The Lime Twig: Novel Read online

  “You managed to get here, Hencher,” the man says.

  “I thought I was on the dot, Larry … good as my word, you know.”

  “Yes, always good as your word. But you’ve forgotten to take off your cap.”

  Hencher takes it off, feels his whole head exposed and hot and ugly. At last he allows himself to look, and it is only the softest glow that his torch sheds on the man before him.

  “We got the horse, right outside in the van … I told you, right outside.”

  “But you stopped. You did not come here directly.”

  “I did my best. I did my bloody best, but if he wants to knock it off, if he wants to stop at home and have a word with the wife, why that’s just unfortunate … but no fault of mine, is it, Larry?”

  And then, listening in the direction of the car, waiting for a sound—scratch of the ignition key, oiled suck of gear-lever—he sees the hand extended in front of him and is forced to take hold of it. One boot moves, the other moves, the trenchcoat makes a harsh rubbing noise. And the hand lets go of his, the man fades out of the light and yet—Hencher wipes his face and listens— once in the darkness the footsteps ring back to him like those of an officer on parade.

  He keeps his own feet quiet until he reaches the yard and sees the open night sky beginning to change and grow milky like chemicals in a vat, and until he sniffs a faint odor of dung and tobacco smoke. Then he trudges loudly as he can and suddenly, calling the name, shines the bright torch on Cowles.

  “Pissed off, was he,” says Cowles, and does not blink.

  But in the cab Hencher already braces the steering wheel against his belly; the driver’s open door swings to the movement of the van. Cowles and the jockey and stableboy walk in slow procession behind the van, which is not too wide for the overgrown passage between the row of stalls, the long dark space between the low stable buildings, but which is high so that now and again the roof of the van brushes then scrapes against the rotted eaves. The tires are wet from the dampness of tangled and prickly weeds. Once, the van stops and Hencher climbs down, drags a bale of molded hay from its path. Then they move—horse van, walking men—and exhaust fumes fill empty bins, water troughs, empty stalls. In darkness they pass a shovel in an iron wheelbarrow, a saddle pad covered with inert black flies, a whip leaning against a whited post. Round a corner they come upon a red lantern burning beside an open and freshly whitewashed box stall. The hay rack has been mended, clean hard silken straw covers the floor, a red horse blanket lies folded on a weathered cane chair near the lantern.

  “Lovely will fetch him down for you, Hencher,” says Cowles.

  “I will fetch him down myself, if you please.”

  And Lovely the stableboy grins and walks into the stall; the jockey pushes the horse blanket off the chair, sits down heavily; Cowles takes one end of the chain while Hencher works with the other.

  They pry up the ends of the chain, allow it to fall link upon ringing link into bright iron pools at their feet until the raised and padded ramp swings loose, opens wider and wider from the top of the van as Cowles and Hencher lower it slowly down. Two gray men who stand with hands on hips and look up into the interior of the van. It is dark in there, steam of the horse drifts out; it appears that between the impacted bright silver flesh of the horse and padded walls no space exists for a man.

  Hencher puts the unlighted cigar between his teeth and steps onto the ramp. Silent and nearly broad as the horse he climbs up the ramp, gets his footing, squeezes himself against the white and silver flesh—the toe of one boot striking a hoof on edge, both hands attempting to hold off the weight of the horse—then glances down at Cowles, tries to speak, and slides suddenly into the dark of the van.

  And Cowles shouts, doubles over then as powerless as Hencher in the van. The ramp bounces, shakes on its hinges, and though the brake holds and the wheels remain locked, the chassis, cab, and high black sides all sway forward once at the moment they absorb that first unnatural motion of horse lunging at trapped man. Shakes, rattles, and the first loud sound of the hoof striking its short solid blow to metal fades. But not the commotion, the blind forward swaying of the van. While Cowles is shouting for help and dodging, leaping away, he somehow keeps his eyes on the visible rear hoofs and sees that, long as it lasts—the noise, the directionless pitching of the van—those rear hoofs never cease their dancing. The horse strikes a moment longer, but there is no metallic ringing, no sharp sound, and only the ramp drags a little more and the long torch falls from the cab.

