Love for Lydia (25 page)

I had become so transfixed and stupid about solitariness that I had even invented a system, a sort of game, rather as children do when they play hop-scotch on pavements, of avoiding roads wherever I could. If I stepped on a road it was, as in the game, a black mark against myself. It gave me a little excitement to make long detours so that I did not touch a
road. It set me problems in physical complexity against all the complexity inside myself. It kept me from going mad, and through it I discovered new country.

That afternoon I was walking across a farmstead – a small stone house with a few blackthorn hovels and a railed garden lay below – when I heard the clank of a water-cart across the baked clay field behind me and a voice yelled across the sizzling air:

‘What do you think you're doing on this land?'

The water-cart was spotted bright red, almost camouflaged, with areas of fresh lead paint. A fair-haired man bare to the waist stood up on it. tightening the reins. The horse had ash-boughs stuck into its bridle. Suddenly I caught from the man, in the brilliant glare of sun, a flash of pale blue eyes.

‘Where do you think you're going?' he shouted.

I started to move across to him; and then he jumped down and I knew by the jump of the body who he was.

‘Tom,' I said. ‘Tom –'

I remember how we stood there, staring at each other and shaking hands. Tears started to well up inside me and I saw his mouth shaking as he smiled.

‘Did you know it was me?' I said. ‘Or do you –'

‘I knew all the time,' he said. ‘I saw you the other day, but you were too far away. I'd know by that walk of yours.'

‘You're a long way from Busketts,' I said.

‘This is my farm,' he said. ‘Dad bought it for me – to set up on my own. Only sixty acres, but it's got water and the house.'

‘You live here?' I said.

‘In the house,' he said. ‘Come on down and see.'

We sat for a long time in the stone kitchen of the house, drinking cups of ice-cold water from a well that came up under the scullery floor. Sun-withered hollyhocks, pale rose, turned by heat to a florid purple, covered the kitchen window. A few hens pecked beyond the threshold, scratching in the neglected flower-bed outside The stone-dark coolness of the house after the blaze of heat was exactly like the shock of a frozen hand across my neck. It made me draw my breath. And once again I could have cried as I sat there listening to Tom telling me of
the farm, his one horse, his six heifers, how it had been too late that summer to start crops, how he cooked for himself, how at last he was free and independent, how Nancy came over once or twice a week to tidy up the place and perhaps cook an extra meal or a cake or a pie for him, and how so far he was working it single-handed, seven days a week, all alone.

‘And where have you been?' he said.

‘Nowhere.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘I gave up the job.'

I felt icy water flow through my body. Feeling woke in me like a cold moving pain. I had been nowhere and done nothing and felt nothing and had asked for nothing. Suddenly feeling was rushing back and I knew I could not hold it and then he said:

‘If you're not doing anything why don't you come up and give me a hand? – for a day or two a week – if you like.'

Loneliness burst inside me like a fester. A suppuration of self-affliction poured through me, hot as the air outside. I could not say anything, but I must have nodded, because he said:

‘That's absolutely wonderful. Nance will be thrilled to bits. I'll nip over and tell her tonight and then –'

‘Not for a day or two,' I said. ‘Let me settle in.'

‘All right, all right, anything,' he said. ‘When do you want to come?'

‘Just when it suits you.'

‘It suits me as soon as you can throw some stuff together. Tonight if you like – we'll have a damn good supper of home cured and four eggs –' and for the first time since Alex had died we laughed together.

That evening we drove into Evensford and fetched my things. In one of the hovels behind the farm Tom had a brand new Ford. ‘Nance bothered me to sell her the old one when I came over here,' he told me. ‘She has to have something to run about in.' We drove back through dusty hedgerows at a gentle pace. ‘Another week and this one'll be run in.'

