Love for Lydia (42 page)

‘I'm not going back,' she said. ‘I'm never going back there again. I don't want that big house and all that goes with it and doesn't go with it – I don't want it any more than you do.'

‘Where will you go?' I said.

‘I wanted to ask you that,' she said.

I said something about how I thought she ought perhaps to go away, for a change and a rest, a month perhaps of convalescence in the spring, somewhere by the sea.

‘The sea?' she said. ‘Would you come with me too if I went to the sea?'

Before I could answer the band stopped playing. I saw Baird mounting the dais, smiling and raising his hands. I heard him begin to say, locking and unlocking his large muscular fingers with sudden nervousness, how he was not very much at speech-making and how there would now be an interval for supper,
but before the interval there was something he wanted to say. His voice, pitched slightly high in its nervousness, quietened the last rustlings of feet among the fallen streamers about the floor. Then he spoke, with a sudden rush of feeling and a smile, of the future Mrs Baird, and as Nora stepped beside him on the platform the room became swollen with high laughter and applause and people shouting. Then the band began to play ‘For they are jolly good fellows', and Lydia took my two hands with impulsive affection in hers, looking up into my face.

‘She lived for that,' she said. ‘All the time that's what she lived for – come on, let's be the first to drink to them.'

At the table, as we held up our glasses and drank to Nora and Dr Baird, saying over and over again that we wished them luck and how we hoped they'd be very happy, I thought I heard the occasional sniff of a nurse's tears among the laughter. It reminded me of the time when Lydia and Tom and Nancy and Alex and his mother and myself had danced together, also on New Year's Eve, and had toasted each other and wished each other luck, also in champagne.

I came out of this recollection to hear Baird say:

‘I hope you'll be the first to come and stay with us, you two.'

Still half lost in the thought of Alex and how that night, in our headstrong stupidity, we had hated Blackie, I did not answer, and Lydia said:

‘He means us, silly. You're not listening again.'

‘I am,' I said. ‘I'm listening. Thank you very much, both of you.'

‘It'll be open house for you two,' Baird said. ‘Any time –'

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘You haven't kissed Nora,' Lydia said, and in response I dutifully kissed Nora. Then Baird kissed Lydia. At this point somebody remembered Blackie, a slightly self-conscious odd-man-out, a dog waiting to be noticed when the rest of us thought fit. Lydia seemed struck too by that same appearance of watching hunger. A rush of pity came over her and with impulsive charm she took his face in her hands, kissing him.

‘Oh! I want to kiss everybody,' she said. ‘You too – all of
you,' and she pressed her lips against my face. ‘All of you – it's nice – I feel so happy.'

I knew, presently, that I could bear no more of this. I felt I could not face any longer the affliction of a dilemma in which I could see, every time I looked up, the reflection in Blackie's face of the love for her I was incapable of giving. I could not stand any more the idea of being false to her.

As I made some excuse and went out, leaving her there with Nora and Dr Baird and Blackie, I felt very much as I had done on the night Alex had died: stubborn and lonely and bewildered and incapable of dissuasion. I went into the men's room to wash my hands. A burly young man combing his hair at the wash-hand basin asked me how my father was and if I remembered how nice, that warm May evening, the singing had been. ‘It put a lot of life into me,' he said, ‘that singing. Do you remember? – I was the one who asked if they'd sing
The Golden Vanity.'
As we talked for a few moments he smiled a lot into the mirror, very meticulous with the comb as he ran it through his hair. He said several times that they'd put two stone or more on him since he'd been in there, and then in a touching moment of private confession:

‘I never thought I'd be able to look at my own face again. They gave me a mirror one day in bed and there was somebody else staring at me. It wasn't me at all. It's a terrible thing when you look in a mirror and you see somebody you don't know.' And then he added, as they all did, ‘I'll soon be out of here.'

As I left him and went out, through the entrance corridors, on to the deserted terrace, I saw that it was still snowing. I stood watching the big flakes curling down through shafts of window light, into a world already deep and soft with snow. In the air there was a curious after-breath, gentle and almost warm, that snow seems to bring down with it after the coldness of cloud has been broken. Flakes that were soft and blown and shining made a line of wetness where they ended on the gleaming bricks of the terrace. Then as I stood watching them I felt rather like the young man in the washroom, looking into his mirror, startled by a reflection he did not know, troubled by being a stranger to himself.

I had been there five minutes or more when Lydia opened the glass entrance doors and came out to look for me.

‘Oh! you're there,' she said. ‘I somehow thought you were.'

She came and stood beside me. She had put on a coat. The material was thick and blue and she said, ‘It's one of the nurse's – she lent it me,' and then I saw that it was not a coat. It was a cloak, and it reminded me suddenly, with its scarlet hood, of the one she had worn on the first Sunday we had skated together on the marshes.

‘You're not cold, are you?' she said.

‘It's quite warm with the snow,' I said.

She touched my hands. ‘They're quite cold,' she said. ‘Come into my cloak,' and she opened the cloak and folded me into it, close against the front of her body.

‘How do you find me?' she said. She found one of my arms and drew it round her waist. ‘Smaller than I used to be? – not so much of me?'

