Love for Lydia (15 page)

‘She did,' he said. ‘Lydia. It's her idea.' He looked at me with pitiful embarrassment. ‘That's what I wanted to say – what I wanted – I took her out to dinner last night.'

He looked so pained about this simple fact that I did not know what to say.

‘Place on the Great North Road,' he said. ‘Eaton something – Blackie took us. Eaton something – Eaton –'

‘Eatanswill?' I said.

‘What?' he said. ‘What? No – that wasn't it,' and the bitter, sickly joke was lost on him.

‘She telephoned me,' he said. ‘It was her idea,' as if he thought this brought the improbability of the whole thing into reasonable fine with truth. ‘She wanted to talk about something.
This dance thing. She's tired of it. She's fed up. She thinks it's got awfully stuffy –'

‘Perhaps it has.'

‘She wants to go somewhere new. For a change. You know? – sort of –' He looked at me with gin-smoky, fuddled eyes. ‘So when we were coming home she suddenly pulled the partition and said to Blackie: “Blackie, you know all the places. Where could we go? Somewhere different? For fun? Somewhere we don't have to dress – where we could let go.” And then he suggested this place. It's some bloody awful hole – you know what those villages are – I think he comes from there.'

Again I could not see what there was to be troubled about in this simple thing. Again he looked at me painfully with mute, fuddled eyes.

‘Perhaps she's right,' I said. ‘We can't go on doing the same old round for ever.'

‘It isn't that,' he said. ‘Have another drink? I'm going to have another one. Waiter!'

The waiter did not come and after that, for some minutes, Alex forgot him. Then what he said next, sucking the words with fumbling lips out of the tankard, seemed very amusing and I laughed.

‘It isn't that,' he said. ‘I think she's flirting with Blackie.'

‘How many did you have in London?' I said.

‘A few, a few,' he said. ‘Not many.' I laughed again, and he seemed acutely pained.

‘What's so funny about it? When you look at him he's bloody handsome – in his way.'

‘That doesn't mean it's her way.'

‘No? You can never tell,' he said. ‘You can never be sure. They get attracted by people you loathe. You wonder how the hell they can – you can never be sure.'

I asked him if there was anything that could possibly make him sure, and he said:

‘She made me kiss her good night in front of him. Deliberately –'

I felt sick. ‘Let's go home,' I said.

‘Deliberately,' he said.

I said I thought he had had enough. I added that I thought I had had enough myself. The trivial obsessions of a half-drunk, even a friend, did not seem very amusing. He called again for the waiter. Then he got up and rammed a blundering forefinger several times into the bell. It rang insistently far away in the bar, and he said:

‘She sees something in him – I can tell by the way she looks at him.'

‘She's excitable and impulsive,' I said. ‘That's all.'

‘I'll knock the bastard down if he even looks at her,' he said.

I suddenly felt sick with fear and doubt and uneasiness that all he was saying might be true. The arrival of the waiter made me get up. Alex was staring into the pier-glass above the fireplace and the waiter asked me if anyone had rung. I said it was all a mistake. We were sorry to have bothered him. We were going home.

‘Home be damned,' Alex said. ‘Two more. Two more, waiter. Let's have two more.'

‘I'm going,' I said.

I walked angrily out of the hotel. Blundering and groping in the darkening night air beyond the lighted steps, Alex ran after me.

‘Don't go off in a bloody huff,' he said.

‘I'm not,' I said.

He waved his hands expansively and uncertainly in air.

‘It's a bad habit of yours,' he said. He laughed with wry, shaky good humour. ‘Going off in a huff. Storming out like an offended bloody old cockatoo.'

‘You're sozzled,' I said.

‘Bad habit,' he said. ‘Terrible weakness.'

He laughed again and I caught a glimpse of his face, half-drunk, careless, taut but amusing and lovable under the grim light of a gas-lamp. My annoyance with him vanished suddenly and I laughed too.

‘I'm sorry I stormed out,' I said.

‘Bad habit,' he said. ‘Something you'll have to grow out of.'