From that day, for the rest of the summer, I felt rather like
the car. I felt as if I were running myself in, gently working back to living. Of Tom's sixty acres four fields were grass. They were small fields bounded by hedgerows of mighty hawthorn, with trunks like rubbed mahogany under which the six heifers panted all day in shade. In the fifth field, a crop of barley, the only crop that year on the place, about five acres left by the previous tenant, was flaring white on the small hillside. Tom had begun to mow it by hand, and when I arrived we started tackling it together. That field too was bounded by big neglected hedges of hawthorn and heat lay compressed in it, over the blinding patch of barley, like the breath of a bakehouse oven. We worked stripped to the waist. Tom worked with a scythe and I followed him with rake and bonds, making sheaves. Sometimes when I bent down and stood sharply up again the field seemed to rock about me, dazzling, pitching slantwise, almost melting away under hard blue sky. We used to start work at five and then have breakfast, in the old-fashioned way, about nine. We always had thick rashers of home-cured bacon and fatty fried eggs and new bread and gallons of strong milky tea. We ate like wolves and soon the blisters on my shoulders skinned, raw and sharp, like peeled pink onions. After breakfast we took cold tea into the field and worked on till noon. In the afternoons we carried water for the cattle, fetching it in the red-scabbed water-cart from the brook, the Biddy brook, that ran over the road down the hill. Pale pink willow herb and flowering cresses and water-dock had almost choked the narrow gullies of water under the white footbridge, and every day the depth of water seemed a little less. Every day I stood in the brook, without even taking off my boots and socks, and made a new water-dip among the weeds and cresses, handing buckets up to Tom on the cart. The coldness of water running over my feet was very like the first cold shock of well-water in the cool kitchen after the heat of the afternoon when I had first met Tom. It did more than cool my body; it acted like a compress on my injured mind.

Sometimes at this point the brook, from liquefied deposits of iron, ran very red, staining cress-roots as I pulled them out a kind of rusty scarlet, and one afternoon the redness clotted on
my socks and boots and the legs of my trousers and when I hauled myself up on the bridge Tom laughed at me from the cart and said:

‘Now you look a rare bloody mess,' and I laughed too and said:

‘I feel wonderful.'

About the fourth or fifth afternoon – I am not sure which, because the days melted into each other – I came into the kitchen, naked to the waist, in boots still squelching pads of water from the brook. I had come to put the kettle on the paraffin-burner for tea. As I came into the kitchen I could hear the sound of the burner. Then I could see that already the cloth was laid.

Then Nancy's voice called from the scullery ‘That you, Tom?' and she came into the kitchen, carrying a pink glass jug of milk in her hands. It was one of those transparent jugs that turn the milk, in a fascinating way, a pure light pink. She stood absolutely still, clasping it in her hands. I could see her fingers pink through the upper glass of the jug. Then the milky fleshy cheek of her face turned almost the same colour, flushing up to bright pale eyes.

‘Where did
you
come from?'

‘I live here,' I said.

‘I think Tom might have told me.'

She put the jug down on the table. She turned quickly and went out of the kitchen; and turning she saw my red boots and the watery pads they had made on the floor-bricks.

‘And where have you been? – you're plastered up to your neck.'

She did not wait for answer to that; I stood at the scullery door, looking in. The scullery had an open square-foot of window shaded by the branches of an elderberry. The odour of elderberry was strong and dark, and Nancy moved pale and big between narrow shady walls about the singing paraffin stove and the fat brown teapot.

‘How do you like your tea?' she said.

‘Strong and black,' I said.

The kettle spouted steam; she forgot the heat of the handle
and burnt the tips of her fingers, sucking them. ‘Damn,' she said. She picked up the kettle by the fringe of her apron. She poured water into the teapot and said:

‘It's hotter than ever today, don't you think? I was going to cook a few things when the sun went down a bit.'

‘Curd tarts?' I said.

‘Whistle and they'll come to you,' she said. She pushed past me with kettle and teapot. ‘I've got something else to do besides make milk turn sour.'

It was on the tip of my tongue to be what she always called clever in answer to that, but I checked myself in time.

‘The sun would curdle it for you,' I said, ‘in no time –'

‘I'm going to bake bread,' she said. ‘Think yourselves lucky I've got time for that.'

The three of us had tea together and once or twice Nancy snapped: ‘Sparing with the milk, Tom. It's all we've got.' That meal, with Nancy between us, was not quite the same as we were accustomed to, and some of my confidence receded. I began to feel tightened and defensive once more, resisting affection.

