The Darling Buds of May by H. E. Bates

Author:H. E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

When Pop got home the following evening he found Miss Pilchester waiting in the yard.

‘Isn’t it absolutely ghastly?’ Miss Pilchester said.

The evening seemed warmer than ever, but Miss Pilchester was wearing a thick thorn-proof skirt of cabbage green and a cable-stitch woollen cardigan to match. Pop did not ask her what was absolutely ghastly and she did not offer to tell him either.

There was no need. Everything to Edith Pilchester was always absolutely ghastly. She lived alone and kept numbers of laying hens. The hens were absolutely ghastly, and so, even worse, was living alone. It was absolutely impossible to get any help in the house, in the garden, or with the hens. She couldn’t afford to run a car because of taxes and the price of petrol and oil and servicing and repairs. She could just afford a solitary hack of her own, but she couldn’t afford a groom. It was all absolutely ghastly. Before the war she had kept a little maid in the house, a man in the garden, and a groom-cum-chauffeur-cum-cook who was an absolute treasure in all sorts of ways, including bringing her early morning tea and hot whisky last thing at night in bed. Now all of them had gone and she could hardly afford the whisky. It was absolutely ghastly. Everybody went out to work in the fields at strawberry picking, cherry picking, plum picking, apple picking, bean picking, hop picking, or at the canning factories in the town, earning mountains more money than they knew what to do with and in any case more than she could pay. It was all absolutely ghastly.

One of the results of everything being so absolutely ghastly was that Miss Pilchester, who was a fortyish, slightly moustached brunette shaped like a bolster, threw herself into an amazing number of projects with an energy quite ferocious, desperately trying to put the whole ghastly business to rights again. Prowling from committee to committee, charity to charity, bazaar to bazaar, she was like some restless, thirsty lioness seeking prey.

‘Hot again, ain’t it?’ Pop said.

‘Absolutely ghastly.’

When Pop suggested that Miss Pilchester should come into the house and have a drink and cool off a bit Miss Pilchester said no thanks, not for the moment, it was absolutely ghastly. She thought they ought to do the field; there wasn’t much time left, thanks to that bounder Fortescue letting them down at the last moment and the committee, with the exception of the Brigadier, having been very nearly as bad. The whole thing was simply too ghastly.

Over in the meadow the grass had been cut and baled during the day. Big fragrant cotton-reels of hay lay scattered everywhere between the house and the river. Only a white and yellow fringe of moon-daisy and buttercup remained standing at the edges, pretty as a ruffle under the hedgerows of hawthorn, rising honeysuckle, and wild rose.

‘Damn good field, Larkin,’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘No doubt about that. Just the job.’

She surveyed it with critical, organizing eye, seeing on it a vision of jumps, judges’ tents, showrings, beer tents, and horses.

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