The Darling Buds of May (11 page)

‘Forgotten me?'

He was startled. He had utterly forgotten Mariette, who had been standing behind him all the time.

‘Afraid I had. So absorbed in the new job and all that –'

‘Well, don't,' she said, ‘or I'll be miserable.' She kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Feeling better now?'

‘Absolutely all right.'

‘You see, I told you,' she said. ‘All you want is rest and fresh air and good food and you'll be as right as rain.'

She stood at the door of the tent, so prettily framed against the clear sky beyond that Mr Charlton wished he were back with her in the buttercup field.

‘See you soon,' she said. ‘And mind what you're up to. Don't get mixed up with other women.'

Mr Charlton, who had no intention whatsoever of getting mixed up with other women, started to apply himself earnestly to the task of checking and weighing the baskets of fruit as they came in. It seemed that he got on very well for a time. All the women seemed very polite and some actually called him ‘Duckie'. They spelt their names out carefully when he wasn't quite sure of them. They said how hot it was and one of them, a big sloppy woman named Poll Sanders, with gold-filled teeth and small gold earrings, laughed in a voice like a street trader selling mackerel and said:

‘Sweat – I can feel it running down my back. Goes on like this we'll have to strip out again – like we did that 'ot year afore. Remember that, Lil?'

Lil remembered. ‘And that wasn't as 'ot as this though.' Lil was tall, yellow, and hollow-faced. She too had small gold earrings. She was much thinner than Poll but this made no difference. She sweated as much as Poll did. ‘Runs orf yer like water.'

Mr Charlton wrote in the book that Poll Sanders had brought in two dozen baskets and then, looking up, saw that Lil had gone. He realized suddenly that he had forgotten exactly how many baskets Lil had brought in. He dropped his rubber-tipped pencil on the table and ran after her, catching her up twenty yards across the field.

He said he was frightfully sorry but he had forgotten the number of baskets.

She gave him a look as hard as flint and her mouth opened and shut like a spring trap.

‘Two dozen,' she said.

‘That's what I thought,' he said and she gave him another look, harder than the first, and he left it at that.

‘You want to get your arithmetic working,' she said.

His arithmetic wasn't working very well with Poll Sanders either. When he got back to the tent and sat down to write Lil's figures he discovered he had pencilled down three for Poll Sanders instead of two. Poll had disappeared.

He was so sure the figure was two that he ran after her too.

‘Three,' she said. She too gave him that same flat, unflinching look he had seen on the face of Lil. ‘I was standing there when you write it down, wasn't I? Use your loaf, man.'

He decided he'd better use his loaf as much as possible, but he was soon over-busy and it was very stifling in the little tent. He had to keep a sharper, keener eye on the figures as the women came in, bringing scores of baskets. Once The Little Twopenn'orth came in, bent double by two dozen baskets in boxes almost as large as herself, so that they hung from her little hands like overladen panniers from the sides of a tiny grey donkey. The entire Larkin family also came in, all of them eating potato crisps and big orange lollipops on sticks, except the twins, who were eating peanuts, strawberries, and bread-and-jam.

Ma offered Mr Charlton an orange lollipop on a stick and seemed surprised, even pained, when he said no thanks, he didn't think so.

‘You'll be glad of it,' she said. ‘You ain't had nothing since breakfast.' Mr Charlton still had moments when he found it impossible to remember breakfast with anything but pain. ‘Anyway I'll leave it here on the table. You might be glad of it later.'

‘Toodle-oo,' the twins said, ‘if you don't want it we'll eat it next time we come,' and ran after Ma, begging for ice-creams.

Mr Charlton looked up, sometime later, to see a pretty, fairhaired, well-made girl standing in the tent. She was wearing tight black jeans and an even tighter thin black woollen sweater. The outlines of her breasts under the sweater were as pronounced as if carved. Her hair was tied up in a long shining horse-tail, the fluffy sun-whitened ends of it brushing her bare shoulders.

‘Pauline Jackson,' she said, ‘two dozen.'

Her eyes were big and blue. Her very smooth skin was deep brown from working in the fields. Her forearms were covered with tender, downy golden hairs. Her tongue played on her straight white teeth when she had finished speaking.

