The Darling Buds of May (7 page)

‘Most of the time you were making love to a billiard ball in the side pocket.'

Pop started choking.

‘I said you potted the white, didn't I?' he shouted. ‘Ain't that what I said, Ma?' With immense glee Pop beat a tattoo on the tablecloth with the handles of his knife and fork. ‘Potted the white. Damn funny. Just what I said.'

‘Tonight I'll make you a proper bed up,' Ma said. ‘In the bottom bathroom. Nobody uses it very much now we've got the new one upstairs.'

‘I really think,' Mr Charlton said, his voice limp, ‘I'd better go home.'

In a sudden gesture of fond solicitude Pop put an arm round Mr Charlton's shoulder.

‘You know, Charley boy,' he said, ‘I wish your name was Charley instead of Cedric. It's more human. I can't get used to Cedric. It's like a parson's name. Can't we call you Charley? – after all it's short for your other name.'

‘Please call me Charley if you wish,' Mr Charlton said and felt once again like weeping.

‘What I was going to say, Charley boy,' Pop went on, ‘is this, old man, I think you need a Larkin Special.'

Mr Charlton had no time to ask what a Larkin Special was before Pop was out of the room, across the passage, and into the living-room on the other side. Presently there were noises from the Spanish galleon, the monster cocktail cabinet that could have only been moulded, Mr Charlton thought, by a man of evil, demoniac designs.

‘That'll put you as right as a lamplighter in no time,' Ma said. ‘Acts like a charm.'

‘A nice walk after breakfast,' Mariette said, ‘and you'll be on top of the world.' Mr Charlton felt sure that that in fact was where he was, but in the act of falling. Mariette was now eating bacon, eggs, large burnished brown sausages, and fried bread. ‘We could walk across the meadow and have a look at the motor boat if you like.'

‘Motor boat?' At the same moment some curious reflex of thought made Mr Charlton remember the buff-yellow tax form. He hadn't seen it since sharing his boiled eggs with the twins the previous day. ‘You've got a motor boat?'

‘Nice one. Little beauty. We keep it in the boathouse on the other side of the meadow.'

‘Pop took it in exchange for a debt,' Ma explained.

‘Mrs Larkin,' Mr Charlton began to say. He felt suddenly, in a guilty fashion, that he ought to make some sort of atonement
with himself for all that had happened. He was actually bothered by a sense of duty. ‘I don't suppose you've seen that buff-yellow form –'

‘Coming up, coming up, coming up,' Pop said. ‘There you are, Charley, old man. Larkin Special. Don't ask what's in it. Don't stare at it. Don't think. Just drink it down. In ten minutes you'll feel perfick again.'

Pop set before a demoralized Mr Charlton, on the breakfast table, what Mr Charlton could only think was a draught of bull's blood.

‘I think I should go and lie down –'

‘Don't think a thing!' Pop said. ‘Drink it. Say to 'ell wiv everything and drink it.'

Mr Charlton hesitated. His intestines rolled.

‘I can vouch for it,' Ma said.

The soft dark eyes of Mariette smiled across the table. The familiar astral vision of cool olive skin against the light lemon shirt, of dark hair and the firm treasured breasts that Mr Charlton had almost clasped the previous evening, revived an inspiring, momentary recollection of his lost white fire.

He ducked his head and drank.

‘Now I must get cracking,' Pop said. ‘I got a bit of a deal to do about some straw. I got the new deep-freeze to pick up. And the pigs. And the port.'

With fond assurance he laid a hand on Mr Charlton's shoulder.

‘Charley, old man,' he said, ‘by the time I get back you'll feel perfick.'

For some time Mr Charlton sat in tentative silence, reawaking. A feeling of slow intestinal restoration made him give, once or twice, a tender sigh. He grasped slowly that the thunder in his head had now become mere singing, like distant vespers in a minor key.

‘Feeling more yourself now?'

Mariette was eating toast and golden marmalade. As she
opened her mouth to eat he saw, for the first time, how beautifully white her teeth were and how pink, in a pure rose-petal shade, her tongue now appeared as it darted out and caught at golden shreds of marmalade.

He even found himself thinking of gardenia, its compelling, torturing night-scent and the pure whiteness of its flower.

‘It's absolutely wonderful in the woods this morning,' Mariette said. ‘All the bluebells out. Millions of them. And the moon-daisies. It's hot too and the nightingales had already started when I was coming back. You're not really going home today?'

