Love for Lydia (34 page)

‘No,' I said.

‘He's the young one. He's been wonderful to me. Here's Mrs Montague coming – you know her, don't you? She does the therapy side –'

‘She taught me in school,' I said.

Mrs Montague, a tallish, sallow-skinned, spare woman of sixty, with rimless spectacles, who had taught me as a child, came up to the bed with strips of flowered petit-point in her hands, saying, as I stood up:

‘It was nice of you to come. Your father is very proud that you came,' and then, ‘Don't you think she's wonderful, this Nora of ours? Doesn't she look fine?'

‘She's marvellous,' I said.

‘You'd think she was more than that if you'd seen her when she came in here. She was ready to float away.' She laughed, showing pleasant gold-stopped teeth. ‘We know who's responsible too, don't we?' she said. ‘I must float too –'

She walked away and then, seven or eight yards up the ward, dropped some of her pieces of petit-point. I ran after her to pick them up and she said:

‘Not too much talking. They all incline to think they're better than they are. It's warm too this evening – it's that muggy May weather that's so difficult for them. Please come again, won't you?'

When I went back to Nora Jepson, leaning over the foot of the bed to say that it was time for me to go, she said she was sorry she had gabbled on so long and kept me.

‘I've made you miss all the sandwiches,' she said.

I said it didn't matter, and she said:

‘Come and see me again, won't you? I want to introduce you to Dr Baird. He's a great reader. He loves to talk to people. You won't forget, will you?'

I promised, as I moved away, that I wouldn't forget; and then suddenly she called me back, saying:

‘Forget – forget – I'm the one that's forgetting. I knew I had something to tell you.'

‘What was it?' I said.

She turned her face sideways on the pillow. There was a smile on her face as she looked up at me.

‘There's a friend of yours here – that's what. She came in after Christmas.'

‘A friend?' I said.

‘An old dancing friend.'

I stood still, wondering, looking down at her face on the pillow. ‘Who is it?' I said and she gave me once again, lightly, the quick bare smile.

‘Lydia,' she said. ‘Lydia's in here.'

As I walked across the lawn and under the still almost leafless walnut trees where the daffodils made large motionless yellow sheaves about the boles I felt myself shaking. The scent of daffodils floated sweet and warm in the still air and there was a smell of bruised grass from the lawn that was fragrant and sappy. A blackbird was still singing, bursting and throaty and exquisite, in the first touch of twilight, and after the long cold spell of dry and gritty winds it seemed possible, almost, that summer had come.

Dark and unsurprised, Lydia lay flat on a bed in one of the open huts and looked at me.

‘I heard you were home,' she said.

‘Lydia,' I said. I sat down by the bed, trying to find her hands. They were under the bedsheets and she kept them there. ‘I didn't know you were ill –'

‘You're not supposed to touch me. You're not even supposed to be here.'

‘I'm not the only one,' I said. ‘For God's sake how did you get here?'

‘Who told you I was here anyway? Nora did, didn't she?'

‘How did you get here?' I said.

When she smiled her teeth were bared in the spontaneous way that made her so unexpectedly beautiful.

‘Nora and I did it together,' she said. ‘We went on a long
binge – nearly two years of it. We did it together – every night. Until we couldn't any longer.'

I asked her why, and the word was dryly shaken from me with the most pointless emptiness.

‘Because of a lot of things.'

She looked past me remotely.

‘What did you suppose it could be?' she said. She stirred her hands under the sheet, still keeping them there. ‘You didn't come and see me before you went. You didn't even come to the funeral, did you?'

I had always been filled with oppressive horror of the paraphernalia of death. ‘No,' I told her. ‘I couldn't come.'

‘You didn't even come to see me.'

‘I felt you didn't want me,' I said.

‘We all wanted you,' she said.

I sat for some moments staring with perpendicular blindness at the bed. There was no sound except the blackbird singing in the walnut tree outside. I listened for some time to the unbearable sweetness of it and Lydia said:

‘He sings all day now. He wakes me in the morning and I lie here and listen to him before they bring my breakfast.'