‘I flare up,' I said. ‘I feel something flare up inside me.'

‘Eh?' he said. ‘Feel what?' He laughed again and then with
a sudden grave mannerism that might have been a mockery of himself if I had not noticed that his teeth were gripping hard together, pulling his mouth into a bloodless line, he shook hands.

‘Don't know what I should do without you,' he said.

His hand was cold. He stood for a long time in the street, holding my hand, gripping it with wiry fingers. He said several times how good it had been to talk and how he felt better because of it. His eyes were uneasy in their bright depression of fatigue under the street gas lamp. He might have been ill except for the constant twisted smile on his mouth and once as he waved his hands in a more exaggerated show of relief and affection for me he staggered and almost fell down.

I wished very often afterwards that he had fallen down. We might then have had a good laugh together. We might have seen the funny side of something that, in the narrowed magnification that youth brought to it, seemed to him only intensely muddled and taut and tragic.

Instead he suddenly turned and looked at me, very curiously, the smile gone from his face, leaving the eyes once again smokily troubled.

‘I keep getting a feeling something bloody awful is going to happen,' he said.

‘Who to?' I said.

‘That's it,' he said. ‘I haven't the least idea.'

As we walked the rest of the way home he did not speak of it again. He did not speak of Lydia either. But that night I lay awake for a long time looking into the mild winter night sky, very bright with stars over the jetties, the alleyways, and the dark roofs of the town, troubled and sleepless, thinking of what he had said to me.

‘I keep getting a feeling something bloody awful is going to happen,' he had said, and I knew that the worst that could happen to me, then or in the future, was that either the love I felt for him or the love I felt for Lydia, or even both of them, might somehow be taken away.

The following evening, when I went up to the Aspen house, I knew how stupid I had been to think of all this.

‘If that's our Mr Richardson,' Miss Bertie called, ‘bring him in at once. I want to scold him severely.'

The voice sailed with dry and starchy assertiveness along the main corridor of the house as I entered with Lydia. Unless we were dancing or I had an invitation to dinner I went up to the house soon after eight o'clock. The Aspens dined at seven; I would join them afterwards for coffee. If it were not raining Lydia came down the long drive to meet me, and that evening she came down with her coat slung sleevelessly over her shoulders. She ran the last twenty yards or so down the slope of the avenue, running into my arms to kiss me, and I said:

‘You had dinner with Alex. I know. You didn't tell me.'

‘He rang up suddenly and asked me,' she said. I did not comment on this. ‘It wasn't anything. Are you jealous?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Good – I wondered if you would be.'

She laughed softly and then said something about my having to get used to sharing her with people and that the world, after all, wasn't composed simply of ourselves. I suddenly felt oddly uncertain about everything and she seemed to sense it and pulled me against her. ‘You're so sweet,' she said, ‘and I do love you.' Then she drew her mouth warmly across the side of my face. ‘Let's stand a minute – I want you to hold me.'

I stood with my back to a lime tree, holding her against me. As I pulled her to me she put up her arms and her coat, sleevelessly draped about her shoulders, fell off, and I felt all the hollowed shape of her body in its dress, hard and soft, warm and strenuous, pressed against me. The night was profoundly still and quiet and unwintry again and she said:

‘Shall I tell you a wonderful, marvellous, exciting, terrific thing?'

‘What?' I said.

‘They're going to talk to you about my birthday,' she said. ‘And then next week they're going to London, looking for a present for me. They're going for two days.'

‘Well?' I said.

‘You poor simple – it means we can be in the house alone together – you and I,' she said.

A flare of excitement, dispelling all the fear I had, went through me fiercely. ‘It'll be all right. Don't worry. I'll arrange it all,' she said.

It was because of this – and there was a wonderful feeling of personal sweetness, lovely and tender and almost naïve, in the way she told it to me – that I put Alex, Blackie, and all the vacuous dreary thoughts I had had about them the previous evening completely behind me.

‘Give me one of those long kisses of yours – do you know it's a year since I first kissed you and then I had to make you?' she said. ‘And then we must go.'

