by H. E. Bates
Out in the yard, by the Chrysler under which Blackie was at last wheeling and lifting a jack, Johnson paused in his slow way and said:
‘Is she Elliot’s gal?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Bad job about her father,’ he said. ‘How old would she be?’
‘She’ll be twenty-one in the new year,’ I said.
‘Will she? Lucky gal,’ he said.
That night the six of us danced together for the first time, and I was bloated with pride and happiness, I think the quietest person among us, quiet in a folded, watchful sort of way, was not Lydia, as I had rather fancied she would be, but Tom’s sister, Nancy. Her face was bland and soft and her arms were covered with glinting golden hairs that gave them the appearance of being covered with velvety down. She had clear, very English blue eyes of pronounced steadiness but whenever I looked at her I always felt the faintest uneasiness, as if the eyes were watching me too closely.
But that evening she did not watch me quite so much. She was always looking, with that puzzled curious reticence of hers, at Lydia. As the evening went on I remember it developed into a kind of shyness, almost a mask of inferiority. I remember too how Lydia was dressed, and when I look back now I rather think it was her dress that evening that made Nancy, in her simplified way, uneasy.
Lydia arrived, that night, rather as she had done for the skating. Her dress was a long affair of grey-pink, with a heavy lace attachment of oyster colour over the skirt. The bodice was very low but there was something shrunken about the whole affair that made me think it was one of Miss Juliana’s, dolled up and revived. Her figure sprang from its tightness in full curves that were not possible in dresses where the cut was so straight, as it was then, and the waist so low. Her breasts seemed high and startling, in a way that was almost aggressive under the tight, old-fashioned cut of the neck. She had also brought a fan – it was of white and black lace and I remember she opened it once as we sat out a dance and how a woman gave a little giggling yap of astonishment at seeing such a thing – and one of those little corded booklets in which at one time, dances and partners used to be written down with a silver pencil on a cord.
After I had danced twice with her I danced with Mrs Sanderson – she was the lightest, most delicate person I have ever danced with, and she had a way of giving a tingling floating exquisiteness to everything she did – and then I danced with Nancy.
After Mrs Sanderson it was a little like dancing with a comfortable half-grown lamb.
‘Where have you been all summer?’ she said.
I felt she knew where I had been all summer, and I did not answer.
‘You never came to see us once,’ she said.
I felt Nancy was being a bore.
‘Anyway here we are again,’ she said. I could feel that she had large, boned corsets under her pale duck-blue taffeta dress. They made her unsupple and slow and hard to lead. ‘And I might as well tell you I think she’s very nice,’ she said.
‘I never go with girls who are not nice,’ I said.
‘You’re always too clever for me.’
‘Nobody can be too clever for a woman,’ I said; and I thought this was rather clever too.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think you might have to be very clever for this one.’
Before I could speak again Alex Sanderson passed us, dancing with Lydia. As he passed he stretched out one hand and ruffled, very lightly, the top of my hair. Then he swung Lydia round and round in a pirouette, making her dress fly in a whirl, and said:
‘Cheer up, old boy. Don’t look so damn serious. Some people are having a wonderful time!’
‘She’s got you all running round like little boys,’ Nancy said.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘The three of you,’ she said. ‘You can’t deny it either.’
I did not deny it. The room was now very crowded and warm and I could feel my right hand making a sticky fan of sweat where I held the hollow of Nancy’s corsets.
‘Would you like an ice?’ I said. ‘Alex says they’re strawberry and very good.’
‘Now you’re being very nice to me,’ she said.
We had pink-coloured ices that tasted of borax or something just as indefinably unpleasant. They slid about, melting rapidly, on glass dishes that were too small for them.
‘Do you know it’s been a year since we found the violets?’ she said.
‘Violets? Oh! yes,’ I said, and I remembered the violets.
