The Darling Buds of May (8 page)

Across the yard a straight, six-foot human straw was drifting. It was dressed in a suit of tropical alpaca, once yellowish, now bleached to whitish fawn, that looked as if it had recently been under a steam-roller.

It was the Brigadier all right, Pop said, and leaned one hand on the front wing of the Rolls with casual pride, raising the other in greeting. He wondered too what the Brigadier wanted and where his sister was and said he betted the old whippet had left him for the day.

‘General!' he called. ‘What can I do you for?'

‘Hail,' the Brigadier said. The voice was low and cryptic. ‘Well met, Larkin.'

At closer range it was to be seen that the Brigadier's elbows had been patched with squares of paler-coloured material that appeared to have been torn from pillow-slips. The cuffs of his jacket sleeves had been trimmed more or less level with scissors and then sewn back. His socks were yellow. The hat worn on the back of his head resembled more than anything a frayed bee-skip and seemed to be worn so far back in order to avoid his extraordinary extensive white eyebrows, altogether too large for the rest of his cadaverous face, which stuck above his pale blue eyes like two salty prawns.

These prawns were repeated on his upper lip in stiff moustaches, which contrasted sharply with cheeks consisting entirely
of purple viens. The chin was resolute and looked like worn pumice stone. The neck was long and loose and held entirely together by a rigid bolt of fiery crimson, the Adam's apple, which seemed over the course of time to have worn the soiled shirt collar to shreds.

The Brigadier shook hands with Pop, at the same time recognizing in Pop's demeanour the divinity of new possession. He held the Rolls-Royce in flinty stare.

‘Not yours?'

‘Just got it.'

‘Good God.'

Pop made breezy gestures of pride. He wanted instantly to reveal possession of the monograms and then decided against it. It was too much all at one time, he thought.

‘Hellish costly to run?'

‘Well, might be, can't tell, might be,' Pop said. ‘But worth it. Always flog it.'

Sooner or later, in his energetic way, Pop flogged most things.

‘Good God.' The Brigadier looked at the car with closer, microscopic inspection. ‘What's all this?'

‘Monogram.'

‘Good God.' In moments of humour the Brigadier drew on dry resources of solemnity. ‘No crown?'

The remark was lost on Pop, who was dying to demonstrate the horn's orchestral variations.

‘Well,' the Brigadier said, ‘I mustn't linger. Down to staff work.'

Pop laughed in his usual ringing fashion and said he betted a quid the General wanted a subscription.

‘Wrong,' the Brigadier said. ‘Not this time.'

‘Well, that's worth a drink,' Pop said. ‘What about a snifter?'

‘Trifle early, don't you think?' the Brigadier said. ‘Not quite over the yard-arm yet, are we?'

‘When I want a drink,' Pop said, ‘I have a drink. Wevver it's early or wevver it ain't.'

The Brigadier, after a minor pretence at refusal, chose to have a whisky-and-soda. Pop said first that he'd have a Guinness and then changed his mind and said he'd have a beer called Dragon's Blood with a dash of lime instead. The Brigadier looked astonished at this extraordinary combination but followed Pop into the house without a word.

In the sitting room he found it hard to concentrate even on the whisky-and-soda because of powerful, torturing odours of roasting geese that penetrated every corner of the house, delicious with sage and onion stuffing. He sat most of the time with his glass on his right knee, where it successfully concealed a hole that mice might have gnawed.

‘Might as well come straight to the point,' the Brigadier said. ‘Fact is, Larkin, I'm in a God-awful mess.'

‘Wimmin?'

The Brigadier looked extremely startled. The prawns of his eyebrows seemed to leap out. He seemed about to speak and then drank with eagerness at the whisky-and-soda instead.

‘No, no, no,' he said eventually. ‘Bad enough, but not that bad.'

Pop knew that the Brigadier's sister, who resembled more than anything a long hairpin on the top of which she generally wore a cloche hat that looked like a pink thimble, was presumed to lead him a hell of a dance on most occasions and in all directions. Among other things he felt that she never gave the Brigadier enough to eat: a terrible thing.

‘No, it's this damn Gymkhana,' the Brigadier said. ‘That Bolshie Fortescue had a God-awful row with the committee Friday and has withdrawn from the field.'

