Love for Lydia (30 page)

The chase with the frying-pan added much to the loveliness of the day. Tom laughed so much that he could not run more than fifty yards across the paddock. At one point Lydia lost a shoe and Tom called back at her ‘There was an old woman came hippety-hop,' and she threw the frying-pan at him and then fell down. After this Tom chased her back to the house, where they finished up with boiled eggs and bread and butter. They laughed so much over these too that they could hardly eat them. ‘I think we must have given them fifty minutes,' Tom said and I did not ask why.

In the afternoon they sowed grass-seed and lay for a long time in the sun. Later they took the water-cart to the brook and Lydia, taking my place, stood in the stream and filled the buckets. She tucked her skirts into her knickers, Tom said, as if she didn't care a damn for him or for anyone else, and she took off her shoes and stockings. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she started throwing water at Tom. They started to laugh again too and on the green and stony stream-bed she slipped and sat down. As she sat there, telling him rather drolly how cool it was to feel the water about the nice parts of herself, he cried with laughing. ‘And now what do I do while everything hangs out to dry?' she said, and when Tom drove back up the hill, seeing the road through a simmering veil of laughing tears, Lydia sat on the water-cart, wringing water from her skirt and knickers so that it ran down her bare legs and thighs in such noisy streams that they laughed about that too.

It was perhaps here, as they came up the hill, perhaps earlier, as they shrieked after each other with the frying-pan across the paddock, that one of the McKechnie sons saw them fooling together.

Back at the house Lydia stripped, put on an old mackintosh of Tom's and hung all her wet garments on a line in the stackyard. ‘Just like a proper old washing day,' Tom said. ‘They took years to dry,' and once again I did not ask him why.

Nothing could have been happier than his face as he told me all this next morning, when I came back.

He kept laughing, and then, as he reached some point where he did not want me to go further with him, he would suddenly stop and choke back his words, going off into some unnarratable private dream. I was glad of all this; there was something wonderfully touching about seeing him rise excitedly out of his shell of shyness, and if I did not shout with laughter too it was usually because an occasional dream of my own kept insistently returning to trouble me in spite of anything I could do to hold it back. I was haunted, briefly, sharply, and sometimes in a peculiar elusive way still harder to bear, by a small recollection of partridge chickens running among summer ferns, by the sound of fingers scratching at a counterpane in a hot bedroom, and a voice sobbing to me convulsively.

I had previously thought I had got over these things. It now appeared that I had not got over them; because of it, that day, I had something of my own to tell Tom.

‘Going away?' he said. ‘Where?'

‘London,' I told him. ‘I've got a bit of a job there.'

‘Job? – what sort of job?'

‘Books – sort of –'

‘Books again,' Tom said. ‘Always the old books. Just like you.'

‘Always the old books,' I said.

‘I shall hate it without you,' Tom said, ‘but I'm damn glad. You know what I mean?'

I said I knew what he meant, and we laughed together.

‘Anyway we'll have a good bust-up one night before you go – a good old send-off,' he said. ‘With some more of that wine.'

That week Tom began to put the plough into the barley stubble. The land was still iron-hard and because he was busy there and because we now had an extra horse I went down with the water-cart, that afternoon, alone. It was light dreamy weather and I stayed down at the bridge for nearly an hour, talking with an old turkey-cock named Sturman about the way the summer had baked us up. ‘Rare weather,' he kept
saying, and went off into some reminiscence of how the stream had dried up completely in the summer of '87.

By the time I got back it was four o'clock. I drove the water-cart into the stackyard and left it there. And then, as I crossed to the house, I saw Tom leaning on the paddock-gate staring heavily across the field. Down on the near corner of the barley stubble the plough-horse was browsing the hedge.

‘Tired out from yesterday,' I said. ‘That's what comes of running after girls with frying-pans – among other things.'

He turned slowly to look at me from the gate with a face that was white and expressionless. There was no kind of emotion in him. He stared at me blank and stunned.

‘Good God, you look dicky,' I said, and then I saw his gun at his side.