While Mr Charlton was writing in the book she said:

‘New here, aren't you? Never seen you here before.'

‘Sort of on holiday,' Mr Charlton explained.

‘Nice to be some people.'

She had a slow, drowsy way of talking. It somehow matched the way her tongue remained playing on her lips and the way her hair fell on her shoulders.

‘Mind if I ask you something?' she said.

‘No,' Mr Charlton said. ‘What would that be?'

‘Is your name Cedric? They all say your name's Cedric out there.'

The blush that ramped through Mr Charlton's face and neck made every pore of his body break with sweat.

‘Oh! no,' he said. ‘Goodness, no. Who told you that one?'

‘That's what they all say. I said there was no such name.'

She was laughing at him, he thought, in her drowsy, large-eyed way. He was sure of that. He fumbled about nervously with book, baskets, and papers and said:

‘Good Lord, no. Charley. That's me.'

She reached out a brown long-fingered hand and took a strawberry from a basket. She bit into it and then stood staring at the white-crimson juicy inner flesh.

‘Don't you like strawberries?' she said.

‘Ask the Larkins,' he said. ‘Ask Mariette. They all call me Charley.'

‘Oh! her. She knows you, does she?'

She put the rest of the strawberry in her mouth and pulled out the clean, white plug.

‘Last feller who was here did nothing but eat strawberries. Every time you came in here that feller was bolting strawberries.'

Mr Charlton, confused again, murmured something about having no time. Having something else to do.

‘Such as what?'

Mr Charlton didn't know.

She moved nearer the table to pick up another strawberry and then changed her mind and picked up Ma's orange lollipop instead.

‘Don't you like these either?'

‘Not frightfully –'

‘Don't like anything, do you?' She laughed, her voice drowsier than ever in her throat, the tongue drifting idly across her mouth. ‘Not much!'

A moment later she started twisting the lollipop round and round in her brown fingers.

‘Suppose you'd think I was greedy if I asked you whether I could have it?'

‘Oh! no please,' Mr Charlton said. ‘Take it if you want. By all means.'

‘Thanks.' She laughed again, once more with that drowsy softness that made Mr Charlton feel dreadfully congested, sweating, and messy, sure that she was mocking him. ‘That's the way to be nice to anybody. First time.'

Unaware of it Mr Charlton said an extremely foolish thing:

‘Aren't people always nice to you first time?'

‘Depends.'

Mr Charlton, unaware of it again, said another foolish thing:

‘Depends on what?'

She turned sideways, so that for the second time in his life Mr Charlton found himself confronted by an astral body of alarming shape, this time as firm and dark as ebony.

‘On whether I let them.'

She had already started to peel the tissue paper from the orange lollipop when Mariette came in, carrying two baskets.

‘Oh! company,' the girl said.

Peeling the last of the tissue paper from the orange lollipop, she stared with flat cool eyes at Mariette. Mr Charlton thought Mariette's eyes looked, in reply, like two infuriated black bees.

‘Well, I'll push off,' the girl said. ‘See you later, Charley.' She tossed her hair from one side of her shoulders to another, at the same time giving Mr Charlton a glad, cool, backward look. ‘If not before.'

She was hardly out of the tent before Mariette banged the two baskets on the table and shouted ‘Tart!'

Mr Charlton was very much shaken.

‘Steady,' he said. ‘She'll hear –'

‘She's meant to, the so-and-so, isn't she?'

‘I really didn't want the thing,' Mr Charlton said. ‘I told her to take it –'

‘She'd take anything. She'd take the skin off your back – and a bit more if you let her!'

He had never seen Mariette angry before. Her voice sounded raw.

‘She's nothing but a –' Mariette choked at some impossible word and then decided Mr Charlton wouldn't understand it. ‘No, I won't say it. It's too good. I'll bottle it in. She's no virgin though!' she shouted, ‘everybody knows that!'

Mr Charlton, who was not accustomed to hear the word virgin bandied about very much, especially in public, was relieved to see two more women approaching the tent, but was disappointed a moment later to see that they were Poll and Lil. He had made up his mind to remonstrate as tactfully as possible with Poll about rubbing out and altering the figures in the book from two to three and thus twisting him. He was convinced that that was what had happened.

