Love for Lydia (7 page)

‘No,' I said.

‘The next time he does you're going to walk out on him,' she said.

The world beyond the gas-light was drowned in a wild blizzard that seemed to have put an end to the long dry and bitter spell.

‘It's snowing awfully fast,' I said. ‘I'll come to the house with you.'

‘No,' she said. ‘I'll run.' Without taking her hands from under the cloak she made a shy grab at one of my own. ‘I'll run to the end of the avenue and then shout. You answer. Say goodbye.'

‘All right,' I said.

‘Shout hard,' she said. ‘Then I'll hear you and be all right. You will, won't you?'

‘Yes,' I said.

The gate had been kept unlocked for her. I opened it and let her through. For perhaps a minute I stood under the gas-lamp outside, listening to her padded footsteps running up the avenue in the snow. It seemed a long time that I waited and nothing happened. Then presently I got the odd feeling that nothing was going to happen, that she was not going to shout, and then again the sickening feeling that I was not going to see her again. Her naïve idea of shouting good night at that
distance seemed all at once like a silly little trick to fool me. I stood there with a growing gnawing sensation of wretchedness, of being tricked and laughed at and let down. Then suddenly I knew that I wanted to see her more than anything else that could happen to me. Snow was coming down in swirling buffeting rings of white wind that I thought would blow out the gas-lamp above my head, and from the avenue I could hear nothing but the empty clap of frozen ash boughs. I had never realized before how long that avenue was; and it still seemed like another five minutes before I heard a voice, deep and clear and wonderfully alive, calling through the snow:

‘Goodbye!'

‘Goodbye,' I shouted.

After a pause of a moment or two her voice came back for the second time, like an echo:

‘Goodbye!'

‘Goodbye,' I shouted.

I waited for a moment or two longer but she did not call again. The gas-lamp shook under a gust of snowy wind. The noise of it woke me with a quiver, almost a shudder, of exhilaration, and as I walked away I came to myself with final reality to see, across the street, the peering, astonished faces of a man and his wife watching me as if I had been calling a snow-ghost. They stood staring at me through the snow long after I had walked past them; and I knew they would go home to speak of the queerest thing they had ever seen, perhaps, in Evensford: a young man standing in a blizzard, in an empty street, under a gas-lamp, calling goodbye at the top of his voice to no one at all.

Next morning Bretherton began to upbraid me for what he called my ‘inexactitudes.' From time to time he spat at the stove. It was always a bad sign when Bretherton spat at the stove, and soon I knew that much was not right with my note, written a week before, on the late Charles Elliot Aspen.

‘Sixty, you say he was. How did that get in? What inspired that particular perpetration?'

I did not answer and Bretherton spat at the stove.

‘You guessed!' he shouted. Waving copy in air, he raved: ‘He was the elder brother! The old fire-horses are seventy if they're a day.'

He calmed a little, and then read out:

‘“It is understood that Mrs Aspen predeceased her husband by some years.” Predeceased for Christ's sake!' he yelled. ‘Who told you that?'

‘I was given to understand –'

‘She's alive! She lives in London!' he bawled at me.

I stood sickly by his chair.

‘We then come to a further masterpiece,' he said. He spoke with flourishes: ‘“It is understood that the deceased, after a sudden collapse, died of heart failure.” Understood, understood, understood!' he raved. ‘Every bloody thing in this piece is understood! Didn't you know he was thrown from a horse?'

‘I know now,' I said; I was wretched and sick with the embarrassment of my inaccurate stilted phrases.

‘In future don't try to understand things. Get the facts. Where were you yesterday?'

‘Skating.'

‘And the day before that?'

‘Skating.'

‘Now we get to the truth,' he said. ‘And today?'

I did not answer. He raged for some moments about the importance of being on hand when citizens shot themselves, when lovers threw themselves from fifth-floor factory windows, and then he leapt for his hat.

‘In future for Christ's sake stay here. Sit by the telephone. Wear your sensitive refined arse out waiting until something does come to you!'

