Love for Lydia (20 page)

‘Like me,' she said. ‘That's what they didn't want her to grow up like.'

In this moment much of what had been sometimes a little confused about that winter evening at the Aspen house, when
I had first met Lydia, became more clear. There had been, that night, among all the flusterings over onion soup and port and the talk of skating, more than a little fear.

Ten minutes later I took her to the station. We had two or three minutes to wait on the platform and I thought, as she stood first on one foot and then on another, that she seemed uneasy and worried and more than a little tired. Even when she stopped moving from one foot to another she wavered a little and could not stand quite still. Then suddenly she put her hand on one of mine, as she had done in the hotel, and said:

‘You won't say anything about this? I don't want anything said about this.'

‘No,' I said.

‘Now, no monkey business,' she said. She turned on me a pair of eyes that were quite fierce in their black determination. ‘I mean what I say. When I say “I don't want anything” I mean I don't want anything.' That too was exactly like Lydia. ‘Keep it to yourself,' she said. ‘See? I know what towns like this are.'

I knew too; and I squeezed her hand.

‘You're rather a dear. You're rather sweet,' she said and I was flattered.

At that moment the train came in. There was a good deal of shouting and banging, with a big blast of steam as the engine came under the bridge, and at this moment she chose to say:

‘You know, I think I could rather –'

What it was she was going to say I never knew. Steam and banging doors and porters' barrows drowned the rest of her words. A moment or two later I had opened a door for her and she was standing inside the carriage, leaning out of the window, to say goodbye.

‘Nice to meet you,' she said ‘God bless.'

She started to take off her gloves. Then she took off her hat and threw it on to the rack, revealing a mass of hair as dark as Lydia's. The hat fell off the rack and her eyes bulged, I thought for a moment with possible tears, as she picked it up and said:

‘There goes my Sunday best. Never have another.'

I hoped she would not cry; and, to my great relief, she did
not cry. She put a hand in one of mine instead. ‘It's been, well – you know –' She brushed her other hand once or twice through her hair – ‘Well, you know – rather nice. God bless,' and then the train began to move away.

‘Goodbye,' I said.

‘Goodbye,' she said. ‘Goodbye –'

At the last moment she laughed weakly, with trembling mouth. Her grey glove blew a final waving kiss at me.

I never saw her again; but I was glad that I had seen her because later, indirectly, in a way I did not grasp to its fullness at the time, the sight of that drowsy, uneasy, tearless face helped to enlarge my understanding.

There was a moment on the evening of Lydia's birthday, about nine o'clock, on the steps of the terrace, when I thought she was going to lead off the dance with me, in front of what seemed to be the whole of Evensford, waiting on the lawns below. To my relief she led off with Rollo instead.

It was like summer that evening; the air was beautifully soft and mild. Under the light of the house and the terrace, where festoons of coloured lamps were burning, the faces of people glowed like flowers against a dark background of full-leafed trees broken by chestnuts still in full blossom and laburnums that had already spilled into lemon tassels of flower. I think someone, that day, or perhaps the previous day, had cut an early field of clover just beyond the outskirts of the park. All evening the fragrance of it hung over us, still and delicate as we danced on the lawns. There was a great scent of lilac too and gradually, as the evening went on, the smell of crushed grass bruised under the feet of dancers. As this smell of bruised grass grew thicker and thicker I felt more and more excited.

Earlier in the day, as I went up to the house, about an hour before the party began, I met the Aspen doctor walking down
the drive. He was a dryish man with the French-sounding name of Morat who was really Scotch.

‘Is it Miss Juliana again?' I said.

He said he was awfully afraid so; and when I asked him what was wrong with her, he said:

‘Her heart. The old regulator isn't set quite fast enough.'

I said that she always gave the impression of being a woman of terrific vitality.

‘Women are deceptive,' he said. He looked at me with humourless sagacity. ‘You think they're this and you think they're that and all the time they're the damn t'other.'

‘Will she be well enough for the party?'

