The Darling Buds of May (12 page)

She swung her body away. He saw the splendid curves turn full circle in such a way that he was dizzy in the heat. She laughed and reached the door as he stuttered:

‘You know, I actually couldn't say if – I mean, there's nothing definite –'

‘Just say when,' she said. ‘All you got to do is to tell me when.'

She had hardly disappeared before Poll and Lil came in. They too had stripped down to the bust and Poll had an unlighted
cigarette dangling from her lips. They had decided to work a new one on Mr Charlton.

‘Hullo, duckie,' they said and Poll took the cigarette from her lips, broke it in half, and gave one half to Lil. ‘Last one, dear. Not unless Charley can help us out. Haven't got a gasper, duckie, I suppose?'

Mr Charlton, who smoked moderately at the best of times, had recently given it up altogether because he was scared of cancer.

‘Afraid not. Don't smoke now –'

‘Came out without a bean this morning,' Poll explained. Too early for the damn Post Office. Else we'd have got the kids' allowances.'

‘How many baskets?' Mr Charlton said.

‘Three dozen.' Poll lit her cigarette and then gave Lil a light, both of them exhaling smoke in desperate relief. ‘Gawd, it's hot out in that field. You want a drag every two minutes to keep you going at all. Don't suppose you could lend us five bob so's Lil can nip down to the shop on her bike, can you? Pay you back first thing tomorrow.'

Mr Charlton wrote desperately in the book while the two bare-chested women watched him, though he did not know it, like two brown, hungry, calculating old dogs watching a bone. There probably wasn't much meat on Mr Charlton; they'd better get it off while they could.

‘Five bob, duckie. Gawd, it's hot out in that field. Two women fainted. Did you hear about that, duckie? Two women fainted.'

‘Work it orf as dead horse,' Lil started to say.

Touched, nervous, and swayed against his better judgement, Mr Charlton was just thinking of lending Poll and Lil the five bob to be worked off as dead horse when he heard, from the field, a sudden pandemonium of yelling and shrieking.

He followed Poll and Lil to the door of the tent. Thirty yards from the tent a ring of semi-naked vultures were shrieking and flapping in the sun. ‘Somebody's at it. Somebody's catching a
packet,' Poll said and Mr Charlton caught a glimpse, somewhere in the vultured circle, of two bare-shouldered girls fighting each other, like wild white cats.

Poll and Lil started running. Mr Charlton started running too. Then, after ten yards or so, he suddenly stopped as if his head had been caught by an invisible tripwire.

One of the white cats was Pauline Jackson; the other was Mariette. Like cats too they were howling in the unrestricted animal voices that belong to dark rooftops. With alarm Mr Charlton saw streams of blood on the flesh of hands, faces, bare shoulders, and half-bare breasts, and then suddenly realized that this was really the scarlet juice of smashed strawberries that the girls were viciously rubbing into each other's eyes and throat and hair. The fair horse-tail was like frayed red rope and the neat dark curls of Mariette that he cared for more and more every time he saw them were being torn from her face. Somewhere in the centre of it all the colossal bulk of Ma was shouting; but whether in encouragement, discouragement, or sheer delight he never knew.

Half a minute later he heard the highest shrieking of all. It came from behind him. he turned sharply and saw The Little Twopenn'orth running from the shelter of the wood, waving her tiny arms in excitement. That high-pitched voice of hers was more like a train-whistle than ever.

When she reached him she started bobbing wildly up and down, like a child too small to see over a fence, and Mr Charlton realized that she could not see any part of the cat-and-strawberry horror that by now had him completely spellbound.

‘Hold me up, mister!' she shrieked. ‘I s'll miss it!'

He took her by the arms and the tiny body rose into the air like a spring.

‘Blimey, it's good!' she shrieked. ‘It's good!' By now she was actually sitting on Mr Charlton's shoulder, her tiny short legs drumming continually on his chest and her fists in his hair. ‘That'll take some getting out in the wash. Git stuck into her, Mariette! It's good! It's good! It's good!'

Mr Charlton didn't think it was good. He was afraid Mariette would get seriously hurt and he felt a little sick at the thought of it. Suddenly he felt constrained to rush in and separate the two combatants, all scarlet now and weeping and half-naked, before they disfigured each other for ever; and he said:

‘I've got to stop them. I've got to make them stop it. Anyway, what on earth are they fighting
for
?'

