Love for Lydia (38 page)

All the time his fear of leaving her was growing into the creed of anxiety that I had heard him state that afternoon. He was desperately frightened of leaving her there, in the dark house, alone, and he said again:

‘You're sure you'll be all right, miss? You're sure?'

‘I'm all right. Come for me tomorrow, won't you? You said you couldn't come for me again, didn't you?'

‘I'll come for you,' he said.

Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the face, thankfully, in a rather confused sort of way. ‘Just as if she thought I was somebody else,' he said. Then she fell asleep again, and he quietly got himself out of the house by the aid of the torch.

‘She frightened me that night,' he said. ‘And I've been frightened ever since. That's why I wanted to ask you – you know – if you thought –'

A cuckoo flew with bubbling throaty calls across the wheat-field, disappearing beyond the copses. In the still air I caught again a great breath of grass and hawthorn and bluebell and earth beating through new pulses of spring loveliness to the very edge of summer.

For some time I watched his hands clasp and unclasp themselves nervously on the driving-wheel and then at last flick at the ignition key.

‘You think she'll be all right?' he said.

He started the car almost involuntarily, and the sound of it startled a blackbird from the hedges and sent it squawking down the hedgerow with fear.

‘Yes. She'll be all right,' I said.

His hand seemed to quiver on the gear-lever as he let in the clutch.

‘Because every time I go up there I'm frightened,' he said. ‘I'm frightened she won't be there any more.'

But whenever we went to see her she was there. She remained in the sanatorium all that summer, and in fact for the rest of the year, and I saw her whenever I could. Sometimes, in the beginning, on Sundays, because I knew that Blackie Johnson would be there, I stayed away from her, but whenever I did so she attacked me with not very serious reproaches that were part of her growing strength.

‘You never know,' she said, ‘I might be up when you come one day. And if I am I want you to be the first to see me. I want to do Nora's trick for you. I've got legs too. You used to think they were rather nice ones.'

‘All of you was nice,' I said.

‘Oh! don't say that,' she said. ‘I think I shall cry if you say that.'

‘You were very nice,' I said. ‘You were the first one –' And then I could not finish what I had to say.

‘Don't reproach me,' she said. ‘I can't bear it if you reproach me.'

She looked at me piteously; and after that, as she struggled up and down through the confusing graph of growing strength, waiting for the time when they would let her walk, too gay sometimes and then too much in despair, I tried as much as possible
not to see her alone. It seemed much simpler, and in a curious way much more inevitable, to have Blackie there.

Then I began to be aware of the fact that Blackie liked to have me there. His stiffness and his fear about her were lessened because of me. And gradually, as two people sometimes do who began with violent dislikes of each other, we began to be friends. I knew I had misjudged him. I liked it when I found him there; I felt I began to understand him. He used to sit by the bedside on Sunday afternoons, all through the summer, in a dark-blue serge suit sweating in the oppressively hot little hut, patient and tortured, awkwardly staring at her and waiting for her to get well. Except for discarding a waistcoat, he did not dress any differently all that summer. He wore his peaked blue chauffeur's cap and sometimes, out of pure habit, he brought his brown leather driving gloves with him. Then he would sit with the cap on his knees and the driving gloves in the cap, nervously playing with first one and then the other, unaware that he was doing so. I would see her go through phases of amusement, irritation, dispair, vexation, and even anger about this until she could stand it no longer. I could see her hands picking with rising disquiet at the coverlet until finally she would snap at it with desperate impatience, as if she felt like tearing it to rags, and say:

‘For goodness' sake, Bert, stop playing with your hat and gloves and take your jacket off and be cool. It makes me boil to look at you.'

Then he would put his hat and gloves on the floor. He would take off his jacket. With self-conscious care he would fold it up and put it on the hat. Then she would say: ‘Don't fold it like that. You'll crease it all up. Hang it on the chair,' and he would hang it on the chair. Then he would sit back in the chair, hotter, more sweating, more awkward than ever from his exertions, and she would say:

‘Can't you take your collar off? It's your collar that makes you so hot. It looks as if it's choking you.'

