The Darling Buds of May (15 page)

Most of this, to Pop, seemed rather light, unsatisfying fare.

‘We want to give 'em enough,' he said. ‘We don't want 'em to think we're starving 'em. What about a leg o' pork?'

To his disappointment Mr Charlton said he rather ruled out the leg of pork.

‘All right,' Pop said. ‘What about drinks?'

Pop was all for making plenty of Rolls-Royces and that sort of thing, good, strong ones, together with two new ones he had recently tried out from
The Guide to Better Drinking
: Red Bull and Ma Chérie. Red Bull was a blinder. That would curl their hair.

Mr Charlton said he thought it made it so much simpler if you stuck to two, or at the outside, three good drinks: say sherry, port, and gin-and-french. He suggested the port in case the evening was cool.

He got no marks this time. Pop thought it was all about as dull as flippin' ditchwater. With sudden enthusiasm he said:

‘What about champagne?'

Both Ma and Mariette said they adored champagne. That was a brilliant idea. Something extra nice always happened, Mariette said, when you had champagne, and it seemed to Pop that he saw her exchange with Mr Charlton an intimate glance of secret tenderness that left him baffled and unsatisfied. Couldn't be nothing in the wind?

‘Well, champagne it is then!' Pop said. ‘Might as well do the thing properly.'

Here Mr Charlton remarked with tact that since not everybody liked champagne it might be just as well to have some other drink in reserve.

‘I'll make a few hair-curlers,' Pop said. ‘Red Bull – remember that one? – and Ma Chérie.'

Mr Charlton remembered Red Bull. It had rammed him one evening after a hardish day in the strawberry field. It was not inaptly named.

It was half-past five before Mr Charlton and Mariette got up at last from breakfast and went across the yard to feed the donkeys. The four little donkeys had been tied up in the stable that Pop had built with his eye on the day when all the family, with the possible exception of Ma, would have a pony or a horse to ride. That would be the day. Two donkeys had been hired by Pop; two had been brought over by their owners the previous night. Three more, it was hoped, were still to come.

As soon as Mariette and himself were in the half-dark stable, among the donkeys, Mr Charlton took her quickly in his arms and kissed her. His arms and hands, as they tenderly touched her face, breasts, and shoulders, were as brown as her own.

Mariette laughed, trembling, and said she'd hardly been able to wait for that one, the first, the loveliest of the day. Mr Charlton, with something like ecstasy, said he hadn't been able to wait either. He could hardly wait for anything. Above all he could hardly wait for the afternoon. ‘Nor me,' Mariette said and held her body out to him again.

Quietly, as the second kiss went on, the donkeys stirred about the stable, swishing tails, restless. Hearing them, Mariette partly broke away from Mr Charlton and said with half-laughing mouth:

‘I suppose there's a first time for everything. I've never been kissed among donkeys before.'

Quick as a swallow himself, Mr Charlton answered. It was the answer of a man sharpened by three weeks in the strawberry field, living with the Larkins, and using his loaf.

‘Wait till the cocktail party,' he said.

*

It was almost half past ten before Miss Pilchester fell bodily out of the taxi she had hired in desperation, four hours late, to bring her to the meadow. Pop, who was helping the Brigadier to string up gay lines of square and triangular flags about and among the tents, stared in stupefaction at a figure that might have been that of a tired and collapsing mountaineer descending from a peak. Miss Pilchester was armed with shooting stick, rolled mackintosh, a leather hold-all containing a spare cardigan, her lunch and a red vacuum flask, an attaché case containing the judging lists,
The Times
; several books, and a basket of pot-eggs. The pot-eggs, evidently brought for use in some pony event or other, rolled about the squatting Miss Pilchester exactly as if, in a sudden over-spasm of broodiness, she had laid them all herself.

It was all absolutely ghastly, but both Pop and the Brigadier were too stupefied to go over and pick up either Miss Pilchester or the eggs; and Pop, for once, was utterly without words. It was the Brigadier who spoke for him.

‘Good God, Larkin,' he said, ‘Edith must be either tight or egg-bound.'

Five minutes later Miss Pilchester, the great organizer, was at her work. This was all done, as the Brigadier himself pointed out, at a half canter. With indecisive excitement Miss Pilchester rushed from tent to tent, inquiring if someone had seen this, somebody that, had the caterers arrived, and above all wasn't it ghastly?