  Then Cowles is vomiting into the tall grass—he is a fat man and a man as fat as himself lies inside the van —and the grass is sour, the longest blades tickle his lips. On his knees he sweats, continues to be sick, and with large distracted hands keeps trying to fold the grass down upon the whiteness collecting in the hollow of bare roots.

  Hencher, with fat lifeless arms still raised to the head kicked in, huddles yet on the van’s narrow floor, though the horse is turning round and round in the whitewashed stall. The jockey has left his chair and, cigarette between his lips, dwarfed legs apart, stands holding the long torch in both his hands and aiming it—like a rifle aimed from the hip—at Cowles. While Lovely the stableboy is singing now in a young pure Irish voice to the horse.

  “Give me a hand with the body, Cowles, and we’ll drag it into the stall,” the jockey says. “Can’t move it alone, cock, can’t move it alone.”

  2

  SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS

  Fastest Track at Aldington Since War …

  Thirteen Horses to Take the Field …

  Rock Castle Remains Question in Reporter’s Mind …

  Oh Mrs. Laval, Oh Sybilline … Your Mr. Slyter has all the luck you’ll say! Well, we drank each other’s health again last night, and she confessed that she knew me right along, and I told her that everyone knows Mr. Sidney Slyter, your old professional. I never lose sight of love or money in my prognostications, do I now? But it’s business first for me. … A puzzling late entry is Rock Castle, owned by one Mr. Michael Banks. And here’s the dodge: if the entry is actually Rock Castle as the owner claims, then I know him to be a horse belonging to the stables of that old sporting dowager, Lady Harvey-Harrow, and how does he come to be entered under the colors (lime-green and black) of Mr. Banks? Something suspicious here, something for the authorities or I miss my guess. However, I shall speak with Mr. Banks; I shall look at the horse; I shall telephone the dowager. Meanwhile, Sidney Slyter says: wish you were here. …

  It was Tuesday next and Margaret began to miss Michael in the afternoon. She tried to nap, but the pillow kept slipping through her fingers; she tried to mend the curtain, but her knees were in the way of the needle. Something was coming toward the window and it made her lonely. She went to the closet and from behind the duster and pail took down Banks’ bottle of spirits and drank a very small glass of it. The missing of Michael came over her, the loneliness, the small grief, and she was drifting quickly down the day and time itself was wandering.

  “Here puss, here puss. …”

  Limping, bristling its hairs, the cat appeared near the pantry door. It ate quickly, choked on every mouthful, the head jerked up and down. The silver of the fish and speckles of the cat’s eye caught the light. Now and then the dish scraped a little on the floor. Her back to the window, kneeling, Margaret watched the animal eat. And the cat, creature that claws tweed, sits high in the hallway, remains incorrigible upon the death of its mistress, beds itself in the linen or thrusts its enormous head into an alley, now sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone.

  But there was nothing sweet for her. She had dropped crumbs for the birds, she had leaned from the window, she had given the cat its dish. In the window—it looked out on the laundry court, was hard to raise—she had smelled the cool drifting air of spring and glanced at wireless antennas pulled taut across the sky. Annie must have heard the frame crash up, or must have caught the sound of her humming. Becaus
e Annie had come to the adjoining window, thrust out her blonde head, at twenty past two had jammed her sharp red elbows on the sill and talked for a while.

  “Rotten day,” Annie had said to her.

  “Michael mentioned it would be clear.”

  “It’s a rotten day. How’s his horse?”

  “Oh, he’s a fine horse. A lovely horse. …”

  “I don’t know who Mike thinks he is, to go off and get himself a horse. But I’ve always wanted to kiss a jockey.”

