Love for Lydia (12 page)

‘Agreed,' we all said. ‘Hear, hear.'

‘May we have the pleasure, Miss Aspen?' Tom said.

‘Thank you very much,' she said.

‘Cheers,' Tom said. ‘That'll be the great day.'

We all laughed. Mrs Sanderson snuggled among the rugs and said: ‘Oh! it's just like a bed in here – here I am in bed with three men, and my husband at home and hungry and waiting and I don't know what – I really don't know –'

Everyone burst out laughing again, and the car, swerving heavily on a misty corner, threw us together in a warm and joyous entanglement of dresses and brushing silken legs and bare smooth arms and laughing mouths, and I felt suspended and elevated and half-light-headed with happiness.

When we dropped Nancy and Tom at the farm they shouted, ‘Sunday – don't forget Sunday,' and we called back that we wouldn't forget and then, several times, ‘Square up later – settle up later,' and I said, ‘I'll pay the cab, Tom, don't worry, good night,' and then, ‘Good night, Nancy,' I called.

‘She's gone,' he said. ‘Good night.'

Afterwards we dropped Alex Sanderson and his mother. At the last moment Alex mischievously put his dark face into the car window and said, ‘Give her one for me, old boy. If you don't I'll take one myself,' and Lydia said:

‘Oh! if you feel like that about it –'

An odd spasm of resentment, the minutest shock wave of
jealousy, shot through me as she said this, only to be quietened a moment later by Mrs Sanderson, who stood waiting by the other open door.

‘Oh! well – if there's going to be kissing of good nights,' she said.

She leaned into the car and in the darkness found my face with her mouth. She laughed, touching my lips in a brief warm flicker. ‘Good night,' she whispered. ‘It's been lovely – we must do it again.'

After that we drove on alone, up through Evensford High Street, to the park. All the street lights were out; the deep yellow moon was down below the houses. There was now only a refracted amber glow of it, tender and transfiguring as snow, in the sky, on the grey church spire with its facings of iron-stone and on the toast-brown October chestnut leaves falling along the wall of the park.

‘Ask him to put us down at the lodge,' Lydia said. ‘We can walk up.'

At the lodge gates, while I stood paying for the car, Lydia stood beside me and although it was a soft sultry night I thought I heard her shiver.

Old Johnson heard it too and said: ‘Don't you git cold, miss. Easiest thing in the world to git cold after dancing.'

‘No, don't get cold,' I said. I took her arm, but she was not cold.

‘Take a rug,' Johnson said. ‘Put it round your shoulders. Muster Richardson can bring it back.'

‘I think I will,' she said.

He opened the door of the car, took out a rug and draped it round her shoulders. ‘You better have one too, Muster Richardson,' he said.

‘Oh no,' I said.

‘Yes, have one,' she said.

‘You git sweatin' and afore you know where you are you got a chill round your backbone.' He put another rug round my shoulders. ‘That's all right. You can bring 'em back.'

‘Well, I don't need it, but thanks,' I said.

As we walked up the avenue she stopped, listening for the
sound of the old Chrysler dying away in the empty street beyond the church, and stood close to me.

‘You very nearly spoiled it,' she said.

‘Spoiled what?'

‘The rugs,' she said. ‘You're very simple sometimes.'

We spread one of the rugs on dry chestnut leaves and lay down on it, drawing the other one over us. The moon had vanished, leaving the sky above the half-leaved branches orange-green, without a trace of blue, warm and lucent with the dying glow. Then it turned paler, whiter, and finally a clear salt-blue, with pure white stars, like a touch of winter. But under the rug it was quite warm and she pressed herself so close to me that I could feel the bone of her hip round and hard against me through the flesh.

As we lay there she said several times how beautiful the evening had been and how much she had enjoyed it and how much she had wanted me. Underneath the rug I found her body in clean long curves and held it there while I watched the stars. I felt there was probably no one else awake in all Evensford except perhaps old Johnson and Alex and his mother, and I pitied everybody because they were not awake and with her and as happy as I was.

Then I remembered how Alex had kissed her; I remembered the keen stab of jealousy, the sudden slitting through of all my puffed vanity; and I was sick because I did not want another person to touch her, and because I did not want to share her with another soul.

