July 27, 1891

Edmund Bliss took three reluctant steps back from the stall Mrs. Simpson had asked him to erect. (This was no small commission⁠—Mrs. Simpson sat on the fête committee the way stone lions sit on pediments.) The canvas was pink and yellow, and looked very smart against the grass, with the gleam of the vicar’s conservatory behind it, but there could be no question that the structure slouched on one side, like a man leaning against a bar, if that man were devastated by drink. Edmund went forward and pulled at the poles a bit. Then he retreated and looked about him with an amiable helplessness. The day was already hot and glaring. Everywhere stalls were assembled, canvases taut and angles correct. Edmund put his hands in his pockets and laughed. Through one pocket he scratched the upper part of his thigh. He was twenty-two, incidentally handsome depending on his mood and the light, with a short strip of mustache and hair that was receding at the temples, where he pulled down his hat. He lived with his parents in a house built three miles from the village for the view, meaning he’d had to wake horribly early in order to assist with the setting-up. He had come in his best summer suit, since it was too far to go back to change. His jacket was hanging on a chair in the tea tent and he was in his shirtsleeves.  

Mrs. Simpson swept past, irritation crisp in her voice. “Oh, Mr. Bliss. Whyever did you volunteer? And you took off your jacket. I’ll ask one of Colville’s men. You needn’t wait.”

“I’ll wait,” Edmund said. He scratched his thigh and wondered what Violet would be wearing.  

“You see how it is,” Mrs. Simpson said behind him. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Nothing to mind. Morning, sir.” A man approached the stall and began taking it apart. 

Mrs. Simpson, whose twelfth year it was on the committee, went on her way. It was always the same: decorative young men cluttering up the place with their muddled purposes. She wondered how it could be discouraged. 

Edmund stood watching as the man fixed the stall. The sun, hidden behind a glare of white sky, was a pressure like a hand on his neck. He debated whether he could in good conscience say to Violet that he’d helped set up. “Can I do anything?” he asked, when the worst seemed over. 

The man tied a complicated knot and trod a peg into the ground. “Nearly there now,” he said, not turning. His hair stiffened into a ridge where it met the line of his cap, as if the cap were too small. 

“Just say,” Edmund said. He noticed Albert Waterson strolling through the gate and moved toward him, before halting. “Am I all right to leave you?”

“Let’s see if you’re happy, sir.” The man fussed with the canvas, smoothing and tucking it like a tablecloth, and then came and stood next to Edmund. 

“It looks very nice,” Edmund said politely. Beyond, he could see two maids inching a table from the house into the conservatory. 

“Good,” the man said. He had an open, outdoors face, shining from the heat but blotted by black hair and eyebrows. He and Edmund were about the same age.

Fête days encourage a sense of fellowship. “Thanks for rescuing things,” Edmund said, and put out his hand. The man took it and his warm sweat rubbed onto Edmund’s palm and between his fingers. Edmund put his hand into his pocket as he went off to find Albert. 

Albert was in the tea tent, where cups were being served to the workmen and volunteers. He was being firmly told that no cake could be eaten yet. It was slightly cooler under the canvas and smelled definitely of grass. Edmund located his jacket and carefully put it back on. When Albert turned around, triumphant with cup and saucer in one hand and cake in the other, Edmund waved at him from a table. “Hello,” Albert said beamingly as he set down his things, tea splashing over. “Where’s Violet?”

“Can I have some of that cake?”

“Not too much.”

“She isn’t here yet,” Edmund said, swallowing a mouthful. 

“I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” Albert said. He was a trim, dapper young man, who affected a monocle. 

“Awfully hot, isn’t it?” Edmund said.

“If she wears anything like last year I’ll simply fall at her feet.”

They looked at each other with displeasure. 

“You’re as besotted as I am,” Albert said. 

Edmund broke off more cake. 

Albert drank his tea, squeezing his eye around his monocle. “Probably won’t be either of us. Almost certainly. Except women do such odd things. That’s all that gives me hope.”