  And Annie had taken up a little purse and counted her change in the window. Together they had heard a tram eating away its tracks, heard the hammer and hawking of the world on the other side of the building. It was spring in the sunlight and they leaned toward each other, and the smell of cooking mutton had come into the courtyard.

  Now, between three and six, there was nothing sweet for her. Even her friend Annie had left the flat next door, and Michael was gone.

  “I’m dead to the world,” she said aloud.

  Behind cataracts of pale eyes the cat looked across at her, cat with a black and yellow head which a good milliner, in years past, might have sewn to the front of a woman’s high-crowned feathered hat. Margaret scratched on the floor, for a moment smiled. Her cat circled round the dish. It was so dark now that she could not see into the kitchen. From somewhere a draft began blowing the bottom of her skirt and she wondered what a fortuneteller—one of those old ladies with red hair and a birthmark—would make of her at this moment. There was the beef broth, water to be drawn and boiled, the sinister lamp to light, a tom photograph of children by the sea. Cold laurels in this empty room.

  “He has only gone to look at the horse in Highland Green,” she said. “It isn’t far.”

  Once the madame of a frock shop had tried to dress her in pink. And even she, Margaret, had at the last minute before the gown was packed, denied the outrageous combination of herself and the color. Once an Italian barber had tried to kiss her and she had escaped the kiss. Once Michael had given her an orchid preserved in a glass ball, and now she could not find it. How horrible she felt in pink; how horrible the touch of the barber’s lips; how heavy was the glassed orchid on her breast.

  Feeling lucky? Soon Michael would ask her that, after the sink was empty and her apron off. It was never luck she felt but she would smile.

  In the darkness the cat swallowed the last flake of herring—Michael usually fed it, Michael understood how it wanted an old woman’s milk to drink—then disappeared. It was gone and she thought it had left her in search of the whispering tongue of some old woman in a country cottage. So she stood, picked up the dish, made her way toward the smells of yellow soap and blackened stove. There was a bulb in the kitchen. But the bulb was bleak, it spoiled the brown wood, the sink, the cupboard doors which she had covered with blue curtains. She washed the cat’s dish in the dark, lit the stove in the dark. For a moment, before the match flame caught at the sooted jets, she smelled the cold endless odor of greasy gas and her heart commenced suddenly to beat.

  “Michael. Michael, is it you?”

  But she turned, struck a second match, and the gas flames puffed up from the pipe in a circle like tiny blue teeth round the rim of a coronet and she herself was plain, only a girl who could cook, clean, sing a little. And then, in the light of the gas, she saw a stableboy’s thin face and, outside, the mortuary bells were ringing.

  … The thin face of a pike and dirty hands—not black by earth, soot, or grease, but the soiled tan color of hands perpetually rubbing down a horse’s skin—and wearing riding trousers of twill but no socks, and from the belt up, naked.

  “Now then, Mr. Hencher’s with the horse, is that it?”

  Together they walk in the direction of the stalls, passing a shovel in an iron wheelbarrow, a saddle pad covered with black flies, a whip leaning against a whited post. Over one stall, on a rusty nail, hangs a jockey’s faded green-and-yellow cap.

  They continue and from the rotted wood in the eaves overhead comes the sound, compact, malcontent, of a hive of bees stinging to death a sparrow. And the stable-boy, treading hay wisps and manure between his shoes and the stones, points to the closed stalls and tells him of Princess Pat, Islam, Dead-at-Night, the few mares and stallions within. And he hears them paw the dark, hears the slow scraping of four pointed hoofs.

  “Smoke, Mr. Banks? I’ll just have a drag or two before I go back in with him.”

  A growth of wild prickly briar climbs one side of the stall. There are no sounds within. Michael steps away, draws in his cuff, stares at the double doors—while the stableboy shoots back the bolt, slips inside. The horse stands head to the rear wall, and first he sees the streaks of the animal’s buttocks, the high point that descends to the back. Then he sees the polished outline of the legs. Then the tail.

