Love for Lydia (21 page)

Tom owned an old Morris-Oxford coupé that he shared with Nancy. It always seemed to me that the exhaust was cracked because, from cold, it exploded like a gas-engine. Five minutes
after Lydia had walked across the terrace with Tom I heard the car start, firing its gun-shots down the avenue.

At that moment I was dancing with Nancy. ‘That's Tom, isn't it?' she said. ‘Where on earth could Tom be going?'

‘He's probably running an errand for Lydia,' I said. ‘I saw her take him off, that's all.'

‘I think he'd jump in the river if she asked him,' she said. I shrugged my shoulders and she turned on me with great scorn. ‘And don't shrug like that. So would you.'

‘Let Tom take care of himself,' I said, ‘and let me take care of you.'

She said something about my being in rather a bright mood and then:

‘By the way, has Alex's mother spoken to you? It seems there's a wonderful dance on midsummer night at Ashby – she wants us all to go.'

And then, very suddenly: ‘I can't think for the life of me where Tom's got to.'

I felt once again that Tom was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. But I did not know until some long time afterwards, until he told me himself, where he had gone to, suddenly, that evening of the party.

Lydia had sent him with a note to Blackie Johnson. A strange driver had turned up with the limousine, bringing relays of elderly people who could not walk. He was simply a man hired for the day. There was no sign of Blackie. It was supremely typical of her to ask Tom to take that note – Alex having refused – and it was equally typical of him that he took it without question.

When he got to Johnson's garage the only light in the place was a naked gas-flare hung over the sink in the kitchen. He heard a sound of voices quarrelling inside. He stood for a moment or two in the yard before knocking at the door. Then he knocked several times and got no answer. It seemed an odd time for people to be quarrelling, he thought, with Johnson dead in the house, and then the voices grew so loud that presently he could pick up the voice of Blackie shouting at his stepmother. It seemed they were quarrelling as to where they
were going to bury old Johnson. Then Tom heard Blackie shout, ‘He'll be with his folks, that's where he'll be. Where
you
can't rob the damn grave,' and then Tom knocked on the door again, more loudly. To his astonishment it was yanked open at once and Blackie Johnson stood there, bare to the waist, his face streaked with shaving soap and a naked razor in his hand, glaring out into the dark at Tom:

‘How much longer are you going to stand there hammering?' he said. ‘Who is it? – oh it's you.'

Tom, not saying a word, gave Blackie the note and then stood there, waiting. Lydia had told him expressly to wait for an answer. Behind, in the kitchen, the stepmother began crying, and Blackie, slitting open the envelope with the razor so that a mess of beard-blackened soap smeared itself like lard along the edge, shouted for her to shut up. She went on crying, not exactly crying but whimpering, dryly and stutteringly, Tom said, as if trying to make herself cry. Then Blackie stepped a pace or two back into the kitchen so that he could read the note more easily under the gas-light. The soapy razor, naked, stuck out from the hand that Blackie leaned against the door, and the big chest, a mass of bearskin glittering hair from throat to navel waving over a dark-golden pack of muscle, heaved for a moment or two out of sight. Then the woman cried again, annoying Blackie a second time so that he shouted that if she didn't shut up he'd do something he'd be sorry for. There was a smell of old grease and car oil and burning gas and Tom felt sick. It revolted him to feel that death was in the house and that people were quarrelling over the dead; and as he stood there, dumb and shocked in his absolute decency and impotently horrified by it all, I think that probably his ultimate feelings about Lydia began to take shape. A dark ugly flare of something threw up, in paradoxical relief, the slow, beautiful beginnings of his final emotions about her. It was strange that it needed something exactly like that – something of quite incidental ugliness and revulsion to project, at last, in recognizable clarity, feelings that were to break down, ultimately, all his diffidence and fear.

