Love for Lydia (28 page)

In bed I lay listening to the church clock, across the fields, striking hollow quarters through the steaming rain. My mind, fired and wakened by too much coffee, raced brilliantly and desperately about, thinking of Lydia and Tom and even Alex in a sequence of bright distortions. Tom and I slept on two iron hospital-like beds that creaked like loose metallic corsets
as we turned from side to side, and after a time I heard Tom tossing and turning about, sleepless as I was.

‘Awake?' he said and I said ‘Yes,' and damned the coffee.

He sat up in bed. Rain, lessening a little now, was falling in a gentle autumnal stream over dark fields and I could see a little far-distant lightning still panting across the sky above the bronzy coverts.

‘We had a nice evening,' Tom said. ‘Well, more than nice – wonderful.'

‘Very nice,' I said. ‘Lydia loved the house, didn't she?'

‘She loved it,' he said.

The air was humid and I threw back the clothes, stretching out, listening to the dying rain.

‘Not raining so fast now,' Tom said.

‘No, not so fast,' I said.

For a few moments he did not speak again. Then he said something else about the rain, and I replied. We went through a series of these deadlocks. I knew then that he was trying to tell me something. He moved several times nervously about the bed. Presently he got out of bed to open one of the windows, which we had closed against the rain. I heard him breathing the cooler rain-washed air. He said he thought the rain was stopping now and how wonderful the air always was after the rain.

He started to speak several times. There is nothing like the complexity of a straightforward mind that finds it cannot express itself in a straightforward way. He made several more false starts, and then got as far as ‘That night she asked Alex to do something for her – at her twenty-first. I never forgot that. Do you remember?'

I said I remembered, and then he began. He unwound it from inside himself in a series of tortured repetitions. He went over and over it: like a man trying to get a speech right. He spoke in humble confusion about his feelings as he had driven down to the garage with the note for Blackie – how he had not wanted to go, how he wished Alex had gone, how he wished to God something had come up to get him out of it. Then he came to the scene there – the two people quarrelling
with, as it seemed to him, such brutal disrespect over old Johnson, dead upstairs, and Blackie with soap-grey razor, big and dark, and offensive under the gaslight. He must have gone over this scene again and again, re-enacting it for himself in the light of later and tortuous reflection, reliving it under the high glare of his own conclusions, his outrage, and his troubled decency. All the time he had wanted to be sick. He was sick with the odour of grease and gas-light and petrol fume. He was sick at something brutally casual, at something of revolting physical grossness that he could only feel and could not describe. ‘God, you couldn't begin to think – you couldn't bear it,' he said several times. ‘You couldn't bear it, I tell you –' I thought the sky began to turn copper-coloured as we lay and talked there. For a few moments there seemed to be no sound of rain. Then he got out of bed and went to the window and said:

‘The sky's clearing – I think it's stopped. Yes – there's a star.'

In the growing darkish coppery light he moved about the bedroom, finding his slippers and his dressing-gown. He said:

‘I'm going down for a drink of milk. Perhaps it'll soothe the coffee down. Do you want some?'

I said no, and he went quietly downstairs, shutting the door after him. Through the window I saw one star after another reveal itself in a breaking sky. I lay watching them and thought of Tom and what he had said and how, at last, I felt I understood him. I thought of Lydia and what she had said, earlier, about love and the inconsequent business of love and how there were a great many things, some of them important to yourself and some of them monstrously impossible and silly to other people, for which you could not give any explanation. Stars began to brighten all over the lighter, rain-swept sky. All the eaves of the house dripped coolly into sloppy puddles in the yard. I thought a long way back to the day when Lydia had first skated, when Tom had first seen her and she had not even remembered his name. It was impossible to guess how tortuously and how far he had travelled round before he had reached the point of knowing consciously that he wanted her.
She in turn had seemed desperately to try to gain one object, and now, at last, had succeeded only in gaining, as people so often do, another she had tried to avoid.

I lay there for a long time, watching a sky from which all cloud and rain and lightning had departed, leaving the entire sparkling naked range of stars. When at last Tom did not seem to come back I got out of bed and went and stood at the window, leaning on the lowered sash, staring across the fields.