There was a lot of noise from outside the tent, outside the greeny, grass-smelling universe they had established themselves in: active voices, and mallets hitting pegs, and crockery furiously coupling in drawers being chucked about. The two young men sat, hardly speaking. They had been to the same school, then Oxford, so they were used to being trapped in each other’s company, in both moderately unpleasant and moderately pleasant situations, and to waiting for things to be done for them. They had never considered whether they liked each other. 

“Shall we have a look around?” Edmund said. “Violet might be here now.” He was rather afraid of being on his own again. 

“I hope she isn’t,” Albert said, though getting up and shaking off crumbs. “I’ve realized I must change my clothes.”

Edmund looked down at his own, much plainer suit. 

“Oh you’re all right,” Albert said. 

Outside, the sky was hard to look at, as though something sharp were poking out of it. The vicar’s garden was large and crowded with stalls, humming with pioneer energy. Only the marquee for dancing was still being put up. 

“No sign of her,” Albert said. “I’ll go and change. If she arrives, please don’t talk to her or amuse her in any way.”

Edmund watched idly as Colville’s men labored on the marquee. The man who’d helped him earlier was playing a leading part. He had taken off his cap and tucked the peak into the back of his trousers so that it wagged cheerfully as he strode about. His black hair was hanging lankly on his forehead, joined into thick strands by sweat. Edmund caught his eye and smiled. The man nodded in a preoccupied friendly way. Perhaps I should buy him a drink later on, Edmund thought. 

He’d gone back to wondering about Violet when Mrs. Simpson discovered him. 

“Mr. Bliss,” she said. She wished she had discovered someone else. It was so very hot. “A sheep has got out.”

“A sheep?”

“A sheep. It is in for a prize. It has got out of its compartment. Some boys have caught it but they need help with the lifting.”

“This is my best suit, Mrs. Simpson.”

“The sheep is in for a prize, Mr. Bliss.”

“I’m afraid I fail to see⁠—”

“It will be very clean and well brushed, Mr. Bliss,” she said tensely. 

Edmund stared. “What about the vicar?”

“What about him?” Mrs. Simpson cried.

Edmund didn’t know what he had meant about the vicar. There came the plaintive sound of a sheep in bondage. 

In her crisis Mrs. Simpson cast dignity aside. “You will be heroic, Mr. Bliss. Miss Laird will admire it, I’m sure.”

He followed her wild gaze to Violet, who was standing at a distance with her mother. She was wearing a lovely dress. 

Violet watched as Edmund tried to fit his arms around the sheep, rather as if it were a baby. The sheep resisted this maternal tenderness, squirmed robustly against the ground, surprising one of its boy captors, and kicked Edmund in the⁠—was it the eye? It was his eye he was clutching now. But he was trying again, looking determined, not letting the next kick, on his chin this time, affect him quite so much. The sheep was at length carried off, gone abruptly still and rather regal. Violet wanted to make a bow to its departing shape, held tight against Edmund’s hip. Her mother observed that the sheep was in marvelous condition and might take first prize. 

When Edmund approached Violet, Mrs. Laird was occupied at a nearby stall. He had an abrasion above his eye and his suit was rumpled⁠—on top of that he was rather red. On a kindly impulse Violet decided she wouldn’t mention the sheep. 

“Well, how have you spent the morning, Mr. Bliss?”

“I have been⁠—” Dark despair dawned on Edmund’s face. “Have you only seen me just now?”

“Just now,” she said, giving him one of her best smiles. 

The smile did none of its accustomed good. It was swallowed by the despair as if it had never been. Edmund touched his injury. “I have been helping set up,” he said in a small voice. 

“Oh, well done. It all looks very lively.”

“Yes.”

“People are arriving.”

“Yes.”

Poor Edmund. It did seem as though he needed a sit-down. But he was sweet. “Why don’t you go for some tea, Mr. Bliss?”

“You are very beautiful today, Miss Laird,” he said. 

These remarks, made simultaneously, did not clash and rebound but rather sailed past each other, landing neatly at their intended destinations. 

“I shall,” Edmund said.

“Thank you,” Violet said. 

