The Rendezvous and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Edwin to the telephone, looking dutiful and attentive into the distemper three inches from his nose. ‘Yes, Lady Dogge. Yes: yes. I’m very sorry, Lady Dogge; but it’s finished now, Lady Dogge. Oh, please don’t say that, Lady Dogge. No, Lady Dogge. Yes, Lady Dogge. Good-bye, Lady Dogge.’

  ‘The bitch,’ he said, but not very loud. He sat down quickly to his desk and read through the manuscript. ‘It will do,’ he said, without conviction, and crammed it into an envelope.

  He hurried down the shallow flights of stairs, iron-bound cement in a chocolate-painted well that clanged and echoed, down to the wan hall with its lavatory tiles. The porter came out of his booth and watched him down the last four flights.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said to the porter, as he put the envelope into the slit. ‘Is there any post?’

  ‘Where’s Mrs?’ said the porter, staring up the stairs.

  ‘She’s away at the moment.’

  ‘Oh. Visiting, isn’t it?’

  The porter was also the deputy hangman for the south-east region and the tenants had to humour his independence.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edwin. ‘Has the postman been?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, putting his hand over his coat-pocket. ‘No, I don’t think. But there is a parcel for you. Mrs is leaving it this morning.’

  ‘Then why did you ask where she was?’

  ‘Oh I did not, Mr; and it is a big old parcel,’ said the porter, suddenly changing his tone to one of close affection and laying his hand on Edwin’s sleeve as if to test the quality of the cloth, ‘I can have the string, isn’t it?’

  The porter had already unwrapped the greater part of the stag, and Edwin finished the unpacking there in the booth: then grasping the polished shield upon which the head was mounted he began his upward journey. At the third flight he had to change his hold, for the shield was too slippery and the head too heavy in front; but taking the creature round the neck he balanced the weight better, and although it was momentarily disagreeable to put his face against the old rough hairiness he soon grew accustomed to it and after a flight or two he did not mind at all. They went up, cheek by jowl, very well balanced, and with the same noble antlers shading them like an open-work umbrella; and as he climbed – far happier than when he had gone down – Edwin reflected upon this token of his wife’s esteem, this mute forerunner of her prompt return.

  ‘I had almost begun to think –’ he confided to the stag. And ‘It will be very useful,’ he said to himself as he opened the door, ‘and although it is far too large and spreading for the lobby, I will fix it solidly to my bedroom wall after I have done the washing-up, and I will hang my clothes on it at night.’

  Samphire

  SHEER, SHEER, the white cliff rising, straight up from the sea, so high that the riding waves were nothing but ripples on a huge calm. Up there, unless you leaned over, you did not see them break, but for all the distance the thunder of the water came loud. The wind, too, tearing in from the sea, rushing from a clear, high sky, brought the salt tang of the spray on to their lips.

  They were two, standing up there on the very edge of the cliff: they had left the levelled path and come down to the break itself and the man was crouched, leaning over as far as he dared.

  ‘It is a clump of samphire, Molly,’ he said; then louder, half turning, ‘Molly, it is samphire. I said it was a samphire, didn’t I?’ He had a high, rather unmasculine voice, and he emphasized his words.

  His wife did not reply, although she had heard him the first time. The round of her chin was trembling like a child’s before it cries: there was something in her throat so strong that she could not have spoken if it had been for her life.

  She stepped a little closer, feeling cautiously for a firm foothold, and she was right on him and she caught the smell of his hairy tweed jacket. He straightened so suddenly that he brushed against her. ‘Take care,’ he cried, ‘I almost trod on you. Yes, it was samphire. I said so as soon as I saw it from down there. Have a look.’

  She could not answer, so she knelt and crawled to the edge. Heights terrified her, always had. She could not close her eyes; that only made it worse. She stared unseeing, while the brilliant air and the sea and the noise of the sea assaulted her terrified mind and she clung insanely to the thin grass. Three times he pointed it out, and the third time she heard him so as to be able to understand his words. ‘… fleshy leaves. You see the fleshy leaves? They used them for pickles. Samphire pickles!’ He laughed, excited by the wind, and put his hand on her shoulder. Even then she writhed away, covering it by getting up and returning to the path.

  He followed her. ‘You noted the fleshy leaves, didn’t you, Molly? They allow the plant to store its nourishment. Like a cactus. Our native cactus. I said it was samphire at once, didn’t I, although I have never actually seen it before. We could almost get it with a stick.’

  He was pleased with her for having looked over, and said that she was coming along very well: she remembered – didn’t she? – how he had had to persuade her and persuade her to come up even the smallest cliffs at first, how he had even to be a little firm. And now there she was going up the highest of them all, as bold as brass; and it was quite a dangerous cliff too, he said, with a keen glance out to sea, jutting his chin; but there she was as bold as brass looking over the top of it. He had been quite right insisting, hadn’t he? It was worth it when you were there, wasn’t it? Between these questions he waited for a reply, a ‘yes’ or a hum of agreement. If he had not insisted she would always have stayed down there on the beach, wouldn’t she? Like a lazy puss. He said, wagging his finger to show that he was not quite in earnest, that she should always listen to her Lacey (this was a pet name that he had coined for himself). Lacey was her lord and master, wasn’t he? Love, honour and obey?

  He put his arm round her when they came to a sheltered turn of the path and began to fondle her, whispering in his secret night-voice, Tss-tss-tss, but he dropped her at once when some coast guards appeared.

  As they passed he said, ‘Good-day, men,’ and wanted to stop to ask them what they were doing but they walked quickly on.

  In the morning she said she would like to see the samphire again. He was very pleased and told the hotel-keeper that she was becoming quite the little botanist. He had already told him and the nice couple from Letchworth (they were called Jones and had a greedy daughter: he was an influential solicitor, and Molly would be a clever girl to be nice to them), he had already told them about the samphire, and he had said how he had recognized it at once from lower down, where the path turned, although he had only seen specimens in a hortus siccus and illustrations in books.

  On the way he stopped at the tobacconist on the promenade to buy a stick. He was in high spirits. He told the man at once that he did not smoke, and made a joke about the shop being a house of ill-fume; but the tobacconist did not understand. He looked at the sticks that were in the shop but he did not find one for his money and they went out. At the next tobacconist, by the pier, he made the same joke to the man there. She stood near the door, not looking at anything. In the end he paid the marked price for an ash walking stick with a crook, though at first he had proposed a shilling less: he told the man that they were not ordinary summer people, because they were going to have a villa there.

  Walking along past the pier towards the cliff path, he put the stick on his shoulder with a comical gesture, and when they came to the car park where a great many people were coming down to the beach with picnics and pneumatic rubber toys he sang, We are the boys that nothing can tire: we are the boys that gather samphire. When a man who was staying in the same hotel passed near them, he called out that they were going to see if they could get a bunch of jolly good samphire that they had seen on the cliff yesterday. The man nodded.

  It was a long way to the highest cliff, and he fell silent for a little while. When they began to climb he said that he would never go out without a stick again; it was a fine, honest thing, an ashplant
, and a great help. Didn’t she think it was a great help? Had she noticed how he had chosen the best one in the shop, and really it was very cheap; though perhaps they had better go without tea tomorrow to make it up. She remembered, didn’t she, what they had agreed after their discussion about an exact allowance for every day? He was walking a few feet ahead of her, so that each time he had to turn his head for her answer.

  On the top it was blowing harder than the day before, and for the last hundred yards he kept silent, or at least she did not hear him say anything.

  At the turn of the path he cried, ‘It is still there. Oh jolly good. It is still there, Molly,’ and he pointed out how he had first seen the samphire, and repeated, shouting over the wind, that he had been sure of it at once.

  For a moment she looked at him curiously while he stared over and up where the plant grew on the face of the cliff, the wind ruffling the thin, fluffy hair that covered his baldness, and a keen expression on his face; and for a moment she wondered whether it was perhaps possible that he saw beauty there. But the moment was past and the voice took up again its unceasing dumb cry: Go on, oh, go on, for Christ’s sake go on, go on, go on, oh go on.

  They were there. He had made her look over. ‘Note the fleshy leaves,’ he had said; and he had said something about samphire pickle! and how the people at the hotel would stare when they brought it back. That was just before he began to crouch over, turned from her so that his voice was lost.

  He was leaning right over. It was quite true when he said that he had no fear of heights: once he had astonished the workmen on the steeple of her uncle’s church by walking among the scaffolding and planks with all the aplomb of a steeplejack. He was reaching down with his left arm, his right leg doubled under him and his right arm extended on the grass: his other leg was stretched out along the break of the cliff.

  Once again there was the strong grip in her throat; her stomach was rigid and she could not keep her lip from trembling. She could hardly see, but as he began to get up her eyes focused. She was already there, close on him – she had never gone back to the path this time. God give me strength: but as she pushed him she felt her arms weak like jelly.

  Instantly his face turned; absurd, baby-face surprise and a shout unworded. The extreme of horror on it, too. He had been half up when she thrust at him, with his knee off the ground, the stick hand over and the other clear of the grass. He rose, swaying out. For a second the wind bore up his body and the stick scrabbled furiously for a purchase on the cliff. There where the samphire grew, a little above, it found a hard ledge, gripped. Motionless in equilibrium for one timeless space – a cinema stopped in action – then his right hand gripped the soil, tore, tore the grass and he was up, from the edge, crouched, gasping huge sobbing draughts of air on the path.

  He was screaming at her in an agonized falsetto interrupted by painful gasps, searching for air and life. ‘You pushed me, Molly you – pushed me. You – pushed me.’

  She stood silent, looking down and the voice rushed over her. You pushed – you pushed me – Molly. She found she could swallow again, and the hammering in her throat was less. By now his voice had dropped an octave: he had been speaking without a pause but for his gasping – the gasping had stopped now, and he was sitting there normally. ‘… not well; a spasm. Wasn’t it, Molly?’ he was saying; and she heard him say ‘accident’ sometimes.

