The Woman Who Had Imagination (2 page)

‘Glasses!' yelled my uncle Silas.

‘Bringing 'em if you can wait!' she shouted back.

‘Well, hurry then! And don't fall over yourself!'

She came back a moment or two later with the glasses, which she clapped down on the table just as she had done the wine-bottle, defiantly, without a word. She was a scraggy, frosty-eyed woman, with a tight, almost lipless mouth, and as she stalked out of the door my uncle Silas leaned across to me and said in a whisper just loud enough for her to hear:

‘Tart as a stick of old rhubarb.'

‘What's that you're saying?' she said at once.

‘Never spoke. Never opened me mouth.'

‘I heard you!'

‘Go and put yourself in curling pins, you old straight hook!'

‘I'm leaving,' she shouted.

‘Leave!' he shouted. ‘And good riddance.'

‘Who're you talking to, eh? Who're you talking to, you corrupted old devil? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you weren't so old I'd warm your breeches till you couldn't sit down. I'm off.'

She flashed out, clip-clopping with her untied shoes along the passage and upstairs while he chanted after her, in his devilish, goading voice:

‘Tart as a bit of old rhubarb, tart as a bit of old rhubarb!'

When the house was silent again he looked at me and winked his bloodshot eye and said ‘Pour out', and I half-filled the tumblers with the clear sun-coloured wine. As we drank I said, ‘You've done it now', and he winked back at me again, knowing that I knew that she had been leaving every day for twenty years, and that they had quarrelled with each other day and night for nearly all that time, secretly loving it.

Sitting by the door, sipping the sweet, cold wine, I looked at the lily again. Its strange, scarlet, turk's-cap blossoms had just begun to uncurl in the July heat, the colour hot and passionate against the snow-coloured pinks and the cool larkspurs and the stiff spikes of the madonnas, sweet and virgin but like white wax. Rare, exotic, strangely lovely, the red lily had blossomed there, untouched, for as long as I could remember.

‘When are you going to give me a little bulb off the lily?' I said.

‘You know what I've always told you,' he said. ‘You can have her when I'm dead. You can come and dig her up then. Do what you like with her.'

I nodded. He drank, and as I watched his skinny throat filling and relaxing with the wine I said:

‘Where did you get it? In the first place?'

He looked at the almost empty glass.

‘I pinched her,' he said.

‘How?'

‘Never mind. Give us another mouthful o' wine.'

He held out his glass, and I rose and took the wine-bottle from the table and paused with my hand on the cork. ‘Go on,' I said, ‘tell me.'

‘I forget,' he said. ‘It's been so damn long ago.'

‘How long?'

‘I forget,' he said.

As I gave him back his wine-filled glass I looked at him with a smile and he half-smiled back at me, half-cunning, half-sheepish, as though he knew what I was thinking. He possessed the vividest memory, a memory he often boasted about as he told me the stories of his boyhood, rare tales of prize-fights on summer mornings by isolated woods very long ago, of how he heard the news of the Crimea, of how he took a candle to church to warm his hands against it in the dead of winter, and how when the parson cried out ‘And ye shall see a great light, even as I see one now!' he snatched up the candle in fear of hell and devils and sat on it. ‘And I can put my finger on the spot now.'

By that smile on his face I knew that he remembered about the lily, and after taking another long drink of the wine he began to talk. His voice was crabbed and rusty, a strong, ugly voice that had no softness or tenderness in it, and his half-shut bloodshot eye and his wet curled lips looked rakish and wicked, as though he were
acting the villainous miser in one of those travelling melodramas of his youth.

‘I seed her over in a garden, behind a wall,' he said. ‘Big wall, about fifteen feet high. We were banging in hard a-carrying hay and I was on the top o' the cart and could see her just over the wall. Not just one — scores, common as poppies. I felt I shouldn't have no peace again until I had one. And I nipped over the wall that night about twelve o'clock and ran straight into her.'

‘Into the lily?'