They glanced away. 

“It’s kind of you,” Violet said. 

“A tea,” Edmund said, “is what I need.”

They parted. 

Soon afterward, Violet met Albert Waterson. He was wearing a checked suit with a mustard-yellow waistcoat, and a straw hat. His monocle dazzled at her. 

“Hello, Mrs. Laird,” Albert said to Violet’s mother, who was back in possession. His monocle gave out a single respectful glint. 

If Mrs. Simpson surveyed as from a pediment, Mrs. Laird was suggestive of a large ornamental gate. Impressive; attractive even, if you could see the attraction in heavy iron, manipulated by supreme technical skill. Violet was always trying to look past her, to get a proper view of things. She had given up on being properly seen herself. She hoped only to offer glimpses from behind the bars.

“How is your brother, Mr. Waterson?” Mrs. Laird asked. She had hopes of the elder Waterson. 

“Engaged,” Albert said swiftly. “Not quite, but nearly. Dreadfully in love anyhow. Charming girl.”

“And how are you?” Violet interjected. 

His monocle lit up. “Wonderfully well, thanks. I’m in the business now. They seem pleased with me. Sometimes I suspect Father is about to hand it all over.”

“Surely not,” Mrs. Laird said. 

“I merely suspect,” Albert said.  

“It is very warm,” Mrs. Laird remarked.

“It is. May I say,” he added, “that you are looking extremely well, Mrs. Laird. And you, Miss Laird.” 

Violet smiled. “I like your waistcoat,” she said. 

“Thanks!” He was delighted. “Your dress is lovely.” And then, the sight of it triggering some reflection: “I heard Edmund was knocked about by a sheep. Some boys ran up and told me about it. Said it was terrific.”

“I wasn’t aware.”

“Really?” He seemed lowered. 

Mrs. Simpson descended. “Mr. Waterson, there’s a tent peg wants stamping on,” she said. 

“A tent peg?”

“Off you go.” She pointed vaguely. 

Albert went off. The stone lion and the iron gate greeted each other as old friends in arms, and Violet shrank behind their defenses. 

The fête was embarked on its short, eager life. The residents of Haleton swelled it and circulated through it. The sky grew whiter and whiter. Noise spread in lapping waves from the shies and the tea tent and the marquee: shouts, the hard clatter of wood striking on wood, conversation and the click of spoons against china, the hemming of the band tuning up. Parasols bobbed like lilies on a pond. Children skipped and ran, stumbled and wailed. Men laughed violent laughter that burst at intervals like gunfire. 

There was a bush that emitted a strong smell almost exactly like that of semen. Some men and women noticed it as they passed by. It was rather shocking, in a vicar’s garden. But then some of them were shocked at themselves for noticing, as surely the vicar never had. No one referred to it, not even the newly married couple who sniffed it at precisely the same time and who, since the wedding, had surprised each other with their brazen lovemaking. 

The animals⁠—the pigs and the sheep⁠—turned in their pens; trod and nuzzled the unfamiliar ground; took applause; tasted the sweets of celebrity. The sheep that had hoofed Edmund took first prize in its category. 

The vicar made a speech and so did Mr. Dawley, the alderman. There was a raffle, sponsored by Groves’ butchers. The prize, a ham, was won by a gentleman whose bald head, when he raised his hat in victory, was comparably pink and glazed. Two boys got into a fight. Another boy, Sam, kissed a girl, Mary, the two of them pressed up behind the tea tent, their feet in a rose bed, unsuspected by the aproned ladies cutting cake on the other side. For both it was their first kiss, and neither ever forgot it. Sam swore that Mary’s mouth tasted of roses. 

Everyone was having a fine time. 

But isn’t it hot? they all said. Isn’t it hot! The air was dense, like cotton wool⁠—they moved through it trying to find fresh cool air behind. Oh, for a breeze! They sweated into their light summer things. Sweat was a taint on the air. The vicar’s flowers and bushes slept heavily. The conservatory was screwed into its place, dulled under the white sky, a clouded diamond. 

