South Riding (69 page)

The little man in the circle gave the Hark For’ard, and the Empire was well away on a chase for that rare quarry, the corporate emotion of mass delight.

“He’s
too
delicious,” screamed the lady, her eyes wet with tears of laughter.

Hicks conscientiously played the fool, but a dull ache constricted his throat and oppressed his chest.

There was no reason why the sight of the chorus girls dancing like ponies should remind him of the four stiff legs of Black Hussar sticking through the mud like the legs of an upturned table. There was no reason why, when he shouted and laughed and applauded, his heart should feel wild with pain. Three weeks had passed since his first sight of that catastrophe. Police and lawyers had questioned him. Mrs. Beddows had been kind to him. Mr. Briggs had told him to stay on and look after things about the stables and garden until the sale. Tom Sawdon had suggested to him that when it was all over he might come down to the Nag’s Head and run in partnership on his savings. Everything was all right for Hicks—“Hicks will be all right”—as Jim Beddows informed his wife.

And he was all right. Had he not driven over with Tom and Bob to a grand football match? Had he not had a fish supper followed by drinks at the York Rose Hotel, and was he not now having a high old time at the Empire? And attracting the attention of half the house by his abandonment of gusto?

If only we could have buried him like a Christian; Hicks was thinking. He gave Castle a slap-up funeral, didn’t he? He never let any of us want for nothing—neither man nor horse.

Horses. Those girls don’t know nothing about horses. I’d like to see ’em look at a really decent horse. Now Burlington Bertie—that was a grand animal, by Albert the Good out of Sweet Sophia. Knocked himself to pieces in that box on the line between Derby and Manchester. Left alone he was. Always hated trains. Glorious stallion for stud. Now Carne would never have let a thing like that happen.

Carne had let Black Hussar break his back on Maythorpe Cliff.

Come off it! That was an accident. The cliff crumbled.

There was that little skewbald thoroughbred Carne bought for the missus. Showy mare. Regular devil she was; but neat on her feet. And Mrs. Carne could do anything with her. A real circus horse. Ride her upstairs if she liked. Had done. That’s a fact. That time they were off to the meet and Mrs. Carne was ready for a first wonder, already down on the drive and waiting. Only time she wasn’t hours late was tor hunting. Carne was up in his dressing-room. Couldn’t tie his stock. One thing he never could do. Always lost his temper. Called out of the window, Come and give me a hand! But she was in the saddle and cried, Damned if I do. Always free in the tongue for a lady. And he called, Oh, come up. Be a sport. Sport, she screamed. Lot of sport we shall get. You’ve kept me waiting half an hour already. Nonsense, he said, for he had a temper too. No wonder, when you think of the old man. Don’t exaggerate. Muriel. I’ve only been five minutes, but I may be half an hour if you don’t come and help me. Ordering me to dismount like a servant! she cried.
I
never ordered you. Don’t dismount then. I’ll come without the damn’ thing, he cried, and she said, I’m not going to ride with you looking like a fool, and turned the skewbald’s head, and gave her a smack with her crop, and rode her in, straight through the front door and down the hall and up the big front stairs, slithering and plucking she climbed, but keeping straight on at it and into Carne’s dressing-room, and there she faced him.

Hicks had raced up behind, fearing the worst, and found Carne in his shirt sleeves, his stock round his ear, gaping at Muriel, who sat still as a statue on the shivering mare. And then, what with surprise or fear or sheer bad manners, the little animal planted her four feet stiffly down together and began to make water, a great streaming torrent, there on to Carne’s grand crimson carpet, soaking down to the drawing-room ceiling, so that the patch was there to this day. And the missus screamed with laughter like she did sometimes, and Carne lifted her clean out of the saddle and stood holding her, her arms round his neck and her hat off, and she limp with laughing, and he said to Hicks, Take that disgusting brute away, and carried his wife through to her bedroom and slammed the door. It took Hicks half an hour to get the mare downstairs, but the Carnes never set off on that day’s hunting.

