The Darling Buds of May (6 page)

BOOK: The Darling Buds of May
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That, Mr Charlton heard himself saying, was what was happening to him, but nobody seemed to hear a voice that was already inexplicably far away, except that Ma once again began laughing, piercingly, the salmon jumper shaking like a vast balloon.

‘A few more of these and you won't see me for dust,' she said.

‘A few more?' Mr Charlton heard himself saying. ‘A few more?'

‘First re-fill coming up, Mister Charlton. How do you like it? Ma, I bet this would go well with a bloater-paste sandwich.'

Something about this remark made Mr Charlton start laughing too. This enlivening development was a signal for Pop to strike Mr Charlton a severe blow in the back, exactly as he had done Ma, and call him a rattlin' good feller. ‘Feel you're one of the family. Feel we've known you years. That right, Ma?'

That was right, Ma said. That was the truth. That was how they felt about him.

‘Honest trufe,' Pop said. ‘Honest trufe, Mister Charlton.'

A wave of unsteady pleasure, like a flutter of ruffling wind across water on a summer afternoon, ran through Mr Charlton's veins and set them dancing. He drank again. He felt a sudden lively and uncontrollable desire to pick strawberries on warm midsummer evenings, no matter what happened. ‘My God, this is great stuff,' he told everybody. ‘This is the true essence –'

Nobody knew what Mr Charlton was talking about. It was
impossible to grasp what he meant by the true essence, but it set Ma laughing again. Somewhere behind the laughter Mr Charlton heard Pop mixing a third, perhaps a fourth, re-fill, saying at the same time ‘Only thing it wants is more ice. More ice, Ma!'

Mr Charlton, for no predetermined reason, suddenly rose and struck himself manfully on the chest.

‘I'll get it,' he said. ‘That's me. I'm the ice-man.'

When Mr Charlton came back from the kitchen, carrying trays of ice, Pop mixed the new drink and tasted it with slow, appraising tongue and eye.

‘More perfick than ever!'

Everything was more perfick, Mr Charlton kept telling himself. The scent of gardenia was more perfick. It too was stronger than ever. He laughed immoderately, for no reason, and at length, looking for the first time straight into the dark searching eyes of Mariette with neither caution nor despair.

‘Mariette,' he said, ‘what is the scent you're wearing?'

‘Come and sit over here and I'll tell you.'

Mr Charlton moved to sit on the other side of the table. Rising abruptly, he stood stunned. It seemed to him that something remarkable had happened to Pop. Pop, it seemed to him, had disappeared.

‘I didn't see Pop go out,' he said. ‘Where's Pop gone?'

Ma began shrieking.

‘I'm under here!' Pop said.

‘Under me! I'm sitting on his lap,' Ma said. ‘Why don't you ask Mariette if she'll sit on yours?'

Mariette, who needed no asking, sat on Mr Charlton's lap. The illusion of being caressed in a silken, sinuous, maddening way by the goose's neck returned to Mr Charlton as he felt her silken legs cross his own. A sensation that for the second time his blood was turning white, while being at the same time on fire, coursed completely through him. The soles of his feet started tingling. The scent of gardenia overwhelmed him like a drug.

‘Tell me what the scent is,' Mr Charlton said.

‘Gardenia.'

‘Gardenia? Gardenia? What's gardenia?'

‘It's a flower. Do you like it?'

‘Like it? Like it?' Mr Charlton said madly. ‘Like it?'

With extraordinarily soft hands Mariette took his own and held them high round her waist, just under her breasts. With stupefying tenderness she started to rock backwards and forwards on his knee, with the result that Mr Charlton could not see straight. His eyes were simply two quivering balls revolving unrestrainedly in the top of his head.

‘Well, getting late,' Pop said. ‘Hitch up a bit, Ma, and I'll mix another before we go to shut-eye.'

Pop reappeared presently from underneath the salmon canopy of Ma and announced that he was going to mix a new one this time.

‘How about a Chauffeur? Dammit, the Rolls has to have a Chauffeur,' he said. He stood earnestly consulting the
Guide to Better Drinking
. ‘One third vermouth, one third whisky, one third gin, dash of angostura. Sounds perfick. Everybody game?'

Everybody was game. Mr Charlton was very game. He said so over and over again. Mariette held his hands more closely against her body and a little higher than before and Mr Charlton let his head rest against the velvety, downy nape of her dark neck.