A lyrical wave passed over Mr Charlton. With distaste he remembered his office: the in-tray, the out-tray, the files, the other chaps, the ink-stained desks, the chatter of typewriters.

‘If you're sure it's no trouble –'

‘Trouble!' Ma said. ‘We
want
you. We love to have you.'

‘I've finished,' Mariette said. ‘Like to get a breath of air?'

Mr Charlton went to the door and stood in the sun. With reviving heart he stared across Pop's paradise of junk, scratching hens, patrols of geese, and graveyards of rusty iron, in the middle of which Montgomery was milking goats under a haystack. Over all this a sky as blue as the thrushes' eggs that had come to disaster in his pocket spread with unblemished purity. The near fringes of meadows had become, overnight, white with moon-daisies, drifts of summer snow. A cuckoo called and was answered by another, the notes like those of tender horns, the birds hidden in oak-trees, among curtains of thickest olive flower.

‘How do you feel now?' Mariette said.

The pale face of Mr Charlton broadened into its first unsteady daylight smile.

‘A little more perfick than I was.'

*

By Saturday night the deep-freeze was installed. By Sunday morning, three nine-pound geese, well-stuffed with sage and-onion, were sizzling in a pure white electric oven that could have spoken, Mr Charlton thought, if spoke to. A light breeze drove with frailest spinnings of air through the bluebell wood and bore across the hot yard the delicious aroma of roasting birds.

Ma, who loved colour, cooked in a canary yellow pinafore with big scarlet pockets and at intervals shouted across the yard, either to Pop or Mariette, Mr Charlton or the children, or whoever happened to be there, a demand for instructions about the meal.

‘What sort of vegetables do you fancy? Asparagus? I got green peas and new potatoes but shout if you want anything different.' It turned out that Montgomery wanted brown braised onions, the twins Yorkshire pudding, and Primrose baked potatoes. ‘Fair enough,' Ma said, ‘as long as we know.'

At eleven o'clock, by which time Pop was no longer in the yard, Ma shouted that it was already so hot in the kitchen that she'd be sick by the time the meal was served.

‘What say we have it outside?' she called. ‘Under the walnut tree?'

By noon Mariette, dressed in neat sky-blue linen shorts and an open-necked vermilion blouse, her legs bare, was laying a white cloth on a long table underneath a walnut tree that over-shadowed, like a faintly fragrant umbrella, the only civilized stretch of grass near the house, on the south side, beside which Ma would later grow patches of petunia and zinnia, her favourite flowers. It was cool and dark there under the thickening walnut leaves, out of the sun, and Mr Charlton helped her by bringing cutlery from the house on papier-mâché trays brightly decorated with hunting scenes, race-meetings, or pointers carrying birds.

At half-past-twelve Pop startled everybody by driving into the yard in a Rolls-Royce, a pre-war landaulette in black, with strawcoloured
doors that actually looked as if they had been made of plaited basket-work. The horn, sounding with discreet harmonious distinction, brought everybody running to the centre of the rusty, dusty graveyards of junk and iron.

Pop stopped the car and dismounted with triumphant, imperial pride.

‘Here it is!' he shouted. ‘Ourn!'

Before anyone could speak he leapt down to the doors, proudly pointing.

‘Monogram,' he said. ‘Look, Ma – monograms on the doors.'

‘Royal?' Ma said.

‘Duke, I think,' Pop said. ‘The feller didn't know. Anyway, duke or viscount or some toff of some sort.'

Ma was dazzled. She took several paces forward and touched the gleaming bodywork.

‘All in!' Pop said. ‘Everybody in! Everybody who wants a ride get in!'

Everybody, including Mr Charlton, got into the Rolls-Royce. On the wide spacious seats of dove-grey upholstery, upon which heavy cords of tasselled yellow silk hung at the windows, there was plenty of room for everybody, but the twins sat on Mr Charlton's lap. Ma herself sat in the centre of the back seat, her pinafore spread out crinoline-wise, almost in royal fashion, her turquoise-ringed hands spread on her yellow pinafore.

Soon an entranced look crept like a web across her face, only her eyes moving as they rolled gently from side to side, taking in the smallest details.

‘I wish I had my hat on,' she said at last. ‘I don't feel right without my hat on.'

