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

delicious,’ he said. ‘This I am sure about. I adore cooking. Don’t you?’
    Speechlessly she watched him turn to the stove and begin to melt butter in a saucepan.
    â€˜Croûte aux champignons,’
he said. ‘A kind of mushroom pie. There are some things one knows one does well. This I love to do. It’s delicious—you know it, of course, don’t you? Heavenly.’
    â€˜No, sir.’
    â€˜Oh, don’t call me sir, Mrs Corbett. My name is Lafarge. Henry Lafarge.’ He turned to fill up his glass with sherry, at the same time fixing her with greyish bulbous eyes. ‘Aren’t you terribly uncomfortable in that wretched mackintosh? Why don’t you throw it off for a while?’
    The voice, though not unkindly, shocked her a little. She had never thought of the cape as wretched. It was a very essential, useful, hard-wearing garment. It served its purpose very well, and with fresh bewilderment she pushed it back from her shoulders.
    â€˜Do you think I’m a fool?’ he said. ‘I mean about this house? All my friends say I’m a fool. Of course it’s in a ghastly state, one knows, but I think I can do things with it. Do you agree? Do you think I’m a fool?’
    She could not answer. She felt herself suddenly preoccupied, painfully, with the old brown dress she was wearing under the gas-cape. With embarrassment she folded her hands across the front of it, unsuccessfully trying to conceal it from him.
    To her relief he was, however, staring at the rain. ‘I think it’s letting up at last,’ he said. ‘In which case I shall be able to show you the outside before you go. You simply must see the outside, Mrs Corbett. It’s a ravishing wilderness. Ravishing to the point of being sort of almost Strawberry Hill. You know?’
    She did not know, and she stared again at her brown dress, frayed at the edges.
    Presently the rain slackened and stopped and only the great beeches overshadowing the house were dripping. The sauce for the
croûte aux champignons
was almost ready, and Lafarge dipped a little finger into it and then thoughtfully licked it, staring at the same time at the dripping summer trees.
    â€˜I’m going to paint most of it myself,’ he said. ‘It’s more fun, don’t you think? More creative. I don’t think we’re half creative enough, do you? Stupid to allow menials and lackeys to do all the nicest things for us, don’t you think?’
    Pouring sauce over the mushrooms, he fixed on her an inquiring, engaging smile that did not need an answer.
    â€˜Now, Mrs Corbett, the outside. You must see the outside.’
    Automatically she began to draw on her cape.
    â€˜I can’t think why you cling to that wretched cape, Mrs Corbett,’ he said. ‘The very day war was over I had a simply glorious ceremonial bonfire of all those things.’
    In a cindery garden of old half-wild roses growing out of matted tussocks of grass and nettle, trailed over by thick white horns of convolvulus, he showed her the southern front of the house with its rusty canopies above the windows and its delicate iron balconies entwined with blackberry and briar.
    â€˜Of course at the moment the plaster looks frightfully leprous,’ he said, ‘but it’ll be pink when I’ve done with it. The sort of pink you see in the Mediterranean. You know?’
    A Virginia creeper had enveloped with shining tendrilled greed the entire western wall of the house, descending from the roof in a dripping curtain of crimson-green.
    â€˜The creeper is coming down this week,’ he said. ‘Ignore the creeper.’ He waved soft pastry-white hands in the air, clasping and unclasping them. ‘Imagine a rose there. A black one. An enormous deep red-black one. A hat rose. You know the sort?’
    Again she realised he did not need an answer.
    â€˜The flowers will glow,’ he said, ‘like big