I kissed her for a long time and then, on the way up to the house, she stopped and said one more thing:

‘What would you say I ought to do for my party?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, it's
my
party. It's
I
who am twenty-one – it's nobody else – it isn't you or Aunt Bertie or anybody, is it? What do you think?' she said.

I told her I thought she ought to have the kind of party she wanted, and she threw her arms about me, with a sort of whispered shriek of delight.

‘Exactly!' she said. ‘Of course! Oh! I'll love you for ever for saying that. I'll love you all the time they've gone away –'

Up in the house, in the drawing-room, Miss Juliana had her neck swathed in flannel and pins and sat in a rather mopey fashion, sucking honey from a teaspoon, before the fire. I thought she cringed a little, putting her hand to her face to touch its tender nerves, as Miss Bertie greeted me with sharp and friendly firmness:

‘Come along in, Mr Richardson, and let me scold you! – you promised to come and give your opinion about the ixias, and that was a week ago.'

Miss Bertie was always having difficulties with freesias or cyclamen or amaryllis or some other flower of which she felt I knew the secret; she thought all her gardeners had wool in their heads and wood in their fingers. ‘They're so awfully hide-bound
you see, so fixed,' she would say to me, ‘you would think it was
their
garden,
their
conservatory.' It was I who had spoken to her of the delicious many-coloured ixias that would make a change, as I told her, from the everlasting bowls of narcissus and daffodils.

‘What about the ixias?' I said.

‘The ixias do not like us,' she said. ‘They sniff and sulk. They reject us.'

‘Perhaps the gardeners don't like them,' I said.

‘Possibly there is something in that.'

I began to say something about affection breeding affection, even in plants, when she said:

‘Oh! That's altogether too profound for me. It's far more likely someone has been over-dosing them with dung-water.' She fussed and laughed her way across the drawing-room. ‘Anyway we shall go and have a look at them. You go on ahead and put on the light for me.'

In the delicious night humidity of the conservatory, all heavily and delicately fragrant with hyacinth and narcissus and small cowslip-like primula among ferns, I could not see that the ixias had much wrong with them except perhaps a touch of fly on the thin gleaming leaves.

‘It's a little early for them perhaps,' I said. ‘They need only the gentlest forcing –' But I could see suddenly that, after all, the flowers were really a secondary thing. She was not really listening. Suddenly she gave one of her hen-like fluffings that always preceded some pronouncement of her intentions and said:

‘Mr Richardson, there was really something else I wanted to ask you – do you mind? – what do you feel about Lydia's party? – say with utmost frankness what you feel.'

I made a pretence of thinking for a moment or two about it; and then I said I thought that, since it was her own party, she ought to have the party she herself wanted.

‘You really feel that? Did she say that to you?'

‘No,' I said.

‘It makes no difference if she did. The point is she wants a rather large party – she wants to have dancing on the lawn
in the evening for the whole town, and a great many people and so on. How does that strike you?'

Then I remembered how Lydia had so often said that she was getting bored with dances; and it made me say:

‘I think every girl wants to have something wonderful on that day. There's nothing quite so big and exciting for her again – except when she's married –'

She played sadly with the leaf of a narcissus.

‘I remember my own twenty-first,' she said. ‘My birthday is on the thirteenth of August and my father thought it was fitting to have grouse, with a claret of '53, I think it was. The grouse was bloody and' – she suddenly looked at me with a kind of melancholy mischief, rather wistfully – ‘and I'm bound to say the claret was bloody too.'

In that moment I felt that I liked Miss Bertie very much.

‘After that we were allowed to play bezique,' she said. ‘You never played bezique, I suppose?' She made a sour little face. ‘With grown-ups?'

I said I had never played bezique. I did not even know what bezique was. But she made it sound like a complaint of the liver; and then she said:

‘That's all I wanted to ask you.' She smiled, and it was that same curious expansive smile that all the Aspens, even Rollo, sometimes gave, quite enchanting and yet disenchanting too.