‘You're my goose. My gardenia,' he said.

‘Wouldn't you think,' Mariette said, ‘that it was soon time to go to bed?'

Some moments later Mr Charlton had drained the Chauffeur in two gulps and was addressing Ma and Pop in what he thought were solid, steadfast tones of gratitude.

‘Can never thank you. Never thank you. Never be able to thank you.'

He shook on his feet, grasped at air with aimless hands, and started jiggling like a fish.

‘Should be a cocktail called gardenia! A sweet one –'

‘I'll make one,' Pop said. ‘I'll think one up.'

‘And one called Mariette,' Mr Charlton said. ‘Sweet one too! –'

He staggered violently and some time later was vaguely aware of walking arm-in-arm to the billiard room with Mariette. There was no light in the billiard room. He felt filled with inconsolable happiness and laughed with wild immoderation, once again feeling her legs brush against him like the goose-neck, in the darkness. Once again too he called her a gardenia and stretched out groping hands to touch her.

Instead, unsurprised, he found himself kneeling by the billiard table, caressing in the corner pocket a solitary, cool abandoned ball.

‘Where are you? Where are you?' he said. ‘Mariette –'

Mr Charlton got up and fell down, breaking the thrushes' eggs in his pocket as he fell.

‘Climb up,' Mariette said. Mr Charlton found it impossible to climb up and Mariette started pushing him. ‘Upsadaisy. Up you go. I'll get your collar off.'

Meanwhile Pop, who was sitting up in bed in his shirt, thinking of the evening sunshine, the meadows shining so beautifully and so golden with buttercups and the prospect of summer growing to maturity all about his paradise, decided that the only thing to make the day more perfick was a cigar.

‘I'm the same as Churchill,' he said. ‘Like a good cigar.'

He lit the cigar and sat watching Ma undress herself. The thing he really loved most about Ma, he had long since decided, was that she didn't have to wear corsets. She didn't need them; her figure was all her own; pure and natural as could be.

‘Ma, I've been thinking,' he said, ‘when does Mariette expect this baby?'

‘She can't make up her mind.'

‘Well, she'd better,' Pop said.

‘Why?' Ma said.

From the depths of her transparent petunia canopy, as it floated down over the global map of her white, wide territory, Ma spoke with her customary air of unconcern.

Smoking his cigar, gazing thoughtfully through the open window to a night of warm May stars, as if pondering again on summer and the way it would soon embroider with its gold and green his already perfick paradise, Pop made a pronouncement.

‘I'm a bit worried about Mister Charlton. I don't think that young man's got it in 'im,' he said. ‘At least not yet.'

4

Mr Charlton woke late and to a dark, disquieting impression. It was that he was lying alone in the centre of a large flat green field. A cold storm was raging about him. Overhead drummed peals of thunder.

Agony taught him some minutes later that the thunder rolled from somewhere inside his own head and that the field was the billiard table, from which he was about to fall. He got up off the table and groped with uncertain agony about the semidarkened room, white hands limp at his sides, stringy and strengthless, like portions of tired celery.

He was wearing Mariette's pyjamas, which were silk, of a pale blue colour, with a pattern of either pink roses or carnations all over them – he was too distraught to tell which. He could not remember putting the pyjamas on. He could only suppose Mariette had put them on. He could not remember that either.

Presently, after managing to pull on his trousers over his pyjamas, he groped his way out of the billiard room. In the kitchen the apparition of Ma, now wearing a parma-violet jumper instead of the salmon one, overrode all other objects, like a circus elephant. She was making toast and frying eggs and bacon. His hands trembled as they grasped a chair.

‘Ah! there you are, Mister Charlton. One egg or two?' Ma, in her customary fashion, started laughing like a jelly, her voice a carillon. ‘Two eggs or three? Sleep all right?'

Mr Charlton sat down and thought that even if wild dogs had begun to chase him he would never again have the strength to move.

‘Cuppa tea?' A heavy weight, like a descending pile-driver, hit
the table, shaking cups and cutlery. It was a cup. ‘Like a drop of milk in it?' With shaking bosom Ma roared happily again. ‘Cow's or Johnny Walker?'

Mr Charlton prayed silently over the comforting fumes of tea.