He spat again across the desk at the stove, missed it. He raved incoherently, lifting his short stubby arms in new despair.

‘Stay in this office!' he yelled and stumbled out, at last, into a street where workmen were chipping at snow and ice with pickaxes in a strange, flat monotone of steel.

I stayed in the office for half an hour. I stared out of the back window to a world of corrugated hen-huts in back-gardens,
of frozen washing-lines, of factory yards where drays had dumped piles of belly-leather on thin layers of snow. The blizzard had not come in the night after all. Wind was blowing fine snow from the roofs of hen-huts and whipping up small clouds of frozen yellow dust where traffic had powdered snow and ice on the roads.

Suddenly I knew that I hated this view more than anything in the world. I stared at it a little longer, remembering Lydia. I remembered her voice calling goodbye in the avenue and how, a moment or two before it came, I had had the queer pained notion of not seeing her again. I remembered what she had said of Bretherton. I thought of that too a little longer. Then I closed the damper on the stove, put on my coat and walked out.

We skated again that afternoon. It was a keen glassy day with ice in the wind, and as we came down to the barge-house I could see the black ring of swept snow almost empty of skaters. And then someone shouted:

‘They're skating on the river!'

‘Now we don't have to get that boy to try it for us,' she said. ‘What's his name?'

‘Tom Holland.'

‘I'm going to race you!' she said.

Because the river flows across the marshes and meadows in long ox-bow curves, making heavy currents at the bends, I had never believed it would freeze at these places; but that afternoon it was a single long block of ice, a white-yellow glacier with smoky shadows of half-frozen strips only under the arches of the railway bridge.

A few dozen people were skating on it; one man, two meadows away, was skating, almost sailing, upstream with the wind.

I stood on the bank watching him come along. Lydia laughed at me from the ice and presently the man came skating in, fast, and I heard him say:

‘Safe as houses. Must be three inches all the way.'

She heard it too and began to skate downstream without waiting for me.

I went after her without any feeling of insecurity; I was not afraid. All along the raised river-banks the ice split under pressure with sounds like whining and cracking gun-shot. The sounds sang away in the wind, far across empty meadows, with strange moaning twanging echoes, like broken wires. Perhaps because I had walked out at last on Bretherton and was free, perhaps because I had again the feeling that as she skated ahead of me she was running away from me – for some sort of reason I went after her only with exhilaration and not fear. She turned several times and laughed at me. Then once I shouted for her to be careful and not fall down and she simply laughed back at me again.

We skated in this way across two meadows. The wind had nothing to stop it in its long savage lick across the valley and by the time we came down towards the railway arches, over the old Queen's Meadow, I was taking deep gulps of bitter air, like a swimmer. Against the thrust of wind I started to skate with my head down.

I suppose I skated like this for half a minute. Then I looked up to see her twenty yards from the bridge. I started shouting. I felt anxiety, then fear, then pure cold horror hit me more savagely than the wind and in another moment, trying to skate faster, I fell down.

In the moment before falling down I remembered seeing her bright scarlet sweater flashing into the left of the three archways of the bridge. When I got up again it was no longer there. I skated wildly forward, yelling her name. Then I hit the bank just in front of the bridge, fell half-forward on my hands and began to scramble like a sort of frozen spider along the tow-path, still yelling her name in shouts that hit ice and bridge in hollow slapping sounds that echoed and re-echoed back to me.

The bridge was supported with round iron pillars, under which the concrete tow-path ran. When I half-skated, half-fell underneath it she was leaning against one of the pillars, waiting for me. Her body was pressed back, its lower shape in the too-tight skirt thrust outward, so that the long line of her thighs was hollowed and clear. She stood there very quiet for a
moment, looking at me with amused dark eyes. Then she began laughing, with a flash of white teeth, because she saw that I was frightened. I was so relieved and shaken that for a second I staggered about, half-losing my balance, so that she had to put out her hands to stop me.