  And at the same moment, under the tail’s heavy and graying gall, and between the hind legs, he sees Hencher’s outstretched body and, nearest himself, the inert shoes, toes down.

  “How do you like him, Mr. Banks? Fine horse, eh?”

  “Hencher,” he whispers, “here’s Hencher!”

  Together they will bury Hencher with handfuls of straw, bolt the doors, wipe their hands, and for himself there will be no cod or beef at six, no kissing her at six, no going home—not with Hencher kicked to death by the horse. And forward in the dark the neck is lowered and he sees the head briefly as it swings sideways at the level of the front hoofs with ears drawn back and great honey-colored eyes floating out to him.

  She heard the distant mortuary bells. Outside, over all this part of the city, returning fathers were using their weary keys. It was time to feed the cats, the dogs, the little broken dolls. It was never luck she felt, but Margaret waited, standing beside the coal grate in which they built no fire, waited for him to hang up his hat, untie her apron strings. When Banks had first kissed her, touching the arm that was only an arm, the cheek that was only a cheek, he had turned away to find a hair in his mouth.

  Feeling lucky?

  In how many minutes now she would nod, smile again, sit across from him and hold her pencil and the evening five-pound crostic, she wearing no rings except the wedding band and, in her otherwise straight brown hair, touching the single deep wave which she had saved from childhood.

  Now and again from out the window would come the sound of lorries, the beat of the solitary policeman’s step, the cry of a child. Later, after he had pulled the light string, she would dream of the crostics and, in the dark, men with numbers wrapped round their fingers would feel her legs, or she would lie with an obscure member of the government on a leather couch, trying to remember and all the while begging for his name. Later still the cat would come licking about for its old woman’s milk.

  The asparagus was boiling finally when the telephone rang. She groped, found the instrument in the hallway, did not let the receiver touch her ear. “Yes?” And even after the first words were spoken the bell continued to ring, a mad thing ringing and ringing, trying to rouse the darkened flat.

  “… the telephone’s broken,” she whispered into the cup, and her hand was shaking. Then it went out of her head suddenly, and there was only the dark terrible dustiness in the hall.

  “Margaret?”

  “Michael, is it you?”

  “It is. Have you turned down the stove?”

  “I think so, Michael.”

  “And the water off?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you all right, Michael?”

  “We’re going up,” and the voice was fainter now. “We’re going up for the Aldington. There’s a hundred thousand in it. …”

  “I want to come,” she said.

  There was a pause. And then: “I’ve thought of that. There’s always the train. You come by train. Tonight.”

  “Annie might join me if I asked her.”

  “Come alone. Just come alone.”

  “Yes, Michael.”

  After anoth
er pause: “You’re the dear,” he said softly in the dark with traces of tenderness, and she heard the click and a child wailing somewhere down the row.

  “You’re the dear,” she repeated to herself in the kitchen. But she had not turned off the stove and the asparagus was burned. She put a little water in the pot and left it. An hour later she locked the flat, went down the stoop, signaled a high-topped taxicab to carry her to the train at Dreary Station. Hurrying she gave no thought to people on the streets. She was a girl with a band on her finger and poor handwriting, and there was no other world for her. No bitters in a bar, slick hair, smokes, no checkered vests. She was Banks’ wife by the law, she was Margaret, and if the men ever did get hold of her and go at her with their truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would still be merely Margaret with a dress and a brown shoe, still be only a girl of twenty-five with a deep wave in her hair.

  A wife would always ride through the night if she were bidden. Would ride through rainstorm, villages like Wimble, through woodland all night long. All of it for Michael’s sake: the station, the sign at the end of the village, the cart with the single suitcase on it, the lantern swinging beyond the unfamiliar spout, the great shadows of this countryside. It was a lonely transport, there was a loose pin under her clothes. And in this world of carriage seats, vibrations, windows rattling, she stared at the other passenger, at the woman who had called something out to her in Dreary Station and followed her aboard the train.