Love for Lydia (33 page)

Then Arthur stood with his hand on the big brass knob of the bakehouse door. I heard it slip in his fingers. It had always been too big for me to hold as a child and it had always slipped through my fingers in exactly that way. Sometimes I used to stand there knocking softly, unable to get my small hands about the big slippery knob, asking to be let in, to be let in please, because I wanted a loaf of bread for my mother, until after a long time old Horseman would open the door with floury hands and let me through.

‘Well,' Arthur said, ‘off you get. I'll be seeing something of you. Goodbye.' He shook hands. ‘I expect Evensford will be here if ever we want to come back.'

‘If ever we want to.'

‘I bet it won't have changed at all if we don't come back for twenty years. You see. Towns like Evensford never do.'

‘There'll be different people,' I said.

‘No, there won't,' Arthur said. ‘You see.'

‘Different ideas.'

‘No,' Arthur said. ‘You see. Towns like Evensford never change.'

‘Well, it'll be different in one way.'

‘How?' Arthur said. ‘I bet it never will. How will it be?'

‘It won't have us,' I said.

We laughed at that, and then said goodbye again, shaking hands for the last time. The knob of the bakehouse door twisted properly at last and the door opened. I felt the warm deep glow of the ovens, the sweetness of bread, the flouriness, the yeast, and the smell of fire.

‘Come in, Arthur,' I heard old Horseman say. ‘You're late tonight. It's after two.'

I walked slowly home, pushing the bicycle. I stood in the garden for a few moments, under the fading bronzy pear-trees, glad of solid people like Arthur Peck, of the comforting sweetness of new bread in bakehouses. I stared at the stars for the last time, thinking of Tom and Lydia, with tenderness, without malice, and with a feeling that everything about us all was tranquillized.

‘Goodbye, Lydia,' I said.

Next morning at eight o'clock my father came to wake me.

‘There someone to see you,' he said. ‘A policeman. I fancy it's that boy you went to school with – only he's grown so much I hardly know.'

‘Arthur Peck,' I said.

I dressed and went downstairs. It seemed strange that Arthur should be standing on the far side of the garden, wiping and continually rewiping the sweat from the inside of his helmet with long strokes of his hand.

‘We're always saying goodbye,' I said. ‘What's up?'

He stood still, wetting his lips. There is always something curiously undressed about a policeman without his helmet, and now I saw that he had unfastened the collar of his tunic too.

‘What is it, Arthur?' I said.

It seemed to take him fully a minute, wetting and rewetting his lips, staring at me and then staring away again, to tell me that Tom was dead.

He began to say something about ‘An accident – we're pretty sure it was an accident. Shot himself getting over a gate – after a fox or something, his sister said. It's one of those things that could happen to anybody – climbing over a gate at night with a gun –'

I stood thinking of Nancy. I knew that it was not one of those things that could happen to anybody. I heard her voice crying to me over the telephone. I stared down at the orange-bronzy leaves of the pear-trees falling on the wet October grass, aware of nothing inside myself except the recollection of her voice trying to tell me how frightened she was.

‘Thank you for coming, Arthur,' I said. ‘It was very good of you to come.'

Three days later Pheley McKechnie came back to Evensford; and I left, the next afternoon, by the London train.

It was more than two years later when I came back to Evensford, in a wintry springtime of long cold evenings and days of dusty dry winds that stripped young buds from trees already backward and slow in breaking. ‘This is the year we don't have any blossom,' my father said. Our few apple trees were fixed in a cycle of alternate sterile and fruiting years. ‘There's just one sprig on the Lord Derbys. That's all.'

Evensford is a town of narrow and late development, of no tradition and a single industry, with its people confined for livelihood by the shoes they make and the leather they tan. It is something like a grey beehive in which every worker has his own cell of concentration for a single-minded purpose, exactly like an instinctive and brainless bee. For these reasons the slump had hit it very hard.