The caterers had been on the field since seven o'clock; all of them had knocked off for tea. Where, then, was the loudspeaker for announcements? Hadn't that arrived? It had arrived and Miss Pilchester tripped over two lines of its wires. Cancelled entries – were there any cancelled entries? – all entries, she wailed, should have been cancelled by nine o'clock.

It was now, the Brigadier was heard to point out dryly, half-past ten.

Where then, Miss Pilchester wanted to know, were the donkeys? Were the donkeys here?

‘Some donkeys,' the Brigadier was heard to remark, ‘have been here all night,' but the remark was lost on Miss Pilchester, who rushed away to inquire if the ladies' conveniences had been installed. ‘They are most important,' she said and disappeared into a far tent as if feeling it suddenly necessary to prove it for herself.

At half-past eleven the sun broke through, beginning to dry at last the heavy dew on the grass, the trees of the bluebell wood, and the hedgerows. From the completely windless cloves the last transparent breaths of mist began to rise. A few water-lilies were in bud, heads rising above wet leaves, and they looked like pipes, gently smoking.

It was then discovered that Miss Pilchester had completely forgotten to meet a London train, as she had faithfully promised, at ten forty-five. The train was bringing a judge who had, in counties west of London, a great reputation for judging such things as The Horse of the Year Show. The committee had specially asked for him.

Now Ma came hurrying from the house to say she'd had a bulldog on the phone. ‘And
did
he bark. And
oh!
the language.'

‘Why the 'ell couldn't he come by car?' Pop said.

‘Said he flipping well couldn't afford one under this fliping government.'

‘
We must do something!
' Miss Pilchester said. ‘It's absolutely ghastly!'

‘Mariette and Mr Charlton can fetch him in the stationwagon,' Pop said. ‘They've got to collect more champagne anyway. Ma don't think we've got enough.'

‘Champagne? What champagne? Who ordered champagne?'

‘I did.'

‘Not for this show?'

‘Cocktail party,' Pop said. ‘Me and Ma. Instead of the fireworks tonight. You got your invite, didn't you? Mariette and Mr Charlton sent all the invites out.'

The word fireworks dragged Miss Pilchester back to Pop's side like a struggling dog on a lead.

‘Now you will promise, won't you, no fireworks?'

‘No fireworks,' Pop said.

Miss Pilchester, remembering Pop's delicate investigation of her knee in the Rolls, the velvety battering ram of the kiss that, as Ma had predicted, had made her sleep so much more sweetly, now permitted herself the luxury of a half-smile, the first of her hurried day.

‘I know you. Sometimes you're more than naughty.'

Sun twinkled on Pop's eyes, lighting up the pupils in a face that otherwise remained as dead as a dummy.

‘Not today though,' Pop said. ‘Got to behave today.'

‘And promise no fireworks?'

‘No fireworks.'

‘Not one?'

‘Not one,' Pop said and fixed his eyes on the hem of her skirt as she rushed away to attend once again to the matter of the ladies' conveniences, which were not quite what she had hoped they would be. It was a matter of some delicacy.

As she disappeared Pop reminded the Brigadier of how he had said Miss Pilchester was a splendid organizer and all that.

The Brigadier was more than kind: ‘Well, in her own sweet way I suppose she is. Fact is, I suppose, she's the only one who can spare the time. Nobody else has the time.'

That was it. Nobody had the time. In the crushing, rushing pressure of modern life nobody, even in the country, had the time.

A few moments later the Brigadier glanced hurriedly at his watch, saw it was after twelve o'clock and said he must rush back for a bite of cold. Pop begged him to come to the beer tent for a quick snifter before he went but the Brigadier was firm. Nellie would be waiting. He was going to be adamant this time.

Pop, watching him depart with bemused admiration, remembered that word. The Brigadier had one shoelace missing and had replaced it with packing string. His hair badly needed cutting at the back, and his shirt collar was, if anything, more frayed
than before. But the word adamant shone from him to remind Pop once again of all those wonderful fellers who could use these startling words. He envied them very much.

