Love for Lydia (8 page)

That summer was very hot and I remember the thick dry strawy heat stifling under the little roof. I remember the scent of azaleas and the hot feeling of tension when Rollo, walking up with his gun one afternoon, tried the door of the summer-house down below us with twenty or thirty or even forty keys, as it then seemed, rattling them one by one in the lock. I remember the thundering thump of my own heart as Rollo tried the keys and how every beat of it got bigger and hotter and more choking with every key. I can see Lydia, lying back in the chair, her chest leaping up in deep gasps that seemed to lift her breasts painfully, and I can feel the grip of her hand on the wrist I had sprained while skating. The grip was so tight that the blood, held back, stopped flowing to the fingers and I could feel them gradually grow colder, until they seemed frozen again with their old familiar winter pain.

When Rollo had gone I sat on the edge of the chair,
dangling my dead, bloodless hand, pained by the flow of blood coming back to it.

‘Did I hold you too tightly?' she said. ‘Did I really? I didn't know –'

‘It's the wrist I sprained –'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘Let me hold it for you.'

‘Gently,' I said.

I sat there watching her for some time while she gently held my fingers. Her body, flat in the chair, was still heaving with excitement. She had grown up very rapidly since the first evening I had seen her in the black dinner dress. The girl I had taken skating, with the low waist, gawkily throwing all the angular body out of proportion, with the almost monolithic straightness of Juliana herself, was not there any longer. Flesh had begun to spread on her bones with the effect of making her seem much less tall. She was warmer, rounder, softer, lovely in a way of which there had been no hint on the days of her scrawny skating in the winter. Her mouth too was firmer. Its fleshiness and breadth were still there, but it was soft now without being loose and it revealed, even more than the rounded breasts, how quickly she had grown.

‘Dare we open the window?' she said. ‘It's so hot in here.'

‘I'll open the back window,' I said.

‘I'm stifled – let's have some air.' She let go my hand. ‘Why don't you take off your shirt? The sweat's pouring from you like water –'

The back window looked out from a tiny landing where the stairs came up. I went through to open it. Through the small casement, as I threw it back, came the heat of July, clear and fierce, sweet with light undertones of hay still being turned in fields outside the park. I stood breathing it for a moment, listening to the beat of a hay-turner, undoing the front of my shirt so that air could cool my chest.

When I went back to her she had taken off her dress. She was sitting up in the long-chair, unrolling her stockings. They peeled from her thighs like another skin, leaving the flesh wonderfully white and without blemishes.

She lay back in the chair. I touched her thighs with the light
tips of my fingers and began to say something about how much I had wanted to touch her and how –

‘I wondered if you ever would,' she said. ‘If you ever wanted –'

She was smiling a little, her lips parted. I could hear the hay-turner beating somewhere across the park. Then my heart started thundering again as it had done when Rollo had tried the keys in the lock.

‘Don't be shy,' she said. ‘I'm not shy –'

She rolled her body sideways in the chair, tenderly and heavily, pulling me towards her with both hands. One of the straps of her slip fell from her shoulders and she let go of me for a moment to pull the other one down. Her skin had begun to mature with the waxen stiff whiteness that goes sometimes with deep black hair and it seemed to melt as I touched it with my hands.

‘Oh! darling – don't stop loving me –' she said. ‘Don't ever stop loving me –'

I promised I would never stop loving her. ‘I promise I never will,' I said. ‘Never. I promise I never will.'

Some time later she lay in a sort of day-dream, quieter, looking at the sky. The hay-turner spun softly across the hot afternoon. The scent of her hair had something strong and aromatic about it and I remember that too as I think of her suddenly sitting up in the chair and bending over me and saying a most curious thing to me:

‘Even if I'm bad to you?' she said.

‘You won't be bad to me.'

‘Even if I were bad to you – would you? – will you always?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Do you want to go on like this – always? For ever and ever?'

‘For ever,' I said.

‘I wonder if we shall,' she said.

I stretched up my hands and put them against her body. Its roundness, I felt, was all mine; it was I, in a sense, who had made it grow up; I was quite sure it was
I
who had woken her.

‘Do you like my body?' she said. ‘Did you think I'd grow like this? Is it the first time you've seen a girl?'

‘Yes,' I said.

