by H. E. Bates
Those insignificant little things – the tea, the conversation on the window-sill, the thrush’s egg held for a second or two in my hand and then tossed away, the cowslip threaded into my buttonhole – cannot possibly seem of very great importance, even together. But they were responsible really, for what happened a few minutes later. Together they delayed me just long enough to make it possible. Without them it could not have happened.
It takes about half an hour to walk from the last gate at Busketts to the centre of the town; and I had been walking, I suppose, about twenty minutes when a car slowed up alongside the curb. If I had walked on the other side of the street I should have been on the high causeway, eight feet up, and no driver would have bothered. But now a grey-haired man of about sixty with a strong Northern accent, leaned out of the driving window and said:
‘Excuse me – would you mind telling me is this the town with the church that has the Strainer arch?’
‘This is the town,’ I said.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘Is it far to the church?’
‘Not far,’ I said. I began pointing ahead, giving directions. ‘About half a mile,’ and then he said:
‘It’s warm, isn’t it? Hop in – if you’re going that way, I’ll be glad to drop you.’
He flicked the door of the car open and I got in, and inside three minutes – in those three minutes he managed to do all the talking, told me his name, which I forget, his business, which I rather fancy was in wool, and how keen he was on church architecture and brass-rubbings and that sort of thing – we were at the church. It is a wonderfully fine church at Evensford. A great spire of soft grey limestone with corner embellishments of chocolate-red ironstone rises up for two hundred and seventy feet from a churchyard of black yews and horse-chestnuts and an apostolic row of twelve pollard elms.
At the church steps I got out of the car. I thanked him for bringing me down. ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘thank you.’ Then I told him that if he could not get in at the main west door of the church he would probably find the small south one unlocked. He got out of the car too. I walked up the western steps with him towards the churchyard. The horse-chestnuts were all in heavy blossom, littering the steps with fallen pink-white petals. I remember him remarking that it was like a wedding. ‘That’s a wonderful spire,’ he said. He stood for a moment or two longer looking up at it in admiration, before at last he lifted his hand and thanked me again and went away.
I felt rather proud of Evensford church at that moment; and I suppose I must have stood there, staring up at the grey and chocolate pattern of the great spire, for two or three minutes longer, before suddenly, on the south side of the church – there used to be a fine white acacia there, but they have cut it down now for the reason that they always cut things down in Evensford, that is no reason at all – I saw Lydia come out of the south door and walk round towards the eastern end.
She was wearing something I had not seen before. It was a light grey costume with black velvet revers. I hurried up the steps and went after her.
‘Lydia!’ I called. By the time I got round to the south side of the church she was just going round by the last corner buttress of the eastern end. ‘Lydia!’ I called after her. ‘Lydia –’
She seemed to hesitate for a second before going round the corner. But it was not until I got round the corner, running to catch her up, that she stopped and waited for me.
‘Lydia –’ and then I stopped too.
For what seemed to me about five minutes I stood painfully staring at the woman in the grey suit with the black velvet revers. She was wearing large clip-on earrings of pearl. In one grey-gloved hand she was carrying a large black glacé handbag and her hat, which she had taken off, in the other. I must have looked incredibly, idiotically startled.
Then she smiled. It was not quite the way Lydia smiled, abruptly, with wonderful beautifying expansiveness, but it was very pleasant and very friendly.
‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,’ she said.
‘I’m terribly sorry – I’m most terribly sorry,’ I began to say.
Then she smiled again, more generous and more amused this time.
‘I’m Lydia’s mother,’ she said.
I have no idea how long I stood there, under the church wall, staring and trying to think of something to say. But presently she laughed.
‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ she said. ‘I’m not a ghost. I haven’t come to haunt anybody.’
I still could not think of anything to say. The only possible thing, it seemed to me, was to apologize, and I began at last to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Aspen,’ but she cut me short.
‘I’ll tell you what I am though,’ she said. ‘I’m thirsty. If you want to apologize really nicely you can take me and give me a drink somewhere.’
There was just time to walk down to ‘The Prince Albert’ before the bar opened at six o’clock. Heat lay thickly along the south-sloping back streets and when we went into the lounge, all fern and palm and moulting deer-heads and carved barometers and pier-glasses, she gave a big sigh and took off the jacket of her costume and laid it across the back of her chair.
It was then that I saw how much like Lydia she really was. Her eyes seemed to me just as brilliant and intensely pellucid in their dark reflections. Only her mouth was different. It had crept, as it were, inwards, tightening until it was really too small and too narrow a bud for the rest of her expansive powdered face.
When the waiter came and I asked her what she would like she said:
‘Personally, if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to have a very large whisky and soda.’ She looked up at the waiter and smiled, and he in turn looked down at her and smiled too. ‘And when I say very large I mean very large,’ she said, ‘don’t I?’
‘Yes, madam,’ he said.
‘I was in here to lunch,’ she said, in a voice loud enough for him to hear as he went out of the door. ‘He knows me now.’
When the waiter came back with her glass she looked at it and then at him and said: ‘That’s more like it. That’s better,’ and held three of her fingers against the side.
