right. The fuse blows and you put in another fuse. But with people the heart's the fuse. It blows and——'

Once again he made the light pouf! of extermination with his hands.

I said how sorry I was about all this and how wretched I thought it must be for him.

‘I get used to it,' he said. ‘Well, not exactly used to it if you understand what I mean. But I'm prepared. I live in a state of suspended preparation.'

That seemed to me so painful a way of life that I did not answer.

‘I'm ready for it,' he said quietly and without any sort of detectable desire for sympathy at all. ‘I know it will just happen at any moment. Any second it will all be over.'

There was something very brave about that, I thought.

‘Well anyway the war's over,' he said cheerfully. ‘That at least we've got to be thankful for. And we've got this house, which is awfully nice, and we've got the garden, which is nicer still.'

‘You must be quite high there,' I said, ‘on the hill.'

‘Nearly five hundred feet,' he said. ‘It's a stiffish climb.'

I said I hoped the hills were not too much for his wife and he said:

‘Oh! she hardly ever goes out. She's got to that stage.'

But the garden, it seemed, was wonderful. He was settling down to the garden. That was his joy. Carnations and phloxes did awfully well there and, surprisingly enough, roses. It was a
Betty Uprichard
, he said, in his buttonhole. That was one of his favourites and so were
Etoile d'Hollande
and
Madame Butterfly
. They were the old ones and on the whole he did not think you could beat the old ones.

‘I want gradually to have beds of them,' he said. ‘Large beds of one sort in each. But you need time for that of course. People say you need the right soil for roses—but wasn't there someone who said that to grow roses you first had to have roses in your heart?'

‘There was someone who said that,' I said.

‘It's probably right,' he said, ‘but I think you probably need permanence more. Years and years in one place. Finding out what will do for you. Settling down. Getting the roots anchored—you know?'

The sadness in his face was so peculiar as he said all this that I did not answer.

‘Have you been in your house long?' he said.

‘Twenty years,' I said.

‘Really,' he said. His eyes groped with diffused wonder at this. ‘That's marvellous. That's a lifetime.'

For the rest of the way we talked—or rather he did, while I did my virtuous act of listening—about the necessity of permanence in living, the wonder of getting anchored down.

‘Feeling your own roots are going deeper all the time. Feeding on the soil underneath you,' he said. ‘You
know? Nothing like it. No desk stuff can ever give you that.'

And then, as the train neared the terminus, he said:

‘Look. You must come over. I'd love you to see the place. I'd love to ask you things. I know you're a great gardener. There must be lots you could tell me. Would you come? I'd be awfully grateful if you'd care to come.'

I said I should be delighted to come.

‘Oh! good, oh! good,' he said.

He produced from his vest-pocket the inevitable diary with a silver pencil and began flicking over its leaves.

‘Let's fix it now. There's nothing like fixing it now. What about Saturday?'

‘All right,' I said.

‘Good. Saturday's a good day,' he said.

He began to pencil in the date and seemed surprised, as he suddenly looked up, that I was not doing the same.

‘Won't you forget? Don't you put it down?'

‘I shall remember,' I said.

‘I have to put everything down,' he said. ‘I'm inclined to forget. I get distracted.'

So it would be two-thirty or about that on Saturday, he said, and his enthusiasm at the prospect of this was so great that it was, in fact, almost a distraction. He seemed nervously uplifted. He shook hands with energetic delight, repeating several times a number of precise and yet confusing instructions as to how to get to the house, and I was only just in time to save him from a spasm of forgetfulness.

‘Don't forget your umbrella,' I said.

‘Oh! Good God, no,' he said. ‘You can't miss it,' he said, meaning the house. ‘It's got a sort of tower on the
end of it. Quite a unique affair. You can't miss it. I shall look out for you.'

