The Daffodil Sky (22 page)

This was as much an hallucination as Saxby's own belief that his rose-garden was already there in the wilderness. But all dreams, like fires, need stoking, and for an hour the Bulfields sat stoking theirs. They drank stodgily, without joy, at a sort of unholy communion of whisky. And by seven o'clock Mrs Bulfield was loud and stupefied.

Whether it was the moment Mrs Saxby had been waiting for I don't know, but she suddenly got up from her chair, as full of immaculate and sober charm and vibration as ever, and said:

‘Well, would you like to see the rest of the house now?'

‘If it's all like this it's as good as done,' Mrs Bulfield said. ‘It's absolutely terrific. I think it's perfect—where do you keep the coal?'

Bulfield let out thunderclaps of laughter at this, roaring:

‘That's it!—we got to see the coal-hole. We must see that. And the whatsit!—we got to see the whatsit too.'

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Bulfield,' Mrs Saxby said. ‘Forgive me—perhaps you'd like to see it in any case?'

‘Not me. I'm all right,' Mrs Bulfield said. ‘I'm like a drain.'

‘Coal-hole!' Bulfield said. ‘Come on, Ada. Coal-hole! Got to see the coal-hole!'

‘You'll excuse us, won't you?' Mrs Saxby said to me, and once again the eyes were buttoned-up, grey and charming as the walls of the house, so pale as to be transparent, so that I could look right through them and see nothing at all beyond.

It must have been a quarter of an hour before Saxby spoke again. He drank with a kind of arithmetical regularity: the glass raised, three sips, the glass down. Then a pause. Then the glass up again, three sips, and the glass down. It seemed to me so like a man determined to drink himself silly that I was intensely relieved when he said:

‘Let's get a spot of air. Eh? Outside?'

So we wandered out through the back of the house, and his first act there was to point out to me three or four rose trees actually growing on a wall. A bloom of cement dust covered the scarlet and cream and salmon of the flowers. He regarded them for a few moments with uncertainty, appeared about to say something else about them and then walked on.

His evident determination to say nothing more about one hallucination, that of the rose-garden, prepared me for his reluctance to elaborate or surrender another. This was his illusion of the sick, the expiring Mrs Saxby.

‘She'll kill herself,' he said. ‘She can't stand up to it. She'll just wear herself down to the bone.'

I refrained from saying anything about how healthy I thought Mrs Saxby seemed to be.

‘You know how many houses she's done this to?' he said. ‘You want to know?'

I encouraged him and he said:

‘Fifteen. We've lived in fifteen houses in twenty years.'

He began to speak of these houses wrathfully, with jealousy and sadness. He spoke with particular bitterness of a house called
The Croft
. I gathered it was a big crude mansion of stone in post-Edwardian style having large bay-windows of indelicate pregnant massiveness
pushing out into shrubberies of laurel and a vast plant called a gunnera, a kind of giant's castle rhubarb. ‘Like fat great paunches they were, the windows,' he said, ‘like great fat commissionaires,' and I could see that he hated them as he might have hated another man.

On one occasion the Saxbys had lived in a windmill. Saxby had spent a winter carrying buckets of water up and down the stairway, eating by the light of hurricane lamps, groping across a dark, stark hillside every morning to catch his train to the office in Whitehall. Then there had been a coastguard's house by the sea. The shore was flat and wind-torn and unembellished by a single feather of tamarisk or sea-holly or rock or weed. Then, because the war came, there were smaller houses: accessible, easy to run,
chic
and clever, sops to the new avidity of war, the new, comfortless servantless heaven for which men were fighting. She roamed restlessly about, looking for, and at, only those places that to other people seemed quite impossible: old Victorian junkeries, old stables, old warehouses, old cart-sheds, a riverside boat-house, bringing to all of them the incessant vibration, the intense metamorphosis of her charm. Her passion for each house was, I gathered, a state of nervous and tearing exultancy. She poured herself into successive transformations with an absorption that was violent. She was like a woman rushing from one amorous orgy to another: hungry and insatiable and drained away.