‘Got a big picnic basket in the boot,' Pop said. ‘Corkscrews an' all.'

‘It's got vases for flowers,' Ma said. She leaned forward and fingered with delicacy a pair of silver horn-like vases fixed below the glass screen that divided the back seat from the front.

‘Notice anything else?' Pop called. ‘Have a good dekko. All
round. Want you to notice one more thing, Ma. Have a good dekko.'

After several seconds of silence, in which Ma's eyes revolved on a slow axis of exploration, in pure wonderment, Ma confessed that she saw nothing more.

‘That thing like the bit off the end of a carpet sweeper!' Pop yelled. In his own delight he laughed in his customary ringing fashion. ‘Mind it don't bite you.'

‘No,' Ma said. ‘No.' Her mouth expired air in a long incredulous wheeze. ‘No –'

‘Speakin' tube!' Pop said. ‘Pick it up. Say something down it. Give me order. Say “Home James!” – summat like that.'

Ma, in possession of the end of the speaking tube, sat utterly speechless.

‘Give me order!' Pop said. ‘I can hear whatever you say perfickly well in front here. Go on, Ma. Give me order!'

Ma breathed into the speaking tube in a voice pitched in a minor key of desolation.

‘I don't know whether I like it,' she said. ‘They'll be putting the price of fish-and-chips up when they see us roll up in this.'

‘Never!' Pop said. ‘They'll be paying
us
.'

The receiving end of the speaking apparatus was just above the head of Mr Charlton, who was sitting next to Pop in the driving seat. The voices of Victoria and Primrose began to shriek into his ears like a gabble of excited young ducks.

‘Take us for a ride! Take us for a ride! Take us for a ride!'

Pop let in the clutch and started to steer a course of slow elegance between a pile of discarded oil-drums and a big galvanized iron swill-tub. No breath of sound came, for a full minute, from either the Rolls or its passengers.

Then Ma said: ‘Like riding on air. Not a squeak anywhere. Must be paid for.'

‘Cash down!' Pop said.

He pressed the horn. An orchestration of low notes, harmonious, smooth as honey, disturbed into slight flutterings a
batch of young turkeys sunning themselves in the lee of the pigsties.

‘That's the town one,' Pop explained. He flicked a switch with a fingernail. ‘Now hark at this. Country. Open road.'

A peremptory, urgent snarl, like the surprise entry of symphonic brass, tore the peaceful fabric of the yard's livestock to pieces. A whole flotilla of white ducks sprang into the air and raced like hurdlers over rusty junk, empty boxes, and feeding troughs. Brown hens flew like windy paper bags in all directions, shedding feathers.

‘Special fittin',' Pop explained. ‘Chap who owned it once lived in Paris or somewheres.'

He completed with slow imperial pride the course of the yard, now blowing the town horn, now the snarl.

‘Comfortable in the back, ain't it, Ma? Make a nice bed, don't you think?'

Ma, who had recovered equilibrium, now spoke down the speaking-tube, shaking like a jelly.

‘Home, James. Else them geese'll burn.'

Pop responded with the honeyed notes of the town horn and the Rolls, like a ship gliding to anchorage in smooth waters, skirted with a final swing of silent elegance past a strong black alp of pig manure.

‘Perfick, ain't it?' Pop said. ‘Ain't it perfick?'

Ma, who had stopped laughing, breathed hard before she spoke again.

‘I got to have flowers in the vases,' she said, her voice full of a pleasure so deep that it was at once loving and lovable in humility. ‘Every time we go out we got to have flowers.'

Back at the house everybody alighted and Ma once again stroked, with touching affection, the shining chariot wings, her huge body reflected in their black curves with a vast transfiguration of yellow and scarlet, distorted as in a comic mirror at a fair.

‘Gorblimey, I must run,' she said suddenly. ‘I haven't even started the apple sauce.'

As Ma ran towards the house Mariette remembered the table under the walnut tree and took Mr Charlton's hand. Pop remembered the port and called after a dutifully retreating Mr Charlton:

‘Charley boy, like to do summat for me while you're helping Mariette? Put the port on ice, old man, will you? Three bottles. Two red and one white. You'll find two ice buckets in the cocktail cabinet. Give 'em plenty of ice, old man.'

At the same time Montgomery stood staring across the yard in the direction of the road.

‘Pop,' he said, ‘I think we got a visitor. I think it looks like the Brigadier.'