Love for Lydia (2 page)

She had long coils of black hair that fell across her shoulders, so that she seemed to be wearing a hood. I saw only part of her face, jerked forward above her raised coat collar, startled but not frightened by the skid. She did not lift her hands. It was her eyes instead that seemed to stretch out, first to one window and then another, in an effort to get her bearings, as if she did not know exactly where she was. And in that moment, before the car straightened and righted itself and went on, she seemed, I thought, about fifteen.

It was my first mistake about her.

In the back office the kettle was on the gas-ring and Bretherton was asleep by the stove. On the table were the remains, set about on torn and greasy paper bags, of Bretherton's lunch, several pieces of bread and butter and a mauled pork pie.

When Bretherton woke, beer-flushed, with belches of discomfort, at the sound of the caddy spoon on the side of the teapot, he looked like one of those model porkers, fat and pinkish, squatting on its hind legs with an advertisement for sausages in its lap, that you see in butchers' windows. The
sausages were his fingers. They glistened, a pink-grey colour, as they grasped tremulously at each other and then at his tobacco-yellow moustache. They were tipped with black moons of dirt that presently scraped at the forefront of his thinning scalp while in the first startling unpleasantness of waking he banged his squat scrubby elbows on the desk, his thick white fingers flapping.

‘Tea,' I said, setting the big white cup on the blotter in front of him. He attacked it where it stood, in a stooping gurgle of his mouth, sucking at it in pig-like fashion. Tea dribbled brownly over desk and blotter and down his shirt front and over his ready-made bow tie that clipped into the shirt with a brass stud, leaving on his Adam's apple a bright green stain.

And then, in this slopping stupor, he remembered his favourite word for me.

‘Come here, Clutterhead!'

I stood before him at the desk, while, for the second time, he soaked his lips in tea.

‘Didn't you have something on, Clutterhead? Don't I seem to remember –'

‘Bazaar,' I said. ‘Four o'clock. Congregational Rebuilding Fund.'

‘Then for Jesus' sake get there!'

‘It's just past three,' I said.

‘Three, two, four, eight, bloody midnight – what does it matter? Be there, never mind – be there, get there –'

‘They're all the same,' I said. There were times when it seemed to me I had written up a million bazaars. ‘One bazaar is like another –'

He sucked incoherently at the cup again. I knew that he was incapable of answering because he began grating his teeth. Brown tea seemed to pour back through his eyes, filtering and dribbling down to his moustache. It poured out of his mouth in pale and sticky spit that he sucked swiftly back again.

At this moment I could not look at him any longer and I turned instead to stare through the back window of the office. Snow was falling now in softer, larger flakes, covering already the steel-blue roofs of tanneries and factories, lining the frostdark
corrugations of backyard hen-houses and coal-sheds. I saw it already beginning to transform, with wonderful delicacy, the harsh flat of the town broken only, in the middle distance, by the iron-stone church spire, and farther away, in the south, by the great chestnuts of the Aspen park.

‘Look at me, Clutterhead,' he said. ‘Could you? For one moment. Does it strain you?'

I turned and looked at him, nursing my sprained wrist, not speaking.

‘Tell me if the strain is too great for you.'

Rage and tears of tea-brown moisture had left the eyes brighter and narrower. They pierced me as the thick little fingers repulsively waved again like tied sausages.

‘It must be so interesting out of the window,' he said.

I did not speak.

‘Tell me what you see,' he said. ‘Could you? Tell me what interests you.'

There was nothing to see but roofs and the corrugated tops of hen-houses and coal-sheds and snow falling across them, obliquely, thickening, borne on a dark wind from a dark sky.

‘I was watching the snow,' I said. ‘It started ten minutes ago.'

‘And from the front window?'

There was nothing to see from the front window except the Succoth chapel with its wind-torn list of preachers and Dancy's furniture shop and Jimmy Thompson's hairdressing saloon.

‘You must have stood there an hour,' he said. ‘Tell me about that.'

There was nothing to tell.

‘It's Thursday afternoon,' I said. All through the street the blue and green and yellow blinds of the shops were down. ‘It's always the same on Thursday afternoons.'

‘Always the same,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Nothing happening. Always the same.' He picked with a black-nailed finger at one of his teeth, staring at whatever he had found embedded there.

