Love for Lydia (26 page)

I said presently I hoped they would not mind if I crept up to bed, and Tom said: ‘Good grief, man, who wants bed after that lot? You'll never sleep. Let's have a whack at old Sir Roger.'

‘One wants to go to bed, one wants to go fox-hunting,' Nancy said. ‘What's the other one want to do? What about the washing-up? You've left two days' already.'

‘Oh! I suppose so,' Tom said.

‘Tom and I will do it,' I said.

‘
You
and I will do it,' she said. ‘Tom can get in wood for tomorrow.'

‘I'll just have one pipe and a squint for Sir Roger,' Tom said. He had begun to smoke a pipe, a new thing for him, and the only time he ever showed uneasiness was when he filled it and packed it tight and lit it and relit it over and over again.

So Nancy and I washed-up, which I suppose was what she wanted, by the light of a tiny oil lamp that made movement vague and yet heightened by the enormity of wall-shadow in the little scullery.

My dislike of washing-up and my blown sleepiness brought me to the edge of a drugged doze; so that I did not pay much attention when she said:

‘Did you see Tom's new car? What did you think of it?'

I said it was nice, and that I liked it.

‘Did he tell you how he got it?' she said.

‘He said you bought the old one and –'

‘She made him buy it – didn't he tell you that?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Who did?'

‘Lydia. She made him do it,' she said.

I dried a number of forks and spoons without knowing it, until I held seven or eight together in my hands.

‘Put the cutlery in the box,' Nancy said. ‘You didn't hear what I said, did you?'

‘You said Lydia made him buy the car.'

‘After that.'

I had to admit to a vacuum after that.

‘She twisted round him until he bought the car from Blackie. She almost got old Miss Aspen to buy one. It's all to get business and they say –'

‘Is she married?'

‘No. What makes you ask that?'

I did not answer. I not only did not want to hear what they said; I did not propose to believe what they said, moreover, even if they said it.

‘Tom saw a lot of her when he was buying the car,' she said. ‘She was up at the house every Sunday.'

If my summer had been loveless it had also been free of the
acerbity of female minds. I did not like Nancy much at that moment, and I might have liked her even less if she had not, a second later, almost changed the subject.

‘They say there's been a fearful battle going on up there. Did you know?'

I said I did not know. ‘And up where?' I said.

‘At the Aspens. Old Miss Aspen isn't capable any more. She's gone to pieces and never gets up. So Rollo is trying to edge Lydia out, and Lydia is trying to edge Rollo out. He's drinking it away on one side and Heaven knows what's happening to it on the other. She's probably drinking it away too. It's going to rack and ruin. They've been selling land. There were awful death duties on Miss Juliana's will – and now there's the slump.'

The slump? – I had not heard of the slump before. I had been aware only of missing a charming, clovered world of vine-houses and acacias and partridge chickens and roses of opulent grace on warm house walls, an oasis of lime and chestnut and grass where Lydia and I had discovered each other, and I did not believe in even the rumour of its change and decay.

‘And who says she's drinking?' I said.

‘Well, I didn't actually say that.'

With extreme care I polished the blade of a knife on the cloth, making it glitter and cast large bloom-like shadows on the walls.

‘Whenever women dislike other women they start making them drink,' I said, ‘or they give them babies.'

‘It's the men who give them babies,' she said coldly. ‘If that isn't too biological for you.'

I think I said I had advanced as far as that, and then: ‘I suppose you'll be telling me next she's going to have a baby?'

‘Not that I know of,' she said. ‘But would it surprise you?'

‘Not since she's a woman,' I said.

She seemed to think desperately for an answer to that, and she said aggressively:

‘I don't think anything would surprise me when you consider who her mother was.'

‘And who,' I said, ‘was her mother?'

She faltered and said:

‘Well, I mean, everybody knows. She's dead now, I think, but everybody knows. They say –'

‘I suppose you never met her,' I said.

‘No,' she said. ‘But I don't see that that matters.'