She laughed and said: ‘I'm growing up and it feels queer – it feels terribly queer – it goes pounding and pounding through me.'

She laughed again lying with her mouth across my face, her voice warm with tenderness and rather hoarse, and I felt all summer spin together, through the sound of the hay-turner, the warmth of her voice and the heavy repeated turn of her body, into a deep and delicate wonder, into what was really for me a monstrously simple, monstrously complex web of happiness.

By this time I had got another job. My father more than anyone was disappointed at my failure with Bretherton. ‘But it's no use if you're not happy,' he said. ‘Better to take a job in the trade and be happy than get above yourself and be miserable.'

It was he who got me the job of clerk to a one-man leather factor's business run by a man named Arthur Sprague. ‘Arthur's a very sound fellow,' my father said. ‘He'll treat you well.' Trade had begun to decline with the seasonal slackness of summer. ‘You're lucky to fall into a job like that too,' he added. ‘There are a lot of unemployed. All you have to do is keep the books in order and unpack the leather as it comes in and answer the telephone. You'll be done every day by four.'

In this way Lydia and I were able to meet in the summer-house almost every hot afternoon of that summer except Sundays.

On Sundays Miss Bertie and Miss Juliana, true to the Evensford tradition, invited me to tea. It used to be part of the sanctity of Sunday for Evensford to meet over heavily laden tables at four o'clock, after a sort of High Street fashion parade, talking of what anthem was going to be sung at chapel, listening perhaps for the voice, crying drably through the streets, of a late watercress man – ‘water-cree-ee-ee-es! –
water-cree-ee-ee-es! – fine water-cree-ee-ee-es!' – and the sound of an early brass-band battling with discord against the sound of pianos played by open parlour windows.

We always had tea in a small, bay-windowed, overcrowded room on the south side of the house, adjoining the conservatory. Its walls were papered in patterns of pink and silver roses and its furniture was in a style of ponderous cabriole, touched with ecclesiastical. The legs of chairs and tables, in the shape of claws, grasped everywhere at balls that were like mahogany cannon shot. The upholsterings were mostly of a bright prawn pink unfaded by sun because at the slightest touch of it all blinds and shutters were drawn. The Aspens were not Catholics, but there was a prie-dieu in blue beaded petit-point in one corner; nor were they very musical, but in another corner was a grand piano, a rosewood music stand inlaid with strips of ivory, and a cello in a case by the wall. Sometimes if the afternoon was very warm we sat at open french windows, through which all the scents of the park and the gardens came to us in exquisite waves, rose with azalea, pink with hawthorn, some wonderfully indeterminate breath of high summer and strawberry with a drowsy flavour of hay.

There were rarely, I think, more than the five of us there: the two Aspen sisters, Rollo and Lydia and myself; and it suited my vanity to be so very privileged. A maid with her appropriate dragonflies of starched apron strings brought tea at four o'clock and Rollo lit the burner under a small silver methylated spirit kettle. Either Miss Juliana or Miss Bertie poured tea, one on one Sunday, one on another. ‘It's Juley's Sunday,' they would say, or ‘it's Bertie's Sunday.' Rollo and I handed round plates of thinnest triangular bread and butter in three varieties of white and brown and a pleasant sugar-browned loaf of currant bread. Sometimes Rollo called me ‘Old fellow' or made a remark about pheasants or spoke of how plum awful something was. Miss Juliana, in her assertive jolly way, rattled on about this and that until arrested with firmness by Miss Bertie on some point of dry, irrefutable fact about the nature or history of the town. Most of the time Lydia and I sat looking at each other.

There was an amazing, beautiful frenzy about these quiet tea-times. There was a sort of suspended inner fieriness about us both that was painful and lovely. Sometimes we could not bear any longer to look at each other and I felt myself caught up again in a sort of entangling web, enraptured and baffled. She always wore dresses of silk on Sunday and their smooth peel-like softness, growing tighter all the summer as her body filled out, was drawn over her breasts with startling clearness whenever she moved.

