The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (15 page)

‘And a good thing for you. 'Cause now you'll
understand
better, see? Her so fat and me an' Arth so thin. It makes it wuss, don't it? Makes it chronic, don't it, eh?'

I said it made it very chronic. I said something, too, about how greatly they must have suffered, and he said:

‘Suffered? We suffered till we couldn't suffer no longer.'

‘And then what did you do?'

‘Put paid to her,' he said.

I asked him how they put paid to her. Slowly he squeezed another gooseberry against his bright red tongue and said:

‘Fust of all we give her a Seidlitz powder.'

‘Wasn't she very well?' I said.

‘Oh! she wur well,' he said, ‘but we jis' wanted to see what happened. We jis' put the Seidlitz powder in the——, well, that don't matter now. Have another gooseberry, boy. Help yourself to another gooseberry.'

I helped myself to another gooseberry and said I hated Seidlitz powders.

‘They fizz,' I said.

‘Thass it,' he said. ‘Thass just it. They fizz.'

His gills began laughing again with the droll shagginess of an old cock and I said:

‘Didn't it make a difference?'

‘Well, it made a difference,' he said, ‘in a way. But not to us.'

‘The puddings didn't get better?'

‘Not until arterwards,' he said darkly. ‘Not until afterwards.'

My Uncle Silas relapsed into a veiled and secret sort of meditation, one eye closed. He did not speak for some time and I began to grow impatient to know what lay behind that arterwards. I was afraid for some moments that he would fall asleep there, in the warm July air among the gooseberry bushes, and never tell me.

Presently I nudged him and asked him not to go to sleep and he flickered an eye:

‘Don't whittle me, boy,' he said. ‘I'm a-recollectin' on it.'

He suddenly gave an immense and fruity chuckle, something like a joyful belch partly arrested. It was the sound I knew, long afterwards, as something always preceding the greatest lie. Then he shook his head as if it were all terribly serious and said:

‘Millions on 'em.'

‘Millions of what?' I said.

‘Puddens.'

He did not look at me. He fixed his bloodshot, wicked eye on the distance and grunted, ‘Never see nothing like it, boy, you never see nothing like it,' and then went on to tell me, between winey belches that rippled out of his corduroyed belly like waves, how he and Arth Sugars, tired of that long prison diet of suet, decided to discover
for themselves how Miss Tutts made and kept up the supply; and how they crept down to the basement at midnight, with a candle, and found there, in rows upon rows, on high shelves, enough puddings to feed an army.

‘Millions on 'em,' he said. ‘All wrapped up in old ham-bags and shimmies and skirts an'——'

‘What did you do?' I said.

‘Filled 'em.'

I asked him how they filled them and what with, and he said, airily:

‘Different flavours.'

‘Strawberry and raspberry?'

‘Ah! better'n that,' he said. ‘Some on 'em we filled with brimstone. Then we had a Seidlitz or two. A few Epsoms. Then some as Arth invented. Then I don't know as we didn't have a——, well, anyway, we wur half-way through the brimstone when we had company.'

‘Who?'

‘Her,' he said.

He shook his head.

‘Never see nothing like it in your life. Half-starve naked. In her nightshirt.'

‘Enough to catch her death,' I said.

‘It wur,' he said. ‘There wur we a-top of a step-ladder, and there wur Arth holdin' the candle and a-givin' me the different flavours. I wur just pickin' a pudden up when she come ravin' in——'

‘What happened?' I said.

‘Dropped it,' he said.

‘On her?'

‘On her,' he said. ‘Give her such a clout—it jis' shows you how hard they was, jis' shows you—give her such a clout she wur cold in a couple o' seconds.'

‘That was awful,' I said. ‘What did you do?'

‘Awful,' he said. ‘Do? Arth run upstairs like a hare for a burnt feather and the smellin' salts.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘but what did you do?'

‘Kept her warm,' he said. ‘Thass what you got to do when folks are cold, ain't it? And she wur very cold, I tell you boy, in that there nightgown. Very cold.'