‘Always was a basket.'

‘Not only withdrawn
from
the field,' the Brigadier said, ‘but withdrawn
the
field.'

‘Means you've got nowhere to hold the damn thing.'

‘Bingo,' the Brigadier said.

In a soft voice Pop called Mr Fortescue a bloody sausage and
remembered Mariette. The gymkhana was in a fortnight's time. It might be the last chance she'd ever get to ride in the jumps before she had the baby. She was mad on jumping; her heart was set on horses and all that sort of thing.

‘Nothing to worry about,' Pop said. ‘You can hold it in my medder.'

‘Don't let me rush you into a decision, Larkin,' the Brigadier said. ‘You don't have to decide –'

‘Good grief,' Pop said. ‘Nothing to decide. The medder's there, ain't it? All I got to do is get the grass cut. I'll get the grass cut this week and things'll be perfick.'

The Brigadier was so much touched by this that he nervously held his glass in his left hand and started poking a finger into the hole in his right trouser knee, a habit about which his sister had already scolded him acidly twice at breakfast.

‘Can't thank you enough, Larkin,' he said. He several times used the words ‘eternal gratitude' in low muttered voice, as in prayer. He coughed, drank again, poked at the hole in his knee, and called Pop a stout feller. He knew the committee would be eternally grateful. ‘Never be able to thank you.'

Out of politeness he rose to go. Before he was on his feet Pop was insisting on another snifter and Ma, hearing the tinkle of ice in glasses, called from the kitchen:

‘What about one for the old cook in here? What's she done today?'

The Brigadier, under indeterminate protest, had a second whisky-and-soda. Pop had a change of mind and had a whisky-and-soda too. Ma ordered beer because she was parched from cooking and came to the sitting-room door to drink it from a big glass that spilled foam down her hands.

‘Bung-ho,' she said to the Brigadier. ‘How's your sister today?'

‘Gone to see an aunt,' the Brigadier said. Now that Ma had opened the kitchen door the smell of browning goose-flesh was attacking him in even more frontal, more excruciating waves. ‘Over in Hampshire. Day's march away.'

‘Sunday dinner all on your lonesome?' Ma said.

‘Not quite that bad.' Torturing waves of sage-sharp fragrance from the roasting geese made him suddenly feel More heady than even the whisky-and-soda had done on his empty stomach. ‘I shall waffle down to the pub and grab a bite of cold.'

‘Cold on Sundays?' Ma was deeply shocked. ‘You wouldn't catch Pop having cold on Sundays. Why don't you stay here and eat with us?'

‘No, no, really no. No, thanks all the same, really –'

‘Encore,' Pop said. ‘More the merrier. Perfick.'

‘Bless my soul, with all your brood –'

‘Of course,' Ma said. ‘Cold, my foot.'

‘Ma,' Pop said, ‘pity you didn't put that leg o' pork in after all.' Ma had calculated that, within reason, three nine-pound geese ought to be enough. ‘Too late now I suppose?'

He seemed quite disappointed as Ma said, ‘Not unless you want to eat about five o'clock,' and went away kitchenwards. She hated having to skimp on joints and things; it made it hard work for the carver.

From the kitchen Ma called a minute later:

‘Come here a minute, Pop, I want you. Lift the geese out of the oven for me, will you? I want to baste them.'

Pop went into the kitchen, realizing as soon as he went through the door that the call was after all merely a ruse to get him away from the Brigadier. Ma was standing by the window, arms folded like huge white vegetable marrows across her bolstered bosom, looking towards the walnut tree.

‘Take a look at that,' she said.

Under the tree, at the dinner table, cloth and cutlery having been laid, Mariette and Mr Charlton were coolly sitting some distance apart from each other, absorbed in the Sunday papers.

Ma made noises of puzzled disgust, which Pop echoed.

‘What's wrong with 'em?'

‘Wrong? Don't he know his technique?' Ma said.

‘Very like do better on the boat this afternoon,' Pop said. ‘There's some very good quiet places up the river.'

Ma, as if she could not bear the sight any longer, turned away to stir the apple sauce with a wooden spoon as it simmered away in a new bright aluminium pan. After looking at it critically she decided it needed a touch of something and dropped into the steaming olive-yellow purée a lump of butter as big as a tennis ball.