‘Gawd Blimey, don't you
know
, mister?' The Little Two-penn'orth shrieked. ‘Don't tell me you don't
know
!'

Even when he was riding home that evening in the back of the truck Mr Charlton still could not really believe that he knew. The notion that two girls would fight for him still had him completely stunned.

Everybody had been sternly briefed by Ma, before the truck arrived, not to say a word to Pop. ‘Might give her a good leatherin' if he knew,' Ma explained, ‘and it's hot enough as it is.'

Everybody agreed; they were all for Mariette. Mr Charlton was all for Mariette too; he felt himself grow continually more proud of her as the truck, driven at Pop's customary jolting speed, rocked homewards through fragrant hedgerows of honeysuckle, the first wild pink roses and may. He kept smiling at her and watching her dark, pretty, red-stained hair. Somebody had lent her a green sweater to wear over her ripped bodice and you could hardly tell, now, that she had been in a fight at all.

In a curious way it was Mr Charlton who felt he had been in a fight. A total lack of all feeling of uncertainty, together with an odd sensation of actual aggression, began to make him feel rather proud of himself too.

‘Well, how was the first day, Charley?' Pop said. In the sitting room Pop had poured out a Dragon's Blood for himself and one for Mr Charlton, who felt he really needed it. He was as hungry as a hunter too. ‘How was the first day? Everything go orf all right? Smooth an' all that? No lumbago?'

‘No lumbago,' Mr Charlton said. ‘Everything smooth as it could be.'

‘Perfick,' Pop said.

He drank Dragon's Blood to the day's perfection and called through to the kitchen to Ma:

‘How long'll supper be, Ma? I'm turning over.'

‘About an hour yet. Roast beef's only just gone in.'

‘How'd you get on today, Ma? Good picking?'

‘Earned fourteen pound ten,' Ma said.

‘Hour yet,' Pop said to Mr Charlton, ‘plenty o' time for you to take Mariette for a stroll as far as the river. They'll be cutting the grass in that medder tomorrow.'

Mr Charlton agreed; he had his thoughts very much on the buttercup field.

Just before going outside, however, he remembered that he had a question to ask of Pop. It was the one about tax on the strawberry lark.

‘An awful lot of money gets paid out to these people,' he said. ‘Strawberries. Cherries. Hops and so on. Take for example all these Cockneys coming down for the hops. Strictly, in law, they ought to pay tax on that.'

‘Pay tax?' Pop said. He spoke faintly.

‘I mean if the law is to be interpreted in the strict letter –'

‘Strick letter my aunt Fanny,' Pop said. ‘Dammit if they was taxed they wouldn't come. Then you wouldn't have no strawberries, no cherries, no nothink. No beer!'

The logic of this argument dashed the last of Mr Charlton's reasoning and he went away to find Mariette, who was just coming downstairs, dressed now in the cool green shantung of which he had grown so very fond.

As Mr Charlton and Mariette disappeared across the yard in the evening sun Ma's only complaint, as she watched them from the kitchen window, was that she hadn't got a pair of fieldglasses, so that she could watch ‘how that young man's getting on with his technique. If he's getting on at all.'

Pop, after pouring two gills of gin into his second Dragon's Blood in order to pep it up a bit, retired to watch television. It
had been on for some considerable time, out of natural habit, though no one was watching it, and now there was a programme on the screen about life in central Africa, about wild animals, pygmies, and their strange, baffling customs.

Pop sat back happily in the greenish unreal semi-darkness. He had had a very good day doing a big lark in scrap that showed six hundred per cent with not a very great deal of trouble. He would tell Ma all about it later. Meanwhile he was perfectly content to sit and sip his beer and watch the pygmies, all of whom hopped about the jungle and the village compounds with unconcern, without a stitch on, all the women bare-breasted. There was hardly a programme he liked better than those about strange hot countries, wild animals, and queer tribes, especially those who had never seen civilization.

Out in the buttercup field Mariette and Mr Charlton were lying in the tall brilliant flowers and the even taller feathery grasses. Mariette, so dark and so pretty in her green shantung, was drawing Mr Charlton very gently to her and Mr Charlton was responding with a proud, searching look on his face so that Ma, if she could have been watching him at that moment through binoculars, would have seen that he had gone some way, in certain directions, towards improving his technique.

