Love for Lydia (16 page)

‘I think we'll give her the party she wants, won't we?' she said.

‘It ought to be very lovely in May,' I said.

‘You never know,' she said, ‘it might be the last nice thing, really nice thing, we could give her,' and with that she turned out the light above the flowers.

When we got back to the drawing-room she gave me a glass of port, pouring it out for me herself. Lydia, who also had one, looked very pleased about something and then puzzled for a moment as I lifted my glass and said:

‘Well, here's to bezique and no grouse,' a remark that seemed to bring some life back to Juliana, who sat gaping and grey as an old landed fish in her chair. She had been rather
croaky and poorly all that winter and the eyelid she turned and, as it were, unpeeled at me was yellow at the edge.

‘What have you two been hatching up besides flowers?' she said.

‘I thought you were going to bed,' Bertie said to her. ‘Not yet,' she said.

Afterwards I fancied Lydia had, perhaps, been wearing both of them down about the party, and that Juliana, the weaker, had been the first to crumple up. But now a brightness began to assert itself in Juliana and she actually said:

‘I rather think I'll have a glass of port too.'

‘It's congestive,' Miss Bertie said.

‘Then, let it be congestive,' Juliana said. ‘My belly has had nothing inside it all day.'

Then Miss Bertie suddenly turned to me and as if it were the newest possible subject between us, said:

‘Mr Richardson, my sister and I wanted to ask you something' – she looked quite grave and flat-faced – ‘it was the question of Lydia's party. For her twenty-first – what sort of party do
you
think she ought to have?'

By that time I knew my one-sentence piece so well that I actually hesitated.

‘Be quite frank and say what you feel. Speak with the utmost frankness.'

Lydia gulped nervously at her port, and I said:

‘I think she ought to have exactly the kind of party she wants to have.'

Miss Bertie wagged her jowls – they did not quite form a dewlap, but they had a certain dog-like floppiness that made her facial expressions sometimes seem convulsive, giving the impression that she was laughing when she really wasn't – and then said:

‘Thank you – that's just exactly what we were thinking too.'

Lydia gave a shriek of joy. She threw her arms round Miss Bertie, calling her the dear pet. Miss Juliana put up pretty, ill, protective fingers, murmuring nervous warnings about things being catching and then let Lydia kiss her on the hair.

‘Oh! I could kiss you all,' Lydia said and then looked swiftly about her and said to me – ‘You too –'

And suddenly she did kiss me, lightly, with a shy sisterly sort of art.

‘Well!' Miss Bertie said. She began to jog up and down like the bonnet of an old motor car, laughing. Then Miss Juliana gave a croaked, congested giggle, and Miss Bertie said:

‘What about
us
?'

I then kissed Miss Bertie's dog-like, semi-dewlapped mouth, feeling the crisp brush of her moustache as we blundered together. Then I made for Miss Juliana, who croaked ‘Not me! You'll catch your death!' and Lydia said:

‘Oh! Aunt Juley, let him. He kisses beautifully,' and Miss Bertie said:

‘Oh! so it
wasn't
the first time!' and we all laughed with great relief and gaiety together.

These twitterings, so trivial and timid, seem stupid now; perhaps the sisters were not, after all, as obtuse as they sometimes seemed; perhaps in their old-fashioned diffidence they had their own way of doing things. At any rate we began to discuss the party Lydia wanted. The air was clear at last.

She knew, as I discovered later, perfectly well what she wanted. But that night she spoke of first one thing, and then another, as if they were surprise packets, quite unexpected:

‘Oh! yes! and then the band on the terrace, and everyone dancing on the front lawn.'

There was first of all, it seemed, to be a reception in the house for invited guests. ‘And champagne!' she said. ‘We must have champagne – I liked it so much at the New Year party. It always reminds me of that.'

And then the grounds would be open – they had not been open since the Coronation of George V, a date I often remembered because it was for many years the one and only time I had ever seen the Aspen house, except that I had not even the vaguest recollection of strings of fairy lights seen from the wicker hood of the family pram – and then the town would come in for dancing, which Lydia would start at nine
o'clock, I hoped with me of course, although as a matter of fact she did not do so.