I did not speak. A little doubt assailed me. I could not in that moment reconcile the picture of my Uncle Silas keeping Miss Tutts warm in the basement at midnight with the way the story had begun. There seemed, suddenly, great discrepancies somewhere. Hadn't it begun by Miss Tutts tormenting him? Hadn't she been a terror, a plague, and a tartar? It seemed very strange to me that plaguing and tormenting and pursuit could end with Miss Tutts being warmed in my Uncle Silas's arms. Strange that things could change so quickly.

‘And did things change?' I said. ‘You know—the puddens. Were they better?'

My Uncle Silas fixed his roving bloodshot eye on the distance and with a delicious spurting juicy sound, squirted the seeds of another gooseberry against his tongue.

‘Arter that,' he said, ‘I wur never in want fur the nicest bit o' pudden in the world.'

The name of Queenie White was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except of course by my Uncle Silas, who was inclined to mention it rather frequently.

‘Now that wur the year when me and Queenie——'

‘We don't want to hear it, thank you, we don't want to hear it, we don't want to hear it!'

‘Now wait half a jiff,' Silas would say. ‘If you can hold your horses I wur going to say as that wur the year we had snow in July——'

‘We know all about it, thank you. We know all about it. We know
all
about it.'

The trouble was that everyone else except myself seemed to know all about it and it was on an afternoon in
September, many years later, before I was able to clear up the mystery of the unmentionable Queenie White and what she had done, if anything, to make her name resound so unspeakably in the ears of the women of my family.

That afternoon I walked over to see my Uncle Silas, taking with me a drop of something I thought would please his palate, and as we sat in the garden, in the drowsy wasp-laden air, under a big tree of Blenheim apples, he turned to me and said:

‘This is a drop o' good, boy. Red-currant, ain't it?'

I said that it was red-currant and he rolled another mouthful of it over his thick red tongue before saying:

‘It's a bit sharper 'n elderberry and it ain't so flowery as cowslip, but it's proper more-ish all the same. Proper more-ish.'

A moment later he started to look very dreamy, as he always did in the act of recollecting something far away, and said:

‘You know the last time I tasted red-currant? It's bin about forty years agoo—over at The Cat and Custard Pot, at Swineshead.' He gave one of those ripe, solemn pauses of his. ‘Wi' Queenie White.'

It was always a good thing not to hurry my Uncle Silas in the matter of these more distant recollections and I did not say a word. I poured him another glass of red-currant wine instead and after some moments he picked up the glass and gazed softly through the pure bright wine, an even purer and sharper crimson than the half-transparent, polished currants themselves had been, and said:

‘Yis: she kept The Cat and Custard Pot, or any road she and her husband did.'

I said I was surprised to hear that Queenie White was married but he said blandly:

‘Oh! yis. Married all right. Well, that is if you could call Charley White a man. He wur more like a damn bean pole with a boiled egg stuck on top.'

I must confess that I was not as interested in the appearance of Charley White as in what a woman called Queenie could possibly look like, but there was no hurrying my Uncle Silas, who shook his head in slow disgust and suddenly let out one of those rare-flavoured rural words of his.

‘Maungy,' he said. ‘That's what he wur, Charley White. Maungy. A mean, maungy, jealous man.'

I don't suppose you are ever likely to find the word maungy in any dictionary but the effect it gives is, I think, a very expressive one. You get the impression of something between mingy and mangy and I knew at once, in this case, that Charley White could only have been a mean, moody misery of a man.

‘Wuss 'n a chapel deacon,' my Uncle Silas said. ‘Allus countin' the ha'pence and puttin' a padlock on the far-dens. If it hadn't been for Queenie the pub'd never ha' sold a ha'poth o' homebrewed to a stray tom-cat in a month o' Sundays.'

By this time I was more eager than ever to hear what Queenie White had looked like, but my Uncle Silas said:

‘Yis, an' a lot older 'n her too. Perhaps he'd told her the tale pretty well and she thought he'd got money but I be damned if I know how she ever got married to that streak o' horse——. Well, never mind, she wur, poor gal, and she had to put up wi' it.'

Then: ‘Or any road she did till she met me.'

In the very expressive pause that followed I had a moment of recollection myself and said:

‘Jalous he was and held her narwe in cage; for she was wild and young and he was old.'

‘What wur that you jist said?' my Uncle Silas asked sharply.

