Love for Lydia

by H. E. Bates

  I opened my arms, letting her go. She sprang away from me, shaking her hair. With bitterness I said:

  ‘You’re twenty-one now. You can please yourself now, of course – it’s all yours.’

  She went out of the room, not speaking. I heard her running downstairs. I stood by the window and did not go after her. Down below, from across the lawns, people were crowding up towards the terrace, singing and laughing and calling her name. I could see their faces in the terrace lights, like greenish flowers upturned.

  ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow,’ they were singing. I felt myself trying to grasp at something that, like the smell of clover, was beautiful but not tangible; it was sweet and young and in the darkness it was floating away. ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow – which nobody can deny –’

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  I was never certain if Juliana ever spoke to Lydia; it could have made no difference if she had. Three mornings later, on the last day of May, she woke, sat up and reached out across the bed, presumably for the knob of the old-fashioned bell-pull above the commode. Her hand never reached the bell. The maid, bringing in her early morning tea ten minutes later, found her, one arm still outstretched, dead where she lay.

  The two Aspen sisters strike me sometimes as having been like two trees that grow up too closely together; the stronger seems to overshadow the weaker, taking strength and light away. Then the weaker falls down; then suddenly it seems as if, after all, it was the weaker that really gave protection to the strong; and presently, exposed and bared, the strong too falls down. Miss Bertie, in the same way, never recovered from the death of her sister. What I had taken, or mistaken, for strength and clarity and firmness, as against the rhetorical flutterings and the beautifying ugliness of the large long-toothed mouth, were really only comparative virtues. When the object of comparison had gone Miss Bertie seemed just as irresolute, just as vague and, as it turned out, just as helpless as Juliana had been.

  Presently, for this reason, a change came over Rollo: perhaps not so much a change as a shifting of attitude. He came suddenly forward out of an obscurity in which his sisters, together, had been able to keep him. Again it was a question of qualities that were comparative. He had seemed like a weak and futile person, with all the vacuities of the inbred, simply because the sisters, so monolithic and garrulous and dominant in their different ways, had kept him overshadowed. He was a man too who had spent his inheritance. He had been forced to eat, over the years, in the form of a strict and meagre monthly allowance, a great deal of humble pie. If he had never seemed to resent this it may possibly have been because he hoped that, in due course, death would help him. The sisters would leave him something. If they did not leave him something then one of them would leave it to the other; and in due course it would come to him. This must have been the reasoning that had kept him, over the years, so evidently cowed and subdued, the family weakling, shooting his pheasants, railing against shoemaker poachers, totting steadily at his whisky, and keeping his friend in Corporation Street: a man who had made up his mind, in a simple way, that he had little to do but wait, reasonably behave himself and hope to survive.

  Then Lydia came. There had never been a sign that he disliked her; or even that he openly resented her. He mostly behaved with decent avuncular attention, bantering and chaffing her sometimes with semi-aristocratic fatuities, mostly in such things as hiding love-notes from me by slipping them between two pieces of toast in the huge Victorian silver rack at breakfast and then solemnly offering her toast and laughing like a braying camel when the note dropped out. All these seemed like the natural pleasantries of a man of limited if not backward mind.

  This is how I saw him. It was typical of Lydia that she saw him in quite another way. When, after the death of Juliana, he seemed to emerge from futile obscurity, stronger and larger, I was surprised. But Lydia was not. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is what he’s been waiting for.’

  After the death of her aunt, Lydia too emerged; she stepped into another stage of her growing-up. Now, as I look back, I am amazed to think that I did not see that she and Rollo were, in a number of things, rather like each other. Both were persons of feeling who really did not think about their actions. If I did not recognize these qualities then it can only have been because I was stupefied by affection for Lydia and biassed, as it turned out, by dislike of Rollo.

  For a short time after the death of Juliana I did not notice anything of this. Then I became aware of a series of pin-pricks, little jabs of unsubtle sarcasm, whenever Rollo met me.

  He had evidently laboured heavily on things like ‘Ha, here comes the fair and dashing suitor – how’s the suiting going, old boy?’ and ‘How are things in the world of the light fantastic? – all fair in love and war still, I suppose, eh?’ and then, about three weeks after Juliana’s death, as I met him one day across the park:

  ‘Hullo, old sport.’ I felt the hairs in the nape of my neck tingle fiercely as he called me this. ‘How’s the rivalry? – how’s the old suitor bearing up under the competition?’

  This seemed to me hardly worth answering, but I said:

  ‘What rivalry and what competition?’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘You mean they keep it from you?’

  I did not ask what had been kept from me, and he said:

  ‘Oh! my error. My error.’

  At this point I tried to go. He said something about not rushing off in such a plum awful hurry and he lifted very slightly the barrel of the gun he was carrying.

  ‘Damn pity you don’t shoot, old boy. Hell of a lot of vermin about. Never had so much. Eat up the ears of corn and all that, you know. Mustn’t let them eat up the ears of corn, must we?’