At ten the invited guests would have supper in the house – we did not work out all these details that first evening: Lydia let many of them fall out like casual afterthoughts, sometimes weeks afterwards – and there would be large cold buffets, with perhaps a speech or two.

‘And
all
the town must come,' Lydia said. ‘Everybody. We want everybody. We must put it in the papers.'

‘That means your horrid Mr Bretherton,' Miss Juliana said.

‘Oh! he'll get drunk,' I said.

‘I think
I
shall get drunk,' Lydia said.

‘Lydia!' they said.

‘Well, Rollo will,' she said, ‘if nobody else does – and probably Alex will, if somebody teases him enough – won't he?' she said to me.

‘I shouldn't tease Alex,' I said.

‘I think it's such fun to see the look on his face,' she said.

‘Don't tease him,' I said.

‘No?' she said. ‘All right – then I'll be serious with him – how does that suit you?'

There was just one more thing she wanted. She thought of the old people. Many old people, she thought, would not be able to come unless they were fetched in cars.

‘Knight could fetch some of them in the Daimler, and Mr Johnson' – she did not once mention Blackie – ‘could fetch some in his car.'

The Aspen sisters thought it a nice idea; it touched them, in these days when the young, as they often said, were getting indifferent and disrespectful and even callous about their elders, to think that she had been thoughtful enough to remember them.

Then Miss Bertie said – and I thought it seemed to point so conclusively to the end of the proceedings that I got up, at last, to go – ‘All we need is a fine day.'

‘It should be lovely,' I said. ‘May-time – nearly the end of May – nearly June.'

‘May-time – the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,' she
said, and her floppy face became alight with the most touching pleasure. ‘I think it will be wonderful – I'm sure it will.'

Lydia came to the front door to say goodnight to me and we stood for a few moments on the dark porch outside.

‘Clever man,' she said.

I did not think I had been very clever about anything, and I did not know when or how.

‘Clever,' she said. ‘You've got those bright blue eyes and they see right through people, don't they?'

I was not, as a matter of fact, ever more obtuse in my life. But it warmed and pleased me to hear her say these things, and especially:

‘I like the others – Alex and Tom and all of them, but you're the one with character. You're the deep one, aren't you?' She said these last words in a whisper; and then also in a whisper: ‘Goodnight, darling. I'll love you every minute – and next week every second,' and with wonderful tenderness she kissed me goodnight in the dark winter air.

On the way down through the park, in the avenue, I met Rollo. He began shouting:

‘Here! – who the devil is that? Who the blazes are you –?' And then he saw me. ‘Oh! hullo, Richardson. So plum awful dark I couldn't see. I thought it was some damn poacher. We've had a hell of a lot of it this winter.'

‘Knight was telling me.'

‘They're getting confounded cheeky with it too. Plum awful. Bloody soon we'll have to have chains on the pheasants.'

‘Knight was telling me they came one night in a van.'

‘It's true,' he said. ‘Gang of damn shoe-making chaps, factory blokes. Can't leave a thing alone that isn't theirs. Damn Bolshies – everybody nowadays is a damn Bolshie.'

‘This has always been a poaching town,' I said. ‘Back to the old days –'

‘I don't know what it used to be like,' he said, ‘but it's plum awful now.' Streaks of whiskied breath went past me on the mild air. He straightened his flattish broad-checked cap, swinging his short malacca cane at the dark. ‘You know what I'm beginning to think?'

I waited to hear.

‘I think the whole bloody show is going to pieces,' he said. ‘That's what. There soon won't be any people left like us.'

It did not really occur to me until long afterwards that Alex might have been in love with her; I did not properly grasp that his anger at Blackie, his drunkenness or his moods were all part of his complexity about denying it to himself, to me and, because of me, to Lydia herself. Even after the dance at Milton Posnett I was so completely obsessed by fondness for him that I could not even begin to see these things.