The band was playing. Music could be heard all over the garden. Closer to the marquee, dancing could be heard, too⁠—the confused tramping of feet and high confused chatter. Violet was drawn over, against the will of her mother. “It’s only the local people,” Mrs. Laird said. 

The marquee was open on all sides. Violet approached the nearest and stood on the grass, a few inches from where the wooden floor began. Her mother left her. The music was very loud. Violet was thrilled by it, and by the stamping laughing whirling dancers. The heat was shaken slightly by their movement, by the swishing stir of dresses, but everyone had red gleaming faces and damp darkening hair. Violet felt her own hot blood pushing in her. If only, she thought passionately and imprecisely. If only!

They were the local people. Some of them were the servants of people she knew, given half the day off; others were familiar from the village, the sons and daughters of shopkeepers or tradesmen. She did not recognize the dances, so fast and cheerful. The women whirled around laughing in the arms of the men. Violet’s attention cleaved to a woman in a fringed red wrap, held loosely by a clasp at her neck, that licked about her like a flame. The man she was dancing with was handsome, dark-haired; he had stuck his cap into the back of his trousers, peak first, so that as he danced it seemed to clap, keeping time with the music. They seemed very easy with each other, and very happy. The woman was not wearing a wedding ring. 

“He helped me put up a stall,” Edmund said, unexpectedly beside her, gesturing at the man dancing. His face had a flinching, nervous look. There was the mark above his eye. 

“Do you think they’re only flirting?” she said eventually. “Or is it love?” The band had finished and were preparing to start again. The couple were still holding each other, smiling and talking, his head sunk toward hers, hair hanging lankly, sipping at her forehead. 

“Oh, one or the other, I expect,” Edmund said, his eyelashes beating, and his Adam’s apple dipping in his throat. 

The band started, and the couple whirled away. Violet followed the woman’s red wrap as it licked around the man, like a flame licking at meat. 

More people were coming to watch, and Violet was now standing at the edge of the wooden floor. She and Edmund were very near together. They were both aware of it, both watching the couple, not daring to take their eyes off them. Their hearts were fast, as though it were they who were dancing. The red wrap flew about, and the man and woman laughed as they whirled, their hands clamped tight together, disappearing behind other dancers and then appearing again. 

How stiflingly hot it was! Violet and Edmund were very near, their hands down by their sides. And just then she felt the tips of his fingers curling under the tips of hers. 

She watched the dancers, blinded by surprise. Her fingers and Edmund’s hung together, out of sight, like necking doves. The man and the woman whirled and laughed, flashing their teeth. 

Violet turned her head slightly, so slightly she hoped Edmund would not notice. His face was flushed, his cheeks erratically pink above the pale column of his neck. She noticed a drop of sweat, descending as though on a line⁠—watched it slowly roll over the bump in his throat, heading for his collar. She wanted to put out her tongue and catch it, like a spot of rain. 

Edmund turned to her and the drop ran away out of sight. 

He smiled. And she smiled. 

Edmund stared blinkingly at the dancers again. He was the happiest he had ever been, and he needed to put an end to it. If the moment were drawn out, if he and Violet were to talk, he knew he would spoil it somehow. If only he could get away! He veered his head and saw Mrs. Simpson a few yards off. His and Violet’s fingertips were still touching. What on earth had made him do it? His great-uncle had been at Waterloo. Perhaps this was the last dreg of heroism left over. For a while longer he kept his fingertips there. Then he fluttered them in temporary, yearning farewell. He hoped Violet would understand that this was what the flutter meant. But oh God, he had not removed them. He had fluttered for nothing. 

“Mrs. Simpson wants me,” he said finally, almost choking on the words but finding solace in speaking into Violet’s ear, the stray hairs under her hat tickling on his lips. He withdrew his hand. Violet moved in surprise but did not speak. His fingertips cradled the memory of hers, and he held them crooked as he walked away, trying to ignore the fact that Mrs. Simpson, sighting him, was quite clearly trying to walk in an opposite direction. 

