The Yellow Houses

  But there it was, apparently unchanged, halfway down the lane, looking small and sulky in its dingy weatherboarding, with its faded sign showing a man with a bundle of faggots on his shoulder. A bog chestnut tree standing beside it had just loosed a shower of golden leaves as Wilfred drove up, and they rattled on the roof of a small, old-fashioned car parked outside. Customers, thought Wilfred. Well I never.

  He pushed open the door and went into the low-ceilinged, dark little bar, and there, sitting by the window with a glass of beer, was Mr Taverner.

  ‘Hullo. Nice blowy day,’ he said, looking up and smiling. ‘Are you one of the regulars?’

  ‘God forbid,’ Wilfred answered, lowering his voice because the landlord was brooding over a newspaper behind the bar. ‘I just came over to have a look at the sea. Felt like it, somehow. You often come here?’

  ‘Oh no – no. I was just tootling around. Miss Dollette wanted some beech leaves to pickle in glycerine. Have one with me?’ He flourished his glass.

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you but the fact is I won’t mix them – I’m driving back – and what I fancy is a glass of wine.’ The landlord had allowed his paper to drift onto the counter and was looking at him remotely. ‘Perhaps you’ll join me?’ Wilfred added.

  ‘And what can I get you?’ the landlord asked at length, with the slightest emphasis on the last word, unsmiling. A gust of wind hit The Woodman so hard that it shook.

  ‘A better day for riding a horse than driving a car,’ observed Mr Taverner, glancing out at the rioting leaves.

  ‘I was here about three years ago with my wife, and I had a bottle of red wine. I’d like another of the same, please,’ Wilfred answered.

  ‘There may be a bottle left. I’ll have to see.’ The landlord got himself off his stool, moving as if he were rheumatic. ‘There isn’t much call for wine, not round here there isn’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m calling for it now,’ Wilfred retorted pleasantly.

  The landlord, without looking at him again, stood at the far end of the bar and shouted: ‘Freda! Go down the cellar and see’f there’s a bottle in that rack we bought off of Wilson . . . left side. Careful now.’ He returned to the bar. ‘Always falling about, the wife,’ he explained to the room generally. ‘Got a weak leg.’

  Mr Taverner shook his head. ‘A disadvantage in the circumstances,’ he said, and was over the bar in a leap, and at the back door before the landlord had opened his mouth again. ‘I’ll get it, madam, I’m an expert in cellarage . . .’

  They heard his voice, in gentle argument with a tired female one in the passage outside, and then steps rattling down a wooden staircase.

  The woman’s face appeared at the door in the dimness, fat and rather frightened. ‘It’s very kind of him, George – I was just going to ask you if you wouldn’t mind going. I’m so nervous of those stairs and my leg isn’t too good today . . .’ The landlord said nothing and, after a quick glance at Wilfred, she withdrew.

  Mr Taverner reappeared, smiling, and waving a bottle.

  ‘This must be it,’ he announced. ‘Do you agree?’ to the landlord.

  ‘I don’t reckon to have the customers fetching up the drinks,’ said the landlord. ‘Those stairs are murder.’

  ‘We will leave you to ponder that word –’ said Mr Taverner, ‘and if we might have the wine . . .’ He went back to their table and sat down.

  The landlord occupied himself with uncorking the bottle, half filling a glass, putting it on a tray, and bringing it and the bottle across for Wilfred’s inspection.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Wilfred, sipping, and the landlord retired to the bar and his newspaper.

  If they kept their voices down he could not hear what they said, Wilfred assumed, and he began at once: ‘I’d have liked to stand you lunch, but there’s nothing but stale biscuits. My wife and I tried last time we were here.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve brought my own sandwiches. There are three left –’ he felt in the pocket of the white raincoat ‘– if you’re hungry.’

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you –’

  ‘I couldn’t eat a bite, my dear man. I’m full of cold partridge – here.’ He handed across the packet, and, muttering thanks, Wilfred bit into the dampish fresh bread.

  ‘Grand . . .’ with his mouth full.

  ‘Miss Dollette’s baking – twice a week . . . Well, how are things?’ Mr Taverner asked.