‘Brigadier looks seedy, I think, don't you?' she said. Pop agreed. He felt immensely sorry for the Brigadier. ‘Trouble with these people they never get enough to eat. Like Mr Charlton. Half-starved.'

Pop agreed with that too. ‘Cold at the pub Sundays,' he said, as if this was the depths of deplorable gastronomic misery. ‘Can you beat it?'

Ma said she could. ‘Because if I know anything about it he wasn't going near the pub. He was going home to a Marmite sandwich and a glass o' milk. Perhaps even water.'

A moment later she turned to reach from a cupboard a new tin of salt and Pop, watching her upstretched figure as it revealed portions of enormous calves, suddenly felt a startling twinge of excitement in his veins. He immediately grasped Ma by the bosom and started squeezing her. Ma pretended to protest, giggling at the same time, but Pop continued to fondle her with immense, experienced enthusiasm, until finally she turned, yielded the great continent of her body to him and let him kiss her full on her soft big mouth.

Pop prolonged this delicious experience as long as he had breath. He always felt more passionate in the kitchen. He supposed it was the smell of food. Ma sometimes told him it was a wonder he ever got any meals at all and that he ought to know, at his age, which he wanted most, meals or her. ‘Both,' he always said. ‘Often.'

This morning, against the shining white stove, the glistening aluminium pans and the background of sunlight on the young
coppery green leaves of the walnut tree, he thought she looked absolutely lovely. She was his dream.

He started to kiss her passionately again. But this time she held him away. The Brigadier, she said, would be wondering what was happening. He was to go back to the Brigadier.

The twins'll be back with the ice-cream any moment too,' she said. The twins had gone to the village, a quarter of a mile down the road, with orders to bring back the largest blocks of strawberry and chocolate
mousse
they could buy.

‘Take the Brigadier a few crisps,' Ma said. ‘They'll keep him going for half an hour.'

With reluctance Pop went back to the Brigadier, who sat staring into an empty glass, elbows on his knees, his trouser legs hitched up so that his socks and thin hairy shins were revealed. Pop saw now that the socks were odd, one yellow and one white, and that both had potatoes in the heels.

‘Crisp, General?' he said and held out a big plastic orange dish of potato crisps, glistening fresh and salty.

The Brigadier, who belonged to two London clubs that he used only twice a year and spent most of the rest of his time wearing himself to a skeleton chopping wood, washing dishes, clipping hedges, mowing the lawn, and cleaning out blocked drainpipes because he couldn't afford a man, accepted the crisps with normal reluctance that actually concealed a boyish gratitude.

Pop also suggested another snifter.

‘No, no. Thanks all the same. No, no,' the Brigadier said. ‘No really,' and then allowed his glass to be taken away from him with no more than dying stutters of protestation.

Half an hour later two of the three geese were lying side by side, browned to perfection, deliciously varnished with running gravy, in a big oval blue meat dish on the table under the walnut tree. Other blue dishes stood about the table containing green peas and new potatoes veined with dark sprigs of mint, baked onions, asparagus, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and broad
beans in parsley sauce. There were also big blue boats of apple sauce and gravy.

There had been times in his life when the Brigadier would have been prompted, out of sheer good form, social constraint, and various other preventive forces of up-bringing, to describe the sight of all this as rather lacking in decency. Today he merely sat with restrained bewilderment, tortured by odours of goose-flesh and sage-and-onions, watching the faces of Pop, Ma, Mister Charlton, and the entire Larkin brood while Pop carved with dextrous ease at the birds, themselves not at all unlike brown laden galleons floating in a glistening gravy sea.

Even the stiff prawns of his eyebrows made no quiver of surprise as Pop, flashing carving knife and steel in air, suggested that if Charley boy wanted to help he could pour the port out now.

Mr Charlton put the port on the table in its champagne bucket, all beady with icy dew.

‘Mix it,' Pop said. ‘It makes a jolly good drink, red and white mixed together.'

Mr Charlton went round the table, pouring and mixing port. He had been introduced to the Brigadier by a more than usually facetious Pop as ‘a late entry – chap on the tax lark'.

‘Actually a real pukka tax-gatherer you mean?' the Brigadier said, as if astonished that there could be such a person.