When the Green Woods Laugh by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141938660
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-03-30T05:00:00+00:00

6

By ten o’clock on Thursday morning Pop decided that he wouldn’t go to the hunt meeting after all. Something big was brewing up in the way of another Army surplus deal and it would take him most of the day to sift the prospects out. Probably show something like five hundred per cent if it came off: anyway, wurf while.

Nevertheless as he drove away from the house in the Rolls he told himself there could be no harm in stopping off at The Hare and Hounds and saying hello to one or two people, just to see what sort of rabble had turned up. The weather had turned very mild again. The first elm leaves were colouring a clear bright yellow and above them the sky was a sharp northern blue, washed clean of any trace of cloud. If anything it was too blue, Pop thought, and as he got out of the Rolls his hypersensitive nostrils instinctively sniffed the morning air for the smell of rain.

Outside the pub hounds were prancing and snuffling about the paddock, tails raised like a collection of pump handles. A few pink coats loped to and fro. Captain Perigo, blue of chin and already slightly watery eyed, was having whisky outside the bar door, his hard hat sitting well down on his ruby ears. Mr Jerebohm had turned up too and was clearly not used to riding very much. His pose of squatting on his horse, posterior pushed out like a rudder, looked part of a game of leap-frog.

Corinne Perigo had, after all, also turned out and was talking to a man named Bertie Fanshawe, the man whom Ma had mistakenly suspected she had run away with. Perhaps Ma had mixed her up with Freda O’Connor, who also often had a fling. She was a girl of spanking bosom and voice of low husky passion who was now talking to Colonel Arbor, a shortish man who rarely talked much but, like a bronchial horse, merely guffawed in a rusty sort of way. Bertie Fanshawe was beefy. You could have cut his face up into prime red steaks. He guffawed too, but brassily, on coarse trumpet voluntaries all his own.

They were a pretty ripe old lot, Pop thought. The cream of country society, eh? It was a good job, he thought, that Mariette had turned out, neat and beautiful as usual, with Montgomery as escort. He was proud of them both. He was glad too to see the Brigadier, though on foot, the poor devil not being able to afford a second-hand motor car, let alone a nag. It would have been pleasant to see Angela Snow appear too but it was, he feared, too much to expect. She lived too far away.

Then, to his great surprise, he saw, less than a minute later, a jeep-drawn horsebox draw up; and out of the jeep, bright as a quince among a collection of sacked potatoes, Angela Snow.

She was a band-box of a girl if you liked, he thought.

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