‘What party she has she'll have in bed,' he said, ‘and if she doesn't she'll have it in a box.'

He walked away; and then, ten yards off, turned and said:

‘By the way, old Johnson died this morning. You knew him, didn't you? Been expecting it –' And I said how sorry I was.

When Miss Juliana came downstairs at precisely six o'clock that evening, dressed in a long silk dress of fuchsia purple, her favourite colour, with a large double necklace of deep violet amethysts set in pinchbeck to match, she looked rosy and assertive. She seemed in every way totally unlike a woman whose heart is tired.

‘You may take me round the garden,' she said, – I had arrived early because I wanted to see Lydia before it all began – ‘Bertie and Lydia are still dressing. Where are your friends? Aren't we supposed to begin at six? What do you think the weather is going to do?'

I had learned, now, the trick of not answering these vitally ejected questions. She took my arm. Slowly we walked into the gardens, where clumps of yellow and purple and coppery-golden iris were in bloom. She herself smelled of violets. A large white marquee with scallopings of scarlet and a scarlet flag had been erected on the far side of the front lawn, between two cedar trees. Lilac was in bloom, pale and dark and pure white, on all sides of us, and she said:

‘The sweetest thing happened. The gardener's apprentice boy brought strawberries for Lydia. No one knew of it – he
did it all himself. Kept it quite secret. Wasn't that wonderfully sweet? Don't you think so? Don't you think she has nice friends? The drawing-room is full of presents. Quite wonderful ones.'

She gave me no time to answer; I got no further than ‘Yes' before she went on:

‘That's greatly because of you, isn't it? It's been simply wonderful the way she's grown up. Don't you think so?'

We were now at the far end of the paved garden, where the roses began. A sour convulsion leapt up through my throat, leaving me for more than a minute in speechless constriction; but at last I said:

‘Miss Aspen, there was something I wanted to ask you.'

‘Yes, yes,' she said, ‘ask on. I don't see buds on the roses there, do I? Do I see buds?' – she almost let go my hand, peering among wine-brown rose leaves, almost sizzling her words through her large protuberant teeth – ‘Yes, buds on them! – look! – and would you believe it, already
greenfly
–!'

‘Miss Aspen,' I said, ‘I wanted to ask if I might marry Lydia.'

She did not seem to be listening. She turned on me a face so remarkably flattened by indifference that it was more stupefying to me than any anger could have been.

‘My dear boy, I thought you'd already asked her.'

‘Oh, no. I wanted –'

‘Then why on earth did she come and talk to me for an hour last night with mountains of wretched innuendoes?'

I began to feel there was something wrong with my brain. Pulses of bewilderment and excitement rocked my head as she said:

‘The child talked and talked and talked. Have you any money?'

I almost said eighteen pounds fifteen, but I told her: ‘A little. Very little,' instead.

‘There you are then. That's exactly what I mean. Why else should she come and talk to me in half riddles about women marrying men without money if it wasn't because of you? When are you going to ask her?'

I was aware of the beginnings of a sort of nebulous delirium at the back of my head.

‘You should ask her tonight,' she said. ‘Then we could announce it. Don't you feel that? Isn't that what you'd like? I think we should go straight back and ask Bertie and then you can ask Lydia, can't you? Don't you feel that? Don't you agree?'

She seemed to be very excited. I do not remember, now, at this distance, much of what I felt as we went back through the gardens to the house. It had something of the blind delirium of a race. I only now remember her saying:

‘You must speak to Bertie. Now – without delay. Plunge forward' – I remember that precise expression because she said it as she half-stumbled up the steps of the iris garden and it made her give a great sharp, almost portentous drawing-in of her breath – ‘and while you speak to Bertie I will have a word with Lydia myself –'

Then, as we came to within sight of the main terrace, she looked up and said:

‘Ah! arrivals. Isn't that your nice Mr Holland and his sister? I can't see very well. Isn't that them? Isn't that the town clerk's wife too? – Mrs Fitzgerald and her sister –?'