But when he saw the two earringed women, one tall and scrawny as a scarecrow, the other brawny as a bare-armed fishwife, wife, both as brown as gipsies, he suddenly lost heart and said to Mariette:

‘Don't go for a minute. Stay until these two have gone. I want to talk to you –'

‘I've got to cool off!' Mariette said. ‘I'm going into the wood to cool off!'

‘Wait just a minute –'

‘I've got to cool off! That's where I'll be if you want me.'

A moment later he was alone with Poll and Lil, who had been having a conference as to whether they could twist him a second time so soon or whether they should leave it for a while and do a double twist next time. Between them they knew a few good ones and they generally worked better, for some funny reason, in the afternoon.

‘Hullo, duckie,' they said. ‘Here we are again.'

*

By the middle of the afternoon it was so hot that Mr Charlton got Montgomery and the twins to bring him a bucket of water drawn from a standpipe by the gate of the field. He drank a big draught or two of water and then plunged his head several times into the bucket and then dried his face on his handkerchief and combed his wet, cooled hair. After this he cleaned up his spectacles, polishing them on the driest piece of his shirt he could
find, and went to stand at the door of the tent, slightly refreshed, to get a breath of air.

The sun hit the crown of his head like a brass cymbal. He had never known it so hot in May. It seemed to affect his eyesight for a moment and when he looked across the strawberry field he was astonished to see a startling change there.

Almost all the women had done what Poll and Lil had said they would do. They had stripped off their blouses and shirts in the heat and were working in nothing but bodices and brassieres. The effect was that the lines of coloured flags had now become like lines of white washing hung out in the blazing sun to dry.

Mr Charlton went back into the tent and tried to satisfy his curiosity about what Pop called the strawberry lark by adding up how many pounds of strawberries had been in and out of the tent that day. He calculated, astonishingly, that he had checked in more than a ton. That meant, he reasoned, a pretty fair lump for the pickers.

His trained mind wondered what the tax position about
that
was. He would have to ask Pop. He was sure Pop would know.

He was still thinking of this when he looked up and saw Pauline Jackson standing in the door. She was not wearing a black sweater now. Like the rest of the women she had stripped down to her brassiere. She had very fine suntanned arms and shoulders but the lower part of her deep chest was as white as the inside of a young apple by comparison.

It was this startling whiteness that made his heart start bouncing. She smiled. She came to the table and said in her lazy way:

‘Not much cooler, is it?'

She put twenty-four pounds of strawberries on the table. He started to fumble with pencil and paper, his eyes downcast. She leaned forward as if to see what he was writing down and said:

‘How many does that make for me today? Eight dozen?'

He started to say, ‘I've got an idea it's more than that, Miss Jackson,' determined to keep it as formal as possible, and then looked up to see, not ten or twelve inches from his face, most
of her bared, white, perfectly sculptured bust, blazingly revealed, heaving deeply.

Like Ma, Miss Jackson did not seem unduly perturbed.

‘Two more dozen,' she said, ‘and I think I'll pack it up for the day.'

‘I see. Are you paid every day, Miss Jackson, or do you leave it till the weekend?'

‘What makes you keep calling me Miss Jackson?'

He started to write in the book again when she said:

‘What time are you knocking off? Going back to Fordington? If you are I could give you a lift on my Vespa.'

Where on earth did these people get the money from? Mr Charlton started thinking. He supposed –

‘What about it?' she said.

Too nervous to think clearly, Mr Charlton said:

‘I don't know what time I'll finish. I did want to go to Fordington to fetch some clothes from my room, but –'

‘Might go on and have a swim at the pool', she said, ‘afterwards. How about that?'

He said: ‘Well –'

‘I could wait.' The sculptured breasts rose and fell heavily and came an inch or two nearer, their division so deep and the pure whiteness so sharp in the shade of the tent, against the darkbrown upper flesh of her shoulders, that Mr Charlton was utterly mesmerized. ‘No hurry for half an hour one way or the other. Just tell me when.'