  ‘Much the same, except that I’m meeting a man this evening who wants to buy my house, I think. I don’t know what to do about it, and that’s a fact . . . there’s Mary, you see, as I said . . . I keep on see-sawing about it . . . Pat . . . that’s my wife, would have made up my mind for me.’

  Mr Taverner said nothing, keeping his fingers on the stem of his glass and his eyes on Wilfred’s. The wintry wind dashed leaves against the low, small windows.

  ‘I wish I could see Mary and talk it over with her. If only I didn’t think she’d cut me off altogether, I’d risk going down to this fake address she’s given me and trying to trace her. But the truth is, Mr Taverner – I’m afraid to.’

  ‘Yes. Loving someone, one is afraid,’ said Mr Taverner, and Wilfred glanced at him in a grateful little surprise. Even his father would not have understood that. Remarks about smacked bottoms sounded for an instant in his inward ear.

  ‘I’ll have to think it out, that’s all – but it doesn’t give you much time. I’m seeing the chap this evening, at half past six.’

  ‘Let’s have a race,’ Mr Taverner said.

  ‘A race?’

  ‘Yes – your car and mine. You’ll be heavily handicapped, because mine’s more than thirty years old. We won’t race side by side, of course, just to some place you can choose, each going different ways. Here –’ Mr Taverner pulled out a large-scale map of the district and deftly unfolded it. ‘How about Eccersley? Twenty miles.’

  ‘That’s where the beautiful church is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – we might go in and look at it . . . all right then, that’s on . . . but let’s finish the bottle first.’

  Wilfred obediently refilled their glasses. He knew that he ought, at this moment when he was sitting half-drunk with a rather odd acquaintance in a run-down pub in a back lane fifteen miles from home, to be sitting in Racket’s – Ratchet’s – office, finding out what houses in his road were fetching on the property market. And certainly, as a driver, not drinking.

  But the wine stole over his senses in a delicious dreaminess. He looked glassily into Mr Taverner’s smiling, shining eyes. How they shone! He never remembered seeing eyes so – luminous – was that the word? They seemed to glow, and he could not put a name to their colour. They had more light than colour. They were unlike any eyes Wilfred had ever seen in a human head.

  A dejected-looking elderly man, with an air of retirement from the working world, had been hesitating with his half-pint, as if deciding whether to come over to their table, but now retreated slowly to a seat in the darkest corner of the bar.

  ‘Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,’ whispered Mr Taverner.

  ‘Yes, I was afraid he might, too. I don’t feel up to strangers today.’

  ‘I never feel up to them . . . or almost never.’

  ‘I – was a stranger. When you saw me on that seat, Mr Taverner. You’re one of those – those who have a kinder heart than you’d admit, I’d say.’

  ‘“I was a stranger and ye lent me a hanky,”’ said Mr Taverner. ‘Ah, but that was different. (Part of my reward, you are.) But that old bundle of grumble in the corner is all right; lives with a married daughter who’s a good girl to him. He just enjoys a whine. We needn’t be sorry about him.’

  ‘Pat – my wife – you remember, I told you’ – Mr Taverner nodded – ‘used to say that it was the whiners, and the murderers and the baby-bashers too, that you should be sorry for. She said people like us – her and me – were all right because we could pull ourselves together, and – and be unselfish. But some people simply
couldn’t. So if you were one of the lucky ones, she said, you had to Make Allowances.’

  ‘She was right – unhappily. Dead right.’

  Mr Taverner’s face, which could sometimes appear empty of expression, merely courteously attentive, as if a pleasingly coloured mask had been assumed, showed no consciousness of having used an unfortunate phrase.

  ‘“Virtue is its own reward”. The sergeant-major of the proverbial sayings: upright, stern, incorruptible. He said so Himself, in other words.’

  ‘He . . .?’

  ‘Jesus. “I come to bring, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Tough luck on the righteous – especially in the twentieth century. If you and people like you had been born, say, about 1853, you would have been with the saved sheep, and comfortable. Nowadays, I don’t know quite where to say you are. Somewhere smug, certainly, and there’s a decided inclination to blame you for being there. “You’re all right. You like the right things,” as someone said to me once.’

  For the first time in their acquaintance, Wilfred heard bitterness in Mr Taverner’s light voice and saw its shadow on his long, charming face.