  I said something about a few ears more or less not mattering very much and he said:

  ‘Just where you’re wrong, old boy, just where you’re wrong. The corn’s got little ears and the little pigs’ve got big ears’ – I could not think what on earth he was driving at – ‘and when you get too many ears after too many ears –’ even he seemed to get entangled now with his stumbling subtleties and finally gave up with the profound remark:

  ‘Ah! well, everything comes to him who waits, they say, don’t they?’

  ‘In that case I won’t wait,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ he said. ‘No? Damn pity.’ He laughed with a curious hardness not meant to show amusement. ‘Well, I suppose love won’t wait, either, will it? No?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No, but it pursues pretty damn hard sometimes, doesn’t it?’ he said and in the face of that cutting subtlety, much too profound for me, I walked away.

  Later that same day I walked in the garden with Miss Bertie. She confused, I noticed, the names of two species of viburnum, now coming into flower on the walls in rosettes of sterile ivory, that she ought to have known. She stood too for a long time before a plant of Mexican orange blossom, filling the June air with too-thick scent, and finally pointed at it a confused and labouring finger:

  ‘What is this plant?’ she said. ‘For the life of me I can’t remember – names have begun to go clean out of my head.’

  As we walked vaguely on together she mentioned Juliana several times by name. She said she found the days unbearably hot. It was really a day of clear, breezy warmth, not at all oppressive, but I felt her grunting beside me in spasmodic struggles to get her breath. Her tendency to mention Juliana by name increased as we walked on; and all at once I grasped that she was under the illusion that Juliana was not dead. It even occurred to me that she thought I was Juliana, because suddenly she said:

  ‘Did you hear Lydia and Rollo having words again after breakfast? They were at it again last night too – it’s awfully distressing, that sort of thing, I can’t bear it. We never had it before and I can’t bear it now.’

  I did not know what to say, and she went on:

  ‘He brought the most monstrous accusations about all sorts of things. Well – not exactly accusations. He ta
unts her. He’s begun to be unbearably sarcastic’

  Out of her obscure reflections she suddenly emerged clearheaded. She stopped on the path, realizing who I was.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ she said. Her voice was slow and deliberate. She gazed straight at me with eyes of tired, pellucid grey. ‘Have you asked Lydia to marry you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And what did she say?’

  I told her what Lydia had said. She looked down at her feet while listening to me. Her hands, larger than Miss Juliana’s, were knotty with bulbous slate-coloured veins as they wrapped themselves about the crook of her stick.

  ‘Are you going to ask her again?’

  ‘Don’t you wish me to?’ I said.

  ‘I wish you to very much.’

  I was not sure if I wanted to ask her again; I was proud and I dreaded the notion that she would hurt me. So I did not speak, and that made Miss Bertie say, in one of those moments of tactfulness that can be more wounding than pure bluntness:

  ‘If I were you I should ask her again – before it’s too late,’ she said.

  I could not speak. Her face widened with distressing brightness as she said:

  ‘I’ve just remembered the name of that shrub. It’s hibiscus something or other. It’s that nice white hibiscus. Odd how you sometimes can’t grasp these things –’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I did not tell her that it was not hibiscus.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Hibiscus. It’s so maddening when a simple thing like that eludes you. It’s the most maddening thing in the world not to be able to grasp a thing you know all the time.’

  Her eyes sought waterily to focus themselves on distances of burning chestnut-flower and oak across the park. Her mouth opened to gasp at air drenched with the thick sweetness of summer.

  ‘It’s awful how sometimes,’ she began and then stopped. ‘Shall we go back?’

  We went back.

  Three days later the six of us – Tom and Nancy, Alex and his mother, Lydia and myself – danced together for the last time.

  The great house at Ashby is not quite a castle; its grandeur is in its remoteness. Nothing stands to molest or overlook or embarrass it in more than a thousand acres of unbroken pasture. The road runs through it through a series of iron swing gates, across bare open fields. It is – or was then – a great self-contained unit of husbandry and servility and wealth and earthly splendour where beef grew easily fat and cream came plentifully as water to larder and table and where peaches ripened to perfect beauty on walls of yellowing stone, above which the level eyes of two hundred windows stared blindly out, across fat sleepy pastures, towards a world it could not see and did not need,

  The night we danced there all the gates across the fields were open, each with a coach-lantern on the side-posts. Cars with their headlights threaded across the dusk of midsummer fields like lethargic processions of gliding fireflies. Even from the first four gates there was no sign of the house and it was only when we came suddenly round a bend in the road by the fifth gate that all of us saw the colossal lighted rectangle blazing out across the fields, all its lawns bathed in golden electric light, and Nancy cried out:

  ‘Oh! it’s like an island! Exactly like an island you see from a ship at sea.’ The house seemed to float in tiers of illuminated decks on dark water. ‘Oh! Stop. Lydia – ask him to stop. Just for a moment so that we can see –’

  Lydia leaned forward, pushing back the sliding glass division of the limousine. ‘Stop a moment, will you?’ Her voice was level and quiet. I saw Blackie’s face turn, quiet too, with deference, above the dashlight.

  ‘Yes, Miss Aspen,’ he said.