We went on to the terrace, and were immersed, a few moments later, in a pool of friends.

When I look back it is not difficult to see that displays of volcanic and fluttering fire like hers were the product of a mind that was also forgetful. There was, as I see it now, a kind of endearing flippancy about her. All these warm tangents and gravitations of her temperament were the result of sickness; perhaps the heart telegraphed its own nervous pulse-warnings to the brain. I know now that if I met her again I should not take her so seriously; the heart may have been tired and I am sure it was warm and true, but it was also untrustworthy, from no fault of its own. Now I should be amused by her only for what she was, a sweet but sick eccentric. But that day I was too young, too excited, and too obliviously single-minded to know all this; and I felt that all she said was true.

Partly because of this, perhaps entirely because of it, the
first words that Lydia said to me, when we met five minutes later, had no real effect on me:

‘Where's Blackie? Have you seen Blackie? He's supposed to be bringing people up –'

‘His father died today,' I said. ‘It may be difficult –'

‘Difficult? Why should it be difficult? They've got their living to earn just the same, haven't they?'

‘Did you get my present?' I said. I had sent her a pair of garnet earrings, set in a three-quarter oval, that were like soft dark raspberries. In order to do so I had sold my bicycle. I felt the garnets would somehow go well with her high colour, her temperament, and her black thick hair.

‘Of course I did,' she said. ‘You're a very darling person and I like them and thank you.'

‘I hoped you'd wear them.'

‘Not at the party,' she said. ‘They'll come unscrewed and get lost and you know how it is –'

A vague delirium was still beating at the back of my head.

‘Will you put them on later?' I said. I stood there, feeling my head rock and not knowing quite what I was saying or what impulses were driving me. ‘Alone somewhere? – for me? Because I want to see them and I want you and I've got something to say to you.'

‘What a speech,' she said.

As I stood staring at her, in what I think could only have been a lost and hungry and desperate sort of fashion, because I wanted her so much, she laughed and said:

‘No: I won't put them on.'

‘No? Why not?' I felt my brain ready to flare up in a final shot of delirious anger. Then she laughed again and bent her head.

‘Because you can put them on for me,' she said.

I felt wonderfully happy then and a moment later we were once again immersed in a crowd of friends.

For almost all the rest of that evening – and perhaps I should not have expected otherwise, since the gardens were so crowded and the day was so much her own – it was never possible to be alone with her. All evening an orchestra played
for dancing and it was a wonderfully gay, crushed and, in the end, rather noisy party. There is something wonderful about the thin sound of a string orchestra, on a summery night, in the open air; there is really a sort of starriness about the sound. Now and then somebody would send over to the orchestra, down below the terrace, asking them specially to play something, a waltz or a fox-trot, and once Alex's mother sent across for a minuet of Mozart. All evening there hung over us the warm scent of drying clover and because of it all I was caught up again, tangled and lost, in the most trembling, bemusing web of happiness.

Some time after supper Alex started to get charmingly, intelligently drunk. An exaggerated and ironic gaiety came over him. And suddenly I heard Lydia saying to him:

‘Alex dear, will you do something for me?'

‘No,' Alex said. ‘You have a whole orchestra of second fiddles down there – ask them.'

‘Alex – please.'

‘No.'

‘Alex, you nice person' – she was wearing a long dance-frock of pale clematis-mauve silk with small gold spots on it, and now she drew herself up and touched his arm and looked him in the face – ‘not even if I let you kiss me?'

‘No,' he said. He bowed with affectionate irony, staggering a little. ‘I get precisely the same effect, dear lady, from a glass of champagne –'

‘All right,' she said. It was easy to see that it was all light-hearted and unangered and unimportant. ‘I'll ask Tom.'

‘In that case I hope you'll kiss Tom?' Alex said. ‘No favouritism.'

‘I expect I shall,' she said. ‘If Tom can bear the pain.'

Tom, I think, was very happy too that night; and presently when Lydia took his arm and they went away together I saw her head close to him as they crossed the terrace, whispering into his ear.