  ‘That sounds to me like downright envy,’ he said sturdily, wanting to see the shadow lift.

  ‘Oh, it may have been. In fact, almost certainly it was. But if you love someone with all your heart, you don’t want to have something that they haven’t got and that they envy you for having.’

  Wilfred was a little embarrassed by ‘love someone with all your heart’. Was Mr Taverner going to turn out religious? He could think of nothing to say. He was certain of only two facts concerning this odd Mr Taverner: first, he was kind; and secondly, not the faintest shade of meaning in another person’s gesture or tone escaped his observation and – though he might say nothing – his judgement.

  ‘But let’s thank God,’ said Mr Taverner, beginning to smile, ‘that we still have the Goddess of Common Sense. (I knew an old German doctor once, who used to say, “I don’t know why they gall it Gommon sense, for it is most Un-Gommon”.) The altars of Common Sense are almost bare nowadays; little incense, few flowers. But she exists, and to her and to her Higher Incarnation and to their divine sister Reason we can still appeal, both for ourselves and for others, often with results.’ The shadow had lifted.

  Wilfred was not certain what this meant, but he heard himself saying, with an effect of notable feebleness: ‘Of course it’s wonderful work, looking after drug addicts and that kind of thing . . .’

  ‘More exciting, too, than reading to deaf Aunt Betty or ironing shirts,’ Mr Taverner drawled.

  ‘Pat used to iron my shirt.’ Wilfred turned to look out of the window. ‘She was a good wife to me.’

  ‘I know she was.’ Mr Taverner rose slowly, tall in his white raincoat. ‘You look so lost.’

  Wilfred stared up at him. The coat glimmered in the dimness of the room, for the day had darkened over. It was the brightest thing there. It seemed to glow.

  ‘Our race,’ added Mr Taverner gently. ‘Come along.’

  The two smallish cars drove quickly away in opposite directions to find their way to Eccersley.

  Wilfred knew that he was not completely drunk. He could keep an eye on the road; his touch on the wheel was firm and light; he knew precisely what was going on. He even knew exactly where he was – bouncing up a lane full of smallish potholes, running along the east side of Dunbury Wood.

  Flying leaves slapped against the windscreen, hung there for an instant, were gone. Branches in untrimmed hedges whipped the roof. The car bounced and banged and Wilfred bounced and banged with it. Everything looked miraculously clear, gold and brown and herb-green in the rainy light. He had no burdens, no longings. He wished that he could drive on for ever.

  The lane ended. He was out on a passable road again, and could safely go up to sixty. The wine was singing its soft, warm, crimson chant in his blood as he drove between brown fields looking as if they were asleep under the darkening sky.

  He passed through a long village street, where already there was a shop with one dress in its window and ‘Boutique’ painted above its once-modest face; and there at the end, tall against the hurrying clouds, was the church.

  Its tower was livid in the last light. He drove round the green, stopped, and sat looking up at the rooks flying slowly about the elms. The trees were naked now; their highest branches rocking slowly in the whistling air.

  No one was about. Lights shone further down the street. He got out of the car and sat down on a seat under the wall of the churchyard. Perhaps it was the quiet, unbroken except for the ancient sound of the rooks, that gave him peace. The birds floated like big black leaves, turned sideways by the wind in the thin golden light from the falling sun. Hasn’t changed since they built the church, not the light, nor the cold, he thought. Makes you feel better somehow. But God, it’s lonely.

  Down the street came another car. The hooter sounded a cheerful signal, and his spirits went up.

  ‘Beat me to it,’ Mr Taverner said, bringing his car to a halt and putting his smiling face out of the window.

  ‘Well, yes. But I did know a short cut. Wasn’t fair perhaps. I ought to have told you, really.’

  ‘Oh nonsense. All’s fair in love and war. (Quite nonsense, incidentally.) Want to have a look at the church?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to.’ Wilfred got up.

  But the oak door, studded with nails made by hand six hundred years ago, was locked.

  ‘That’s a nice state of affairs,’ Mr Taverner exclaimed, having vigorously twisted the massive handle once or twice. ‘Suppose a demon had been after us, and we’d wanted to take sanctuary?’

  Wilfred glanced at him sideways in the dimness. He was not smiling. High up in the golden, hurrying sky, a bell struck one note: clear, soft and very ancient was the sound.