They always used to say, in Evensford, that there was nothing like leather and that everyone had to have a pair of shoes; but that spring it began to seem possible that perhaps a million people had suddenly decided to wear shoes no longer. I arrived home when the town was carrying a load of four thousand unemployed; when the three tanneries were shut down by the river; when factories were working, if they were working at all, three days or two days or even one day a week, and when every little while it seemed that my father came home with news of another smash. ‘Nicol's have gone. Oakley's have gone. They say Williamson's haven't a pair on the books. They say Green and Porter can't last much longer.' The streets were melancholy with three-men bands of shuffling heroes with strips of medal ribbons pinned on narrow chests. Back doors were haunted by slow-footed men carrying suitcases of cheap fibre that opened to reveal meagre wardrobes of hanging shoelaces
and cards of buttons and rolls of cheap pink and blue ribbon for threading through ladies' underwear. Over the streets, on the cold long light evenings, there hung that smell of burnt leather I hated so much, a yellow-grey cloud of smoke from grates that burned no coal. There was no joy in Evensford. ‘It has been an awful winter,' my father said. ‘There is a lot of distress.'

It was typical of him, and indeed typical of Evensford, that he had decided, in his modest and generous way, to do something about all this. There was not much, in a practical way, that he could do; but he was very fond of singing and he had formed, that winter, a little choir.

‘There are fifteen of us,' he explained to me. ‘Ten basses and five tenors. Part of the old Orpheus. It's always difficult to get tenors, as you know. But we're knitting together a bit now and it's going very well. We sing at hospitals and places and concerts for charities and relief funds and after-care and that sort of thing. We go to the sanatorium a lot. We feel it gives a lot of pleasure to people – anyway it makes us very happy.'

I was very restless in the long cold smoky twilights of a backward springtime.

‘Why don't you come and sing with us?' my father said. ‘I think you'd like it.'

‘You know I can't read a note,' I said.

‘It doesn't matter about reading,' he said. ‘Charlie Macintosh doesn't read. Will Purvis doesn't read. They're two of the best men we've got. It doesn't matter about reading – your ear is good. And so is your voice. I've always said what a good voice you had.'

‘It's been ages since I sang a note,' I said. Nor, in fact, did I feel like singing.

‘So it has for all of us. You get back into it very quickly.'

Much of my restlessness rose, that spring, from an inability to decide what I wanted to do. I suffered, I felt, from a kind of mental cramp. But if there was one thing about which it was not difficult to make up my mind it was the question of singing part-songs at charity concerts or about the beds of hospitals.

‘Well, as you like,' my father said. ‘But I think you'd find it would take you out of yourself.'

It was impossible to tell him that it was not out of myself that I wanted to be taken; and he went on with his singing, for another week or two of that backward spring, without me.

Then one day he said: ‘I wish you'd do something for me if you haven't anything on tonight.'

I said I would if I possibly could.

‘We want somebody to give out the sheet music when we sing at the sanatorium tonight. Peggy Whitworth always does it, but he fell down this morning and broke his leg.'

‘That's a bad blow for you,' I said.

‘Oh! it was only his wooden one,' he said, and I think he said this because he was aware of my restlessness and with the idea of cheering me up.

But as he said it I was not cheered; I could only feel impatient with myself that I did not share his generous simplicity. A great deal of myself was not merely cramped; it was depressingly complicated. What I wanted for myself was not clear, and much of what I felt about it seemed to twist back inside me, impossibly knotted.

‘Couldn't you get someone else?' I said.

‘I think you'd like it up there,' he said. They give us a beautiful ham supper with coffee afterwards. It's all very gay and cheerful. It would do you good to see their faces.'

He looked out of the window, into a garden of apple trees lightly sprigged with blossomless leaves.

‘I think it's turned much warmer,' he said. ‘I think we shall probably sing out of doors this evening. In that case you needn't come inside if you didn't want to.'