‘Tah! Into a gal. See? Young gal — about my age, daughter o' the house. All dressed in thin white. “What are you doing here?” she says, and I believe she was as frit as I was. “I lost something,” I says. “It's all right. You know me.” And then she wanted to know what I'd lost, and I felt as if I didn't care what happened, and I said, “Lost my head, I reckon.” And she laughed, and then I laughed and then she said, “Ssshhh! Don't you see I'm as done as you are if we're found here? You'd better go. What did you come for anyway?” And I told her. She wouldn't believe me. “It's right,” I says, “I just come for the lily.” And she just stared at me. “And you know what they do to people who steal?” she says. “Yes,” I says, and they were the days when you could be hung for looking at a sheep almost. “But picking flowers ain't stealing,” I says. “Ssshhh!” she says again. “What d'ye think I'm going to say if they find me here? Don't
talk so loud. Come here behind these trees and keep quiet.” And we went and sat down behind some old box-trees and she kept whispering about the lily and telling me to whisper for fear anyone should come. “I'll get you the lily all right,” she says, “If you keep quiet. I'll dig it up”.'

He ceased talking, and after the sound of his harsh, uncouth racy voice the summer afternoon seemed quieter than ever, the drowsy, stumbling boom of the bees in the July flowers only deepening the hot drowsy silence. I took a drink of the strong cool flower-odoured wine and waited for my uncle Silas to go on with the story, but nothing happened, and finally I looked up at him.

‘Well?' I said.

For a moment or two he did not speak. But finally he turned and looked at me with a half-solemn, half-vivacious expression, one eye half-closed, and told me in a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, all and more than I had asked to know.

‘She gave me the lily,' he said.

The Restaurant Rosset, which had once been painted a prosperous white, was now dingy and cheap; so thickly freckled were its windows with the black dust of London that from the outside nothing within was visible except the ghostly white circles that were the tables and the even more ghostly white blobs which were the shirt-fronts of the waiters. It looked like the kind of place into which unhappy lovers would go to talk over some misfortune and come to a decision about their lives. On the second floor were rooms which other lovers, having a different purpose, might have used also. Pierre Moreau had been learning to be a waiter there all winter.

He was fifteen: a thin, gawky boy with long black hair, heavy southern lips that he hardly ever opened and dark mute eyes that stood out with sombre dreaminess from his sallow face. He had been growing paler and thinner throughout the winter and he now looked like a plant that had been tied up in darkness and blanched. When there was nothing to do in the restaurant, when no one wanted wine or coffee, which it was his duty to pour out, he stood with his back to the wall and stared
at the opposite wall as though he were staring at something beyond it — and beyond it hopelessly.

It was April, and spring was late. He had come over from France the previous November, alone, with his belongings in a black glacé bag and enough money to bring him to London; he knew no English: but he would learn it from Rosset and his wife, who were distant relations, and from the other waiters; it was part of the bargain his mother had made with Rosset.

From the first he had been wretched. At the very beginning he had also been frightened. He had arrived on a Sunday and he had been troubled by the bleakness of London, his loneliness, the sensation of being in a strange country, the walk with Madame Rosset through the rainy darkness to the restaurant, and then by Rosset himself.

His first sight of Rosset sent him sick; the hard lump of fear in his chest was shaken suddenly by an acute convulsion, a spasm that seemed to turn it to water, filling him with a cold nausea. Rosset was a gross figure, a man of appalling physique. Like some old boxer, he had degenerated to fat without losing his air of brutality; his greasy face, a strange yellowish-grey colour, had a loose red slit of a mouth and little black eyes that quivered under depraved loose lids that would close slowly and open again with incredible quickness, leeringly suspicious; his whole body was like that of some ponderous ape, latent with brutality and anger waiting beneath the skin to be stung into
life. Continually he worked his brows up and down, as though itching to fly into a rage at something. When he smiled there was something loosely and suavely cynical about it; it was a potential leer. He moved about heavily, rolling from side to side, his hands clasped behind him with a kind of meditative cunning. He spoke with guttural rapidity, with a mean, sneering, brutish, domineering voice, uttering also queer noises of disgust or satisfaction.

But it was not only this. He took an instant dislike to the boy. ‘Pierre, eh? Ha! Pierre?' he muttered. ‘Pierre, eh?'

A spasmodic terror shot through the boy at the sound of the voice, speaking with a dark sneer of significance, as though Rosset had been waiting all his life for that moment. Rosset leered, looked him up and down. They were in the restaurant, in the long alley between the empty white tables. It was five o'clock and since it was Sunday the place was not yet open. Madame Rosset had vanished to take off her wet coat, so that Rosset and the boy were alone.

‘Sit down!' roared Rosset suddenly.

And the boy, before he had realised it, sat down. It was a miracle wrought by fear. Rosset smiled with wet loose lips and grunted. The boy sat sick and white; he could feel his strength oozing from his finger-tips.