The house was built of white weatherboard and tile and it hung on the steep chalk-face with the precise and arresting effect of having been carved from the stone. The tower of which Saxby had spoken, and which as he said was impossible to miss, was nothing more than a railed balcony that somebody had built on the roof of a stable, a kind of look-out for a better view. That day it was crutched with scaffolding. In the yard below it there were many piles of builders' rubble and sand and broken timber and beams torn from their sockets. A bloom of cement dust lay thick on old shrubberies of lilac and flowering currant, and in the middle of a small orchard a large pit had been dug. From it too, in the dry heat of summer, a white dust had blown thickly, settling on tall yellow grass and apple leaves and vast umbrellas of seeding rhubarb.

There was nowhere any sign of the garden of which Saxby had spoken so passionately.

It took me some time, as he walked with me to and fro between the derelict boundaries of the place, to grasp that this was so. He was full of explanations: not apologetic, not in the form of excuses but, surprisingly, very pictorial. He drew for me a series of pictures of the ultimate shapes he planned. As we walked arm-pit deep through grass and thistle—the thistle smoking with dreamy seed in the hot air as we brushed it—he kept saying:

‘Ignore this. This is nothing. This will be lawn. We'll get round to this later.' Somebody had cut a few
desultory swathes through the jungle with a scythe, and a rabbit got up from a seat in a swathe that crackled like tinder as it leapt away. ‘Ignore this—imagine this isn't here.'

Beyond this jungle we emerged to a fence-line on the crest of the hill. The field beyond it lay below us on a shelf and that too, it seemed, belonged to him.

Spreading his hands about, he drew the first of his pictures. There were several others, later, but that was the important one. The farther you got down the slope, it seemed, the better the soil was, and this was his rose garden. These were his beds of
Uprichard
and
Madame Butterfly
and
Sylvia
and all the rest. He planned them in the form of a fan. He had worked it out on an arc of intensifying shades of pink and red. Outer tones of flesh would dissolve with graded delicacy through segments of tenderer, deeper pink until they mounted to an inverted pinnacle of rich sparkling duskiness.

‘Rather fine,' he said, ‘don't you think?' and I knew that as far as he was concerned it actually lay there before him, superbly flourishing and unblemished as in a catalogue.

‘Very good,' I said.

‘You really think so?' he said. ‘I value your opinion terrifically.'

‘I think it's wonderful,' I said.

We had waded some distance back through the jungle of smouldering thistle before I remembered I had not seen his wife; and I asked him how she was.

‘I fancy she's lying down,' he said. ‘She feels the hot weather quite a bit. I think we shall make quite a place of it, don't you?'

He stopped at the point where the grass had been partially mown and waved his hand at the wilderness. Below us lay incomparable country. At that high point of summer it slept for miles in richness. In the hotter, moister valley masses of meadowsweet spired frothily above its hedgerows, and in its cleared hayfields new-dipped sheep grazed in flocks that were a shade mellower and deeper in colour than the flower.

‘It's a marvellous view,' I said.

‘Now you get what I mean,' he said. ‘The permanence of the thing. You get a view like that and you can sit and look at it for ever.'

Through a further jungle of grass and thistle, complicated at one place by an entire armoury of horseradish, we went into the house.

‘Sit down,' Saxby said. ‘Make yourself comfortable. My wife will be here in a moment. There will be some tea.'

For the first time since knowing Saxby I became uneasy. It had been my impression for some time that Saxby was a man who enjoyed—rather than suffered from—a state of mild hallucination. Now I felt suddenly that I suffered from it too.

What I first noticed about the room was its windows, shuttered with narrow Venetian blinds of a beautiful shade of grey-rose. They only partially concealed long silk curtains pencilled with bands of fuchsia purple. Most of the furniture was white, but there were a few exquisite Empire chairs in black and the walls were of the same grey-rose tint as the blinds. An amazing arrangement of glass walking-sticks, like rainbows of sweetmeats, was all the decoration the walls had been
allowed to receive with the exception of a flower-spangled mirror, mostly in tones of rose and magenta, at the far end. This mirror spread across the entire wall like a lake, reflecting in great width the cool sparkle of the room in which, on the edge of an Empire chair, I sat nervously wondering, as I had done of Saxby's mustard sandwiches, whether what I saw had the remotest connection with reality.