I thought of the grey-gloved hand blowing a goodbye kiss to me from the window of Evensford's little train; I thought of the tearless face that was almost tearful and I did not answer.

‘No, I never met her,' she said. ‘But that's where she gets it from – Lydia I mean. You've got to get it from somewhere, haven't you?'

There was nothing I had to say.

‘Of course you don't see it,' she said. ‘But you mark my words – she'll go like her mother one day. She'll go that way too.'

‘And which way,' I said, ‘was that?'

She pursed her lips and in answer she used the words that my father always used to describe any aspect, in Evensford, of decline and decay: the paths to the grave, the whisky bottle, the racecourse, the other woman and, not least, the sanatorium. They were all ominously and terribly embraced in them.

‘Wrong way,' she said. ‘That's the way she'll go. You see. Wrong way.'

That was the end of almost all we had to say to each other that evening. It was curious that we did not, at any time, ever really dislike each other. It was simply that her nature, which ought to have been so soft and milky and appeasing in order to match her gracious and pleasant body, seemed to grow petty when confronted with mine and with anything Lydia had to do with mine. Without intention we started grating furiously on each other. Possibly we suffered – if there is such a thing – from a sort of immutual affection. More and more we conducted conversations in cooling phases, so that always, in the end, we stood frozen against each other, without words.

So perhaps I should not have been surprised when, as she said goodnight to us, she asked:

‘Could you two bear it if I came over and cooked dinner for you on Sunday? You'll get nothing otherwise if you're painting.'

We said we should like it, and she said:

‘And what would the gentlemen like to eat? Then I can get the butcher to bring it over.'

We decided there was nothing better than roast beef again, preferably more than ever and this time with Yorkshire pudding and possibly yellow plum pie, preferably with cream from Busketts. She made some remark about people giving their orders and knowing what was best, and then said:

‘And don't let me come up here at twelve o'clock and find you still in bed. Get the place painted. It's my birthday in three weeks and then we could have a house-warming little party.'

August burned into September until the shorn lobes of grassland were the colour of the fox we were always stalking but could not catch and the only green was in the great sprays of hawthorn and the water-weeds about the brook. When the barley was finished we carried it and stacked it in the yard. It was our only crop, and the land on which it had grown was fissured like the cracked dry basin of a pond, still too hard for ploughing.

There was nothing we could do but turn to the house, and in the last week of August we painted it through. Then we began on the outside. Before we started it looked something like a grey stone box sunk, under a crust of crumbling tile, in a wilderness of elderberry and shrivelling hollyhock and gooseberry and vast clumps of horseradish and rambler rose. We went through everything with scythes and mattocks and even crowbars for the horse-radish, like slaughterers. Under a tangled mattress of fading rambler rose the front fence fell down, and when we put it up again I thinned out the ramblers and tied them back, in fresh long fans. We did not think the front door had been opened for fifty years. Its bolts were so rusted that when we opened it at last we stepped out into high, wiry, mildewed tunnels of honeysuckle and rambler, impenetrably
interlocked, black with the birds' nests of past summers and brittle with the tinder of dead branches. When we removed it all we saw that the door had a small fanlight in the shape of a quartered orange about it, and at the foot of it boot-scrapers in the form of ancient fenders. We painted the door, the fence, and the windows white. The house began to have eyes and seemed, presently, larger than it was. This illusion of size sprang also from the cleared garden, the square fore-apron of bare earth on which I planned to have, in autumn, clumps of wall-flowers and tulip and winter-stock. Tom kidded me a good deal about the flowers. There wouldn't be time on a farm, he said, for things like that.

A clutter among the hens brought me out one evening, while it was still light, to see old Sir Roger standing between the house and the barley stack with a dripping pullet in his mouth. He looked like an old yellowish dog singed by fire. He stood for fully half a minute sneering back at me, and I made as if to throw something at him, giving a great rambling sort of yell:

‘Tom! – Sir Roger –!'

