The Flying Goat by H.E. Bates

room behind. It must all have been sepulchrally strange and foreign to her, not quite real, with the lead-colouredDecember light shining on the dead glass that covered the dead animals, and the dead light itself gradually being watered away by the dark December rain beyond the windows. It must have sent her thoughts flying back to wherever it was she came from, and it must, I think, have made her unhappy, because now and then you would see her look far beyond windows and rain and dark sky with a look of unconscious pain.
    But there were two things in that room that she did understand. One was a case of butterflies; they were tropical and I think perhaps, at one time, Ephraim had brought them home for his father. The other was Ephraim’s ship, the model of
The Mary Porter
.
    Ephraim had brought home the ship for the last time. It was finished and it stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. It stood raised up, on a wooden support, in front of a pier-glass. The glass was tilted so that, just now and then, you had the illusion of the ship, with all her canvas set, waiting for a breeze in the dead calm of some tropical latitude where sky and sea had fused to a sheet of glass.
    And she understood that ship. She must have seen its original over and over again. It wouldprovoke her into long moments of reflection, not painful, not really happy, but full of something inexpressible.
    Nothing happened about the ship that afternoon. Soon after that first ‘Hullo’ my aunt came in with a bucket of small coal and kindling sticks that she had been chopping in the back-yard and as she set down the bucket by the fireplace she looked old and yellow, like a woman who has just come through an illness. She muttered something about not being so young as she used to be and another remark about some people who were young enough to do things but never lifted a finger, and I knew she was bitter against the black girl. Then I had an idea. ‘Let me come round every afternoon through the Christmas holidays,’ I said, ‘and get your sticks and coal in.’
    So I began to go round every afternoon, and sometimes Ephraim’s black girl would be sitting there, by the fire, doing nothing except staring at the ship or the sky or the butterflies. And sometimes Ephraim himself would be there and they would be talking together, in her language, softly, this barrier of language cutting them off from my aunt, who would sit silent and apart from them, her yellow face bone-hard with an extraordinary bitterness and jealousy.
    Then on the last day but one of December I went there and Ephraim had gone. He had sailed that day for Singapore, master of a ship named
The Border Lass
, for different owners I think, and he had left the black girl behind. He had left her because, I think, neither the new owners nor the old nor any others would ever countenance the sailing of a white skipper with a coloured wife. How he had ever brought her in the first place I could never fathom. Why he had brought her was something which troubled my aunt still more.
    And even I, a boy, could see what was going to happen. It would be nine months, perhaps longer, before Ephraim came back. And in the meantime? I could see nothing but tension: the tension of the long winter days in the gloomy room behind the shop, the girl with her three words of English able to express almost nothing of what she felt, my aunt expressing what she felt by jealousy and silence. I could see all this, but how it was going to end was beyond me.
    Then something happened. Every Thursday afternoon my aunt shut the shop, and sometimes she took the train into the next town, to see some friends. One Thursday when I went round to theshop to get in the coal and sticks she had shut the shop and gone, leaving Ephraim’s black girl alone in the back room.
    â€˜Hulloyes,’ she said when I went into the back room, and smiled.
    â€˜Hullo,’ I said.
    I put the bucket of coal and sticks