The Lime Twig: Novel Page 7

  A sudden roll of smoke passed the windows and she saw herself, and her eyes ached and already she had been in her clothes too long. But the crostics would be waiting when she returned. “What have you done with the kiddies, Mrs. Banks?” asked the woman again.

  Beyond the lights of crossings it was dark, the trees bent away from the train, and Margaret felt the wobbling tracks running over the ties, and each tie crushed under the wheels became a child. Children were tied down the length of track: she saw the toads hopping off their bodies at the first whisper of wheels, the faint rattling of oncoming rods and chains, and she saw the sparks hitting the pale heads and feet. Then the steam lay behind on the tracks and the toads returned.

  “Done with them?” Margaret said. “I’ve done nothing with them. There aren’t any children.”

  The handle was rattling on her valise—she had not put it in the rack—and her toes pressed against a sooty pipe. Her brown skirt was drawn down completely, cloth over anonymous knees and heavy calves. In her hand was the pink ticket. She sat backward with her shoulder blades to the whistle engine, and looking out the window, she feared this reversed and disappearing countryside.

  “Oh,” said the woman and flattened her paper, “I thought you’d probably parked them with your mother.”

  “No. I didn’t do anything like that.”

  “Weren’t you ever parked when you were a child?”

  “I don’t remember. …”

  “I was. I remember it,” said the woman. “I was parked out more than I was home. For me there was nothing at the window, I used to eat my hands in the corner.”

  “I don’t remember much of when I was a child,” said Margaret. She noticed then a dead wasp suspended between the window’s double sheets of glass. The train turned sharply and the overnight bag fell against her leg.

  “Well,” the woman spoke up above the noise. “Well,” and coldly she reached a hand toward Margaret, “it used to be parking out for me.” The woman paused, steadied herself, the train hissed round the turn. “But that’s past. Now it’s my sister leaves her kids with me of a weekend or summer. And I’m at the good end, now.”

  “All summer long?” asked Margaret.

  “Some years, she does. I encourage it.” And Margaret saw the wheels flattening the heads and feet.

  A signal flashed. A yellow light then red, and levers, long prongs, pig-iron fingers worked in rust out there. The train swayed and stale water splashed in the decanters. The train smelled like the inside of an old man’s hat—smelled of darkness, hair, tobacco—and the steam was up and she saw a car with its tiny lamps like match heads off in the blackness at a crossing. Were they merely waiting in the car? Or had the hand brake been set and were they kissing? Margaret felt the soot sifting into her bosom, she was breathing it down her nostrils. She wanted a wash.

  “How old are they? Your sister’s, I mean … her little children.”

  “Oh, young,” said the woman, and Margaret looked at her. “But not so young they won’t remember when they’ve grown. …” There were smells coming off the woman too, smells that lived on her despite the odor of coke and burning rails. Smells of shoe black and rotting lace, smells that were never killed by cleaning nor destroyed by the rain. The woman’s strong body, her clothing, her hatpins and hair—all were greased with the smells of age.

  “Monica’s in the middle. Seven. She paints her nails.”

  “It’s a nice name,” said Margaret, and looking up, saw the woman’s eyes like a female warden’s eyes, black, almost beside each other, set into tiny spectacles with tweezers.

  There were coffins in the baggage car and all through the night she smelled the cushions with their faint odor of skin tonic and old people’s basketry and felt the woman watching her—wide-awake—and it was dark and stifling, a journey that made her muscles sore. The light began to swing on its cord.

  The train had stopped. The door handle went down suddenly—after how long, she thought. Then the door opened and she saw the figure of a man who was standing on some country station ramp with the steam round his legs and a wet face. Margaret saw the night behind the man, heard the far-off ring of spanners or hammer heads against the locomotive’s high black dripping wheels at the front of the train. The man was big, heavy as a horse cart of stone; there was not a wrinkle in his trenchcoat over the shoulders, his chest was that of a boxer. He blocked the door, held it, and his head came through. Hatless, dark hair, large straight nose. In one hand was a cigarette and he flicked the ash quickly into the skirts of his coat, as if he had no business smoking on the job. He swayed, leaned, his neck was red. He looked at the woman, and then at her; there was a movement in the dark eyes.

