Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories by H.E. Bates

would, once more to order barons of beef and saddles of lamb and demand the choicest cuts of venison, then she supposed they would come back. That was all.
    In due course, if such things happened, she supposed Clem would know how to deal with them. Clem was experienced, capable and shrewd, a good butcher and a good business man. Clem knew how to deal with people of class. Clem, in the early days of business, had been used to supplying the finest of everything, as his father and grandfather had done before him, for house parties, shooting luncheons, ducal dinners, and regimental messes. The days of the gentry might, as Clem said, be under a temporary cloud. But finally, one day, class would surely triumph again and tradition would be back. The war might have half killed the meat trade, but it couldn’t kill those people. They were there all the time, as Clem said, somewhere. They were the backbone, the real people, the gentry.
    â€˜Didn’t I tell you?’ he said one day. ‘Just like I told you. Belvedere’s opening up. Somebody’s bought Belvedere.’
    She knew about Belvedere. Belvedere was one of those houses, not large but long empty, whose chimneys rose starkly, like tombs, above the beechwoods of winter-time. For six years the army had carved its ashy, cindery name on Belvedere.
    â€˜See, just like I told you,’ Clem said two days later, ‘the gentleman from Belvedere just phoned up. The right people are coming back. We got an order from Belvedere.’
    By the time she drove up to Belvedere, later that morning, rain was falling heavily, sultrily warm, on the chalk flowers of the hillsides. She was wearing the old war-time cape, as she always did under rain, and in the van, on the enamel tray, at the back, lay portions of sweetbreads, tripe, and liver.
    High on the hills, a house of yellow stucco frontage, with thin iron balconies about the windows and green iron canopies above them, faced the valley.
    â€˜Ah, the lady with the victuals! The lady with the viands. The lady from Corbett, eh?’ A man of forty-five or fifty, in shirtsleeves, portly, wearing a blue-striped apron, his voice plummy and soft, answered her ring at the kitchen door.
    â€˜Do come in. You are from Corbett, aren’t you?’
    â€˜I’m Mrs Corbett.’
    â€˜How nice. Come in, Mrs Corbett, come in. Don’t stand there. It’s loathsome and you’ll catch a death. Come in. Take off your cape. Have a cheese straw.’
    The rosy flesh of his face was smeared with flour dust. His fattish soft fingers were stuck about with shreds of dough.
    â€˜You arrived in the nick, Mrs Corbett. I was about to hurl these wretched things into the stove, but now you can pass judgment on them for me.’
    With exuberance he suddenly put in front of her face a plate of fresh warm cheese straws.
    â€˜Taste and tell me, Mrs Corbett. Taste and tell.’
    With shyness, more than usually meek, her deep brown eyes lowered, she took a cheese straw and started to bite on it.
    â€˜Tell me,’ he said, ‘if it’s utterly loathsome.’
    â€˜It’s very nice, sir.’
    â€˜Be absolutely frank, Mrs Corbett,’ he said. ‘Absolutely frank. If they’re too revolting say so.’
    â€˜I think——’
    â€˜I tell you what, Mrs Corbett,’ he said, ‘they’ll taste far nicer with a glass of sherry. That’s it. We shall each have a glass of pale dry sherry and see how it marries with the cheese.’
    Between the sherry and the cheese straws and his own conversation she found there was not much chance for her to speak. With bewilderment she watched him turn away, the cheese straws suddenly forgotten, to the kitchen table, a basin of flour, and a pastry board.
    With surprising delicacy he pressed with his fingers at the edges of thin pastry lining a brown shallow dish. Beside it lay a pile of pink peeled mushrooms.
    â€˜This I know is going to be