‘I can't believe it,' he said, ‘the oddest damn thing happened when you were gone –'

He stared up the field, telling me of what had happened. About half an hour after I had gone Sir Roger had loped up the hawthorn hedge, not fifty yards away. Tom had got into the habit of taking the gun with him almost wherever he went, and it lay that afternoon under the hedge at the end of a furrow.

He ran up towards the McKechnie land, seventy or eighty yards behind the fox, with the gun in his hand. The fox, as always, did not seem to hurry. Once he stopped and dallied and leered back. By the time Tom got to the gate leading into the track the fox was not more than fifty yards away.

‘I'd have got him if it hadn't been for the gate,' Tom said.

The gate was padlocked. Then Tom saw McKechnie coming down the track. Tom yelled something about the fox but McKechnie came straight on, as if he did not hear. Then he began shouting at Tom, in a throttled shaking voice:

‘Here, I want you, I want you! – ye're the one I'm looking for –'

Somewhere beyond the sloe-bushes the fox lost himself, and McKechnie came shaking and strutting down the track.

‘Dinna run off – I want ye, I want ye –!'

Tom stopped in the track and waited. There was something
inexplicably hostile about the action of McKechnie as he came stumbling on, panting.

‘Dinna run off – ye needna think ye can get away like that.' He glared at Tom with a vast holy sort of outrage, his eyes glittering and reddening with excitement. ‘I want you – I've got one plain simple straightforward question to ask ye, young man.'

Tom simply stared, too staggered even to ask what question it was. And when it came it stunned him.

‘I want to ask ye this, young man.' And Tom said afterwards it had a sort of throttled staginess about it, so that even then he could not think of it as real. ‘What are your intentions towards Pheley? – my daughter?'

The pole-axe effect of this blow lasted until I saw Tom at the gate. ‘We had a terrible row,' he kept saying, ‘a terrible row – I thought he was going to hit me –'

It was all so stupidly in the monotonous McKechnie fashion that I began to laugh.

‘Pheley,' I said. ‘Pheley. What have you done to Pheley?'

‘I can't even look at her,' he said.

I could understand that; no one could look into those stripped hairless green-sandy awful eyes.

‘You came into it too,' he said. I laughed again at that.

‘Me? What have
I
done to Pheley?'

‘You all come into it. Nancy, Lydia – he raved about you all.'

‘The bloody old fool,' I said. ‘Come and have a cup of tea and forget it.'

‘You might have thought I'd violated her,' he said as we went into the house. ‘Either her or the Kingdom of Heaven –'

‘Good grief,' I said, ‘think of Heaven populated with the McKechnies.'

Some of the trouble went out of his face, leaving me, if anything, the more furious of the two of us. I had strong views about bigotry and parsimony and conventions and the high discount charged by small-town moralities on happiness, and I kept urging him angrily to treat it for what it was, to forget it, to let Pheley and the McKechnies, in general, go to hell.

But suddenly the tea we sat drinking at the table reminded him of something. He hit the table with both hands.

‘Good God, it was the day she came down here about her hair.'

Then he told me of the hair, the beating, the rage, the tears, and the way he had listened.

‘That still doesn't alter it,' I said. ‘The bigots will wreck your life if you let them. Don't let them. Forget it and let them go –'

That evening a more fatuous and in a sense more terrible thing happened.

About seven o'clock there was a knock at the door. When I went to answer it – Tom and I had been having a drink together, and I had just been saying that if he couldn't forget it one way he'd better forget it another, and drink was as good a way as any – Pheley stood there, with her sister Flora, the deserted one, behind her.

‘I've come to see Tom,' she said.

I hesitated.

‘We've both come to see him,' Flora said.

‘Tom's down in Evensford, I said.

‘Oh?' Flora said, ‘his car appears to be in the garage,' and after that it was not much use pretending, and Tom came out of the kitchen to the door. He was white again, his blue eyes terribly troubled.

‘Well?' he said.

Flora said that it was a nice thing when people started by telling lies, and Pheley said in a grim hollow whisper:

‘I've got a few things I want to say to you.'