When Pop got home the following evening he found Miss Pilchester waiting in the yard.

‘Isn't it absolutely ghastly?' Miss Pilchester said.

The evening seemed warmer than ever, but Miss Pilchester was wearing a thick thorn-proof skirt of cabbage green and a cable-stitch woollen cardigan to match. Pop did not ask her what was absolutely ghastly and she did not offer to tell him either.

There was no need. Everything to Edith Pilchester was always absolutely ghastly. She lived alone and kept numbers of laying hens. The hens were absolutely ghastly, and so, even worse, was living alone. It was absolutely impossible to get any help in the house, in the garden, or with the hens. She couldn't afford to run a car because of taxes and the price of petrol and oil and servicing and repairs. She could just afford a solitary hack of her own, but she couldn't afford a groom. It was all absolutely ghastly. Before the war she had kept a little maid in the house, a man in the garden, and a groom-cum-chauffeur-cum-cook who was an absolute treasure in all sorts of ways, including bringing her early morning tea and hot whisky last thing at night in bed. Now all of them had gone and she could hardly afford the whisky. It was absolutely ghastly. Everybody went out to work in the fields at strawberry picking, cherry picking, plum picking, apple picking, bean picking, hop picking, or at the canning factories in the town, earning mountains more money than they knew what to do with and in any case more than she could pay. It was all absolutely ghastly.

One of the results of everything being so absolutely ghastly was that Miss Pilchester, who was a fortyish, slightly moustached brunette shaped like a bolster, threw herself into an amazing
number of projects with an energy quite ferocious, desperately trying to put the whole ghastly business to rights again. Prowling from committee to committee, charity to charity, bazaar to bazaar, she was like some restless, thirsty lioness seeking prey.

‘Hot again, ain't it?' Pop said.

‘Absolutely ghastly.'

When Pop suggested that Miss Pilchester should come into the house and have a drink and cool off a bit Miss Pilchester said no thanks, not for the moment, it was absolutely ghastly. She thought they ought to do the field; there wasn't much time left, thanks to that bounder Fortescue letting them down at the last moment and the committee, with the exception of the Brigadier, having been very nearly as bad. The whole thing was simply too ghastly.

Over in the meadow the grass had been cut and baled during the day. Big fragrant cotton-reels of hay lay scattered everywhere between the house and the river. Only a white and yellow fringe of moon-daisy and buttercup remained standing at the edges, pretty as a ruffle under the hedgerows of hawthorn, rising honey-suckle, and wild rose.

‘Damn good field, Larkin,' Miss Pilchester said. ‘No doubt about that. Just the job.'

She surveyed it with critical, organizing eye, seeing on it a vision of jumps, judges' tents, showrings, beer tents, and horses. It was awfully decent of Larkin to do it, she said, otherwise everything would have been an absolute shambles.

‘Always like to oblige,' Pop said and laughed in cheerful fashion.

Miss Pilchester laughed too. One of the things she always liked about Larkin was the man's inexhaustible cheerfulness. Friendly chap.

‘What about the carpark though?' she said. ‘That's always another nightmare.'

‘Use the other field,' Pop said. ‘Next door. The little 'un. Simple.'

Swallows were flying high above the meadows and the river, swooping in the blue hot sky, and Miss Pilchester might almost have been one of them in the quick, darting glances of gratitude she gave to Pop.

‘All yours,' Pop said. ‘Come and go just as you like. Any time.'

Another thing Miss Pilchester liked about Pop was the terrific easy generosity of the chap. Good sport. She had once been casually kissed by Pop at a Christmas village social, in some game or other, and the experience, for her at least, had been something more than that of two pairs of lips briefly meeting. It gave you the same feeling, she thought, as smelling bruised spring grass, or new-mown hay, for the first time.

‘All we want then is a fine day,' Miss Pilchester said. ‘If it's wet it'll be absolutely ghastly.'

‘Can't control the tap water I'm afraid,' Pop said and laughed again, at the same time remarking how thirsty he was. ‘Might put something in it, though, if you feel like it now. Drop o' gin? Drop o' whisky? Glass o' port?'