On the edge of a spinney at the farm – ghostly and lovely butterfly orchis with lacy green-white wings grew there in July and once I had taken her to see them too – we had found one of those late freak patches of violets, in black-purple bud, that flower sometimes in favourable autumns, giving a second spring. I had pinned a small bunch of them on her dress. It was about the time I had gone into Bretherton’s office, a month or two before the great frost began, and it seemed like a million years away.
‘They kept for weeks,’ she said.
I felt it embarrassing to talk of them and I took another mouthful of flat ice-cream.
‘When are you coming up again?’ she said. ‘Tom would love it.’
‘Some time,’ I said.
‘Come on Sunday. It doesn’t seem the same if you’re not there,’ she said. ‘We got sort of used to you coming up there and you know how it is.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I felt that Nancy was exactly like a drink of milk that we used sometimes to take straight from one of the cooling-pans in the stone whitewashed dairy at Busketts, on a warm summer evening, after a walk across fields of eggs-and-bacon flower. She was fresh and clean and smooth, neither warm nor cool, neither flat nor exciting. She would turn, some day, into a buttery and solid woman with light golden hair, brown and shining every summer from work in harvest fields. She would have children with straw-coloured hair, like Tom, or else not marry at all and grow, more buttery and firm and plump every year, into an uncurdled, kindly and clovered middle-age.
‘Come up on Sunday,’ she said again. ‘You can bring Lydia. We’d love to have her.’
‘Perhaps I might,’ I said.
‘Oh! good,’ she said. ‘We’ll have curd-tarts. I know you like them.’
When we went back to dancing Tom was dancing with Lydia. As we passed them Nancy leaned back and said over her shoulder:
‘Tom. I say, listen. He’s going to bring Lydia up to tea on Sunday.’
‘Oh! good,’ Tom said, and his voice and manner, and the sweetness of his surprise were identical with hers, ‘we must have a bang at the wild duck one day. Crowds of them down at the brook.’
‘Will it be all right, Lydia?’ I said.
‘I would love to,’ she said. ‘I can escape from church,’ and I saw her smile at Tom with that sudden expansion of the mouth that always revealed, in a curious and disarming way, her rather large shining teeth, and I saw him stare back at her, transfixed, almost blank, his pale blue eyes almost fierce with wonder, as he had done on the marshes when she first skated there.
‘He looks tired,’ Nancy said. ‘Don’t you think so?’
‘I hadn’t noticed it.’
‘He’s going to sit for an exam,’ she said. ‘He’s taking one of those correspondence courses in bookkeeping and that sort of thing.’
‘Tom? – bookkeeping? – he hates things like that.’
‘He wants to have a farm of his own,’ she said.
As we drove home, after that first dance, at three in the morning, a large blown golden moon was setting across the valley through low cylindrical mists that charged the car in puffs of pale ochre. Old Johnson had tucked us up, like the coachman he really was, and as he always did afterwards, with many chequered horse rugs, and we sat snuggled and fuggled together, warm and intimate, arms about each other. The evening had been very happy.
‘I think we all should send a vote of thanks to the Miss Aspens,’ Mrs Sanderson said. It was exactly the gracious and correct thing she would think of saying and w
hich we should probably have forgotten. ‘It was their idea and it’s been wonderful –’
‘Hear, hear,’ we all said.
‘Hear jolly well hear,’ Tom said loudly.
‘Will you thank them, Lydia, please?’ Mrs Sanderson said. I could see the flash of her earrings as she turned next to me in the misty ochreous light of head lamps, her face pale and distinguished. ‘Tell them what a lovely time we had.’
‘I will,’ she said.
‘And I should like to say,’ Tom said, and again it was rather loud, almost as if he were forcing himself, ‘that next time we take Lydia. It’s on us. There’s a Hunt Ball at Grafton on the third of next month and I vote we go. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ we all said. ‘Hear, hear.’
‘May we have the pleasure, Miss Aspen?’ Tom said.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said.
‘Cheers,’ Tom said. ‘That’ll be the great day.’