‘So you know Lydia,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Tell me about her.’
I think I repeated four or five conventional statements of the kind that people always do; and then she smiled.
‘Is she good-looking?’ she said. ‘Very pretty?’
‘She’s very handsome,’ I said.
‘Just how I was,’ she said. ‘I was a terribly gawky thing until I was nineteen and then suddenly’ – she did a queer little wriggle with her hands – ‘in and out in all the correct places.’
Perhaps I was staring at her merely in the hope of being able to think of something to say; perhaps I was sliding off into one of my daydreams, thinking of Lydia; but suddenly she said:
‘You’ve got the most unbelievably blue eyes, haven’t you?’
‘So they tell me.’
‘Awfully bright and awfully penetrating.’
‘That’s what Lydia says.’
‘Are you fond of her?’ she said and I said yes, as simply as I could.
‘Oh! That’s nice.’ She laid her left hand with gentle impulsiveness on one of mine. ‘Oh! That’s awfully sweet. I think that’s wonderful. I think we have to have a drink on that, don’t we?’
So we drank to that, at first with one drink and then a second; and then, although we had no fresh excuse, we had a third, for which she paid with a note from her large black handbag, afterwards holding up the bag against the light so that she could see her face in the mirror inside.
‘What does my face look like to you? Ghastly?’
She evidently did not expect an answer, and I did not give one. She patted her face about with a powder-puff and bared her teeth, shaping her lips again with lipstick that spread on the teeth small carmine stains.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about the family.’
I repeated, as flatly as I co
uld, a few conventional things about the family.
‘What about that bastard Rollo?’
‘Well –’ I said.
‘Perhaps that was an unfortunate word,’ she said. She gave a last suck at her finished lips. ‘Eh? Unfortunate?’
I said that perhaps it was.
‘You do agree with people so, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Do you always agree with people like that? Do you agree with Lydia?’
‘Mostly,’ I said.
‘That’s probably because she’s indulgent and generous to you,’ she said. ‘I’m sure if she’s anything like me she has a generous nature.’
‘The path of wisdom is supposed to be the path of excess,’ I said. It was a phrase Alex and I sometimes bandied about, thinking it profound.
‘Oh! steady on,’ she said. ‘I can’t cope with that stuff. I’m a whisky-and-soda girl. Not champagne. Lower the standard a bit – give a girl a chance.’
Laughing, she choked a little over her whisky. ‘I believe you’re a bit of a character with those eyes of yours, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘I should find it hard to be a character with anybody else’s,’ I said, and that phrase too seemed to amuse her very much. She rocked from side to side with uneasy laughter spilling part of her whisky down the front of her blouse.
‘A drink certainly does liven you up, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Always does the opposite to me. I get all blank and cosy and warm – just like a warming-pan ready for the bed.’ I thought this rather a good phrase and I smiled. ‘What are you smiling at?’ she said. ‘I suppose you wonder why I’m here?’
I did wonder.
‘A little business with the family solicitor,’ she said, ‘that’s all. Once a year. Papers to sign – and that sort of thing. I don’t always come down.’
She stopped speaking and took a long drink of whisky, staring down at last into the glass. The whisky seemed to flow back almost at once in a fresh spate of words that were, to me, surprisingly touching because they were not bitter:
‘You called me Mrs Aspen up there, and it quite shocked me. First time for years. I always go by my maiden name since we were separated. I’ve never been part of the family because I really never married into it. I suppose there was too much difference in our ages – Elliot and me – anyway it was one of those things and there you are.’
I am easily sorry for people and there may, perhaps, have been some sort of preoccupied expression of pity on my face to show that I was touched by what I had heard, because she said:
‘You’re terribly sympathetic. I talk too much, don’t I?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘That means I do,’ she said, ‘but I don’t care. I saw all about the birthday in one of the papers. I hope she’ll have a nice birthday. I hope it’ll be nice. Will you be there?’
I told her everybody would be there.
‘All except me,’ she said. ‘I shan’t be there. But you might think of me if you can spare a moment, will you?’
I promised to think of her. All this time, as she grew warmer, drowsier, and more unthinking, more and more like some cosy inanimate object or, as she said herself, like a warming-pan ready for the bed, I caught inflections of her voice that, deep and throaty and disturbing, were so like Lydia’s that if it had been dark I felt I might have reached out and touched her hands.
‘Well, I must push off,’ she said. ‘What time would there be a train?’
I looked at the mantel-clock and said: ‘The next is at seven-thirteen. You’ve got eighteen minutes.’
‘Does that connect?’
‘Where for?’ I said.
‘London.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they all connect for London. Sooner or later.’
She laughed. ‘Just got time to have another,’ she said. Then, not laughing but rather wearily looking at me from eyes that had begun to puff a little underneath with red-striped snail-like bags, ‘One-eyed hole, isn’t it?’
I supposed she meant the town and I said yes, it was a one-eyed hole.
‘What sort of life does the girl lead?’ she said. ‘Wrapped up? Cotton wool – you know?’
‘No. They like her to be free,’ I said. ‘They’ve been very good about that. They didn’t want her to grow up like –’
‘Like me,’ she said. ‘That’s what they didn’t want her to grow up like.’