He moved off then at a slow lope, the hen still in his mouth like a blooded rag, and before I yelled again for Tom the big yellow body was sliding up the hedgerow. By the time Tom came out of the house, running with an extraordinary softness I did not understand, the fox was nothing but a snip of alternate dark and yellow shadow beyond the hawthorns.

We raced after him up the field. After a few yards I noticed that Tom was slipping on the bare dry grass. He had been changing his boots when he heard my yell and was running now in his stockinged feet. It was rather comic to see him slipping and floundering up the slope, swearing ‘You blasted old Roger – you damned saucy old bastard, you –' but by the time we reached the crest of the field, where a cart track wound between hedges of blackberry and thorn up to the coverts, there was nothing to be seen. We had lost him for the fifth or sixth time and Tom, opening the gate and walking some distance up the track, shouted into the evening silence:

‘We'll get you! – you wait, you old devil – you damned old
Roger, you –' and then turned to me and said:

‘Come on, we'll get him up at the covert – that's the only place we'll get him. We can follow the blood.'

I reminded him of the stockings and he laughed, remembering it too, and we turned back.

‘I get so concentrated on that damn thing,' he said, ‘one of these days I'll forget my head.'

The following week it was Nancy's birthday. There was a difference in age of only about eleven months between Tom and Nancy, and it seemed to me sometimes that they were more than brother and sister. They were like two persons out of the same pure blonde world, with the same buttery hair, the eyes of the same earnest blue transparence, the same un-treacherous, unsubtle minds. And since they had been reared, actually, in the same cradle, it was perhaps not surprising that they sometimes thought alike, wanted the same things, and felt for each other with intuitive tenderness.

It seems clear to me now that it could only have been for this reason that she invited Lydia to her birthday: not necessarily because she wanted it herself but because she knew, intuitively, even more than he did, that Tom wanted her.

I should, I suppose, never have guessed that. He had not told me yet of the night when, so shocked and so sickened, so puzzled and so decent, he had heard Blackie and his stepmother quarrelling in the house of the dead about how they should bury the dead. Nor should I ever have guessed, at least in precisely the eventual terms, another thing.

A great change had come over Lydia; and I want to tell why.

The evening of Nancy's birthday, a Saturday, was a purple umbrella of storm, under which long westerly crevices of sombre and brilliant ochre marked a black horizon that seemed slowly to be elevated, like a mountainside, until it merged into
a mass of boiling thunder-cloud. All above the fox coverts, under a sky panting continuously with pale yellow sheet lightning, you could see the conical larches, burnt by summer heat, bronze in the high bright flashes.

It was not an evening, after all, to eat hot roast sirloin and baked potatoes and well-larded pies and sizzling yellow plums; and I was in my shirt-sleeves, without a tie, as Tom drove into Evensford to fetch Lydia, leaving me to help Nancy. The little house was suffocating with storm and fire and roasting beef and crackling pudding and the smell of table candles, which I had to light early because of the storm. It was perhaps not a very good evening for drinking Burgundy either, but I had bought a bottle as a present for Nancy, and she wanted us to drink it. There were still a few pale yellow roses on the house wall and I ran out, at the last moment, just before darkness fell, to gather what I could and put them on the table. I uncorked the bottle of Burgundy and set it there too, between the candles and the roses, and there was a delicate fire on it and on the still dry petals.

Whenever I was alone with Nancy I grew slightly on edge, not precisely nervous, but defensive, and the back of my neck would start tingling. That evening I felt not only defensive, but strained and nervous inside. The bleak thought of rejection by Lydia came back and oppressed me. I kept forcing myself towards a notion that I did not want her. I felt I had made the impossible mistake of thinking that one of the virtues of love was permanence. Now I tried to persuade myself not only that it was not permanent but that it was best that it never should be.

The way out of this was flippancy. Already, as I arranged the roses and uncorked the wine and listened for the rain that seemed so long in coming, I had fired off one or two casual sparks of what I thought was bright conversation to Nancy, lost in vapours of beef and gravy in the scullery.