‘I'll buzz off, Tom,' I said.

‘No, you don't,' Flora said. ‘You're in this too. And if the pair of you don't mind so am I.'

The monstrous thought did not strike me until afterwards that she had come as a witness. She began to put on her sinister deserted voice:

‘We're going to have this out,' she said. ‘I've had some of this before.'

We had it out. An evening of pallid lamplight flamed with
idiotic words. Nothing plausible or logical or conclusive or of plain sense emerged in anything that anybody said. But two festering texts ran through it all, suppurating hate:

‘This is what they do to you if you give them a chance,' Flora said. ‘And what else can you expect of people who begin by lying and end by blaspheming?'

‘Good God,' I said.

‘There you are!' she said, pulsing and sour and triumphant.

After this I withdrew from the contest, pouring myself a drink. She crowed ‘And drink too,' and I walked out into the garden saying: ‘Excuse me. Before I either say or do something I shall regret for ever.'

‘It's already been said! It's already been done!' she screeched.

For some time I walked about the field. Nothing so stupid had ever happened to us. Then I thought of Pheley's hair, the way she had cut it off, and the way her father had beaten her; and suddenly I knew what, under the sexless, sterile pale-eyed face, she evidently felt for Tom. That seemed, incredible as it was, to alter everything. I saw it suddenly from their point of view: how Pheley had committed the next worst thing, perhaps, to adultery, and had been whipped for it; and how, for both outrages, Tom was the cause.

I went back into the house in time to hear Flora saying:

‘And girls riding about undressed on carts. And running about half-naked like mad-women.'

‘I think this is finished,' I said. ‘We're going to bed.'

‘With whom?' she screeched.

I held open the kitchen door. ‘Goodnight,' I began saying. ‘Unless you'd like to search upstairs –'

‘We know who we'd find!' she said.

‘I'm surprised,' I said.

‘I don't know why you should be!' she said. ‘She was one of yours –'

At this point I knew that, at last, old rumours, old hatreds, old jealousies, old gossip had, as they always do in little towns, caught up with me. No answer was needed, and Pheley began crying on the threshold.

‘Is that your last answer?' she said to Tom. I stood utterly flabbergasted. There had never seemed any question to which Tom had been compelled to give an answer. He stood hopelessly staring. He was knocked out by the impact of this stupid appeal, and she took it for his last dumb iron refusal of her. ‘You didn't treat me like that when we sat there that afternoon,' she cried bitterly, ‘did you?'

Tom was too stunned to answer, and she took it as his utter rejection.

‘All right,' she said, ‘then you must be responsible for what happens.'

‘Come on, Pheley!' Flora said. ‘He knows it now!'

Alone in the house with Tom I took two more drinks and raged about the room in a sad state of mocking bitterness. ‘You must be responsible for what happens, you must be responsible for what happens!' I mouthed. ‘They always say that. They say it to get under your skin. They say it when they know they're beaten. They say it when they know they can't get anything except through conscience and tears –'

‘God,' Tom said. He held his face in his hands. ‘My head hurts. I can't think. I don't know where I am.'

Two nights later a voice called me, at home, on the telephone my father had proudly had installed. It wheezed bronchially several times, with smoky autumn phlegm, before I recognized it.

‘Do you know a girl named Pheley McKechnie?' it asked. It was Bretherton.

‘No.'

‘I thought you did.'

‘No.'

‘Isn't she a friend of young Holland's?'

‘Not that I know of,' I said.

Bretherton, wheezing again, seemed puzzled by these answers, and I said:

‘Was there any reason for asking me?'

‘No,' he said. ‘No. None at all.'

‘You should never do things without a reason,' I said: a remark that, in the past, had been one of his favourite sticks with which to beat me.

Half an hour later, walking down to catch the evening post, I saw the newsboys with their placards leaning by the walls of ‘The Rose and Mitre,' in the High Street, where in the old days the potato-oven used to stand.

‘Local Girl missing,' they said, in the daubed violet ink Bretherton used for swift sensation. ‘Inquiries widespread.'