Going to the beer tent he found that the bulldog of a judge had arrived and was drinking with two members of the committee, Jack Woodley and Freda O'Connor. The judge was a squat ebullient man in a bowler hat. With Woodley, a ruddy, crude, thick-lipped man who was wearing a yellow waistcoat under his hacking jacket, he kept up a constant braying duet, swaying backwards and forwards, waving a pint mug of beer. Woodley was evidently telling smoke-room stories, at the same time gazing with rough interest at the notorious O'Connor bosom, which protruded by several white marble inches above a low yellow sweater. The coarser the stories the more the O'Connor bosom seemed to like them. Like a pair of bellows, its splendid heaving mass pumped air into the hearty organ of her voice, setting the air about her ringing.

All three ignored Pop and he knew why. He and Ma hadn't invited them to the cocktail party. Not caring, he said in a loud voice, ‘How's everybody? Fit as fleas?' as he went past them. Nobody answered, but Pop didn't care. He believed in treating everybody alike, fleas or no fleas.

Glass of beer in hand, he found a companion some moments later in Sir George Bluff-Gore, who owned a large red-brick Georgian mansion that was too expensive to keep up. He and his wife somehow pigged it out in a keeper's cottage instead. Bluff-Gore, yellowish, funereal, stiff, and despondent, had the face of a pall bearer cramped by indigestion. He was not the sort of man you could slap on the back to wish him well.

Nevertheless Pop did so.

Bluff-Gore, recoiling with dejection, managed to say that it was nice of Larkin to invite him and Lady Rose to this cocktail party. They didn't get out much.

‘More the merrier,' Pop said and then remembered that the Bluff-Gores had a daughter – Rosemary, he thought her name
was – a big puddeny girl with sour eyes and a blonde fringe, whom he had sometimes seen riding at meetings or pony gymkhanas with Mariette. He wondered where she was; he hadn't seen her lately.

‘Hope the daughter's coming too?' he said. ‘Welcome.'

‘Rosemary? Afraid not. Lives in London now.'

‘Oh?' Pop said. ‘Doing what? Working?'

With increasing gloom Bluff-Gore gazed at the grass of the beer tent and thought of his only daughter, who had suddenly decided for some utterly unaccountable reason to give up a perfectly sound, happy, normal home to go and paint in Chelsea. It had practically broken her mother's heart; it was utterly unaccountable.

‘Gone over to art,' he said.

It was as if he spoke of some old despicable enemy and Pop could only say he hoped it would turn out well.

Drinking again, deciding that art could only be some man or other that Rosemary had run off with, he suddenly switched the subject, charging the unready Bluff-Gore with a startling question.

‘When are you going to sell Bluff Court, Sir George?'

Bluff-Gore looked white. For some moments he could find no suitable words with which to tell Pop that he had no intention of selling his house, Bluff Court, even though it was far too large to live in. Bluff Court had sixty rooms, an entire hamlet of barns, dairies, and stables, half a mile of greenhouses and potting sheds and an orangery where, for fifty years, no oranges had grown. You needed a hundred tons of coal to heat it every winter and eighteen gardeners to keep the place tidy and productive in summer. You needed to keep twenty servants to wait on you and another twenty to wait on them. It was dog eat dog. You couldn't get the servants anyway and you couldn't have afforded to pay them if you could.

But to give it up, to sell it, even though you hadn't a bean, was unthinkable. It was a monstrous idea; it simply couldn't be
entertained. Among its miles of neglected beeches, elms, and oaks, Bluff Court must and would stand where it did. It might be that one day it would be possible to let it to one of those stockbroker chaps who played at farming, made colossal losses but in the end came out on the right side because they got it out of taxes. Everybody was doing it and it was all perfectly legitimate, they said. It just showed, of course, what the country was coming to. It was grim. No wonder everybody you met was worried stiff. The country was committing suicide. ‘What makes you think I have any intention of selling Bluff Court?'

‘Well, you don't live in the damn thing,' Pop said, straight as a bird, ‘do you? And never will do if you ask me.'

Bluff-Gore indicated with funereal acidity that he was, in fact, not asking him.

‘Damn silly,' Pop said. He started to say that it was like having a car you never rode in and then decided on a more illuminating, more contemporary metaphor and said: ‘Like having a television set you never look at.'