I still hesitated and he said:

‘It's a beautiful garden there. Full of flowers. Full of daffodils.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘So long as you don't ask me to sing.'

‘It's a curious thing,' he said, ‘you feel you
want
to sing when you see their faces. It makes you feel glad to be alive.'

In the gardens of the sanatorium my father and his friends made a semi-circle and sang, unaccompanied, a programme of
songs. It was true, as my father had said, that the air had turned much warmer. The soft May evening became filled with a scent of daffodils. There was a slight astringent odour, too, of something clinical and dry on the long glass-verandahed terrace where rows of patients sat or lay in their beds, intent and listening. The daffodils were scattered in broad streams of yellow and white about grass lawns on which, in a wide line, a series of open white huts contained other patients from whom, at the end of each song, came the sound of a distant delicate clapping.

The choir sang
There Was a Jolly Fisherman
and
Oh! My Love is like a Red, Red Rose
and then
Sweet and Low
and then several comic songs and then
Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms.
These were the songs I had heard my father sing ever since I was a child. There is something very beautiful and touching, as Miss Aspen had once said, about the sound of men's voices harmonizing softly in the open air, and I felt the evening begin to draw out, tense and fine and over-delicate, like a nervous string. Then as I collected the sheets of one song and began to give out another a young man beckoned me from his bed on the terrace outside the ward. When I went to him he said:

‘Do you suppose they could sing
The Golden Vanity?
– you know, it's about the boy and the lowland, the lowland, they left him in the lowland sea – that's a fine song. I like that song.'

‘I'll ask them,' I said. ‘Is there something else you'd like if they can't sing that one?'

‘No,' he said. ‘That's the song. They sang it last time.'

Then as I moved away to ask my father about the song I saw a thin strange girl stir on a bed. She gave me a bare, quick smile as I looked at her.

‘Hullo,' she said.

‘Hullo,' I said to her, and there was nothing about her face that I thought I could remember.

Presently the choir sang the song called
The Golden Vanity
, the song about the boy left in the lowland sea, and the sound of it seemed to drift about the garden in melancholy and beautiful waves. There was a great deal of applause for that
song; it was a great favourite. By the time it was finished, the daffodils were motionless in a sunless air that had calmed down completely. Then the matron of the sanatorium made a speech of thanks and my father replied, saying how much they all liked coming there. Once again, he made the joke about Peggy Whitworth's broken leg, and there were ripples of laughter along the terraces. Then there was a rattling of plates and cups. Nurses in snowy uniforms rustled as they handed round cups of coffee drawn from a large urn and plates of ham sandwiches and sausage rolls.

As I took a ham sandwich from a bright nurse I remembered something and said:

‘The girl in the end bed – could you tell me who she is?'

‘The end bed? – over there?' she said. ‘That's Nora Jepson.'

I remembered then, and went and sat on Nora's bed.

‘Hullo,' she said. ‘You didn't know me, did you?'

‘Not just for that moment,' I said.

‘I thought you didn't.'

‘I didn't know you were here,' I said. ‘I've been away so long –'

‘I've been here nearly six months,' she said. ‘I'll probably be out by the end of the summer. What are you doing now?'

‘Not much,' I said.

‘No dancing?'

She laughed with sudden thin brightness. She had always been a spare and sinuous girl, too fine-drawn, and now, as she lay in bed, a little excited at talking to me, I thought she looked much the same as ever, perhaps even a little less strained than when I had seen her before.

‘My dancing days are over,' I said.

She looked thoughtful for a moment.

‘That was my trouble,' she said. ‘Too much dancing. I know now. They have dances here sometimes – one Saturday a month – for the nearly-cured ones. It's friendly and nice but I can't bear it. I put my head under the clothes so I can't hear the band –'

‘You were the great one for dancing,' I said. ‘You used to float – positively float –'

‘That's because there was nothing on me,' she said. ‘I was worn away. Dr Baird said my bones were hollow when I came in here. Like a bird's. Do you know Dr Baird?'