  “All right now, Little Dora?” Nerve ends crossed in his gray cheek, it was a low conservative voice for kindness or bad weather.

  “Right enough,” said the woman without moving her hands. Her chin was squared. Then: “But I could do with a smoke,” she added, and turned her spectacles toward Margaret.

  “You don’t mind if Little Dora takes one, do you, Miss?” He looked at Margaret, spoke to her from the empty ramp. His tie was loose and he was an impassive escort who, by chance, could touch a woman’s breast in public easily, with propriety, offending no one. “You don’t mind, Miss?” And there was nothing hushed in the voice, no laughter in the eyes, only the man’s voice itself and his rainswept cheek and the cliff of his head with the old razor nicks, to startle her.

  “It’s all right, Larry, don’t push it. I can wait,” said the woman. “Seen this item, have you?” She tapped her newspaper, watched him. A short cough of the whistle swept back over them like smoke.

  He leaned forward, holding the door, gripping the jamb, and the shoes were blackened, everything neat about the socks, the gray gloves were softly buttoned about the wrists and the hair was smooth. Only the hint of the tie was disreputable; it was red silk and loosened round the neck.

  “I don’t mind smoking,” said Margaret quietly.

  She followed them, and the man put up his collar against the wind and coldness of the night’s storm. Down the wet planking, down the train’s whole length of iron, walking and through her tears now looking at the heads asleep behind the train’s dim and dripping windows. The rain had stopped, but there was a good wind. Despite it she thought she heard laughter and, farther on, the sounds of an infant crying and sucking too. In a brace on the wall of the station master’s hut was a rusty ax; directly over the top of the engine she saw a few stars. But she was cold, so dreadfully cold.

  “Bloody wild,” the man said softly into her ear.

  He was on one side of her, the woman on the other. The man took hold of her arm as if to escort her firmly, safely, through a crowd of men; the woman caught her by the hand. She breathed, was filled with the smell of the fog, saw the woman dart her cigarette into the night. At the platform’s sudden edge, she saw a field sunk like iron under the stone fences, a shape that might have been a murdered horse or sheep, a brook run cold. The soot was acrid, it drove against her cheeks; the smell of oil was heavy in its packing and under it lay the faint odor of manure and wet hay and gorse.

  “Feeling better?”

  But she could not answer him. The wind had not disturbed his collar, he never blinked, eyelids insensitive to the rush of air.

  “Larry,” the woman plucked at his sleeve, shouted, “What have you on for tomorrow?” She clutched her spectacles, the lace was torn at her throat.

  “Not much,” putting his arm down upon her, round her, “sleep late … get Sparrow to do my boots … drive out to the Damps, perhaps. …”

  “And come by the Roost?” she shouted.

  “I’ll look in on you, Dora. …”

  Then his loose red tie was caught by the wind. It came out of the coat suddenly, and the red tip beat over the mist and thistles and wind off the end of the ramp. He waited a moment and carefully shut it away again.

  “Had enough?” he asked.

  They took h
er back down to the glass-and-iron door left open in the night, and she saw that it was the correct number on the door. With his hand still on her arm, and looking in as he had at first: “I expect you’ll be wanting to see Mr. Banks tomorrow, Miss? Look sharp for him, Miss. That’s my advice,” and the woman laughed. When he stepped away, cupped his cigarette from view, once more the train began to move and the man stood waiting for his own door to be pulled abreast of him.

  It was a good crowd. Margaret and the woman climbed down together. Men pushed close to the standing train and reached up, while steam boiled round their trouser legs, to tap the windows with their canes. The coffins went by on their separate trucks. Women with their stockings crooked, men with their coats wrinkled— sounds of leather, wood, laughter, and a bell still tolling. There were beef posters, hack drivers displaying their licenses, a fellow drinking from a brown pint bottle. Suddenly she felt the woman taking hold of her hand.