If I had nothing to say it was simply because whatever I could think of saying was inadequate and deprived of all possible emotion except a stifling pain.

‘We had a terrible binge, Nora and I,' she said. I let her talk for some moments, staring down at my hands as I listened.

‘We just burnt ourselves out – she's a terrific person when you get her going, Nora. She's got tremendous vitality. We tried to keep up with each other, but she lasted just a bit longer than I did. Now Dr Baird says she'll be out by the summer – anyway soon.'

She had learned the trick of lying absolutely relaxed and prostrate, her hands covered, her head quite still as she talked.

‘I don't believe you're listening,' she said.

‘I'm listening,' I said. I had really been thinking of something Nancy had said, long ago, about Lydia going the way of her mother.

‘Don't look so far away then,' she said. She smiled again
with a spasm of unexpected loveliness. There's no need to be so gloomy – I'm not going to die.' She paused for a moment, looking horizontally, from under her long dark lashes, down the bed. ‘I very nearly did, though –'

When I had nothing to say to this either she went on:

‘I always said the owls would get me one day. They very nearly did this time. I went down and down, right to the bottom, right down beyond everything, where nobody was – just nobody – oh! do you have to sit such miles and miles away from me –?'

When I turned my face and looked at her again I saw that she was crying. Because she lay so flat the tears did not fall away from her face. They made two pools in the dark sockets of her eyes, separate at first, and then joining together. Then for the first time she lifted her hands from under the coverlet. They were terribly like two casts of colourless plaster as she lifted them free and said:

‘Don't be frightened – you won't catch anything. Come and hold me for a minute – what there is of me.'

I could not tell her how frightened I was as I held her there, as gently as possible, on the bed, and as I held her she said several times, very quietly:

‘There was no one there. I was down in a place where there was nobody at all but me. There was nobody there to be with me.'

I felt myself sink down and become submerged, for a few moments, in the dark crater of her awful loneliness.

‘You're the first one I ever told about that,' she said ‘I never spoke about that before.'

I kissed her face, and she said:

‘This won't do at all. If Dr Baird or Nurse Simpson finds you here you'll get six months. They'll never let me have another visitor. You'll have to go – really you will. Goodbye now.'

I could not even frame the word; I pressed my lips against her face instead.

‘Goodbye,' she said. ‘Come and see me again another day. Will you?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Often? – promise. I shall hate you if you don't.'

That old expression of hers lifted me up a little.

‘If you were nice to Dr Baird,' she said, ‘he might let you come in any day. See if you can get Nora to introduce you. He's very sweet on Nora.'

I stood up, letting go her hands, and she slipped them down under the coverlet.

‘I'll bring you some flowers,' I said.

‘Oh! will you?' she said. Her eyes sparkled under dispersing tears, with a flash of gaiety I did not share. ‘Oh! that would be nice – that's just like you. You were always the great one for flowers.'

I smiled and looked at her and raised my hand in goodbye.

‘Thank you for coming,' she said.

When I went to take her the flowers, a bunch of copper-yellow irises that were like stiff torches, two days later, it began to rain with warm May-time thunderiness as I went up the hill. The gatekeeper took my name and telephoned it through to the matron's office, while I stood in the doorway of his small entrance lodge, waiting for the answer. An avenue of sycamores led up from the lodge-gates to the main buildings. As I stood there rain began to drip warmly and heavily through the green-flowered leaves, splashing fatly and softly on to the gravel, on the knotting branches of lilacs, and on the formal beds of yellow tulips below. I waited a long time for the answer, and at last the gatekeeper said:

‘She's asleep. It really isn't visiting day. They say you could come back later, or you could leave the flowers.'

I left the flowers. After I had left them I walked up and down the road outside, listening to the blackbirds whistling continuously in the high rain-soaked branches of surrounding trees, and thinking of her, lying asleep there, in the thundery greenness of the afternoon, alone, in the rain.