The Jewish comedienne and her ponies pranced away. A strong man replaced them, who bent bars of iron and lifted pianos, and hung upside down from a trapeze with a rod suspended from his mouth on to which more and yet more weights were slung.

A strong man, not only strong but agile, his muscles flexible as elastic and tough as steel. Heyer, whose shoulder had been aching all day since he stood on the damp football ground, thought of his own maimed body. As Hicks was bereaved of Carne, of horses, of the old values and loyalties which composed his world, Heyer was bereaved of more than his physical capacity. He too had lost a way of life, a set of values.

He knew that war was evil. With the British Legion he had passed resolutions about profiting from death and all the rest of it. But as he watched Sacho the Strong flex his huge muscles, and shouted applause at his spectacular feats, his mind was back in the worst experience of the war, the mud of Passchendaele. His feet groped for the duckboards through the foetid water. He was carrying rations up to the front-line trenches; the pack ground into his shoulder, the foul ooze seeped through puttees and boots. The fear of falling into that filth tormented him. Yet as he sat in his plush tip-up seat, leaning over the parapet into the boiling cauldron of the Kingsport Empire, he envied that younger self. He suffered from a sick nostalgia for the young Bob Heyer who had been Scotty’s friend, who had two good arms, who could himself play football instead of watching it, who could box, swim, dig, and was one of the best all-round athletes in the company. It was Scotty who had gone down into the mud, and for whose body they had groped in the stench and ordure of a flooded crater. Nothing in all his life had been so horrible as that . . . yet until he got his blighty he had known good times again. Boxing at the base; the ring in the tent at Amiens. The acid sweaty smell of men crowded together in woollen uniforms, the arc lights, the referee. The sing songs in that estaminet near Abbeyville. The relief from responsibility, the good fellowship, the pride of manhood and living that grew up there in France under the menace of death. He hungered for it. He knew that all other years must be lifeless and dull compared with those. He would continue to farm. He had his friends, Tom and Geordie. He would spend his evenings when he could in the Nag’s Head. But something more than his arm had been left behind in France. He would walk now maimed and bereaved till death.

The strong man was followed by a famous Whistling Comedian.

“Oh, I adore him! Watch our three musketeers in the circle now. This’ll be popular.”

It was. The three in the circle all applauded furiously as the familiar little phrase, whistled off the stage, grew louder, and the comedian strolled forward, peeling off his gloves, removing and folding his coat.

Tom Sawdon applauded. But he wished that the whistler had not chosen this special tune. He was one of Lily’s favourite broadcast entertainers. She had sat so often, her head a little on one side, her thin fingers raised, her lips pursed in sympathy. Now, listen—you! she had commanded. Isn’t he fine? Isn’t he grand?

Lily was now in hospital. After unthinkable weeks, Tom had induced them to take her. She was kept under drugs now. She did not know him that afternoon when he had visited her. She was already dead, so far as he was concerned.

“Just a little story,” began the comedian, “about a Scotsman who came down to Yorkshire and said . . .”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roared the three in the circle.

“Just listen to them!” cooed the lady in the box.

She could not see the ghosts marching through their minds as they laughed and listened. There was that grey pony from Texas Huckleberry that Carne tried to hunt when hounds met at Yarrold. Only time I ever saw a horse bolt with him. Gave one look at the hounds, got his tail between his legs, and was off like the wind.

That time we got that lift in a mule-wagon, along the Rouen Road, and the driver half-boiled and the mules took fright and we ran right into a staff car and the mule put his head in at the window and old Turnip Face thought he was having D.T.s. . . .

That time the colonel and I came home unexpected, and the big house was shut and we went to Lily’s, and she made up a bed for the colonel in our front room and roasted us a chicken.

All their dreams for the future, all their memories of the past, swarmed round them, wounding them, mocking them, as the comedian replaced his gloves, whistling pensively, and strolled again off the stage. It was their memories that they applauded.

“What about a drink?” asked Bob.

They made for the bar.

“Now,” explained the lady, “we all go and squash up in a perfectly
revolting
bar, packed with pimps, ladies from the dock and God knows what, and drink frightful beer, out of the most
disgusting
glasses, and it’s all too he-mannish and Hemingway for words.”