But I did not deduce any of this until he spoke of it much
later, under the pressure of another circumstance. It is quite possible that he was not even partially aware of it himself. All he saw that night was Blackie reading the note under the gas-light, the razor sticking out, the black chest naked and glinting; all he heard was the quarrelling, the whimpering, the bawling about under the same roof as the dead and then, at last, Blackie Johnson crackling Lydia's stiff notepaper like an egg-shell in his hand and saying, before he shut the door:

‘No answer. Tell her no answer.'

He told me afterwards that he stood for some time outside, in the old yard with its wagonettes and landaus and its curious straw-oil odour of two worlds, afraid to go back. He was afraid partly because he felt he saw some terrible menace in the quarrelling and the naked razor, partly because of an idea, typical of his utterly simple decency, that he had failed Lydia, even though he loathed what he had seen and what she had asked him to do.

And finally when he did go back it was perhaps lucky that he could not find her. By that time I had found her myself, and was alone with her, in a room upstairs.

Many of the spare upstairs rooms in the Aspen house were being used that evening as cloakrooms; but in the room where we went, one storey above, it was dark and comparatively quiet and no one bothered us. There were still, even then, gas-fittings in several of the upper rooms, mostly of brass-scrolled mantel-lights with globes of coloured glass, but we did not need any light in the room because, from the terraces below, the lights of the party shone up, in a greenish-golden glow, through the windows.

It was nearly midnight before I managed to get her there. We stood by the lighted window and she took the earrings, in their maroon leather box, from where she had hidden them between her breasts. I could feel the box warm from her body as I held it in my hands. Afterwards I used to think how odd it was that I stood there, trembling and tenuous with excitement, aching and fired and nervously happy, while almost at the same time Tom stood watching Blackie, razor in hand,
reading the note she had sent him. But I did not know of this at that time. I simply took the earrings from their box. Then, because I could not very well hold box and earrings at the same time, I put the box back between her breasts, touching the crest of them for a moment at the same time.

‘I said you could put the earrings on,' she said. ‘Nothing else. Don't be greedy – anyway it's no time for lingering here.'

‘I think it's the perfect time,' I said. She looked so dark and lovely in the semi-shadowness of the terrace lights from below, that I kissed her suddenly and for a long time.

‘That's all,' she said. ‘Now put the earrings on and let's go down.'

I did not want to go down; and I was determined, at last, that nothing would make me. As I put the earrings on I trembled and fumbled a little and then, in a rather hot and clumsy gesture, kissed them both, and she said:

‘I believe you're the smallest bit tiddly. It's the champagne.'

I held her tightly against me, making her body press itself forward from the waist.

‘This is the same room where we came once,' I said. ‘That Sunday – do you remember? – the Sunday you didn't go to church?' And she said, in a rather shortish voice, that she remembered.

Down inside me I felt that a well of feeling had been unlocked. As it came rushing up through my body I heard the orchestra across the lawn lightly beginning a new dance, and I felt once again the same starry sort of beauty in the sound of strings in the half-dark air.

Presently she moved restlessly in my arms and I could see the earrings shining, dark rose-rich blobs, as she moved. She said something about not holding her there any longer and how late it was and how we ought to go down. At that moment I thought she seemed more wonderful than ever; and then as she moved with final restlessness by the window I could bear it no longer and I said:

‘I've got something to ask you. I've asked Juley but I haven't asked Bertie yet.' Now at last when I said it my voice seemed flat and strained. ‘Would you marry me?'

She did not answer for a moment; she looked sideways with deep black eyes through the window. Across the lawns people were calling ‘Goodnight' to each other. I could hear their voices rising after a silence of the strings.

Then she said: ‘No.'

‘Lydia –'

‘I don't think I could,' she said.

From the back of my head delirium began to pound at me again.

‘Oh! but my God,' I said. ‘You've got to. I want you so much – you've got to –'

‘I haven't got to do anything.'

I could not speak. Outside, across the lawn, the orchestra did not begin again. In the silence I stood there still holding her. I looked at her face, but she did not look at me, and I stared down at the small ear-ring box between her breasts. The orchestra still did not begin again and presently I said what, I suppose, everybody says at these times:

‘Will you think it over? Will you think about it?'