Some days later my father said to me: ‘What did you think of the visit to the sanatorium? How did you like it? I saw you talking to quite a lot of people there.'

I said I had enjoyed it very much, and he smiled and said:

‘I'll bet you could never guess where we're singing next Tuesday?'

‘No,' I said, ‘where?'

‘It's quite a little honour,' he said, ‘at least we feel it is.' He looked enigmatical and pleased with himself.

‘Well, I'll tell you,' he said at last, ‘we're going to sing for Miss Aspen – oh! no, not your Miss Aspen. The old lady – up at the house, next Tuesday, at seven. Don't you think that's a bit of a feather in our caps?'

I said I thought it was, and he said:

‘Perhaps you'd like to come? It would give you a chance to see the house again.' Then before I could answer he went on:

‘They say the old lady is going downhill fast. She doesn't get up now. She's a poor thing, they say. And Rollo –'

He stopped, and I said: ‘What about Rollo?'

‘They struck his name off the Liberal Club last month,' my father said, almost as if it were a disgrace comparable to being barred from the gates of Heaven. ‘He's been banned from “The Prince Albert” too. They say he's soaking every penny of the place away.'

With these remarks I felt I was really back, at last, in the narrow aisles of Evensford, where disgrace could go no deeper than expulsion from the Liberal Club, a shabby fifteen-roomed Victorian villa in which a few boot manufacturers and leather men and shopkeepers earnestly played cribbage and solo-whist and snooker on an ancient table over thimbles of whisky for stakes of sixpence a time; where banishment from public-house bars for drunkenness was a sin even worse than the one of ever going there in the first place. Indeed Rollo had been so guilty of flouting canons of behaviour in a sphere my father thought reprehensible in itself that he seemed quite sorry for him.

‘It's a great shame to see a man like that going down,' he said. ‘Soaking it all away. After all, the Aspens are somebody.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘it'll take him some time. There's plenty to soak away.'

‘Is there?' my father said. The question was so direct that it
startled me. ‘That's what everybody has always thought, of course. That has always been the popular idea.'

I thought of what had always seemed to me the immutable opulence of the Aspen house in its park of great trees. The fact of its richness, more impressive because it lay like an oasis in the centre of Evensford's red-brick municipal mess of factory and chapel, of leather and Nonconformity, was something I had grown up to regard as inviolate, almost as unquestionable as things like the Commandments and the Royal Household.

‘They say they lost a good deal in the crash,' my father said. ‘But then, so did everybody. George Baker of the Evensford Shoe Company died in February and his will was in
The Shoe and Leather News
this week. His father left him forty thousand when he died in 1916 and George was a director for forty years. But what do you think he left after all? He lived in that great big house in Park Way, and everybody thought he was the wealthiest man we had in Evensford.'

Before I had time to give my opinions of this my father said:

‘Seven thousand. That's all. I tell you it stunned people here. They thought he was one of those quarter-of-a-million men. And then look at William Allen Parker, of Parker, Groome & Fletcher – there's another man. The biggest people in the district. I remember when they had a Russian Army contract for two million. And you know what that meant. He had a stroke while inspecting the stitching room one day last January. At one time they talked of giving him a knighthood.'

My father paused for a moment and then informed me in shocked tones:

‘A bare four thousand. That's all. Hardly enough to pay the duties.'

I knew that the fortunes of his fellow men were, in that town of narrow and single-purposed interests, like creeds; and that when they were assaulted or threatened it was a painful and momentous thing.

‘It isn't always the people who look as if they've got it,' he said. ‘Often the opposite. Look at Luther Edward Jolly. He wore the same straw hat for forty years to my knowledge, and
picked up stub-ends in the gutter. The biggest skinflint in the whole Jolly family, and that's saying something. You remember what he left,' my father said, as if I were intimately acquainted with the balance sheets of every Evensford family – ‘a hundred and thirty-eight thousand.'