We all laughed. Mrs Sanderson snuggled among the rugs and said: ‘Oh! it’s just like a bed in here – here I am in bed with three men, and my husband at home and hungry and waiting and I don’t know what – I really don’t know –’
Everyone burst out laughing again, and the car, swerving heavily on a misty corner, threw us together in a warm and joyous entanglement of dresses and brushing silken legs and bare smooth arms and laughing mouths, and I felt suspended and elevated and half-light-headed with happiness.
When we dropped Nancy and Tom at the farm they shouted, ‘Sunday – don’t forget Sunday,’ and we called back that we wouldn’t forget and then, several times, ‘Square up later – settle up later,’ and I said, ‘I’ll pay the cab, Tom, don’t worry, good night,’ and then, ‘Good night, Nancy,’ I called.
‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘Good night.’
Afterwards we dropped Alex Sanderson and his mother. At the last moment Alex mischievously put his dark face into the car window and said, ‘Give her one for me, old boy. If you don’t I’ll take one myself,’ and Lydia said:
‘Oh! if you feel like that about it –’
An odd spasm of resentment, the minutest shock wave of jealousy, shot through me as she said this, only to be quietened a moment later by Mrs Sanderson, who stood waiting by the other open door.
‘Oh! well – if there’s going to be kissing of good nights,’ she said.
She leaned into the car and in the darkness found my face with her mouth. She laughed, touching my lips in a brief warm flicker. ‘Good night,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been lovely – we must do it again.’
After that we drove on alone, up through Evensford High Street, to the park. All the street lights were out; the deep yellow moon was down below the houses. There was now only a refracted amber glow of it, tender and transfiguring as snow, in the sky, on the grey church spire with its facings of iron-stone and on the toast-brown October chestnut leaves falling along the wall of the park.
‘Ask him to put us down at the lodge,’ Lydia said. ‘We can walk up.’
At the lodge gates, while I stood paying for the car, Lydia stood beside me and although it was a soft sultry night I thought I heard her shiver.
Old Johnson heard it too and said: ‘Don’t you git cold, miss. Easiest thing in the world to git cold after dancing.’
‘No, don’t get cold,’ I said. I took her arm, but she was not cold.
‘Take a rug,’ Johnson said. ‘Put it round your shoulders. Muster Richardson can bring it back.’
‘I think I will,’ she said.
He opened the door of the car, took out a rug and draped it round her shoulders. ‘You better have one too, Muster Richardson,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ I said.
‘Yes, have one,’ she said.
‘You git sweatin’ and afore you know where you are you got a chill round your backbone.’ He put another rug round my shoulders. ‘That’s all right. You can bring ’em back.’
‘Well, I don’t need it, but thanks,’ I said.
As we walked up the avenue she stopped, listening for the sound of the old Chrysler dying away in the empty street beyond the church, and stood close to me.
‘You very nearly spoiled it,’ she said.
‘Spoiled what?’
‘The rugs,’ she said. ‘You’re very simple sometimes.’
We spread one of the rugs on dry chestnut leaves and lay down on it, drawing the other one over us. The moon had vanished, leaving the sky above the half-leaved branches orange-green, without a trace of blue, warm and lucent with the dying glow. Then it turned paler, whiter, and finally a clear salt-blue, with pure white stars, like a touch of winter. But under the rug it was quite warm and she pressed herself so close to me that I could feel the bone of her hip round and hard against me through the flesh.
As we lay there she said several times how beautiful the evening had been and how much she had enjoyed it and how much she had wanted me. Underneath the rug I found her body in clean long curves and held it there while I watched the stars. I felt there was probably no one else awake in all Evensford except perhaps old Johnson and Alex and his mother, and I pitied everybody because they were not awake and with her and as happy as I was.
Then I remembered how Alex had kissed her; I remembered the keen stab of jealousy, the sudden slitting through of all my puffed vanity; and I was sick because I did not want another person to touch her, and because I did not want to share her with another soul.