In this moment much of what had been sometimes a little confused about that winter evening at the Aspen house, when I had first met Lydia, became more clear. There had been, that night, among all the flusterings over onion soup and port and the talk of skating, more than a little fear.
Ten minutes later I took her to the station. We had two or three minutes to wait on the platform and I thought, as she stood first on one foot and then on another, that she seemed uneasy and worried and more than a little tired. Even when she stopped moving from one foot to another she wavered a little and could not stand quite still. Then suddenly she put her hand on one of mine, as she had done in the hotel, and said:
‘You won’t say anything about this? I don’t want anything said about this.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Now, no monkey business,’ she said. She turned on me a pair of eyes that were quite fierce in their black determination. ‘I mean what I say. When I say “I don’t want anything” I mean I don’t want anything.’ That too was exactly like Lydia. ‘Keep it to yourself,’ she said. ‘See? I know what towns like this are.’
I knew too; and I squeezed her hand.
‘You’re rather a dear. You’re rather sweet,’ she said and I was flattered.
At that moment the train came in. There was a good deal of shouting and banging, with a big blast of steam as the engine came under the bridge, and at this moment she chose to say:
‘You know, I think I could rather –’
What it was she was going to say I never knew. Steam and banging doors and porters’ barrows drowned the rest of her words. A moment or two later I had opened a door for her and she was standing inside the carriage, leaning out of the window, to say goodbye.
‘Nice to meet you,’ she said ‘God bless.’
She started to take off her gloves. Then she took off her hat and threw it on to the rack, revealing a mass of hair as dark as Lydia’s. The hat fell off the rack and her eyes bulged, I thought for a moment with possible tears, as she picked it up and said:
‘There goes my Sunday best. Never have another.’
I hoped she would not cry; and, to my great relief, she did not cry. She put a hand in one of mine instead. ‘It’s been, well – you know –’ She brushed her other hand once or twice through her hair – ‘Well, you know – rather nice. God bless,’ and then the train began to move away.
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Goodbye –’
At the last moment she laughed weakly, with trembling mouth. Her grey glove blew a final waving kiss at me.
I never saw her again; but I was glad that I had seen her because later, indirectly, in a way I did not grasp to its fullness at the time, the sight of that drowsy, uneasy, tearless face helped to enlarge my understanding.
Chapter Six
There was a moment on the evening of Lydia’s birthday, about nine o’clock, on the steps of the terrace, when I thought she was going to lead off the dance with me, in front of what seemed to be the whole of Evensford, waiting on the lawns below. To my relief she led off with Rollo instead.
It was like summer that evening; the air was beautifully soft and mild. Under the light of the house and the terrace, where festoons of coloured lamps were burning, the faces of people glowed like flowers against a dark background of full-leafed trees broken by chestnuts still in full blossom and laburnums that had already spilled into lemon tassels of flower. I think someone, that day, or perhaps the previous day, had cut an early field of clover just beyond the outskirts of the park. All evening the fragrance of it hung over us, still and delicate as we danced on t
he lawns. There was a great scent of lilac too and gradually, as the evening went on, the smell of crushed grass bruised under the feet of dancers. As this smell of bruised grass grew thicker and thicker I felt more and more excited.
Earlier in the day, as I went up to the house, about an hour before the party began, I met the Aspen doctor walking down the drive. He was a dryish man with the French-sounding name of Morat who was really Scotch.
‘Is it Miss Juliana again?’ I said.
He said he was awfully afraid so; and when I asked him what was wrong with her, he said:
‘Her heart. The old regulator isn’t set quite fast enough.’
I said that she always gave the impression of being a woman of terrific vitality.
‘Women are deceptive,’ he said. He looked at me with humourless sagacity. ‘You think they’re this and you think they’re that and all the time they’re the damn t’other.’
‘Will she be well enough for the party?’
‘What party she has she’ll have in bed,’ he said, ‘and if she doesn’t she’ll have it in a box.’
He walked away; and then, ten yards off, turned and said:
‘By the way, old Johnson died this morning. You knew him, didn’t you? Been expecting it –’ And I said how sorry I was.
When Miss Juliana came downstairs at precisely six o’clock that evening, dressed in a long silk dress of fuchsia purple, her favourite colour, with a large double necklace of deep violet amethysts set in pinchbeck to match, she looked rosy and assertive. She seemed in every way totally unlike a woman whose heart is tired.
‘You may take me round the garden,’ she said, – I had arrived early because I wanted to see Lydia before it all began – ‘Bertie and Lydia are still dressing. Where are your friends? Aren’t we supposed to begin at six? What do you think the weather is going to do?’
I had learned, now, the trick of not answering these vitally ejected questions. She took my arm. Slowly we walked into the gardens, where clumps of yellow and purple and coppery-golden iris were in bloom. She herself smelled of violets. A large white marquee with scallopings of scarlet and a scarlet flag had been erected on the far side of the front lawn, between two cedar trees. Lilac was in bloom, pale and dark and pure white, on all sides of us, and she said:
