by H. E. Bates
It was quite by accident that her father supplied the means of putting an end to this protracted childhood of hers. One summer afternoon, when she was seventeen, she saw her father ride home with a woman.
‘I knew she was married, too,’ she said. The July afternoon was hot and still and Lydia had been sent upstairs, exactly like a child, to rest. But it was too hot to sleep, and she sat at the open window, staring into the quivering afternoon. Then her father and the woman rode up. The woman had on a soft white silk riding skirt. Her father dismounted first and tethered his horse under a cedar tree that fringed the lawn between the house and the outer fields. The woman sat there and waited for him to come back. When he came back he held up his hands and she smiled and slipped slowly down the flank of the horse and into his arms.
The sight of her elderly father kissing the woman stung her into an amazed spasm of something between jealousy and pure excitement. She had actually never seen two adult people kissing each other in anything but the most formal fashion; she had never even seen it on a cinema or in a play. She heard the woman laughing as her father kissed her again and ruffled her hair. She saw her brushing his face with her lips, teasing him and waiting to be kissed again. A confusion of bewildered and vaguely exultant ideas that what she saw might be something to give great pleasure to a woman poured through her, fantastic in an intricate and delayed effect of waking.
It was still only a half-awakening. Even to make it a little fuller she found herself grow cunning. She tricked the nervous Miss Crouch into accepting a ten shilling note so that she might go out for the day; and then re-tricked her by threatening exposure. Her idea of going out was to take long walks through neighbouring fox-coverts with the gardener’s daughter, a restless heavy-bodied girl of her own age with reddish-golden hair and a head full of spun-out stories about the delicious variations of masculine betrayal. The girls sometimes took food and lay on hot days under dark spruce boughs, talking of love and their idea of how you did it and what it did to you. It awoke in Lydia a startling hunger, of which she was, in turn, startlingly afraid. She had hardly ever had an intimate conversation on any sort of subject with a single soul; and it was not surprising that all her life suddenly began to be a long passionate adventure in curiosity, with the amorous gardener’s daughter and her restless blonde body as the focal centre of it all.
Two years later her father was thrown from his horse; he died as the grooms carried him home. Miss Bertie and Miss Juliana came to fetch her.
‘I didn’t know my father. He was never there. It made no difference,’ she said.
Miss Bertie was appalled. She found a girl so lamentably backward in physical behaviour that she still looked and dressed like a child of fourteen and so shy that she did not speak more than half a dozen words on the long icy drive down from Leicestershire. Miss Bertie had evidently done a great deal of thinking on that freezing journey among the leopard rugs. She must have been a little frightened herself by the problem of how to break down that special shyness that had all the frigidity of glass outside and yet was evidently seething madly within. I had drawn what I thought were all the correct conclusions that first evening among the passionate soup-suckings of Miss Juliana and the sippings of port and the assertive pronouncements of Miss Bertie. It was impossible not to detect the ghastly shyness, the frigid, rigid awkwardness, the bony undevelopment. It took me some time longer to reach Miss Bertie’s first intuitive conclusion that there was something molten underneath it all.
So we were, in several ways, an oddly opposite pair as we walked home through the snow from the river after skating, with almost nothing in common except sheer youth and an exchangeable shyness that we were slowly breaking down; myself intolerably over-proud and with my head up because I was walking with a strange girl from a family I pitifully imagined was the last word in ancient lineage, Lydia almost as pathetic in a hunger to get down into Evensford’s gutters and lap up the life she found there simply because she had never known any life at all.
‘Let’s go to the Geisha. Let’s stop at Porter’s. Whose shop is this? Cartwright? Tell me about Cartwright. Who is he? How long has he been here? You know everybody, don’t you? I want to go everywhere – I want to know everybody like you do.’
Every evening she kept up that same tireless kind of catechism; and I would tell her about Cartwright, the draper, or Meadows, the tailor and hatter who drank all day in the back of the shop, or Avery, the seedsman, or the two Miss Quincys, the confectioners, peering out like a pair of keen binoculars from behind the marshmallows, under piled Edwardian coiffures that were themselves like dark brown chocolate whirls.
But I drew the line, one evening, at Jerry O’Keefe’s, the fish-shop where people crammed in late for hot plates of peas and chips and yellow-battered fish, in a kind of boiler house of steaming fat, after the last cinema show or the old theatre.
‘But why?’ she said. ‘Why? It looks fun in there.’
I said I did not think it the place for her, and she said:
‘You talk like a parson or something. You talk just like old Miss Crouch.’
‘I’m not taking you,’ I said.
‘Why? If it’s good enough for these people it’s good enough for us, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘That’s because you’re really an awful snob,’ she said. ‘You’re too uppish to be seen in there.’