Into this beautiful show-piece came, presently, Mrs Saxby.

Mrs Saxby was an immaculate and disarming woman of fifty with small, magenta-clawed hands. She was dressed coolly in grey silk, almost as if to match the room, and her hair was tinted to the curious shade of blue-grey that you see in fresh carnation leaves. I did not think, that first day, that I had ever met anyone quite so instantly charming, so incessantly alive with compact vibration—or so healthy.

We had hardly shaken hands before she turned to Saxby and said:

‘They're coming at six o'clock.'

Saxby had nothing to say in answer to this. But I thought I saw, behind the flattering glasses, a resentful hardening bulge of the kidney-brown eyes.

Not all beautiful women are charming, and not all charming women are intelligent, but Mrs Saxby was both intelligent and charming without being beautiful. We talked a great deal during tea—that is, Mrs Saxby and I talked a great deal, with Saxby putting in the afterthought of a phrase or two here and there.

She mostly ignored this. And of the house, which I admired again and again, she said simply:

‘Oh! it's a sort of thing with me. I like playing about with things. Transforming them.'

When she said this she smiled. And it was the smile, I decided, that gave me the clue to the fact that she was not beautiful. Her grey eyes were like two hard pearl buttons enclosed by the narrow dark buttonholes of her short lashes. As with the house, there was not a lash out of place. The smile too came from teeth that were as regular, polished and impersonal as piano keys.

It seemed that tea was hardly over before we saw a car draw up among the rubble outside. In the extraordinary transition to the house I had forgotten the rubble. And now as I became aware of it again it was like being reminded of something unpleasantly chaotic. For some uneasy reason I got to thinking that the inside of the house was Mrs Saxby's palace and that the outside, among the wilderness of plaster and thistle and horse-radish, was Saxby's grave.

The visitors turned out to be a man and wife, both in the sixties, named Bulfield. The woman was composed mainly of a series of droops. Her brown dress drooped from her large shoulders and chest and arms like a badly looped curtain. A treble row of pearls drooped from her neck, from which, in turn, drooped a treble bagginess of skins. From under her eyes drooped pouches that seemed once to have been full of something but that were now merely punctured and drained and flabby. And from her mouth, most of the time, drooped a cigarette from which she could not bother to remove the drooping ashes.

Of Bulfield I do not remember much except that he
too was large and was dressed in a tropical suit of white alpaca, with colossal buckskin brogues.

‘Would you like a drink first?' Mrs Saxby said, ‘or would you like to see the house first?'

‘I'd like a drink,' Mrs Bulfield said, obviously speaking for both of them. ‘If all the house is as terrific as this it will do me. It's terrific, isn't it, Harry?'

Harry said it was terrific.

Perhaps because of something disturbing about Saxby's silence—he sat defiantly, mutinously sipping glasses of gin for almost an hour with scarcely a word—it came to me only very slowly that the Bulfields had come to buy the place.

It came to me still more slowly—again because I was troubled and confused about Saxby's part in it all—that the reason the Bulfields wanted to buy the house was because they were rising in the world. They sought—in fact desired—to be injected with culture: perhaps not exactly culture, but the certain flavour that they thought culture might bring. After the first World War Bulfield would have been called a profiteer. During the second World War it was, of course, not possible to profiteer; Bulfield had merely made money. Mrs Bulfield must have seen, in magazines and books, perhaps scores of times, pictures of the kind of house Mrs Saxby had created. She must have seen it as a house of taste and culture and she had come to regard these virtues as she might have regarded penicillin. Injected with them, she would be immunised from the danger of contact with lower circumstances. Immunised and elevated, she could at last live in the sort of house she wanted without being able to create for herself but which Mrs Saxby—the
sick, slowly expiring Mrs Saxby—had created for her.