‘I'm all right,' he would say. ‘I'm all right.'

Then she would invite him to look at me.

‘Why don't you dress sensibly like that?' she would say. ‘Just shirt and trousers and no tie? You'd be so much more comfortable.'

‘I'm comfortable,' he would say. ‘I'm quite comfortable.'

Into his starched Sunday collar his thick Adam's apple would beat like a gulping piston. Sweat would stream down from the black side-panels of his hair and soak, with bluish stains, into the armpits of his shirt. He would run a dark hairy finger along the inner rim of his collar and painfully extract it, scooping sweat. And she would cry in despair:

‘Oh! You're so stubborn! You do irritate me so!'

But he was not stubborn; and if he irritated her it was only because he was trying, desperately hard, to do exactly the opposite.

Then her nurse, the blonde Miss Simpson, muscular and candid, would bring tea on a hospital trolley. And Lydia would laugh at Blackie and say:

‘Come on now. You can make yourself useful. You can pour.'

He would make a slow, bungling, clattering mess of this. His big engineering hands, into which oil seemed to have soaked with a stain of permanent shadowy brown made more greasy by sweat, would grasp at cups and plates and teapots with the kind of excessive care that ends in shattering clumsiness. Lumps of sugar would be dropped into the tea from considerable height, like bombs. Tea would squab sordidly into saucers, from which he would drain it noisily back into cups.

Somehow, finally, he would get cups and plates distributed; and then would begin the business, really the performance, of having his own tea. He elaborately prepared for himself clumsy mountains of bread and jam. He balanced his cup on his knees and then set it on the floor; then took a vast mouthful of bread and jam and then a vaster drink of tea, washing it down, stirring and sucking and clattering loudly. Food and drink and china were pieces with which he made a series of terrible laborious moves, ended by her crying from the bed:

‘Why don't you put your cup on the trolley, you poor man!'

Then at last she would turn to me:

‘
You
pour me a cup, will you?'

And I would try to pour it not too efficiently, not too delicately, in order not to touch him with acuter embarrassment; but she would be sure to say:

‘There you are – that's more like it. That's something
like
service –'

Then perhaps as I took away her cup she would press my arm and smile and say:

‘Thank you. You're awfully sweet to me.'

I knew that this would embarrass him, and I would try to play it off by mocking her:

‘Does madam wish anything else?' I would say.

‘You can put my pillow straight. Sit me up a little higher –'

She would let herself sink into the pillows a little, so that I could lift her up. She would make it necessary for me to put my arms under her body as I lifted her. Then she would laugh, or the scalloped front of her nightdress would fall away, showing her breast, or her hair would get tangled and she would make me reach for the mirror and her comb and then hold the mirror in front of her so that she could comb her hair into place again.

Sometimes I would not be able to resist a desire to tilt the mirror or move it away, so that she could not see herself. Then she would slap my knuckles with the comb and say:

‘Hold it still. I can't see myself! Hold it still, can't you? – I shall hate you – hold it still –!'

‘“Now hate me if thou wilt –”'

‘You're an awful torment. You always did torment me so, didn't you? I believe you love to torment! Hold still –!'

‘How can I if I'm trembling?'

‘You idiot! – hold it
still
so that I can see myself – I can only see one side of myself –'

‘Let's hope it's the right side – the nice, true, kind, right side,' I would say, and we would laugh together in the small private world of former acquaintance, exclusive, unkindly, where he could not follow.

Exactly what pain this gave him I could not tell. He had already been so pained and frightened by the thought of her dying that it is possible it gave him no pain at all. He was so
absorbed in the idea of her walking again that I do not think he ever noticed, with envy or malice or even unkindliness, all that summer, that she began to show her growing strength by growing fonder of me.

One Sunday I could not go to see her. The next week he was sitting in the limousine waiting for me, eager, relieved, touched by gratitude, when I walked up to the gates. He leaped out, scrambling together with cap and gloves a bunch of violent gaillardias that were like stabbing orange and crimson suns against the plain dark serge of his suit. He kept saying, as we walked into the gardens:

‘I'm glad you could come. I'm glad you could come. It was queer last week without you. She didn't talk much – we had a job to find something to talk about. She always seems brighter somehow when you're there. You know what to say to her.'

It was humid, thundery weather after a spell of drought.

‘No flowers this week?' he said.

‘No,' I said. ‘Not this week.' I said the drought had parched everything up, and he said:

‘That's what I found. I went all over the place to find something for her. I thought I was never going to find a thing for her – I couldn't think of coming without finding a flower or two to bring.'

As we branched off towards the huts, out of shade into open sun, Dr Baird bore down the path towards us, signalling with big hairy hands:

‘Not today, not today,' he said. I felt a chilling sensation of sickness. Blackie stood spectral, hunched, pinned down, on the path. ‘Well, not the both of you. Just one, if you like. And then only for three minutes. That's all.'

‘What is it?' I said.

‘No need for alarm,' he said. ‘She was naughty, that's all, the day before yesterday. She put herself back a week or two.'

From Blackie there was no reaction but a spectral stare.

‘Don't worry,' Baird said. ‘We expect these things. They can't always get on. The weather isn't easy either. Which one of you would like to go in?'

‘He'll go,' I said. ‘He has the flowers.'

Blackie stood staring, shaking his head.

‘No. I'll wait,' he said. ‘I'll sit down somewhere – I don't like to see her if – it upsets me to see her –' And I knew that all his fear for her, blinding and inarticulate, had come back.

She was lying without a pillow, very flat, staring with dark eyes at the ceiling of the hut, when I went in. I stood over her with the flowers. They glowed more than ever like fiery suns in the shadow of the hut. The luminous figure of Nurse Simpson hovered in the doorway. My shadow fell on Lydia's face and I did not know what to say.

‘It was nice of you to bring the flowers,' she said. Her voice was empty. Her lips were crusty and colourless, without makeup, and I could not see her hands.

‘Blackie sent them.'

‘Didn't you bring any?' Her voice seemed hurt.

‘The drought has withered everything up,' I said.

‘Including me.' She gave me a smile, small, prolonged, indeterminate, that was troubled. ‘Blackie always remembers, doesn't he?'

‘He'd rather die than not remember,' I said.

The pain of my idiotic words shot across her face before I could check them. She gave a little sob and the nurse, swift and admonitory, bore down on me from the door. ‘I expected this. I expected this. No crying now,' she said. ‘Come now. We've had enough of tears.'

‘I'm very sorry,' I said.

‘You'd better go,' she said.

‘I'm terribly sorry.' I laid Blackie's flowers awkwardly on the bed from which the starched fins of the nurse's apron, turning stiffly, knocked them suddenly off. I picked them up again and laid them on a chair before I turned and went away.

When I got out into the sun I found myself trembling so much that I turned and walked back to the long perimeter of open huts farther into the gardens, away from Blackie. A few convalescent patients in deck chairs were sitting in the shade of trees; and one of them, a girl, rose and came across to me as I went past them.

‘Nora,' I said.

‘I thought it was you,' she said. ‘How is she?'

I stood confused by surges of relentless heat.

‘Come and sit down in the shade,' she said.

‘No thanks,' I said. ‘What happened to start all this?'

‘Oh! it's a relapse – Dr Baird says it's normal in this type of case.'

‘Anything that happens more than once is normal,' I said. ‘Is that it?'

‘You should ask Lydia that,' she said.

There was something oddly enigmatical about this remark. It struck coldly through my confusion. When she left me after a few moments and went away to her deck chair under the trees, I walked slowly round the remainder of the path. There was no sign of Blackie but from the direction of the huts the luminous, candid Nurse Simpson came swiftly rustling.