‘We're going to paint the kitchen out on Sunday,' Tom said. ‘It's wonderful what difference this bloke makes. We'll have the barley all down tomorrow.'

‘You both look as if a wash would do you good, the pair of you –'

‘We bath every night, don't we?' Tom said, and winked at me.

‘Every night.'

‘I'll believe it when I see it,' she said.

‘Well, you can,' Tom said. His happiness at my being there had been, I think, greater than my own; he looked all the time wonderfully bright, almost glowing with happiness. ‘We'll have the old bath tin here on the floor – penny a look –'

‘I don't think
that's
very funny,' she said.

My defensiveness increased as tea went on. I was glad when it was over. We had hens to feed; water and swede-tops to give to the heifers; a bait to find for the horse. I had not often been so happy as I was that late summer, with Tom, the horse,
the fields, and the six heifers. Already the heifers had begun to know me and would come forward from under the hawthorn shade to lick my hands.

That evening the heifers stirred under the hedge before I reached them, and something a tone brighter than sepia-yellow elm leaves broke from the hawthorns and trotted in the glare of sunlight up the field. I stood watching a fox, old, rusty-yellow, big as an airedale, lope across a series of rabbit warrens on the brown hill. He turned once and looked round at me, hesitated, haughty, cool and old, so that I felt almost that if I had whistled him he would have come back. Then he jumped a rabbit hole, shook himself and trotted away towards the coverts, like an old rank yellow dog, until I lost him in the high sere grasses.

When I went back to the house a bowl of milk was souring in the sun on the window-sill overlooking the garden. Tom and I had started to dig in the garden every evening after supper and I had visions, when rain came again, of planting flowers.

‘There's a fox about, Tom,' I said.

‘I know – I've seen him – we've got to get the old roger, somehow.'

‘He's all foxes in one,' I said. ‘You should have seen the way –'

‘He's been here since the Middle Ages,' Tom said. ‘He lay in the barley one day, washing himself like a dog. I bet if you called him Sir Roger he'd answer.'

After that we called him Sir Roger; we used to wait for him in the hen-yard, under the hovels, every night; we even took the gun to bed with us, so that we could fire at him from the upstairs windows.

Before supper that night we washed. We had lived on a staple and increasingly monotonous diet of bacon and eggs, varied by bread and cheese or bread and jam. That night Nancy cooked us roast sirloin, with beans and new potatoes and a lot of excellent gravy, with a dessert of tarts. There was a refreshing smell of peasmint in the air. The meat, roasted in the old range, with coal, was crisped at the edges, and you could taste the delicious fire-burnt crusty juices of it on the
long red slices. I remember how I carved the meat that night and how I tried to carve it thinly. The knife was not very sharp and Tom rubbed it up on the doorstep. He said what an extraordinary thing it was that so few people could carve, and then I remembered how once, at the Aspen house, I had carved for the old ladies when Rollo was not there. The thought of it made me remember Lydia and I went off, suddenly, not knowing it, into a daydream of thoughts about her. I had tried not to think of her. Now I wondered if she would marry anyone, Blackie for instance, and how much she thought of me and if she was happy. The knife was poised in air, with a slice of beef still on it, and a little blood dripped down, without my knowing it, on to the tablecloth. My impression of her was so vivid that I felt I could see her and feel her in the fading summer evening air. Then suddenly the beef flopped off the knife, falling with a wet splash on to the dish below.

‘Thank you,' Tom said. ‘Thank you indeed. Thank you most kindly.' He peered down at his empty place. He had been holding his plate in air for quite some time. ‘Nothing like having the food thrown at you.'

‘Good God,' I said.

‘Well, who was it?' Nancy said.

‘I'm terribly sorry,' I said. ‘I was thinking of the fox.'

After that I paid more attention to the beef and gradually, in a series of pretended refusals, and pretended hints that it would eat just as nice if not nicer cold, we finished it up. Tom had brought in some beer, and between beer and beef and plum-fat slices of curd-tart I began to feel blown and hot and sleepy.