‘Nobody in trouble?' he said. ‘No suicides?'

I did not answer. Suicide was an unkind, embittering, excruciating point between us. A week before a girl had leapt from the fifth floor window of a factory; she had quarrelled first with her foreman lover and then had jumped from the crane doors on to frozen concrete below. It ought to have been my business to have discovered these things about her long before I did. Negligently, instead, that same afternoon I had sprained my wrist while skating.

Remembering it and staring at the snow again I remembered too, suddenly and uneasily, the big Aspen Daimler coming up the street, skidding in the first fluster of snow. Bretherton seemed sharply aware of my new uneasiness. He flicked a finger in the air. ‘Nothing?' he said, and looked sideways with a drab yellow smile at the falling snow and then at my face again.

‘There's nobody out,' I said. ‘The only people I saw were the Aspen sisters. They came by in the Daimler. The two of them, with a girl –'

He lay for some time across the desk, swaying slightly, saying nothing, beating his elbows mournfully on the blotter so that the teacup rattled. An occasional incoherent sound was sucked in through his teeth and then exhaled. I felt a dry sickening rawness in my upper throat liquefy into bile that drained down into my stomach with scalding bitterness.

‘Get your hat,' he said at last. ‘Put your hat on.'

Bretherton always forgot that I did not wear a hat. Snow was now falling in such large, easy blowing flakes that it created a mist in the air behind which the town had disappeared.

‘You will need your hat,' he said. ‘Because it's polite for a young man to have a hat. And you are going to be polite to the two Miss Aspens.'

He spoke quietly now, with restraint that terrified.

‘You are going to get a story from them,' he said. ‘Perhaps there is a story about the girl – she's the niece, she's the one who will come into the money – you never know. Get your hat and go up there now.'

‘Now?' I said. ‘They'll hardly have arrived. They'll hardly be there themselves –'

‘For the Good Jesus!' he shouted.

He flung his short squabby arms sideways and then sideways across his neck, tearing at the shoulders of his jacket with clawing movements of rage, his eyes expanding like intolerable yellow bubbles moist with tears.

‘They'll hardly be there themselves!' he said. ‘But you will – you will – you will. For once you will.'

He threw back his face and I thought for a moment he would spit into the cold milk-skinned tea that stood before him on the desk.

‘You will – for once. For the first time. Perhaps,' he yelled at me brokenly, ‘for the last time –'

As he turned and prepared to spit at the stove I found my coat and walked out into the street. Broad feather-like flakes of snow blotted out the distances of the street of closed shops, bringing to the afternoon an air of relief, a wonderful softening, after weeks of snowless frozen wind. In the shop windows with their drawn blinds the reflection of snow had an effect of scintillation. It began to transfigure them all. The gauze-windowed offices of solicitors, the club where local gentlemen met and played billiards over tots of whisky, the Succoth chapel with its narrow windows of stained glass, the piano shop where Miss Scholes gave music lessons, Thompson's barber saloon with the umbrellas in the windows, the shuttered banks and the Temperance Hotel with its tea room on the side and its copper tea urn, boiling under blue gas flames, on the marble slab on the counter: curtained by falling snow, it grew more delicate and unreal and transfigured as I walked through it, sick and nervous and nursing my sprained wrist, to call for the first time on the Aspen sisters, Bertie and Juliana, and their niece, whose name I did not know.

My father was a man of gentle and unargumentative temperament who loved music and spoke sometimes of the sin of pride. He was most anxious, as he said, that I should not get above myself.