‘Lydia,' I said. ‘Oh! Lydia, for God's sake –'

A moment later she stretched out her arms and drew me slowly towards her. I wanted to ask her what had happened and how she escaped, but I did not say another word. I could hear a small continuous lapping of loose water over thin ice under the bridge behind her and I listened to it, in fear, all the time she kissed me. Her stretched long body tautened itself in a curious curve as she kept her balance and folded me against her, kissing me at the same time.

‘Did you think I'd gone?' she said. ‘Did you think I'd run away?'

I pressed my mouth against her cold fresh skin and could not answer.

‘Not yet, my darling,' she said, and again I could not speak for happiness.

Spring came to Evensford about the end of April with shabby flowerings of brown wallflowers on allotment grounds, with dusty daffodils behind the iron railings of street front gardens. Earth everywhere had been pulverized by black frost to a saltiness that blew grittily about on dry spring winds, cornering fish-and-chip papers in Evensford's many alley-ways. In the town there was hardly anything to distinguish what was now the spring from what had been the winter except that the days were longer and not so cold and that the view across the valley showed ice no longer. There were now only broken lakes of receding water to which swans returned for a last few days in great white flocks, before they too broke up and paired for summer nesting.

Behind the walls of the Aspen ground, all across the park, spring came so differently that it was another world. Rooks did not begin nesting in the old chestnut trees behind the lime avenue and in the big elms above the gate-house until the
middle of April, cawing all day in slow-greening branches. Everything was late that year. The brook thawed and all along its wet banks white anemones came fluttering into bloom, together with big soft white violets, pure as snowdrops, and primroses among blobby islands of king-cups under yellow hazel boughs. Whenever I went through the gates and along the avenue there was a wonderful belling chorus of thrushes that expanded under a closing framework of branches, madly and most wonderfully in the long pale twilight when the air was green with young leaves and the acid of new grass after sunset and spring rain. Nearer the house there were random drifts of pale blue anemone, bright as clippings of sky among black clusters of butchers broom, and then, under limes and in grass along every slope leading up to the house, daffodils in thousands, in crowds of shaking yellow flame. Some earlier, far-sighted Aspen had planted great groups of blue cedar about the place and they rose in high conical groups, greyish after winter, to be touched, as spring came, with young delicate sprouts of blue-green fire. Acres of grass flowed away under plantings of horse chestnut that flared, by the end of April, into thick blossom that soon became scattered by wind into rose-white drifts on paths and terraces and even as far as the elm avenue that Jed to more spinneys of primroses and hazel and white violet on the western side.

By May the spinneys were thick with bluebells. The air all day long was soaked heavy and sweet and almost too rich with the scent of them and the juices of rising grass. The earlier Aspen who had planted the cedars had also planted great shrubberies of lilacs that by now had grown into old rambling woodlands heavy with white and rose-pink flower. He had planted many white acacias too and it was he also who had built a small two-storeyed summer-house on the south side of the park, at the crest of a walk of yellow wild azaleas. They too broke into flower about the time of the bluebells, the lilac and the chestnut flower, clogging the air with a haunting, drowsy perfume that still rises, above all the smell of grass and bluebell and lilac and primrose, to mark the spring and summer that I spent there.

By this time I had stopped using the main gate that led into the park from the centre of the town. I used to walk round the long wall and come instead through the spinneys on the south side. The spinneys are all gone now. New streets of houses built of prefabricated slabs of stucco-concrete, with concrete paths and concrete line-posts and concrete coal-sheds, with television aerials sprouting everywhere like bare steel boughs, have taken their places; but in those days there was a carriage gate to the spinneys and a riding that went down through them until it forked one way to the house, down the long avenue of elms that concrete tank emplacements killed as sure as a poison twenty-three years later.

It is very hard to say exactly what happened to us that summer, to express in terms that do not seem foolish how for a long time we did nothing but meet in the summer-house and lie on the old cane long-chairs in the small upstairs room and look through the little arched diamond windows down on the path of azalea flowers, where it was so quiet that we could watch pheasants feeding a yard or two away on the corn we put down and see a partridge bring up her brood of thirteen there, fussing about with her own small brown circus under her wings.