Mrs. Bodwick was enjoying a long talk with Albert. She had known him since he was a child, and this apparently gave her a tremendous claim on his attention. He had been bearing it with great fortitude until he realized that the bush they were standing next to smelled powerfully of semen. Its steady enveloping of him and Mrs. Bodwick was an unprecedentedly awful event. Surely, Albert thought, she cannot recognize it. And indeed Mrs. Bodwick seemed entirely unaffected. But for Albert it was a torture. He grew redder and redder. He understood it, this smell, to be a new part of that conspiracy on the part of the world, or God, or whoever’s miserable fault it was, to bring him to boil over absolutely with lust. He was a virgin still. He was doing his level best to keep himself one, to keep himself pure for marriage, for Violet Laird, but would anybody let him get so much as an inch closer to Violet Laird? Would anybody give Violet Laird a chance to say anything more to him than that she liked his waistcoat? Even though she liked his waistcoat! And was there ever a nice cooling mist of rain for him to walk about in, to wash his sticky, smelling thoughts away? No. There were two weeks of this stifling, cotton-wool weather. There was this damned bloody bush, sitting there wafting sex at him. There was this wholesale conspiracy to make him boil over, so that it would all end with some trollop off the streets, because that’s how it would end, with him surrendering at long last, simply giving in for poverty of hope, and then immediately getting a nerve disease and going off his head, being put into a home somewhere, a chill white room with a view of fields, and then being slid like a jelly into his grave and no one remembering him kindly, except perhaps Mrs. Bodwick, and perhaps his mother if he was lucky and hadn’t gone too horribly mad beforehand, hadn’t paced around flaunting an erection and screaming all the filthy thoughts that went in and out of his head day after day. 

Edmund! 

Albert had never been so pleased to see that silly face. Making his excuses to Mrs. Bodwick, he rushed over. 

“Your waistcoat is different,” Edmund said. 

“I went to change, remember.”

Edmund absorbed the checked suit and the mustard waistcoat. “I think you look rather flash, Albert.”

“Violet liked it.”

“Liked what?”

“My waistcoat.”

“When?”

“An hour or two ago.”

“Ah.” A look of deep satisfaction appeared on Edmund’s face. 

Albert wondered if he was all right. “You have a mark by your eye,” he said. “I heard you were kicked by a sheep.”

“It won first prize,” Edmund said. 

“So all’s forgiven?”

“Certainly.”

Albert still had his itchy irritated feeling and for a moment struggled to recall what it had to do with. He checked to see if Mrs. Bodwick was gone. “Look here,” he said, and dragged Edmund over to the bush. “You know what this smells like, don’t you?” 

Edmund sniffed. 

“Well?”

“I do, yes.” 

Albert was sweating a good amount. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.” 

But Edmund did know. 

Violet knew it was a mistake, letting Edmund Bliss hold her hand. Not holding her hand⁠—only cradling her fingertips. It was most unlike him, yet like him all the same. This was how it would be, she told herself, to be married to him: a vague, tentative, fingertipping sort of love. If she ever married Edmund, it would mean she had become vague and tentative herself. It didn’t bear thinking about. She continued thinking about it as she searched for her mother, stopping to gaze all about her and seeing the couple from the marquee, the man with the wet dark hair and the cap that clapped at the seat of his trousers, and the woman with the red wrap that licked. The cap was placid on his head now, and the wrap lay quiescent. Violet saw that the man and woman were also altered: gentle, talking closely and quietly, him with his hands in his pockets, thumbs stretched on the outside, and her with arms lightly folded, head tilted back. Violet wondered about them again, with that guilty, jealous ache. 

Some time after, she was standing in the conservatory, in a mob of ladies seething around the tables displaying lacework. It was a competition, which Violet had entered. She wanted to see her piece. It was rather difficult, shuffling among so many ladies, when Mrs. Bodwick on her own took up so much space, and when it was so hot, hotter for all this kindling of parasols and dresses. Violet looked along the table she was nearest to, at the pieces of lace laid out, delicately indistinguishable. She wore a small fixed smile on her face, as though she were admiring the talents of others. She reached the end of the table and moved to the next. It was maddening to be so surrounded, and so hot, with the blinded white sky weighing on the glass above them, when all she wanted was to see her own work. And yet she knew it to be such a small thing, so insignificant. So indistinguishable, since she could not even recognize it. And yet when she did find it, far down the second table, she thought immediately that hers was the best, and felt irritated, preemptively, at the thought of not winning. 