She had in fact been unfaithful to him for a series of houses; it amounted to that. She had taken love away from him and had given it with discriminate wantonness
to bricks and mortar. I do not say she could help this; but that was how I looked at it. She and Saxby had been married rather late. He was reaching the outer boundaries of middle-aged comfort when he first met her. He had wanted, as men do, a place of his own. He had wanted to come home at night to a decent meal, unassertive kindliness and some sense of permanency. Above all the sense of permanency. He had a touching desire to get his roots down: to plant things, invest in earth, reap the reward of sowing and nurturing things in one place.

He came home instead to that quivering febrile vibration of hers that was so astonishing and charming to other people—people like me—until he could stand it no longer and could only call it a disease. He was really right when he said there was something wrong with her heart. The profundity of its wrongness was perhaps visible only to him. Case-books had no name for her condition or its symptoms or anything else about her—but he had, and he knew it had turned him into a starved wanderer without a home.

That was the second of his pictures: of Mrs Saxby constantly sick with the pressure of transforming another house, too sick to eat, distraught by builders and decorators and electricians and above all by the ferocious impact of herself. ‘She's really ill. You don't see it today. She's really ill. She'll kill herself. She lives at that awful pace——'

The third was of himself.

Did I remember the sandwiches, that first night we had met in the train? That was the sort of thing he had to put up with. Could I imagine anything more hideous
than that awful bread and mustard? That had been her idea of his supper.

I thought he might well be sick as he spoke of it. And I even thought for a moment I might be sick too. We had again wandered beyond the house into the wilderness of horse-radish and smoking thistle. In the hot late afternoon a plague of big sizzling flies, a fierce blackish emerald turquoise, had settled everywhere on leaves and thistle-heads, in grass mown and unmown. Our steps exploded them. He swung at these repulsive insect-clouds with his hands, trying to beat them off in futile blasphemies that I felt must be directed, really, in their savagery, against Mrs Saxby. I could not help feeling that, in his helpless fury, he wanted to kill her and was taking it out on the flies.

But he was not taking it out on the flies: not his feelings for Mrs Saxby anyway. He took an enormous half-tipsy swipe at a glittering and bloated mass of flies and spat at them:

‘Get out, you sickening creepers, get out! You see,' he said to me, ‘I wouldn't care so much if it wasn't for the people. She makes all the houses so lovely—she always does it so beautifully—and then she sells them to the most ghastly people. Always the most bloody awful ghastly people. That's what gets me.'

From the house, a moment later, came the sound of Mr Bulfield triumphantly playing with the appurtenances of the whatsit and of Mrs Bulfield, drooping drunkenly from an upstairs window, trumpeting hoarsely in the direction of the rose-garden that was not there:

‘Now you've started something. Now you've set him off! He'll spend his life in there.'

And I knew, as Saxby did, that another house had gone.

We met only once more: in the late autumn of that year.

On that occasion we travelled down together, into the country, by the evening train. He seemed preoccupied and did not speak much. I imagined, perhaps, that another house had been begun, that he was off again on his homeless, bread-and-mustard wanderings. But when I spoke of this he simply said:

‘The Bulfields haven't even moved in yet. We had some difficulty about another licence for an extension over the stable.'

‘How is your wife?' I said.

‘She's——'

The word dying was too painful for him to frame. Yet I knew that it was the word he was trying to say to me; because once again, as when I had first met him, he lifted his hands in that little pouf! of sad and light extermination.

‘She started another house on the other side of the hill,' he said. ‘It was too much for her. After all she can't go on like it for ever——'

After he had got out at the little station I could not help feeling very sorry for him. He had left behind him a queer air of sadness that haunted me—and also, as if in expression of his great distraction, his umbrella.

And because I did not know when I should see him again I drove over, the following afternoon, to the house on the chalk hillside, taking the umbrella with me.

The house stood enchanting in its wilderness of perishing grass and weeds, yellow with the first burning of frost on them, and a maid in a uniform of pale grey-rose—to match, evidently, the exquisite walls of that room in which Bulfield had roared his joy over the coal-hole and the whatsit—opened the door to me.

‘Is Mr Saxby in?' I said. ‘I have brought the umbrella he left in the train.'

‘No, sir,' she said. ‘But Mrs Saxby is in. Would you care to see Mrs Saxby?'