The dance at Milton Posnett was the last before Lent that year. I had hoped, once or twice, that Lydia had forgotten about it, but sooner or later she always brought it up again. But I had learned, at least, one thing: that it was stupid with her, as with children, to say Don't or No or Must you? It was better to give way to her, sooner rather than later, on the assumption that very soon she would forget what it was you had had to give away.

Milton Posnett turned out to be a scrubby riverside village in Huntingdonshire, low on the edge of fens. High rows of black elms grew on either side of the yellow stucco school-house, where the dance was. All of us were strangers there – except, as it turned out, Blackie – and when we went into the low school-room, still hung with its scarlet and white and green and gold festoons and even a little dusty tinsel from Christmas, I thought there was a sort of glazed hostility, blank rather than in any way aggressive, in the eyes of the big-boned country boys who were hauling their girls about the dusty floor. A four-piece band of men in red top-hats was playing a slow lugubrious fox-trot, and there was a stumping of village feet that was like a barrack-room parade.

Alex took one morose look at all this. He had occasional fits
of depression that coincided with attacks of catarrh, so that a kind of despondent ferocity developed in him, and then he said:

‘I'm going to get a drink. I've got to have a drink before I can face
that
.' He was breathing heavily.

The girls were changing their shoes and brushing their hair in what I imagined was the infants' cloakroom; there was a smell of dust and face-powder and sweat and, oddly enough, of spilt ink-bottles everywhere; and in a sudden fit of depression I followed Alex into the street under the elms outside.

‘I can't think whatever possessed us to come here,' I said.

‘Can't you?' he said. The catarrh had already brought an unlovable, bellicose look of resentful pain to his eyes. ‘Blackie comes from here – that's why.'

I think I was mystified by that, but not troubled. Then Alex said:

‘Come on – we're going to have a couple of blinders before the pubs close. My head thumps like a press.'

‘You go,' I said. ‘I think I'll go back – I'll come along later.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll order a few up for you in case they call time.'

When I got back to the school-room Lydia was dancing with Tom, and Nancy was waiting for me. Mrs Sanderson had not come with us that night. Alex had decided that village hops in school-rooms had nothing to offer her smart and dignified elegance. He had brought as his partner a girl named Nora Jepson, a thin, smooth-haired, serpentine girl whose dancing had about it a shining felicity that was thrilling and uncanny. It was my impression that Nora never wore anything but shoes and stockings and a georgette dress. Her figure was as lithe and plain as a boy's. She danced with a tense feline beauty that looked voluptuous but that was, in fact, passionately academic. She was one of those people who dance for dancing's sake – which was perhaps, after all, why Alex had brought her, since all evening he did not dance with her once and he must have known she would not care.

The band played in deadly off-rhythms and across the floor village boys clamped about, raising dust, like horses.

‘This is pretty awful,' I said.

‘Oh? I think it's rather nice,' Nancy said. ‘Don't be so uppish. It's just an ordinary Saturday village dance – the sort we always went to before Lydia came. I think it's good for us. We were all getting so far up in the air I thought we were never coming down.'

I clenched her about the corsets and swung her across the floor, impotent with annoyance, and she said:

‘Lydia's waving to you and you're not looking. Wave.'

Turning, I saw Lydia.

‘Don't gape,' Nancy said. ‘We've all gaped – try to be different, do.'

Lydia was wearing a long silk dress of black and scarlet that reached down to the floor. It was low in the bodice and had no sleeves. A broad black band at the waistline pulled across her body perfectly smooth and flat, giving the impression that she was wearing only a scarlet skirt and a scarlet blouse, leaving the middle of her body a stretch of bare black skin. I had never seen this dress before; she seemed to have chosen it a fraction, perhaps a size, too small for her. For some reason – perhaps because the bodice was so low and her bare shoulders so high and arched – it gave the impression that she was taller than she was. It seemed to make her stand out, tall and aristocratic and rather dashing, above all the others in the room.

She waved the tips of her fingers at me above Tom's shoulder, and I waved in reply.