  “Where will Michael be?” asked Margaret then, surrounded by the searching crowd. A stray dog passed after the coffins. For a moment she saw the man in the trenchcoat and his broad belt. He made a sign to the woman and, with three others dressed like himself, went under an arch to hire a car. On a wall was pasted an unillustrated poster: You Can Win If You Want To.

  “Little Dora,” a young woman was calling to them, “Dora!” She had red hair, dark near the crown. Her restless fingers touched the shoulder of a child whose hair was fastened with an elastic.

  “You here too?”

  “For the weekend only,” the little girl’s mother said, and fluffed her hair up on one side, kissed the woman’s cheek. “But fancy you … such luck!”

  “What’s footing it, Sybilline?”

  “It’s the sunshine I want only,” she said, holding the small girl’s collar, “a rum, a toss, a look through a fellow’s binoculars. … Will you take her, Dora?”

  And after the child had changed hands: “This is Monica,” she said to Margaret.

  Margaret lost the far-off smell of grass when they went up the stairs. She had smelled it, wondered about it, sniffed it, the fresh clipped odor, the living exhalation of earth green and vast, a springtime of wet and color beyond the town’s steam baths and shops and gaming rooms and the petrol pumps wedged between shuttered houses and hotels. Out there, over the steeple, over the wires, the wash, was the great green of the racecourse: the Damps. The grass itself; several ponds; the enormous stands with flags; the oval of roses in which men were murdered and where there fluttered torn-up stubs and a handkerchief—Margaret had tasted the green and then it was gone. Now the door closed and she smelled cheap marmalade and the rubber of pharmaceutical apparatus for home use. A small trunk stood by the door to the room. The woman, Dora, had a key in her hand.

  “You seem to know the place, Little Dora.”

  “It’s the first time for me.”

  “How then …”

  “It’s like all the rest.”

  The room was on the second floor. White, large, it had a closet with a sink in it. There were two brass beds covered with sheets, a picture of a girl in a lake. It was clean, but a pair of braces had been forgotten near the window.

  3

  SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS

  Candy Stripe Looks Good …

  Marlowe’s Pippet Still Picked to Win …

  Owner Refuses Comment on Rock Castle …

  … extremely popular several seasons back. Well, Slyter excused himself from Mrs. Laval last night and talked by telephone to Lady Harvey-Harrow’s groom. I couldn’t reach the Manor House hence requested the stables, and Crawley the groom—he’s as old as the dowager herself—Crawley said he had no recollection of the horse. That was his phrase exactly. (Heard stable rats nibbling corn in the background while Crawley tried to make it clear that his Lady, who might remember something helpful, had fallen off to sleep in the Manor House at sundown and could not be called.) Your Sidney Slyter will not take no. … Must drive to the estate. … Mrs. Laval just laughed—Oh Sybilline’s lovely laugh—and said I should forget about Rock Castle. But what do women know of such mysteries? Slyter’s got his public to consider. … This afternoon I confronted the enigmatic Mr. Banks coming out of the Men’s and offered him my hand, saying Slyter’s the name. But he was white as my carnation and trembling; said he had no words for the Press; claimed he had an engagement with a lady, and I laughed at that. No apologies. I told him my readers were betting on Marlowe’s Pippet to win, and let him pass. … I want to know what’s the matter with Mr. Banks. I want to know the truth about his horse. A case for the authorities without a doubt. And Sidney Slyter says: my prognostications are always right. …

  The cigarette burned in a saucer next to the brilliantine, and there was steam at the open lavatory door and sunlight at the raised window. Larry washed down to the muscles of his neck and arms, but the tips of his fingernails were black. He was whistling. Again he held the brushes in two hands, applied them simultaneously to the shine of his hair.

  It was one o’clock, the racing crowd was at the Damps, and only the constable took a standing ale in the hotel’s taproom while the wireless reported the condition of the horses. The foam was high on his tankard.