We lived, intensely respectable, behind drawn lace curtains, in the end house of a row of six, adjoining a factory from which the thump of presses shivered the crockery on the table and fluttered the artificial flowers in the ornaments on the mantelpiece. At the back was a little garden bounded by a tarred fence on two sides and part of the factory wall on the other. In summer there were lilies in bloom by the factory wall and a pure white Frau Karl Druschki rose by the water butt and along the fence a row of sunflowers and shrubs of pale yellow flowers whose name I did not know. We had no light upstairs. I went to bed either in darkness or by candlelight and then in the after-darkness watched the glow of furnace lights across the valley. On Saturday nights I heard Joe Pendleton, our neighbour, quarrelling with Clem Robinson, his neighbour on the one side. Everybody seemed to get drunk on Saturdays; neighbours threw buckets of water on each other and violently against back doors. The days were filled with the beating of ragged bits of matting on backyard fences and the chant of women gossiping in curling pins and sackcloth aprons and men's caps. I had a text on my bedroom wall which told me that God was the unseen listener to every conversation; but the walls were so thin that we could hear the conversation of the Pendletons too and the sizzle of kippers in their frying-pan. Joe Pendleton played the euphonium in the Rifle Band and practised sometimes in the bedroom next to mine, so that I could hear the metallic clatter of valves between the notes of music. Clem Robinson kept homing pigeons in a gas-tarred dove cote made from orange boxes at the end of the garden,
and in the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays the birds circled gracefully over a world of other little gardens, other back-jetties lined by gas-tarred fences and other factories, gaunt and silent and covered with a snuff-brown bloom of leather dust that was sometimes blown too on gritty little winds down the streets outside.

‘The trouble with you is you're too damn shy,' Bretherton said to me. It was six o'clock the following evening before I could in fact bring myself to walk up to the lodge of the Aspen house, where the lodge keeper came out with an old-fashioned hurricane lamp and let me in. I had pleaded the sprained wrist and a doctor's surgery as excuses to Bretherton for not going before and that morning he had yelled at me about my damned shyness – ‘that's what you've got to get over,' he said, ‘that's what you've got to conquer. Yourself!'

As I walked through the gates of the Aspen house and up the avenue of limes on the other side no snow was falling, but sometimes from the trees a few wind-feathered flakes detached themselves and floated slowly down and it was quite quiet except for the clip of high ash-boughs swinging stiff and frozen against each other in the darkening air. Under snow the avenue, the trees and the park looked larger than perhaps they really were, and the house seemed more impressing and more secluded and farther away.

In Evensford's world of steep back-alleys and whining stitching machines and clattering dray-horses pulling loads of belly leather into granite factory yards there were no aristocrats except the Aspens; there was no possible suspicion of any monogram but theirs. Everyone else in the town had climbed up, self-made, self-projected, sometimes self-taught, to whatever he was, and if he could not climb he remained whatever he had been.

The town had grown swiftly from a long stone street and eight hundred people and an open brook in 1820 to a place of fifty boot factories, ten chapels, a staunch Liberalism and ten thousand people in 1880; and to a town of Rotarian and Masonic circles, many gleaming fish-and-chip shops and a public library, of golf clubs and evening classes, of amateur operatics
on winter evenings and sacred concerts on Sunday afternoons, in 1929. Long rows of bright red brick, or houses roofed with slate shining like blue steel, had rapidly eaten their way beyond the shabby confines of what had been a village, beyond new railway tracks and gas works, obliterating pleasant outlying farms and hedgerows of hawthorn and wild rose, to stop only where the river-valley took its steep dip to wide flat meadows that were crowned in turn by the iron-ore furnaces I could see flaring at night along the escarpment beyond. Gauntly, in a few generations, a valley-side had been transformed; a skyline of factory chimneys and railway viaducts, gasometers and chapel cupolas, temperance hotels and bus depots had marched in, replacing old horizons of cornstack and farm and elm. Continually new roofs spawned along clay hillsides, encrusting new land, settling down on the landscape in a year or two with the greyness of old ash-heaps under rain.

In the centre of all this the Aspen house stood in a circle of land diametrically split by great avenues of lime and chestnut and elm. The town had been kept away from it by the barricade of a stone wall a mile long and a perimeter of great trees. Outside the barrier men crawled with despondence into and fled with a sort of hungry distraction out of opaque-window factories and their dark bloom of leather dust. Odours of burning leather hung on all Evensford streets, in puthering clouds, on windless afternoons, after waste had stoked the fires. Men like Clem Robinson kept homing pigeons in stunted cotes in back gardens and watched them, mostly on Sunday mornings, with a sort of forlorn possessiveness, carving patterns of grey and pearl and white on Evensford's sky. Life in Evensford and life behind the long Aspen walls were not merely different. It was possible to live in Evensford for a long time, even for a generation, and not see the Aspen house, the Aspen garden or the Aspens themselves. It was possible to drive through it and never know that behind the factories and their alley-ways and the streets that were like parallels of smoky ash-heaps, desolate under rain and transfigured only under snow, a great house remained.