‘Stand up!' roared Rosset.

And the boy, again by that miracle wrought through
fear, stood up, sick and weak. He could not look at Rosset and in desperation he stared at the opposite wall.

‘Look at me!' ordered Rosset.

Pierre's eyes fixed themselves on Rosset's face at once. There had not yet been a word of French from Rosset, yet the boy had obeyed. Rosset was leeringly triumphant. The boy stood staring, mute, mystified, at a loss to understand.

‘You see!' said Rosset suddenly. ‘That zow you learn English — that zow. You see!'

Then, as though remembering that the boy could not understand a word, he began speaking for the first time in French. His thick glistening lips moved with repulsive rapidity; he seemed to suck and taste the words of his own language greedily, his lips protruding and sucking back again like those of a man gorging on a ripe fruit, and his voice took on a thick lusciousness of tone, almost sensual. His features were amazingly flexible and in a way that bewildered the boy he worked his lips and cheeks and brows incessantly, every movement exaggerating the grossness of his face, its lines of cruelty, its perpetual sneer of insidious suspicion.

He spoke for ten minutes, rapidly, yet coldly, with that sensual ripeness of tone, yet with intense calculation. ‘So he had come to be a waiter, eh? To learn to be a waiter? Did he know how long it took to learn that? How long did he think? How long?' The boy listened mechanically, his sense numbed by Rosset's
voice, as Rosset told him his duties, how he must take the orders for wine and coffee, pour the wine and coffee, lay the knives and forks, clean the knives and forks, how he would be subordinate to everyone, Rosset, Madame Rosset, the waiters, the chef, even to the girl at the counter, how he must wash up the dishes in the afternoon and again in the morning. By a curious cynically playful tone of voice, Rosset implied that there was little to do. Only to pour the wine and the coffee, only to wash up, that was all: only a little — a little, but so important.

Rosset talked on without ever pausing for answer. All the time the boy stood stiff, half-stupid, his big mute eyes bulging. At the end of it all he understood only two things: that it took a life-time to learn to be a waiter and that the only way to learn English was Rosset's way, to speak nothing but English, to be addressed in nothing but English. He was wondering how, since he knew not a single word of English, he was to do this when Rosset suddenly shouted again:

‘Sit down!'

He sat down, as before through fear, and again Rosset leered in triumph. A moment later he sucked in his thick lips and became almost menacingly serious. That was the way! Did he understand that? He was to speak French to no one but Rosset; to the rest, the diners, the waiters, the girl at the counter, he was to speak English. And so he would learn.

He gave the boy one single look, a queer look of
insinuation, his dribbling lips curled and one eyelid sagging, and then was finished.

‘Madame!' he called. ‘Madame!' Without waiting he rolled off, grunting, between the rows of tables and vanished as Madame Rosset appeared in the restaurant to take the boy to his room.

Pierre followed Madame upstairs, to a little room under the roof, four stories up. Madame was fat and glum but there was no strength in her bulk and nothing to fear in her silence: she had weak grey eyes that blinked continually as though at a strong light and a little red cupid mouth whose colourlessness she painted over with some dark red colour, like that of cheap red wine; her hair was black and frizzy, half hiding her little tumbling black ear-rings. She was like some round, naive, mindless doll. Perhaps Rosset had forbidden her to talk, for when she spoke she kept glancing back, with little apprehensive uneasy smiles, towards the stairs. She seemed glad when she had told the boy to change into the waiter's suit that lay on the little iron bed and be down in the restaurant by six. She left him a candle, flickering on the wooden washstand under the roof-window. He would rather have been in darkness. He changed his suit; the trousers struck damp against his legs, his hands were cold and he could not manipulate the shirt studs. Only these things kept him from blowing out the candle, from plunging himself into a darkness in which he could feel safe from Rosset, in which he could even hide from
Rosset if necessary. He did not realise until he began to go downstairs the full depth of his weakness and terror; his legs would scarcely support his body, weighed down by its flood of sickness and dread, a sickness which he felt might at any moment make him swoon and a dread which was already half-turned to terror. He groped his way heavily and slowly, as though ill, downstairs. At moments only his body seemed to be in existence; the rest of him became annihilated, dead even to terror. At last the smell of cooking reached him, awoke the deadness in him and gave him a little comfort. He went into the restaurant with a queer, forced, half-paralysed step.