‘Mariette waited for you but you didn't seem to come so she's gone for a ride now to get her appetite up,' Ma said. ‘She'll be back any minute now. Pop's feeding the pigs. He's had one breakfast. But he'll want another.'

Life, Mr Charlton felt, was ebbing away from him. In his cup large tea-leaves swam dizzily round and round, the black wreckage of disaster.

‘You never said how many eggs,' Ma said. ‘One or two? How do you like 'em? Turned over?'

‘I –'

A moment later a rough sledgehammer hit Mr Charlton in the middle of the back.

‘How's the taxman?' Pop said. ‘How's my friend? All right, old man? Sleep well? Perfick morning, ain't it?'

Whereas overnight Mr Charlton's veins had run white, in crazy, voluptuous courses, he now felt them to be some shade of pale, expiring green. There was also something seriously wrong with his intestines. They were dissolving under waves of acid. He could no longer claim them for his own.

‘I don't think Mr Charlton feels very well,' Ma said.

‘No?' Pop said. ‘Pity. Didn't sleep very well? Potted the white, eh?' Pop barked with violent laughter at his joke. ‘Hair of the dog I should say.'

Mr Charlton had never heard of hair of the dog. Pop sat down at the table and drummed on it with the handles of his knife and fork, whistling ‘Come to the cook-house door, boys' through his teeth.

‘What's your programme this morning, old man? Like to come with me and take the pig over to the bacon factory?'

‘I think I shall have to go home.'

Faintly Mr Charlton spoke for the first time, his voice full of pallid distress. Echoes of his words rang through his head in hollow tones, as through a sepulchre.

‘Don't say that, old man,' Pop said. ‘We was looking forward to having you the whole weekend. I want to show you the place. I got thirty-two acres here altogether. Lovely big medder at the back. Beautiful stretch o' river. Perfick. Do any fishing?'

While Pop was speaking Ma set before him a plate of three eggs, four six-inch rashers of home-cured bacon, three very thick brown sausages, and a slice of fried bread. Pop attacked this with the precipitate virility and desperation of a man who has not seen food for some long time. In an excruciating moment the last of Mr Charlton's intestines got ready to dissolve.

Suddenly Pop slapped down his knife and fork, troubled.

‘Something wrong?' Ma said.

‘Don't taste right.'

‘You forgot the ketchup, you loony, that's why.'

‘Gorblimey, so I did. Knowed there was summat wrong somewhere.'

Pop reached out, grabbed the ketchup bottle, and shook an ocean of scarlet all over his breakfast.

Mr Charlton shut his eyes. This grave mistake made him think that he was on the deck of a sinking ship, in a hurricane. He opened his eyes with great haste and the deck came up at him.

‘Hullo there, bright eyes. Good morning. How are we this morning?'

The astral figure of Mariette, fresh in yellow shirt and jodhpurs, was all that Mr Charlton felt he needed to set him weeping. The pristine, cheerful voice was beyond his range of thought. He tried to say something and failed, faintly.

‘Mister Charlton doesn't feel all that well,' Ma said. ‘He says he might have to go home.'

Pop belched with enormous pleasure, as usual surprising himself.

‘Manners. Early morning breeze. Pardon me.' He struck his chest with the handle of the fork, as if in stern reproval. ‘Home, my foot. Stop worrying, old man. That's the trouble with you office fellers. You all worry too much by half. After all, here today and gone tomorrow.'

It was not tomorrow, Mr Charlton thought, that he was worried about. Unless he could find some speedy, drastic remedy he would, he was convinced, be gone today.

‘Heavens, I'm hungry,' Mariette said.

She sat down at the table, stirred a cup of tea, and started laughing. Her voice put stitches into Mr Charlton's head: stabbing lines of them, on hot needles.

‘See something funny out riding?' Pop said. ‘Like the Brigadier's sister?'

‘I was just smiling at Mr Charlton. He's still got the pyjamas on.' She started laughing again and Mr Charlton could not help feeling there was some sinister, hidden meaning in the word smiling. ‘Oh! that was a laugh, getting them on last night. First we couldn't get one lot of trousers off and then we couldn't get the other lot on. Oh! Mr Charlton, you were a scream. Absolute scream.'

Mr Charlton, who began to feel among other things that he was not grown up, did not doubt it. Everything was a scream. His whole body, his entire mind, and his intestines were a scream.

BOOK: The Darling Buds of May
7.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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