‘Don't let Alex kiss you again,' I said.

‘Oh! that was just fun,' she said. She laughed at me from deep in her throat, and the sound danced a long way through the already baring trees. ‘There was nothing in that at all.'

Sunday would not have been remarkable in any way if it had not been for something that happened after all of us – fourteen I counted when we sat down to table at Busketts and then sixteen as two brothers came in, rather late, in shirt sleeves, from milking – had had tea in the long white parlour.

Even now I cannot remember clearly – I never could – if there were six Holland sons and five daughters, or six daughters and five sons. One son had been killed during the war; two sons and three daughters were married and already a new generation of fair, chaste-looking, golden-skinned Hollands was springing up, all alike, all clean and fresh as sheaves in a wheat field. You were never expected to hold conversations at Busketts; meals had the pleasant discordance of a disorganized and hungry choir. Brown arms passed and exchanged and repassed across the table buttery masses of scones and bread and currant loaf, plates of ham and watercress and pork-pie and in winter toasted crumpets and apples baked and stuffed to a sugary glitter with walnuts and figs. Tarts of lemon curd and Mrs Holland's speciality, cheese-curd, a tart of greenish melting softness with fat brown plums in it, were wolfed down by mouths that seemed to be laughing whenever they were not eating. Mrs Holland, pale, of delicate semi-transparence, exactly like egg-shell, as Juliana Aspen had said, sat at one end of the table, watching it all with the brightest small violet eyes, staring sometimes with bemusement at Will Holland, the father, who sat at the other. Masses of reddish-golden hair grew out of his ears and perhaps it was these that attracted her.

If you did not eat at Busketts, it was held that there was something wrong with you. If you did not help to finish up, with second and third helpings and large washes of thick brown tea, the plates of ham and pie and fruit and tart, there
was something equally wrong with the food. Neither of these things, in my experience, had ever really happened there. Only Lydia did not eat much that day.

At first the Hollands, in their own honest way, were shy of her. They stood, as it were, a little away from her, in respect, almost with delicacy, briefly formal; they looked on her as the aristocrat – there had been Hollands in Evensford as long as Aspens, for probably five hundred years, and there are Hollands there now, although there are no Aspens – and it was, I think, ingrained in them to stand away and look up, seeing her, as their forefathers had seen her forefathers, as someone from the great house, a lady growing up, a little unreal, detached from them. Her colouring had something to do with it too. Her darkness was glossy and almost foreign, a little smouldering, against their clear, blue-eyed Englishness. It made them seem like touchingly simple, most uncomplicated people.

It was this that made them press on her, in their customary way, as the meal began, everything that the table bore under its arching glass vases of scarlet dahlia and late curled pink and purple aster. They could not understand a person who did not share with them their staunch and mountainous hunger.

Then all at once they grasped it and understood it. They stood away from her at once, shy again. Even Mrs Holland left off asking, in her rather prim, distant manner, if Lydia was off-colour or anything of that kind?

Suddenly Harry, who had eyes and hair some shades less pale than the rest, so that there was almost a shadow on them, a glint of something slightly richer, livelier, and more full-blooded, leaned gravely across the table and spoke to her. He was in his shirt-sleeves, fresh from milking. Sweat under his darker eyes made them flushed and glittering.

‘Miss Aspen,' he said, ‘is there anything you fancy that you
don't
see on this table, because –'

We broke into the first shouts of laughter. Lydia laughed too; and Harry, a little mocking, said:

‘Miss Aspen, I implore you to eat. I can't
bear
it. If
you
don't eat, how can I?' – and we all laughed again.

‘Let me fetch you something,' Harry said. ‘Let me go to the
pantry and see if I can find a titty-bit of something to tempt you –'

‘Harry!' his mother said. ‘You great fool-jabey!'

‘Girls have to eat,' Harry said. He got up with a touch of solemn mockery.

‘You great fool-jabey!' his mother said. ‘Sit down! –'

‘Got to find something to
tempt
Miss Aspen,' Harry said. ‘Eh, Mister Richardson? – Mister Richardson knows, don't you, Mister Richardson? – like to be
tempted
, don't they?'