The atmosphere of the Empire bar was certainly robust and pungent. Two cynical barmaids, one elderly, hennaed and fatigued on aching bunions (she had three sons to keep), one young, skinny and avid, slapped down the glasses on to the beer-ringed counter as fast as they could fill them. The drinks ordered were as various as the company. Sherries, ports, beers, whiskies, stouts and even such exotic luxuries as
crême de menthe
and cherry brandy for the ladies who sat in the wicker chairs, exposing fat calves in light mud-splashed stockings bulging up from tight high-heeled patent shoes. One, drinking gin and ginger, boasted a little green toque ornamented with black osprey. A great port wine mark half covered one side of her face. She had been married three times. Pearls dripped from her bosom.

The more rustic Hicks looked at her and her friends. “Tarts,” he observed.

“Not a bit,” Sawdon, more sophisticated, told him. “Old clo’ dealers, and fish and chip shopmen’s wives having a night out.”

It was a night out. The Empire sold the noises of happy uproar with its tickets. True, no single face in all the company there was lit by real gaiety. True, that behind the toasts, the jokes and cat-calls, thoughts of death, sickness, unemployment and loss tugged, nagging, at their minds. The laughter was not loud enough, the jokes were inadequately brutal, the good fellowship too ephemeral, to drown that consciousness. Yet on the whole these Yorkshire men and women were having a good time. They had paid for it and bought it; they enjoyed it. It was something as definite and tangible as the counter, the palms and the marble topped tables. Eee, I did have a good time at the Empire last night. I did an’ all.

They did, and all.

Young Lovell Brown was sharing the enjoyment. He was showing off with the splendid self-assurance following three whiskies to a little platinum blonde with startled blue eyes. Perhaps she was really startled by Brown’s stories, perhaps the mascara on her eyelashes made her eyes water unless she opened them very wide.

“My dear girl,” he was saying, “it stand to reason. Absolutely. There’s a fellow in debt—thousands—jolted off council—wife mad—mortgage on farm—little girl to keep— dotes on her. What would you do?”

“I’d like another mint,” said the blonde sensibly.

“
Crême de menthe
, miss, and look nippy,” commanded Lovell.

If they’d invent a lorry I could drive with my feet, thought Heyer, we might get on.

Lily liked
crême de menthe
, thought Sawdon.

Hicks moved nearer to Lovell Brown, his face glowering deeper crimson. So this was what the—were saying, was it?

“A man like Carne of Maythorpe,” continued Lovell, enchanted by admiration of his own deductive powers, “doesn’t ride far along a cliff after heavy rains without knowing what he’s in for. He doesn’t take out a life insurance and let it lapse, then suddenly pay all up a few weeks before he’s supposed to be killed—for
nothing.
Does he?”

“When does the show start, ducky?” asked the girl.

But Lovell was well away.

“No. Let them
find
the body, I say. If there
is
a body.”

“Just say them there words again,” commanded Hicks quietly.

“I beg your pardon.” Lovell swung round.

“What you was saying—about Mr. Carne.”

“Oh, Carne? You interested in the case?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Good. So am I. In on it for the
Chronicle.
Press, you know. Personally, I don’t think there’s really much doubt about it. The insurance company’ll be a fool if it pays up. There’s been too much hanky panky about here lately all together.”

“Has there?”

“All that business about the Town Planning Scheme. Carne accuses Snaith and others of corruption. Snaith brings a libel suit. Carne loses his seat. Can’t stand up to it. Stages a getaway.”

“You mean he never did fall over that cliff?”

“That’s what I mean, my friend.”

“That he broke a good horse’s back to save his face, eh?”

“That’s it. Right first time.”

The bell announcing the second half of the programme whirred over the bar; the big commissionaire in blue and silver paused by the bar; couples began to squeeze their way past to the tortuous stone passage, but a few found greater hope of entertainment in the sight of the little red-faced groom dancing up and down in rage before the young reporter.