  Still she stood, stone-still and grey and later he was saying ‘… possibly live together? How can we possibly look at one another? After this?’ And sometime after it seemed to her that he had been saying something about their having taken their room for the month … accident was the word, and spasm, and not well – fainting? It was, wasn’t it, Molly? There was an unheard note in his voice.

  She turned and began to walk down the path. He followed at once. By her side he was, and his face turned to hers, peering into her face, closed face. His visage, his whole face, everything, had fallen to pieces: she looked at it momentarily – a very old terribly frightened comforting-itself small child. He had fallen off a cliff all right.

  He touched her arm, still speaking, pleading. ‘It was that, wasn’t it, Molly? You didn’t push me, Molly. It was an accident …’

  She turned her dying face to the ground, and there were her feet marching on the path; one, the other: one, the other; down, down, down.

  The Clockmender

  SUDDENLY he was awake. His waking had the abrupt completeness of an electric light, entirely off one second and entirely on the next. This was no warm transition from a confused doze to a partial consciousness of the world, an awareness that would begin with the pillow, the position of his relaxed body under the bedclothes, and that would work slowly outwards to a comfortable realization of the world, with himself in it, each piece falling naturally into its accustomed place. No. This was an abrupt and full awakening from a profound sleep; and the world that presented itself was naked, instantly concrete, sharply defined and entire.

  He knew at once that there was no hope whatever of drifting off again, and he realized with horror that the grey light in the room could not have been there much above an hour. He looked over the edge of his bed at the pair of chronometers on the low table: on each severe dial the steel hands showed five twenty-five. Some disturbance, some chance noise had cheated him of three hours of sleep.

  It was a tragedy. He would have to get up very soon, for in a short time the insistent restlessness of his body would make bed intolerable and he would be forced into waste of another day, another cruelly lengthened day.

  Three hours more to serve. It was a tragedy: and it was so unfair. He had spun out the evening until well past ten o’clock, and he had won the right to sleep until eight or even nine. He had gone on polishing the new-cut pallets of the Knibb clock until they were almost beyond perfection, burnishing the faces with a slip of agate – four thousand lengthways strokes to each of the four angles. Two hours and thirteen minutes, timing each stroke by the beat of a half-seconds pendulum. That had earned him his rest, surely.

  But no. Here he was at half-past five, irrevocably awake and committed to the day. Something tapped on the window and scraped across the glass: that must have been it, he thought, looking round; the long thin branch from the wistaria: it should have been pruned years ago, when it was a stray twig; but now it had grown long enough to reach the windowpane as the cold wind of the dawn dragged it against the side of the house.

  He had planted that wistaria himself when first he had the place. In those days he had been up with the first light – he had been up before the first light – for he had often switched on the lamp as he dressed. He had dressed in his gardening clothes at once, to lose no time.

  He had dressed then: he had willingly gone through the process of putting on all those garments, selecting, buttoning, tying, turning right-side out, doing-up; every day he had accepted the series of motions that would have to be reversed at night. At that time he had been able to accept the drill of left arm – right arm, left leg – right leg, left foot – right foot, and its perpetual repetition. And the prospect of it had never kept him daunted in his bed: he remembered his eager getting up – springing up – in spite of his warm sleepiness, from a bed where he had gone to sleep still working out the details of the garden. Of the kitchen garden, mostly, for although he had a brave show of flowers it was the parallelograms of the kitchen garden that fascinated him – the drilled rows of the potatoes and the cabbages – and he would lie fighting against sleep while he carried out the mental arithmetic designed to show the total yield of his thirty-five rows of main-crop potatoes, if each plant yielded an average of three and a quarter pounds.

  He remembered that now, as a fact: but he could no longer comprehend the once-vital urgency that had made it a fact; he could not feel that there was anything at all in common between the young man who had so enthusiastically worked out the cropping-plan for a seven-year rotation; who had, as the winter days grew short, dug the last double trenches
by the light of a hurricane lamp to be doubly ready for the longed-for spring. Nothing in common between the man who had dug and cherished the garden and the one who now had not even visited the lower plot, the head-high jungle of nettles and fool’s parsley, for months and months. Yet there was a physical continuity: the body was the same. And it was the same bed in which he lay. The wistaria, too, was a speaking witness. He had planted it, a straggling Whipple, over the buried carcass of an ass, and now its trunk was like a grey python on the wall and its untended branches rapped against his bedroom windowpane.

  One day, perhaps, he would go down through the tangle of roses to the kitchen garden and see whether among the rank growth below the apple-trees he could find the remains of his hives. It would be interesting to know if any of the colonies had survived. Once, nearly three years ago it must be now, he had seen a swarm clustered like an uncoloured shining bunch of grapes on the handle of a forgotten spade. They might have been from his own bees.

  He would go down. But at the thought of actually doing it, of fixing a time for doing it, of dressing in order to do it, so great a physical repulsion seized him that to escape he turned his head further down into his pillow and fixed his eyes on the glass window in the side of the chronometer case.