The ladies were still in the conservatory, waiting on the judges, when Violet sighted Edmund outside with a tankard of beer in his hand, talking excitably to the man from the marquee. The man was also holding a tankard; he looked a little amused, and a little shy⁠—it was strange to see anybody shy around Edmund. Violet wondered why on earth they should be drinking and talking together. 

Edmund had remembered his idea of buying the man a drink only after receiving his sign. The sign he had received from the bush. The scent of life beginning. It had created in him a world-embracing joy and gratitude. He found the man talking to his woman friend in the red wrap and rather imperiously, in his excitement, marched him away to the beer stall, to be thanked. This was what he was doing now, thanking this man, whose name was Geoff. It was marvelous, Edmund was saying⁠—while turning over the thrilling afterimage of Violet as he had just fleetingly seen her, watching him with blatant curiosity from inside the conservatory⁠—what a fine job Geoff and the other fellows had done, setting everything up, and Geoff was smiling from his handsome face, taking long drains at his beer. Small spots of rain had begun to land, hesitant cool touchings of rain, extending from a sky which seemed, in its heavy whiteness, to deny all responsibility. And then, like a belch surging out from between close-set lips, there came a break and ripple of thunder. 

It was announced that Violet had won third prize. Her mouth ticked at the corners and she pressed resentfully forward against the gentle demeaning applause to where Mrs. Simpson was waiting to congratulate her. She was pressing forward when the air seemed to shudder, no, to dart⁠—frantically back and forth, like a moth under a lampshade. Only when it stopped, when the air went pale and still, did Violet hear the thunder, and the screams. 

Through the rain-flecked glass of the conservatory men and women could be seen lying on the ground in funny positions, as though it were a game they were playing. Violet watched a dog run shrinkingly over to one of them, sniffing at the head, and being cuffed away by an arm that reached down, tried to drag the body up. There were arms everywhere, reaching down, and some of the bodies came to life at their touch, with straining necks and jerking limbs. Some remained very still, permitting themselves to be dragged and dropped, to be rolled and patted and pleaded with. The rain was continuing to fall in its accidental, negligent way, and the glass was only slightly obscured in that period when Violet stood gazing through it, before she tore her way out into the garden, where Edmund and the man from the marquee were lying dead. Violet looked at the two men, thrown next to each other on the ground, and could not understand. The air darted again, though differently, making a change on Edmund’s face, deepening the mark above his eye. She heard thunder. People were jostling, a stream of summer clothes, and here was her mother, and here was Mrs. Simpson, crumpled and weeping. And⁠—oh, someone was lifting Edmund! She felt herself pulled toward him, as though they were still hooked at their fingertips. Edmund, with someone’s hands under his arms, his head nodding on his chest. A hook in her, helplessly pulling. The other man was being lifted too. His cap had fallen, it lay lonely on the ground like something trampled, and the woman in the red wrap was flinging herself down on it, on her knees, the wrap a red snare shut fast around her, she was holding the cap, her face covered with tears, her mouth opening and terrible words shouting out. 

Violet did not think of Edmund being carried away. Already this buried hook of pain was what remained of him. She ran and seized the woman, falling on her knees too. The woman’s shouts pulsed into her chest and Violet began to sob, gripping tighter, squeezing her tears against the woman’s neck. She heard someone saying her name and stared up through the strands of the woman’s hair at Albert in his mustard waistcoat, stricken, his monocle trapped and blurred in his eye. The woman shouted again into her chest, wrestling in her grip, and Violet put her mouth to her ear, whispering. “Was it love?” she said. “Please, tell me, please, was it love?”

Home page image: Ennio Pettenello, 1955, from Issue No. 8 Cover in issue no. 8 (Spring 1955).