‘That was a line of poetry,' I said, ‘about a carpenter and his wife. By a man named Chaucer. It made me think of Queenie White.'

‘Chaucer?' he said. ‘Any kin to old Blunderbuss Chaucer over at Stanwick Woods? He wur a rate old poachin' man.'

‘No,' I said, ‘this Chaucer was a long way before your time.'

‘Then he must have been a fly 'un,' my Uncle Silas said.

After that he took another drink of red-currant wine, afterwards brushing the back of his hand across his wet red lips, and then went on to tell me how, in her narrow cage, where even the farthings were padlocked, Queenie White did all the work, attracted all the customers and never had a night's fun or day's outing from one year's end to another.

‘Very sad gal, Queenie,' he said. ‘Proper un'appy.'

‘You might tell me what she looked like,' I said.

‘Queenie? Big,' he said. ‘A very big gal.'

He licked his lips slowly.

‘And when I say big I don't mean ugly big.' He lowered his voice a fraction. ‘I mean beautiful big.'

The wine, I thought, was beginning to inspire him now and he went on:

‘You've 'eerd talk o' gals with them titty little waists what you can get your two hands round? Well, Queenie'd got a waist like a big sheaf o' corn—summat big and strong you could git holt on. Solid. And legs an' arms like a mare. And upstairs——'

Here he glanced, I thought, at the upstairs windows of the house, as if thinking that someone might be looking down on us from there, but instead he was really preparing, as I heard a moment later, to complete the description of Queenie White.

‘Beautiful bosom,' he said. ‘Like a winder ledge. You could a' laid a bunch o' flowers on it easy as pie.'

This charming picture of the upper parts of Queenie White's figure brought her fully to my mind's eye at last, except for one thing.

‘What colour hair?' I asked him.

He seemed for a moment uncertain, I thought, about the colour of Queenie White's hair, and he paused for several moments longer, pondering on it.

‘If I wur to tell you it wur just about the colour of the sand that day we nipped off to the sea,' he said at last, ‘that'd be about as near as I could git to it.'

‘The sea?'

‘Yis,' he said, ‘the sea. We done a bunk together.'

He ruminated a little more on this, stooping down after some moments to pick up a big fallen apple from the grass. After he had polished this apple on his corduroy trousers he held it up to me, clenching it hard in his hands.

‘She wur as firm as that there apple,' he said. ‘Beautiful an' firm. No: she wadn't one o' them Skinny Lizzies, Queenie, all gristle and bone and suet. They didn't call her Queenie for nothing—and I tell you, boy, that's what she looked like. A red-'eaded queen.'

All this, I thought, was so interesting that I poured him another glass of red-currant wine. And again, before drinking, he held it up to the light of the clear September afternoon. All the ripeness of late summer floated down
through it, pouring on to his crusty hands a tender crimson glow.

‘What I can't a-bear is a man what's maungy,' he said. ‘A man what's jealous. I see that gal a-working night an' day there and him a-locking the fardens up and skin-flintin' over every pint o' beer and a-fiddle-faddlin' over how many matches in a box. God A'mighty, I believe he grudged breathin' too often—he hated wastin' 'is breath. He even grudged her peelin' the skin too thick off a tater. Yis!—God's truth, I be dalled if he didn't measure a tater skin one day. Told her it wur too thick to give to pigs!'

You didn't often see my Uncle Silas in a state of anger, but suddenly he lifted the apple and threw it violently across the garden, where it burst on the pig-sty door.

‘That's what I'd a-like to ha' done to 'im,' he said. ‘Throwed 'im up against the 'ug-sty. Instead o' that I said to myself “Silas,” I said, “you're a-goin' to give that there young gal one day in her life as she'll never forgit if she lives till bull's-noon.”'

It was June, he said, when they did their bunk together. They waited until the long, bald, jealous bean-pole of a husband had gone off to market one Wednesday—‘allus went skin-flintin' off to market of a Wednesday wi' a couple of rabbits or a hare or a brace o' birds some old poacher had brought in to swop fer a pint—allus on the mek-haste, never 'ettin' on 'em, no blamed fear, not Charley'—and Silas could drive her to the station in a trap.