‘It’s not myself,’ I said. ‘It’s you.’
‘Are you going to take me or aren’t you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
She turned and walked down the street. I stood for a moment alone, stubbornly, watching her swinging away into darkness out of the steamy, glowing gas-light. Then I had a moment of sickness when I felt she was walking out of my life, that I had given her impossible offence and that I should never see her again.
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘wait. Don’t go like that. I’ll take you.’
Coming back, on the half-dark glassy pavement, she turned on me the sudden disarming smile that was always so irresistible and so compelling, and we went in.
The curious thing is that I was glad we went in. Inside the shop the old gas-light sang warmly and I knew that I was irritable simply because I was cold and tired and hungry. We sat at the counter and ate fish and chips and separate saucers of scalding stewed peas, seasoning them from great tin salt and pepper dredgers that were like pint pots. Mrs O’Keefe tossed the frizzling chips in the gleaming fryers and wiped her fat hands on her hips and asked me how my father was. Steam hung thick and hot against the ceiling and there was a glow on Lydia’s face and patches of glowing grease on her lips that made them more red, more shining and more tender.
‘You see, you like it now, don’t you?’ she said. ‘It just shows it’s better to do the things I want to.’
She put her mouth against my ear to whisper the last words, and I was full of intolerable pride again because Mrs O’Keefe stared at us through the steam of the fryers and wondered who the lady was; I was large with vanity.
Another evening we stopped at the potato oven that used to stand in those days on the corner by ‘The Rose and Mitre,’ opposite the post office, half way down the High Street. We ate hot baked potatoes with our fingers, juggling them up and down, and presently snow began to fall in slow fat flakes that hissed on the hot oven. In the bitter night we stood close by the fire, talking to old Sportsman Jennings, the man who kept it – a small man with black side-whiskers and a square bowler that he wore on the back of his head – and every time the shutter was opened the glow of fire sprang into the night, turning the snow, the ice-bound pavement and her face a quivering rosy orange. The fresh potatoes as they came from the oven were too hot to hold. We blew on them, making steam against an air already clotted with dancing snow. The winter, as I stood there watching her bite at the hot potatoes and laugh with her mouth against the burnt black skin and the white flesh of them, did not seem like winter. Evensford was not like Evensford any longer.
I did not think I had ever been so happy. I felt exalted by the transfiguration of snow and cold and fire, each of them turning the world to something it was not, and because I felt she was free and exalted too.
And when the voice of a young police constable said, ‘I’ve a good mind to take the three of you in charge for loitering,’ I could only laugh and then laugh again as I saw her face, horrified at what I had done.
The constable, a man named Arthur Peck, laughed too as he saw the frightened stare of her face.
‘It’s all right, miss. Mr Richardson and I were at school together,’ he said.
Then we all laughed and Sportsman Jennings opened the oven and said, ‘What about a nice ’ot tater, Muster Peck?’ but Arthur stood solidly in the snow and murmured about duty and what a night it was for it too. Then I said:
‘Arthur, I’d like to introduce you. This is Miss Aspen,’ and I saw a stupefied look of startled respect on his face that made me feel again the intolerable, superior, condescending pride of knowing her. He was so impressed that I thought he would so far forget himself as to take off his helmet. Like me – and in fact like the rest of Evensford – he had grown up to think of the Aspens as a legend, to associate them with hereditary wealth and position, a high and distant aura the rest of us did not share.
I do not know how long we stood there, eating potatoes in the snow, warming our hands by the open fire, talking and laughing to Sportsman Jennings and Arthur Peck, exalted and happy in the dancing, sizzling snow, but suddenly she remembered how late it was. She gave a little cry and said ‘Goodnight, Mr Peck,’ and ‘thank you for the potatoes,’ and then we began to run.
Snow was still falling heavily, the wind sweeping it already into smooth drifts on dry pavement, as we reached the gates of the park and stood under the street lamp there.
‘You’ll come tomorrow,’ she said, ‘won’t you?’
‘It depends on Bretherton –’
‘Oh! Who cares about Bretherton?’ She laughed and said: ‘Don’t be so serious about, him. If you don’t like him walk out.’
‘It isn’t so easy as that.’
‘Of course it is. You’re too serious about things. What about the river tomorrow? Shall we try it?’
‘It depends on the snow –’
‘It depends on Bretherton, it depends on the snow – don’t keep saying it depends,’ she said. ‘If we want to do it we just do it, don’t we? I think it’s awfully silly to weigh up things. Let’s just do them when we want to.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘if the snow stops –’
‘There you go again. It’s simply got to stop. And I shall hate it if you’re late. You won’t be late, will you? You won’t let old Bretherton keep you?’
‘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.