From below Tom's voice, and then Lydia's, came from the yard. I saw a stream of light from the kitchen swing out to the barley stack, and I heard Tom say:

‘You see – all over. Every star in the sky out now.' And then: ‘It's drying already. It just ran through the cracks like a drain. Careful just here –'

Footsteps, voices, then the figures of Tom and Lydia went across the yard. I stood for a moment or two longer looking down. From the yard I caught the words ‘Tom,' and then something else, and then something about ‘ploughing perhaps on Monday'. Tom's voice threaded nervously into air alone, babbling on as he had done in bed, confused and groping.

I saw it at last silenced by an upward gesture of her arms. He seemed to stand stunned and then she began to kiss him. He had probably never kissed a woman before except perhaps at a party, in fun, at a dance, or in some stupid game at Christmas time. Now he was in love, for the first, the most miraculous time. I walked away from the window and lay down on the bed. I stared up at the stars again and thought of him, stunned, joyous, blown explosively out of himself by the force of a new and tender wonder.

‘All the stars are out,' I heard him say again. ‘Every single star.'

Tom's neighbours were a family of Presbyterian Scots named McKechnie; they owned a farm of three hundred acres up the hill. In the beginning they had been, as neighbours are in the beginning, very friendly. McKechnie, a man of sixty or so, had something of the appearance of a thin cylinder of freckled steel gone rusty at the top. The McKechnie boys and the McKechnie girls, seven of them, were cylinders of comparable appearance, all stiff, all dry, all freckled, all rusty at the head.

Every Sunday the McKechnies did a regimental march to church in Evensford. Since there was no Presbyterian worshipping place in Evensford they had joined a chapel, the fearsome Succoth, that gave the nearest pattern of a tomb-like ideal. In summer they trailed across field-paths, the girls white-gloved, the men in squarish bowler hats; in winter they marched by road. They did not cook at the McKechnie house on Sundays. There were stories of midday dinners of cold pork faggot and bread and jam, with only streams of long cold prayer and cold water to wash them down. The McKechnies brought even to the Nonconformity of Evensford an essay in Sabbatarianism the severity of which it had no hope of matching. Even Evensford cooked and ate on Sundays. With the halo of the chapel pew went, just as deeply revered, the halo of the oven: roast beef and hymn book were equally sanctified. Only the McKechnies, spare and cylindrical, with their strange eyes of sandy-green, their vivid rustiness and their fleshless essay in self-denial, stood mirthlessly apart from a day that Evensford, both in belly and spirit, really enjoyed.

The friendliness of the McKechnies on week-days was entirely the opposite of this. Mrs McKechnie became a pale but jovial-feathered hen sending down to Tom, in the afternoons, plates of still warm girdle-scones. McKechnie lent him
tools, promised a pup from a coming litter of sheepdogs and threw open to Tom, without prompting, the entire three hundred acres of shooting from the house with its drawn Venetian blinds of dark cocoa-colour up to the coverts on the hill. The McKechnie sons went to endless and selfless trouble, even once or twice at night, to bring us veterinary help when the six heifers had forty-eight hours of mild poisoning from a temporary pollution of the brook. ‘And if ever ye find ye can't manage, Tom,' Mrs McKechnie would say, ‘just shout and one of the girls'll be only too glad to come over.'

One of the girls was Pheley. I thought at first her name was Phebey, but when the final entanglements of accent were cleared away it plainly emerged as Pheley, perhaps a diminutive of Ophelia: we never knew. Pheley, cast in the freckled-rusty-cylindrical mould of all McKechnies, was twenty-eight. Her figure seemed to have various spoon-like knobs stuck about it, like bony afterthoughts. In sunlight her eyes were a pale, sharp green. In other lights they were sandy, with irradiations of mild streaked emerald. She had a habit of saying ‘Ye never will!' or ‘Ye never do!' as other people say ‘There, now' or ‘Fancy.' Her voice had a light piercing astringence, a sort of over-eager gristliness, and her skin the pale embarrassing candescence of the sandy-haired.