‘Of course I shall think about it,' she said. ‘It's the first time –'

‘Don't you love me any more?' I said.

‘Love you?' she said. ‘I don't know.'

‘Would you kiss me?' I said.

She lifted her lips and I felt I achieved something, sterile though it was, as I kissed their unresponsive flatness. Then at last, down below, the orchestra started up again, making her break away.

‘Let me go now,' she said.

‘Don't go,' I said. ‘Lydia, please don't go –'

I held her for a few moments longer; and then it occurred to me what the orchestra were playing. People were singing too.

‘For she's a jolly good fellow – for she's a jolly good fellow – which nobody can deny –'

‘Let me go,' she said. ‘Let me go – they're singing for me.'

I opened my arms, letting her go. She sprang away from me, shaking her hair. With bitterness I said:

‘You're twenty-one now. You can please yourself now, of course – it's all yours.'

She went out of the room, not speaking. I heard her running downstairs. I stood by the window and did not go after her. Down below, from across the lawns, people were crowding up towards the terrace, singing and laughing and calling her name. I could see their faces in the terrace lights, like greenish flowers upturned.

‘For she's a jolly good fellow,' they were singing. I felt myself trying to grasp at something that, like the smell of clover, was beautiful but not tangible; it was sweet and young and in the darkness it was floating away. ‘For she's a jolly good fellow – which nobody can deny –'

I was never certain if Juliana ever spoke to Lydia; it could have made no difference if she had. Three mornings later, on the last day of May, she woke, sat up and reached out across the bed, presumably for the knob of the old-fashioned bell-pull above the commode. Her hand never reached the bell. The maid, bringing in her early morning tea ten minutes later, found her, one arm still outstretched, dead where she lay.

The two Aspen sisters strike me sometimes as having been like two trees that grow up too closely together; the stronger seems to overshadow the weaker, taking strength and light away. Then the weaker falls down; then suddenly it seems as if, after all, it was the weaker that really gave protection to the strong; and presently, exposed and bared, the strong too falls down. Miss Bertie, in the same way, never recovered from the death of her sister. What I had taken, or mistaken, for strength and clarity and firmness, as against the rhetorical flutterings and the beautifying ugliness of the large long-toothed mouth, were really only comparative virtues. When the object of comparison had gone Miss Bertie seemed just as irresolute, just as vague and, as it turned out, just as helpless as Juliana had been.

Presently, for this reason, a change came over Rollo: perhaps not so much a change as a shifting of attitude. He came suddenly forward out of an obscurity in which his sisters, together, had been able to keep him. Again it was a question of qualities that were comparative. He had seemed like a weak and futile person, with all the vacuities of the inbred, simply because the sisters, so monolithic and garrulous and dominant in their different ways, had kept him overshadowed. He was a man too who had spent his inheritance. He had been forced to eat, over the years, in the form of a strict and meagre
monthly allowance, a great deal of humble pie. If he had never seemed to resent this it may possibly have been because he hoped that, in due course, death would help him. The sisters would leave him something. If they did not leave him something then one of them would leave it to the other; and in due course it would come to him. This must have been the reasoning that had kept him, over the years, so evidently cowed and subdued, the family weakling, shooting his pheasants, railing against shoemaker poachers, totting steadily at his whisky, and keeping his friend in Corporation Street: a man who had made up his mind, in a simple way, that he had little to do but wait, reasonably behave himself and hope to survive.

Then Lydia came. There had never been a sign that he disliked her; or even that he openly resented her. He mostly behaved with decent avuncular attention, bantering and chaffing her sometimes with semi-aristocratic fatuities, mostly in such things as hiding love-notes from me by slipping them between two pieces of toast in the huge Victorian silver rack at breakfast and then solemnly offering her toast and laughing like a braying camel when the note dropped out. All these seemed like the natural pleasantries of a man of limited if not backward mind.