Harry gave me a grave wink, and his mother called that if he didn't sit down she'd warm his backside, big as he was, and all of us laughed again. One of the elder sisters began to say how Harry had always been the fool of the family and another said he'd never grow up. Mr Holland sat eating without a word, grasping a piece of celery as large as a ham-bone in one hand and a wedge of cheese cake in the other. The celery cracked and crunched and Mrs Holland shouted over her shoulder that if Harry didn't keep his fingers out of the pantry she'd burn him. Even Nancy, who had begun by being correct and formal as a window-model, in order I suppose to impress on Lydia some idea that they were as good as she was, began trying not to laugh into a squeezed lace handkerchief.

When Harry came out of the kitchen with an unplucked wild duck on a dish George, the elder brother, put his head down and started shrieking into his plate.

‘Our Harry, you big wet thing,' Edith said, and Mrs Holland got up, tears running down her face, and began beating him about the shoulders.

When Harry started running round the room the duck did a lively stiffish dance on the plate. The blows from Mrs Holland went thumping into Harry's back. The duck with a rubbery brilliant leap sprang into the air. Mr Holland sat transfixed, celery and cake suspended, and Harry, trying to catch the duck, dropped the dish instead.

‘You great fool!' Mrs Holland said and picked up the dish, unbroken. Harry dived again for the duck and Mrs Holland – I see clearly now why, more like a little hawk than any eggshell, she was really the soul and master of the house – hit
him squarely on the back of the head with the dish. It was the sort of smart playful tap that breaks things more easily than more substantial blows and the dish snapped into two pieces.

‘It won't hurt him!' we shouted. ‘It's hard! – it can stand it! Hard as iron,' we said, ‘he'll never feel it!' and Mrs Holland said ‘He'll feel it next time, I'll warrant,' and chased him from the parlour into the kitchen, where we could hear her, in some final scuffle of motherly horse-play, giggling like a girl.

‘Loves it! Just as bad,' we said. ‘Makes him worse! –'

‘I remember the time she poured milk down his neck – I'll never forget that time,' George said, and only Nancy looked embarrassed, murmuring something about a bad example and how lucky it was that Arthur's children were not there.

When it was all over Mrs Holland sat at the head of the table again, trying to pat solemnity into her bright laughing violet eyes with a fresh and respectable handkerchief still folded into a square.

‘I don't know what you think of your first visit to Busketts, Miss Aspen,' she said, and before Lydia could answer Harry said, with the old solemnity:

‘Good Lord, hasn't she
heard
of us? – the Holland circus? I thought everybody in Evensford had
heard
of us.
Me
– at any rate –'

‘She hasn't been in Evensford so very long yet,' Nancy said.

‘Well, now show that Busketts
can
behave,' Mrs Holland said, and Harry said, gravely:

‘She should come at Christmas – that's a time –
will
you come at Christmas, Miss Aspen?' he begged her.

‘Oh! perhaps,' Lydia said. She laughed, and I could see that she was happy and liked it all. ‘It's a nice name, Busketts – it's very English and very like you.'

Nancy saw her chance and said:

‘It's really French. That's where it comes from.'

‘I never understood that,' her father said. ‘I never heard of that.'

‘It's a corruption,' Nancy said. ‘It's the same word as bosky – there was probably a wood here once –'

‘There's wood here now!' Tom said. He tapped the top of Harry's head so that we all began laughing again. ‘Ah! that's wood if you like. That's wood.'

‘In the French it's probably
bosquet
– and you get another word,
bocage
, meaning a sort of wooded place, too –'

‘Harry again!' we said. ‘Wooded place –'

‘
Now
we know,' Tom said. ‘All this time we
wondered
– so that's it, wooded place.'

‘Good old Harry,' we said ‘Busketts for wood! Plenty of wood. A good wooded place.'

Nancy did not know quite what to do about this nonsense. She sat for some time afterwards taking the plums carefully from a piece of cheese-curd, pushing them, in finicky embarrassment, to the side of her plate. When she had carefully removed them all there was not much left of the cheese-curd, and Harry said, in a sly way: