Love for Lydia (39 page)

‘Is she all right, nurse?' I said.

She regarded me with blanched severity.

‘You should never have come in. Dr Baird should never have permitted it.'

There was something withering about the word ‘permitted'.

‘I'm terribly sorry if I did anything that –'

‘If you'd been sorry before it needn't have happened,' she said.

I felt once more bludgeoned by waves of relentless heat that seemed to become part of my own stupidity. She looked at me with what I thought was harshness and said:

‘I suppose you wouldn't grasp what I meant by that.'

‘No,' I said.

‘She worked herself up into a state because you didn't come in last Sunday. That's what I meant. And now you come this Sunday and start it all over again.'

I did not answer. I turned and walked down the avenue, in and out of stabbing August sunlight, a little sick from sunlight and not really thinking, to where Blackie was sitting in the front seat of the limousine, waiting for me.

‘How was she?'

He leapt out of the car, distraught and eager, his face drawn.

‘She's all right,' I said. ‘She's rather tired, that's all.'

‘And the flowers?' he said. ‘What did she say to the flowers?'

There seemed, I thought, no choice between truth and anything less brutal that I could tell him. I could not tell him, partly because I was not sure of it myself, partly because I did not want to give him pain, that she really hardly noticed the flowers. I could not explain to him that she was touched and amused and charmed by his kindliness; but that it meant no more than that. I could not tell him, again partly because I was not really sure of it myself, partly because I was half afraid, that I thought her love for me was coming back. And what was worst of all, I could not tell him, because it rose from the deepest of my perplexities, creating entirely new bewilderment in me, that I did not know, now, if I had any love to offer in return.

I only knew that he stood there in solid, naïve eagerness, his face perplexed and troubled as he waited for me to answer and then alight, as I did answer, with the sort of joy I could not feel.

‘She thought they were very lovely,' I said.

‘What did she say?'

‘Not much. She was very tired.'

He stood there mutely, hoping that I should be able to remember something she had said. I could not remember, but in a moment of acute pity for him, not knowing what else to say, I told him she had cried.

‘Cried?' he said.

He seemed to leap across a final chasm of doubt. His face, softening, became immensely relieved and happy. I thought I caught a glint of tears in his own eyes and I knew, at last, that torrid afternoon, I had somehow succeeded in saying the right thing to somebody. Out of my own perplexity I had somehow managed to conjure the things he wanted, above all, to hear.

‘It was damn good of you to go in,' he said. ‘I don't think I could have stood it by myself – I couldn't bear it, I know.' He became aware, suddenly, of the realities of the afternoon. ‘Can I drop you somewhere, Mr Richardson?'

‘No thanks,' I said. ‘I'll walk.'

He got into the car and said: ‘See you next Sunday. You'll come, won't you?'

‘I suppose so,' I said. ‘Yes: I'll come.'

‘I appreciate that,' he said. ‘I appreciate that. I can't tell you how I appreciate that – you know – I can't explain –'

In his gratitude he could not finish what he was saying. In his happiness he drove unexpectedly fast down the hill, blind with joy.

She got well very slowly. I had some idea that the summer would be good for her. I had forgotten that Evensford, lying in an enclosed segment of valley out of which there is no road downhill, produces in summer an enervating pressure of heat that saps the body and meshes the mind in a damp, exhausting net. The summer air cannot rise from the hollow. The streets, in dry years, are drab and dusty, blown about with gritty papers. In wet years rain streams down steep tawdry yards, dark-stained with leather, over old high causeways, into gullies and gutters of blue brick that add to the soft depressive vapours.

It was some time before it occurred to me – mistakenly – that it was because of this that she did not improve. She lay every Sunday in the little hut, prostrate and relapsed, staring at myself and Blackie. There began to be something transfixed, almost embalmed, about her.

Blackie brought to her all this time the same inarticulate, growing affection, the same continuous anxiety to see her well. He continued to pour the tea which a muscular and affronted Nurse Simpson brought to us on the trolley. He was always there with his flowers. When under some breath of encouragement from Lydia he found it possible to break into a few minutes of articulate response the only thing he would tell her was about the old Chrysler limousine: how he was taking it down, decoking it, fitting new rings, replacing shock absorbers, doing something about the crankshaft, treating the upholstery with some patent cleanser that would bring it up, as he said, like new, so that she would not know it again.

‘Then I'm going to respray it,' he said. ‘A nice blue, I
thought. Do you think blue would be nice? I'm going to see to the windows too,' he said once, ‘so that it won't be so draughty.'

One Sunday he got carried away on a wave of rambling technicalities. He became lost for some time in the obscure mysteries of gaskets. There had been some curious leak in the packing or something that had baffled him. He shed his inarticulate shyness completely as he rambled about, explaining this to her in repetitive mechanical terms. For a week he had struggled to get it right and now he went over it again and again with the awful laboriousness of enthusiasm she could not share.

As he talked I saw a dark skin of boredom close over her eyes, until at last she shut them. I saw her body stir several times, with scarcely perceptible restless writhings, on the bed. He went on without noticing this. I got bored too, until I grapsed at length that he was speaking out of a vision amazingly enlarged by love for her. I grasped that he could not express the depth of himself except like this, in the only terms, the obscure, mechanical boring terms, he knew: that this tenderness for her could release itself only through a tortured technical language of things like gaskets.

He crowned it all by saying: ‘Anyway it'll all be finished in a fortnight – and then you'll be able to come for a drive.' A curious hypnosis caught and held him in a suspense of anticipatory delight, and I knew that he was building a chariot for her.

She eventually turned on the bed and said to him, opening her eyes:

‘I think you'll have to go now, Bert. I'm getting awfully tired.'

He came out of the maze of his obscure enthusiasms with a shock. He realized with lacerating self-consciousness that he had tired her out with his rush of talking. He grabbed his cap, incapable of any other reaction but some stumbling remark that he had been a terrible fool.

‘No you haven't. You've been very sweet,' she said. ‘Only I'm very tired.'

He mumbled again something about how sorry he was and how he hadn't meant to do all this and then, in a renewed
laceration of a fear that he might have set her back a week or two, blundered out of the hut before I could stop him.

‘I ought to go too,' I said.

‘No,' she said. ‘Stay with me. A little while.'

I had got up in readiness to go. She held out her hand. I took it and she said:

‘I was going to be walking by the summer, wasn't I? – but here I am. I don't get on very fast, do I? Not like Nora.'

‘Dr Baird has been wonderful with Nora,' I said.

‘They'll probably be engaged,' she said. ‘Did you know that?'

‘No.'

‘They want to announce it at Christmas – or the New Year. There'll be a dance then. Nobody knows but Nora and me –'

‘Not even Dr Baird, I take it.'

‘Oh! he knows in a vague sort of way. He has a vague idea – sit down again. Don't go – I don't want you to go –'

‘Blackie will be waiting. He always waits for me.'

‘Yes, but don't go yet. Not for a minute,' she said. ‘Do you think he'll always come up to see me? – every Sunday, like that? As long as I'm here?'

‘As long as you're here,' I said.

She looked at me with a puzzled reflective way. Her lips were momentarily parted, as if she were going to say something: to ask me a question, perhaps, about Blackie and his inevitable devoted comings and goings; or of something else that was on her mind, perhaps about myself.

She actually did begin to say ‘Do you –' and then broke off. I thought for a moment, uneasy and a little troubled, that she was going to ask me if I loved her; and I knew, if she did so, that I should not know the answer.

But she said again, ‘Must you go?' and I said again that I must, because of Blackie.

‘Won't you please kiss me before you go?' she said.

As I stooped and kissed her she caught my face lightly in her hands.

‘That makes me feel better,' she said.

She smiled quietly and I felt myself dry and anguished and
unable to give a part of myself that was shut away from her. She needed a great deal of love from me that afternoon, and the pain of not being able to give it to her hurt me more than if I had given it and she had turned it away.

‘You'd better go now,' she said. ‘You were always the same, you were never in one place five minutes before you wanted to go to another.'

When I went away and across the grounds it was not Blackie who was waiting for me at the near end of the avenue, but Dr Baird.

He looked at the watch on his hairy wrist. ‘You're early away,' he said, ‘aren't you?'

‘I didn't know I was early,' I said.

‘There's no need to keep to the clock,' he said, ‘if you don't want to. She's the sort of person who needs a little flexibility. She needs a little company.'

I remembered, as he suddenly asked me to walk across the grounds with him, how he had made the same remark before. We walked for a few minutes across lawns where dark groups of rhododendrons were already budding a light yellow-green in the October sun.

‘You could come up every day if you felt inclined,' he said. ‘Every afternoon. She's at that stage –'

It seemed to me that there was a troubled ambiguity about what he said.

‘Every afternoon?' I said. ‘Aren't you pleased with her?'

‘It isn't that.'

He went on to talk for some moments, guardedly, with professional reticence, and yet troubled, as if he were holding something back, about how it was not that, how they had got over the organic troubles, at least the worst of them, and how it was now a question –

‘Wouldn't you tell me the truth?' I said. ‘Isn't she going to get out of this?'

He gave me a jolted sort of look that was piercing and unpleasant. Rather sharply he said:

‘You don't seem to understand what's the matter with her – you don't seem to grasp that she's terribly lonely, do you?'

‘I think so –'

‘You think so, man. You ought to know. You ought to know that she's been down to the bottom of the pit – God, man, you ought to realize that she's got nobody but you and that taxi fellow. She's got nobody else in the world – don't you grasp that?'

It was as if I grasped it, I thought, for the first time.

‘It's time you woke up to that, don't you think so?' he said. He gave me a series of piercing and condemnatory looks, searching my face, and when he stopped suddenly after saying, ‘You see, you – you could –' I knew what it was he was trying, with so much difficulty, to say. I knew that he was asking me to give her, in some way, an outward expression of love. He stood breaking into minute particles a young rhododendron leaf, cracking it with his fingers. There was a curious feeling in the air of a question he had not actually framed in words. A barrier of stubbornness, really a barrier against feelings unbearably broken, seemed to grow suddenly stiffer inside me. I remembered how I had been so much in love that I could not eat for happiness; and how I had been so much hurt when love had been taken away that I had wanted loneliness because it was the only bearable thing. I could not explain all this. I felt only a screen of protection rise and harden inside myself against the possible renewal of deeper, harsher pain.

Perhaps he saw that I was choked by difficulties I could not express. Perhaps he saw it simply as an example of some tiresome youthful obtuseness that needed sternly rebuking: I don't know. But suddenly he tossed the ripped fragments of rhododendron leaf into the air and said quite brutally:

‘Look. I'll tell you this. I warn you. Clearly and plainly. If she doesn't get the thing she wants – if something doesn't happen soon – she won't be there when you come up one day. Good God, man – can't you see that it isn't simply a question of some bloody organic adjustment?'

Savagely he plucked another rhododrendron leaf and began to crush it in his fingers and then threw it down, apologizing:

‘I'm sorry, old man. I blow up easily about these things. I'm most awfully sorry.' He stuffed both hands with affecting awkwardness
into his trouser pockets, kicking at the grass with his feet. ‘You can come up every day – whenever you like. Come and go. I'll tell the nurses. You can come and go when you like and stay as long as you like. Never mind about anybody or anything – will you?'

I hesitated. I thought of Blackie, so mutely bound up in love for her that he became articulate only through the disintegration of mechanical things, of his limousine, his gaskets. He had nothing to offer but that. I thought I saw him suddenly as a personification of myself as I had been: wonderfully in love with a cold, fragrant face in the snow, with a young body in a hot summer bedroom. I knew, because it had happened to me, the kind of laceration he would know if, one way or the other, she were taken away from him: and how, unlike me, he would never be able to explain it all and never know why.