In a flash of recollection that was more like a spasm of pain I remembered her body, soft and young and firm-breasted, as I had first seen it in the summer-house in the park.

‘Your waist is smaller,' I said.

‘You say nice things sometimes,' she said. She brushed her lips to and fro across my face, gently, thoughtfully, as if to soothe me. ‘Except you didn't answer my question.'

‘What question?'

Her voice was muffled when she spoke again, half into the cloak:

‘The question about the sea. Would you come with me to the sea?'

I watched the snow slowly graining with curling oblique lines the background of darkness beyond the lights of the terrace. Would I go with her to the sea? – I felt the question float away, losing itself in snow and darkness, dissolved among a thick slow white scramble of flakes. I knew that it was something that I was afraid to answer and that, presently, I should have to answer, and then she said:

‘Would you? Come with me, will you, please?'

I stared into the snow, trying to frame an answer. The flakes
were quite soundless as they fell windlessly down on the snow-covered grass and yet I felt at the same time that I could hear, a long way off, a low-blown echo of them across the darkness.

‘You will come with me, won't you?' she said. ‘You're not hesitating about something?'

‘I can't come with you,' I said.

She did not speak for a few moments. I felt her body quiver again before she finally said, with bewilderment:

‘Why did you say that?'

‘I can't come with you,' I said.

I heard her drawing her breath with sharpness through her mouth.

‘Do you mean you don't want to come with me?' she said. ‘You mean you don't want me?'

‘It isn't that –'

‘You do love me, don't you?' she said.

The directness of the question I had feared so long and did not want to answer struck something inside me that seemed to burst like a fester. I felt my entire body swamped by bitter surges of intolerable pain. I felt her begin to move away from me, in a short stiffened struggled to be free, and then she quietened herself again and said:

‘If you don't love me please say so – I could understand it.'

‘How could you understand it?'

She did not speak for a moment or two. Across the snow I could hear, sharp and hollow, the barking of a dog, followed by the high yelp of another. The sound seemed to intensify a silence already so snowbound that everything was muted. I could not see a single light from the town. In this curious disembodied quietness the movement of her body turning to me seemed suddenly magnified. There was something reassuring in the enlarging disturbance of the cloak as she moved her hands underneath it and said:

‘That was how I got in here. It was because of you and all the things I did to you.'

Across the snow the barking voices of the two dogs seemed to be joined by a third, and she said:

‘Can you hear the dogs? It's Rollo. He lets them out every
night. You can always hear them all across the fields. I listen to them sometimes when I lie awake –'

The ugly memory of the bloated Labradors crawling about the porch and the hall of the house came back to me with the strangest effect of beginning to clear the blurred and complicated distances inside myself. As the sound of barking across the snow increased and became a series of quarrelling howls thrown to the empty fields I became unaware of her face. I felt I saw instead only the ugliness of Rollo, the dogs, and the dying house. It was dying and I knew suddenly that I did not want her to be part of it, exactly as Tom had not wanted her to be part of a dreary gas-lit kitchen where two people were quarrelling over the dead. I could not bear the thought of her in either place.

What I saw too of myself seemed gradually no longer strange. The unrecognizable edges of a person distorted as much by fear of love as by lack of love began to reshape themselves into something that was acceptable at last. I had so often thought of her growing up from something awkward and lonely that it had not occurred to me that I too had been growing up, just as painfully, in that same way. It had not occurred to me that the pain of love might be part of its flowering. I had not grasped that the love I felt for Tom and Alex had so much to do with the love I felt for her. With inconceivable stupidity I had not given love to her simply out of fear of being hurt by its unacceptance; I had not grasped that I might have made her suffer.

‘Would you forgive me?' she said, ‘for the awful, terrible things I did?'

Not answering, I remembered Bretherton. I had misjudged even Bretherton. ‘You've got to conquer yourself,' Bretherton had said.

‘Would you forgive me?'

The laceration of my misjudgements was so sharp that I could not answer.

‘I thought of you every night when I lay there – at the bottom,' she said. ‘After Tom had died. There was no one there and I wanted you.'

‘You know there is nothing to forgive,' I said. ‘Except the things I did.'

The slow breaking of her voice into tears seemed to wake me at last. Holding her, folding myself into the nurse's cloak, against her, I shut out the snow, the darkness, the raw night-barking of Rollo's dogs across the park. A flake or two of snow penetrated with the floating effect of frozen bubbles the aperture of the cloak, falling on my head and on her face as she lifted it up to me.

‘Do you remember the snow last time?' she said. ‘How lovely it was after the winter. That lovely April weather?'

Ths cloak fell away from her face as she spoke to me. The sound of dogs quietened completely across the park.

‘And will you come with me to the sea?' she said. She was not crying any longer.

‘Yes,' I said, and I kissed her face.

‘It took me a long time to know how you felt,' she said. ‘But I know now and I know what it meant for you.'

Holding her, I felt I could hear the sound of the sea rising out of new distances. With happiness I remembered Tom and Alex, the winters and the summers, the young and the dead, the snow and the dancing.

Staring through the snow, I could feel already the warmth of the spring beyond it: the time of the blackbird and the lovely April weather.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950).

Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.