‘Don’t let Alex kiss you again,’ I said.
‘Oh! that was just fun,’ she said. She laughed at me from deep in her throat, and the sound danced a long way through the already baring trees. ‘There was nothing in that at all.’
Chapter Two
Sunday would not have been remarkable in any way if it had not been for something that happened after all of us – fourteen I counted when we sat down to table at Busketts and then sixteen as two brothers came in, rather late, in shirt sleeves, from milking – had had tea in the long white parlour.
Even now I cannot remember clearly – I never could – if there were six Holland sons and five daughters, or six daughters and five sons. One son had been killed during the war; two sons and three daughters were married and already a new generation of fair, chaste-looking, golden-skinned Hollands was springing up, all alike, all clean and fresh as sheaves in a wheat field. You were never expected to hold conversations at Busketts; meals had the pleasant discordance of a disorganized and hungry choir. Brown arms passed and exchanged and repassed across the table buttery masses of scones and bread and currant loaf, plates of ham and watercress and pork-pie and in winter toasted crumpets and apples baked and stuffed to a sugary glitter with walnuts and figs. Tarts of lemon curd and Mrs Holland’s speciality, cheese-curd, a tart of greenish melting softness with fat brown plums in it, were wolfed down by mouths that seemed to be laughing whenever they were not eating. Mrs Holland, pale, of delicate semi-transparence, exactly like egg-shell, as Juliana Aspen had said, sat at one end of the table, watching it all with the brightest small violet eyes, staring sometimes with bemusement at Will Holland, the father, who sat at the other. Masses of reddish-golden hair grew out of his ears and perhaps it was these that attracted her.
If you did not eat at Busketts, it was held that there was something wrong with you. If you did not help to finish up, with second and third helpings and large washes of thick brown tea, the plates of ham and pie and fruit and tart, there was something equally wrong with the food. Neither of these things, in my experience, had ever really happened there. Only Lydia did not eat much that day.
At first the Hollands, in their own honest way, were shy of her. They stood, as it were, a little away from her, in respect, almost with delicacy, briefly formal; they looked on her as the aristocrat – there had been Hollands in Evensford as long as Aspens, for probably five hundred years, and there are Hollands there now, although there are no Aspens – and it was, I think, ingrained in them to stand away and look up, seeing her, as their forefathers ha
d seen her forefathers, as someone from the great house, a lady growing up, a little unreal, detached from them. Her colouring had something to do with it too. Her darkness was glossy and almost foreign, a little smouldering, against their clear, blue-eyed Englishness. It made them seem like touchingly simple, most uncomplicated people.
It was this that made them press on her, in their customary way, as the meal began, everything that the table bore under its arching glass vases of scarlet dahlia and late curled pink and purple aster. They could not understand a person who did not share with them their staunch and mountainous hunger.
Then all at once they grasped it and understood it. They stood away from her at once, shy again. Even Mrs Holland left off asking, in her rather prim, distant manner, if Lydia was off-colour or anything of that kind?
Suddenly Harry, who had eyes and hair some shades less pale than the rest, so that there was almost a shadow on them, a glint of something slightly richer, livelier, and more full-blooded, leaned gravely across the table and spoke to her. He was in his shirt-sleeves, fresh from milking. Sweat under his darker eyes made them flushed and glittering.
‘Miss Aspen,’ he said, ‘is there anything you fancy that you don’t see on this table, because –’
We broke into the first shouts of laughter. Lydia laughed too; and Harry, a little mocking, said:
‘Miss Aspen, I implore you to eat. I can’t bear it. If you don’t eat, how can I?’ – and we all laughed again.
‘Let me fetch you something,’ Harry said. ‘Let me go to the pantry and see if I can find a titty-bit of something to tempt you –’
‘Harry!’ his mother said. ‘You great fool-jabey!’
‘Girls have to eat,’ Harry said. He got up with a touch of solemn mockery.