It was Pheley who brought down to Tom her mother's plates of still warm girdle-scones. At first it was only scones, with honey to put in them; then it was oat-cakes and currant biscuits and shortbread and damson pie. Tom, in the weeks before I joined him, was not ungrateful for these things. They saved his cooking, varied the monotonies of his cheese and eggs and bacon. It came, at first, as a pleasant surprise to him, an act of unsolicited neighbourliness that touched him. Then, alone there at the farm, lonely at times, oppressed by the death of Alex and miserable, as I afterwards knew, because I had abandoned him, he began to expect them. He began to look forward to the figure of Pheley coming down the hill.

‘Well, here I am again. The old nuisance. Always turning up like a bad penny. Well, we had a wee bit stuff left over –'

Soon she began to come every afternoon; she began to focus on Tom, during the hot weeks of August, the ferocious concentrations of a burning-glass. Through the pallid eyes, deceptively emotionless as marbles, poured a white heat of narrowed interest that must have throbbed under the colourless candescent skin like fever. She started to linger about the house. She stretched her long gaunt red-haired figure, with its uneasy afterthoughts prodding under the blouse like her own clenched knuckles, in his chairs. She gave him ardent help with buckets and horse and heifer feed and said: ‘Take the load off your poor feet while I rinse the tea-things – ah! ye're awful, the breakfast things too. Didn't you have
any
dinner? You know you could have dinner with us.'

Presently the McKechnies invited him home. In the four or five weeks before I joined him he went up to the venetian-blinded house, stuffed inside with manorial fumed oak, two or three times a week for supper. He walked over the farm with McKechnie. He was intensely anxious to succeed up there, in his own small neglected farm, by himself. He wanted to set out alone, severed from his father, from his family, as a sort of Benjamin hitherto overshadowed by big brothers. McKechnie was a good farmer and Tom, I think, felt that he could learn much from a man who had so succeeded on a comparable piece of neighbouring soil. So he was glad of McKechnie. He drank in a great deal of McKechnie advice, generously and gladly given, about the peculiarity of land that is so strong that it grows wheat like dark reeds but so harsh, in misuse, under rain, that it becomes savagely temperamental and intractably ruinous to people who work it stupidly and weakly.

So McKechnie would say: ‘Ye'll never grow barley on that bit. That's a mistake. Never do that again. Bring your barley up yon hill. There. That's your barley land, boy. Keep your wheat down at the bottom. It's terrible strong land there. Catch it right and y're made. Catch it wrong and I doubt if prayer'll ever put it right from now till Doomsday.'

Tom became intensely grateful for advice of this kind. Even when he didn't go to supper he got into the habit of walking across, in the evenings, to the McKechnie land. The two farms
shared for a short distance a cart-track that led, finally, up to the coverts. It was a mass of sloe and camomile and silver weed, with hare-tracks running across from one field to another, and some distance along it a pile of wurzels, sprouting pink-violet from a summer of clamping, stood unused by a gateway.

‘It'll do your heifers no harm to eat a bit of water for a change. Roots are another way of feeding water – just come up and help yourself any time ye want them. The gate's unlocked at the end.'

If McKechnie was not there Tom could talk to the sons; and if there were no sons Pheley was always waiting.

One evening, after about a month of this, Pheley met him on the hill. There was no one at home, she said, and she wanted to walk back with him. She seemed rather upset. If each of the McKechnie girls had been dressed as men and each of the McKechnie sons dressed as women, it would hardly have been possible to tell that a mistake had been made. Except for her thin narrow soprano voice, Pheley was very like a tall, pinafored boy.

That evening, as they walked down between alleys of ripening sloe-bushes, under a brilliant July sunset that seemed to inflame every McKechnie hair until it was a virulent shade of red-ochre, she asked him if he saw anything different about her.

And Tom, in exactly the way typical of himself and of most men, said ‘No. ‘I don't think so.'

She turned, strained and nervous and drawn, and said:

‘Nothing? You mean you don't see anything changed at all?'

And Tom said, with that honest innocence of his: ‘No. You look just the same as ever, as far as I can see,' a remark that would have annoyed most women but that must have gone through Pheley like a sting of agony.

Then she stopped. ‘Take a look at me, Tom,' she said. ‘Will you take a good long look at me?'