Tea was always over by five o'clock. There would then be half an hour of latitude, in the garden perhaps, or on the terrace outside, before Miss Juliana and Miss Bertie and Lydia went to dress for church and I said goodbye and thanked them for having me. During this time Rollo drew himself off and smoked a cigarette in the conservatory. Then he got ready for church. Then the servants got ready for church. As he smoked that cigarette in the conservatory Rollo always had about him something of the uneasy and chained-up look of a dog that has had no run all day. It was not until late summer that I discovered why. There was a look of unhappy costive strain about him as he paced up and down among the ferns and begonias and dracenas with his long amber-green cigarette holder, in his two-inch collars and his cravat of dark blue, with horse-shoe tie-pin, in the style of twenty or thirty years earlier. He always looked rather like some advertisement for Edwardian bicycles, a dried-out dandy waiting, dog-like, abject and eager, for a girl.

Punctually at ten minutes to six the Daimler came to the front door to take the three women to church. Rollo, even when it was raining, preferred to walk. It was not until the third Sunday in July of that summer that I discovered he did not go to church at all.

That Sunday was a week after Rollo had tried the door of the summer-house and Lydia had said that curious disturbing thing to me: ‘Not even if I'm bad to you?'

It had been very hard to look at each other during tea that day. Summer had burned up into hard flaming heat, into a torrid afternoon of white reflections springing back from the
stones of the terrace and the glass panes of the conservatory outside. Twice during tea Lydia complained about the heat and finally she got up and said, ‘I feel rather queer,' and went outside.

When she came back, five minutes later, she did not sit down. She ran one of her hands backwards and forwards across her face. Her white dress was pulled, as it always was, tight across her figure, which seemed flushed and swollen by the heat of the day.

‘I think I'll go and lie down,' she said. ‘I've been rather sick.'

Anxiously Miss Juliana said, ‘Oh! my dear child,' and I got up to open the door. The necessity of opening doors for ladies on all possible occasions had been brought acidly home to me on an earlier Sunday by Miss Bertie. ‘Young men do not seem to be very well trained nowadays,' she said. ‘I suppose it's part of the general decay.'

So now I had the trained promptitude of a dog in opening doors. I rushed forward to hold the door for Lydia and she seemed to sway slightly, I thought, as she went through it into the hall outside. I said something about her being able to manage by herself and then she swayed out into the hall and I went after her.

‘I haven't been sick,' she said.

She stood there staring at me with a curious, rigid sort of smile.

‘I'm not going to church,' she said. ‘Come back to the house.'

She framed the words with her big wide lips soundlessly, in a sort of speaking smile, and before I could answer she went upstairs.

At a quarter to six I said goodbye to the Aspen sisters and Rollo and walked across the park. A footpath led out to the south-east side of it through a plantation of old birch-trees and to a keeper's house at the far end – twenty years later a tank brigade put a camp of cylindrical corrugated huts on it and later squatters moved in and hung from the few remaining birch trees their lines of frowsy washing – and I waited there until the church bells stopped and six o'clock struck and then I walked back to the house.

She must have watched me all the way across the park and all the way back again. Coming up the steps of the south terrace I saw her wave from an upstairs window, and then she opened it and said:

‘There's no one here, darling. Come up.'

I had never been upstairs in the house before. A wide mahogany staircase wound up in a central coil of ponderous chocolate-red banisters to an amber skylight at the top. She was there leaning over the upper rail, waiting for me.

When I ran up to her she ran a little way down the top flight of stairs to meet me. She could not wait for me. We fell against the banister rail in a frenzy of kissing. I could feel all the heat of the afternoon compressing and narrowing and refining itself until it was a needle that jabbed down through the two of us and held us together. ‘Oh, darling?' she kept saying to me. ‘Darling, darling.'

She held me there in this refined needle-like trap for some moments longer. We came out of it in an ecstatic daze. I remember thinking that the bedroom where we went was not even her own bedroom, but only some spare servant's room in which a brass-railed monster of a bed glittered among piles of varnished travelling boxes. On the bed she begged me several times, in a dry tearless sort of a crying: ‘Kiss me harder,' and I heard her fingers running with regular frantic scratchings across the old-fashioned cotton counterpane until she drew it up to her thighs and then let it go again with a sigh. I felt the impact of all this through the confusing softening complex of my web of feelings about her. I felt her voice struggling to free itself with the frenzied panic of an insect torturously trapped. Her fingers scratched at the counterpane over and over again and her voice beat at me the same dry harshness that had shed all tenderness, begging me to hurt her, until I could only break into half-sobbing against her body and tell her I could hurt her no longer.