  ‘I suppose you’re joking. But . . . not joking, Mr Taverner, I’m interested to know what you think. You . . . do you believe in all that sort of thing?’

  ‘Demons?’ He turned away before he answered. ‘Oh yes. I believe in them. Not that I’ve ever . . . really . . . seen one.’ Then some kind of change, to which Wilfred could not put a name, came over his face as he looked round. ‘But it’s vandals, of course, not demons that make the Reverend Peter Pinkright, MA,’ nodding in the direction of a noticeboard beside the gate, ‘keep his door locked.’

  ‘And ghosts?’ Wilfred persisted, while carefully fastening the gate behind them. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘Oh lord, yes. Yes to both questions. Now, about getting back. It’s half past four. I gather you’re seeing this chap at half past six. Come back to us for tea first, won’t you?’

  *

  When Wilfred let himself into the hall at Lamorna, somewhere around ten, he was much drunker than he had been at three.

  Three double whiskies paid for by Mr Dill had been necessary to bring him up to agreeing to sell his house to the latter for eleven thousand pounds; for although Mr Dill’s juicy lips had never parted in his steak-like face to utter any plea of parenthood or poverty, Wilfred had had continually before his mind’s eye the figures of Mr Dill’s children, and also that of Mrs Dill, recently encountered at the side door of the shop, in what the newspapers used once to call ‘a certain condition’.

  He had bargained with Mr Dill. He had Held Out. He had pooh-poohed Mr Dill’s contention that a house backing onto the railway meant noisy days and disturbed nights. He had even quoted the rumour about one Biggs, living in the same road as himself, whose house had ‘gone’ for thirteen thousand.

  ‘Ah, but there was a big converted attic,’ Mr Dill had thrust in. ‘Made two bedrooms.’

  ‘Say pokeholes. Nearer the mark.’

  ‘Pokeholes or not, Mr Davis, they were rooms. Brought it up to a six-bedroom house in the twelve-to-fifteen-thousand bracket.’

  ‘I never said anything about fifteen thousand.’

  Mr Dill had ordered a third whisky, and Wilfred, who looked noticeably
exhausted and white, broke into a pause by saying quickly: ‘All right, Mr Dill. We’ll say eleven thousand. The fact is, I haven’t . . . had time . . . gone into the matter . . . as I should. Rather caught me on the hop, as you might say.’

  ‘Done, Mr Davis,’ said Mr Dill smoothly. ‘That’s settled, then. Now I s’pose you’ll want everything above board and legal –’

  ‘There’s Anstruther and Coburn in the high street. Mr Anstruther’s married to the headmistress of my daughter’s school.’

  ‘They’re a reliable firm, I’m told,’ said Mr Dill. ‘Been there fifty years. I remember old Mr Anstruther. Used to come in for his veal cutlets and a bird now and then, in season, when I was a boy . . . You’ll go along there first thing tomorrow morning, then?’

  Wilfred nodded.

  ‘Chance ’ud be a fine thing . . . fifteen thousand,’ said Mr Dill, as he thundered (it seemed to Wilfred that he thundered) after him on their way to the door. ‘No, eleven’s about right, Mr Davis – you can take it from me. No phoning up some old pal when you get home tonight and fixing up a deal for fifteen thousand?’ he shouted playfully.

  Outside the air was raw and icy with the Torford sea-mist. The street was empty and almost silent. Wilfred turned up his coat collar. The pale bushy willows and buffeting winds of the afternoon seemed in another world.

  Money and business are dreadful. Some chap in the ’20s had said that, or something like it. Wilfred had come across it in a book. Poor bastard – took his own life. I don’t know why I never really thought of doing that, not even when I was feeling worst. He got out to unlock the garage doors. Dad, perhaps. And Mary, of course. And Mary.

  When he got into the house, the colours and shapes in the hall struck him as entirely, completely, and undeniably dislikeable. And it’s that Yellow House that’s done it, he thought, standing in the hall and staring around. If I hadn’t been there, and seen what a home’s like, I’d never have turned against . . . all this and sold it.

  He stood, looking stupidly about him. Something – an impression, a feeling, the ghost of a thought – was teasing at the boundaries of his memory.