Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

The chapel was roofless and derelict, but it had the melancholy romantic air that ruins so easily adopt. Nettles sprang through the cracks in the stone floor, but beneath this lay the bones of long-dead wool merchants, so that as well as its other charms, an implication of mortality lingered inside the broken walls.

Harry was sitting on one of the fallen stones.

“I came here to think,” he said in a guilty voice.

“All right. I’ll leave you.”

“Hester, please.”

She sat down beside him.

“I’ve been given a lot of advice about you today, Harry. Are you so bad?”

“I’ll tell you the truth. I’m no good at all. You’d do the right thing to tell me to go now. But I can’t make myself go, unless you tell me. I can’t move, with love of you closing over the top of my head.”

He knelt beside her and she put her hand on his shoulder. “So bad, Harry?” she whispered.

“In every way. You only have to trust me, and I’ll let you down.”

“It’s not true, Harry,” she said, beginning to cry quietly. “Anyway, you’re a poet.”

“Yes, in a way. Yes, I am.”

“So you wouldn’t be the same as other people.”

“I’m telling you, I’m worse than other people. You’ve no right to make excuses for me. And if I’m a poet I’m too lazy to be a good one.”

“I don’t believe it. You haven’t had a chance. You’ve had too much worry, with nowhere to live and no money.”

“Listen, Hester. I’m trying to tell you. I’ve had plenty of places to live, but I’ve been thrown out of most of them. When I was sent down from Oxford my mother couldn’t bear it any longer. She threw me out too. I went to Australia. I wanted to be an old-fashioned remittance man, but she wouldn’t send me the remittance.”

Hester made a weak attempt to laugh.

“It’s nothing to laugh about,” he said angrily. “I had to work on a sheep station. It was hot.”

“Hot?”

“It was so hot the snakes used to get burnt crossing the floor of my hut. It was so hot the mosquitoes turned into fireflies. The kangaroos fainted with the heat. And I was in the middle of it all, hacking away with an axe at the prickly pear, digging with a spade to reach the artesian wells fifty feet below ground – so that the sheep could get a drink. And the nearest pub was ninety-five miles away. It was filled with bearded men who had never seen rain. They carried guns. They shot anyone who tried to make a joke.”

“Harry, I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Even now, if I see a sheep in Hyde Park I get the bush staggers.”

“I liked your Australian poetry.”

“You’re an angel in blue stockings.”

“What did you do when you came back from Australia?”

“This and that. Angels never ask questions.”

“When did you come back from Australia?”

“About four months ago.”

He stood up.

“Hester, I’ll have to go away. I want to tell you how I love you. I want to steal all the words of the poets and make a chain of them that will hold you for ever.”

She waited. He moved away from her, and for a minute they were poised in silence, with emotions swooping between them like birds.

“I can’t say anything, Hester. I was trying to write something when you came. Here it is. It’s on an envelope.”

He felt in his pocket, then gave her the envelope, and she read:

“You understand I haven’t finished it?” he asked anxiously. “A clumsy offering, but it means something. I’m not giving it to you as a love poem. It’s a warning. You think now your strength is enough for two. You’re making plans, you know. Soon you’ll feel you have no right to marry a man who is strong. Hester, you’ve the air of a woman who wants martyrdom. I’m the man to give it to you.”

“You don’t mean all this, Harry,” she said in distress.

“Be quiet. Goodness is as much a part of you as redness is of a cherry. I’m the worm that will eat the cherry away, redness and all. You think now you can change my character, tidy me up, get me a nine to five job, give me a room to work in, and watch the self-respecting income roll in one door while the works of genius roll out the other. But the cherry doesn’t change the worm. It’s the other way round. I’m an experienced worm. I know!”

Hester looked at him with the intensity of someone waiting for a miracle to be performed.

“You’re the fourth person to tell me today how worthless you are. I don’t believe it.”

“Well, I’ve tried,” he said gloomily. “I’ll not try again. Just describing myself makes me see I’m only half the man I was. I can’t reason any more. I met you two weeks ago, and I’ve been drowning ever since. My past life has come up before my eyes so often it’s beginning to look like a non-stop revue. Throw me a straw before I sink for ever. Are you in love with any other man?”

“I’ve never been in love – except with actors and people I haven’t met. That was when I was young. I’ve never wanted to marry anyone.”

He didn’t take up the offer to talk of marriage, but sat down again beside her.

“What made you come here now, Hester?”

“I came here to think, too,” she said, flushing. “I’d like to be buried here.”

“Now?” Harry asked. “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?”

“Of course I didn’t mean now. It was only a mood.”

“Anyway, you couldn’t, unless they made a special place for you, like Napoleon or Lenin. Just tell me how you’d like it. What about a mortician’s dome in rose-coloured plastic?”

“It’s nothing to laugh about,” Hester said, beginning to laugh. “I was being perfectly serious. I’d like to be buried here. There are vaults at the other end. Prudence and I used to play here with the Peters boys, and they raised one of the stones and we all went down and sat beside the coffins and smoked Father’s cigars. He used always to have boxes of cigars, it was before we lost our money. Prudence was the youngest, much, but she was the only one who wasn’t sick.”

“You were all sick in the vault?” Harry enquired with interest.

“Oh, no,” Hester said in a shocked voice. “Even the Peters boys wouldn’t have done a thing like that.”

“Is this a roundabout way of telling me I have a rival called Peters?”

“I’ve told you. I’ve never been in love. I don’t know what it’s like to be in love,” she said stiffly.

“I don’t know what it’s like for a girl. It makes a man want to smoke. Have you a cigarette on you, Hester?”

“I bought some for Father this afternoon.” She took a packet of cigarettes from her bag, and gave it to him. He lit one, and absently put the packet, with his own matches, in his trouser pocket.

She considered the action.

“You can give me a cigarette case for my birthday next month. I like cigarette cases and watches – they give a man something to pawn in time of need,” he said easily. “Let’s get back and have some tea, shall we?”

They walked back together, without exchanging a word of love. They went quietly in by the back door to the kitchen.

Harry sat down, with a sigh.

“Put on the kettle, there’s a good girl,” he said. “Hester, you’ll do me a favour? If Morgan talks of changing his room, you’ll tell me?”

She stopped, with the teapot in her hand.

“But why?”

“One of my peculiar ideas. I’m always having them. I’ll offer you something in exchange. Don’t trust Maurice.”