‘Yes,' I said.

I went in and I gave the umbrella to Mrs Saxby. The day was coolish, with clear fresh sunlight. As I came away she stood for a moment or two at the door, talking to me, the light filling her eyes with delicate illumination, giving her once again that look of being full of charm, of being very alive with an effect of compact vibration—and as healthy as ever.

‘I am glad you came over once more,' she said. ‘We are moving out on Saturday.'

The dead grasses, scorched by summer and now blanched by frost, waved across the white hillside where the rose-garden should have been.

‘I'm afraid it's an awful wilderness,' she said. ‘But we never touch gardens. That's the one thing people prefer to do for themselves.'

I drove slowly down the hill in cool sunshine. The country was incomparable. The fires of autumn were burning gold and drowsy in the beeches.

If they seemed sadder than usual it was because I
thought of Saxby. I wondered how long he had wanted to be free of her and how long he had wanted her to die. I wondered how many times he had wanted to kill her and if ever he would kill her—or if he would remain, as I fancied he would do, just bound to her for ever.

He was last coming off the shift at noon. The six of them, including himself and Johnson, had been working some way up the gully of the new quarry face, where the rock was raw cheese-yellow under the rim of dry brown earth. Big batches of wild golden broom had sown themselves across the old workings and sometimes as he looked up in the heat of June the entire valley seemed alive with running flame.

He stooped behind a tip-truck to tie his bootlace. It was his ruse for dropping back. His rock-dusty fingers were thick and awkward and by the time he had finished tightening both laces he saw that Johnson and the rest were already at the foot of the line. The thin silver rails of the narrow-gauge track quivered with heat where they met in the dusty distance. The crusher that had cracked and thundered and spewed white rock-dust all morning was quiet in the cloudless noon.

He turned and walked back up the track. He was so sick of Johnson, so obsessed by it, that he had come away from the quarry-face with a spanner in his hands
and even when stooping to tie his bootlaces he put it down and picked it up again and had not noticed it. Now he became aware of it and stopped to stare at it stupidly, a big blue steel ratchet-spanner that he used on the mechanical digger and that he had blindly grabbed and walked away with when the whistle blew.

‘How's the villa, Joe boy? Found the villa yet, Joe? How big's the villa going to be when you find it, Joe? Big enough for you and Kitty? Think the professor'll give you first chance on it?'

At first he simply said, ‘Put a sock in it, Johnson,' but now he had gone beyond that.

‘Only asking, ain't I? After all you gotta find the villa. You got the bath-house. You gotta find the villa.'

‘They'll find it. Without your help.'

‘Hope so too. You don't catch me excavating for Roman pre-fabs. How'd they know it's Roman anyway?'

‘Shut your mouth, Johnson. One of these days you might open it and say something.'

It was six weeks since he had first scooped up, on a parching windy April morning, a squared corner stone of rock and half a scoop of what he thought at first were broken flower-pots. He got down from the scoop and held a few fragments of terracotta in his hands and let a little of the light red-brown dust run through his fingers. He found a larger piece of terracotta that might have been the rim of a shallow bowl and for some time he stood there looking at that too with brown, puzzled, unvindictive eyes until at last Pop Nichols came up and saw it and said:

‘You better tell Mr Dyson. I remember Jim Pawley found some stuff like that up on the old workings. There
was a hell of a row because he dumped it and never said. You go down to th' office and tell Mr Dyson. I think it's Roman or something, Joe.'

That was the beginning of the bath. Mr Dyson rang up the curator from the archæological museum in the county town, a man named Brookes, who presently came out on Saturdays and Sundays and began digging when the men were not working on the Monday. The men called Brookes the professor and after the first week-end the men on the new quarry face went up to look at the excavations. An oblong trench had been dug and except that there were steps in it Joe Longland thought it looked like a grave. A little pile of the familiar terra-cotta fragments lay beside it and further away a heap of small squared stones. He picked up one of these stones in his big hands and held it and looked at it for some time. A pale rose dust, like pollen, came off on his fingers and in his slow way he felt stirred for the first time by the idea that he might be holding something immensely old, something ageless and wonderful, in his hands.