  Larry whistled again, opened the bottom drawer, and from between layers of tissue lifted a vest of linked steel, shiny, weighing about five pounds. It fit over the undervest like silk. He turned sideways to adjust the ties. Then he carried a moist towel to the bathroom, finished his tea—it was bitter after the mouthwash and paste, and cleaner—and sat in the horsehair rocker in the sun by the window. He raised his black shoes to a footstool mauve and fringed with tassels, the sun began to glow against the steel beneath his shirt. He had changed the water in the flower vase first thing, so that was done; the pistol was loaded; he smelled fish frying in the kitchen next to the Tap. A small biplane was dragging a sign across the air in the direction of the spirited crowds: Win with Wally. He glanced at the yellow petals, a comer of his pillow, at Sparrow who was stretched on the bed. Then he nodded down at his black shoes, thick and perfect as parade boots.

  “Put a little spit on them, Sparrow,” he said, and watched the other climb off the bed, kneel, begin to polish.

  Sparrow caught up with Larry near the Booter’s. They walked by the steam baths—it had a marble front and, waist-high, two protruding and flaking iron pipes—walked by red petrol tanks, the beef posters, the hedgerow upon which the birds were hopping, a novelty shop with a rubber bride and groom in the window. On a low wooden door the single word Jazz was chalked and beside the door stood a pot of drying violets. Sparrow walked with the perspiration coming out on his chin; the sun flashed from his mother’s wedding band on his pinky. Larry whistled and there was hardly a movement of the pale lips.

  All about them was the stillness of the village: this watering place of cocaine and scent, beer and feather mattresses and the transient rooms of menservants, all deserted by sports and gypsies and platinum girls. Deserted except for the constable, themselves, and the captive in the white building. The small bets now—on a kiss, for show, for the cost of lunch, the small and foolish bets for fun—were being placed elsewhere along with the serious wagers for a sick wife, burial of an aged woman, relief from debt, a trip to the beach, and there were few risks in the village now except those taken by the telephone operator who made small business with anyone owning an instrument. The widow who had held Michael Banks’ face in her hands at breakfast was sleeping when Larry and Sparrow started their day; the constable’s lips were salty; the girl who had screamed was crying herself into dreams on the floor. But Larry and Sparrow were walking through the odor of old trees, through the village diaphanous and silent, walking now in search of Thick and Little Dora.

  On the stair, carpeted with rubber held firm by tacks, smelling of varnish and the rubber, a dark stair yet safe, the two men stopped to light up thin cigarettes; then Larry went first and Sparrow followed. From the end of the second-floor hall came the sound of a flushing toile
t, the sudden swift plash of water in pipes, and a moment later the tinkling of a key. Nothing more. The hall, tinted green, was without decoration, without furniture except for a steamer trunk with lid half-raised on ancient petticoats and a bottle of silver-coated pills.

  When he pulled open the door the little girl darted past, but Sparrow snatched at her arm—she smelled of Paradise Shore, had her hair full of pins—and twisted her round to the room again. He could feel the sweet pith of her arm, the ordinary thinness of flesh without ruffles. Under his fingers was a vaccination still bandaged and the spot was warm, a bit of radiance on the skin which, since her day in the clinic, she had attempted to hide under her short sleeve.

  “Where’s Sybilline?” asked the child, but Sparrow said nothing, letting his hand touch the hair that made him shiver just to feel it, to feel the pins which the girl had found and a few which Little Dora had stuck into it from a cardboard for her amusement. He put his hand in his pocket.

  “Syb wouldn’t want you running off,” he murmured.

  Everyone stared at Larry: Sparrow and the child now, and the two women. Little Dora with her shadow of mustache, steel spectacles, purple hat in place, and the captive Margaret whom they had dressed only in a white shapeless gown tied behind with cords. And two men. Thick with his ear close to a portable radio, listening to the sounds of sport—if not of horses then dogs or cars or motorcycles—and on the opposite side of the room from him, suit dusty and smelling of straw, the trainer Cowles, enormous and seated on an upended valise, shirt unfastened and his hair raised into a nasty crust. All of them stared, and there was no dirt on Larry’s collar. Now Larry was in the room, and even when drunk he could comport himself. But he was not drunk, was at the other extreme from the full bottle, cognac preferred, which it took to make him laugh. Stood straight as he did when predicting, Larry who was an angel if any angel ever had eyes like his or flesh like his.