  I had never heard him call her Miss Aspen before. He sat patient, unaloof, his hand on the wheel. Nancy, excited, said again how like a ship the house was and Mrs Sanderson said if only the evening was as lovely it would be the most wonderful thing we had ever done together.

  We sat for some seconds longer staring at the lighted house. I suddenly felt all my frustrated happiness with Lydia begin to reignite itself in a series of exciting little fires, creating one large tender illumination, about the tiers of glowing windows. There seemed, I felt, to be a spell on things, and then Alex said:

  ‘Car coming up. We’d better move on.’

  ‘You can drive on now,’ Lydia said through the open division.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ Blackie said.

  I caught the glow of her face in the dashlight. At the house, in the large long central hall already crowded with people, I could not wait to dance with her. She danced quietly, almost reticently. She did not speak to me much, and I was glad. The spell of elation, begun by Nancy in her first excitement at seeing the great lighted house across the fields, lasted through three dances before I realized they had gone. Lydia seemed to wake too and said:

  ‘Don’t you think you should dance with Nancy? The poor girl is sitting out there like a flopped wallflower.’

  I did not want to dance with Nancy.

  ‘Be a dear and go and dance with her,’ Lydia said.

  ‘The dance after the next,’ I said.

  ‘After this one. Will you? Don’t make her unhappy.’

  I swung her round, feeling the smooth curve of her thigh against me. ‘You will, won’t you?’ she said. As she lifted her face at me the eyes were shadowless.

  ‘Don’t make her unhappy,’ she said again. ‘She was so excited when she saw that house – ‘I could have cried for her. Have the next dance with her, will you? For me?’

  ‘Only for you,’ I said. ‘Not for Nancy.’

  ‘That sounds selfish,’ she said. ‘It’s not like you to be selfish.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be selfish.’

  ‘Then don’t be,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

  All the delicate distant fires I had seen at the house windows seemed again to prance about in my head, firing and illuminating me with happiness. It was like being back, I thought, in the summer of the year before, in the summer-house across the park, lost among birch and bracken, in a world of mown hay and sunlight and partridge chickens hiding in the grass. Everything then had seemed to have on it a bloom of simplicity; there had been no complication to upset us as we discovered each other. Now the bloom, like the spell of the house, seemed to have redescended on us, and I said:

  ‘All right. Just for you. And because I love you.’

  ‘You mustn’t love me.’

  ‘I shall love you till my bones rot,’ I said.

  ‘It’s sweet to hear you say it but all the same you mustn’t. Spare a little for Nancy.’

  She said this with a gentle cooing sort of delicacy, smiling up at me.

  ‘You’re much happier if you make other people happy,’ she said.

  ‘That sounds like a text hung on a bedroom wall.’

  ‘Well it isn’t. It’s true and I discovered it.’

  ‘How?’ Elated, I mocked her a little, but there was no response.

  ‘Never mind now,’ was all she said. ‘Just go and dance with Nancy.’

  But when, at the end of the dance, I went to find Nancy it was only to discover her eating strawberry ice-cream with Alex, and she danced the next one with him. Over his shoulder Alex said something about having a private word with me afterwards, and I heard Nancy say, ‘Oh! shut up and dance. You and your private words. You’re always jawing, you two.’ So I danced with Mrs Sanderson, who said:

  ‘To what do I owe this immense, sudden, free-gratis-and-for-nothing honour?’

  I had neglected her too. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I really had no chance,’ she said. ‘I’ve been chased all evening by a master of fox hounds who actually called me a little vixen –’

  ‘Heavens, this is a tango,’ I said.

  ‘Now I know why your feet are crossed like knitting needles – would you rather sit out?’

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  The tango was something I had never mastered. After I had found
her a glass of claret cup we walked outside, into a crescent-shaped ante-room where guests were standing about in groups, eating supper.

  ‘Not in here,’ she said. ‘There’s my vixen friend.’

  We sat eventually on a long seat of petit-point needlework at the foot of the main staircase. The petit-point is clear in my mind because, all the time we talked, she ran her left hand flatly across it, over and over again, as if she were apprehensive about something.

  Then suddenly she said: ‘I suppose you heard about Blackie?’

  I had not heard about Blackie; and perhaps a little peremptorily I said: ‘What about Blackie?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t hear about the fire?’

  How exactly like me it was, I thought, not to hear about a fire.

  ‘He had a fire in the back stables this week. All the old landaus and wagonettes and things were burned. All those old wooden stables and things went up like touchwood. He lost nearly everything except the limousine.’

  ‘And no insurance,’ I said. I felt a spasm of regret at the destruction, at last, of all that was left of old Johnson’s charming, straw-stuffed world. ‘There never is.’

  ‘No, there wasn’t,’ she said.

  I did not say much; I was less sorry for Blackie than for the memory of Johnson and the charred world of landaus and brakes and the Schneider sleeping under the martins’ nests. Then she ran her hand across the petit-point and said:

  ‘I’d like another drink – would you? Find something that’s recognizably alcoholic – this is neither claret nor cup.’

  I went out and came back with champagne, which she welcomed. She drank it rather quickly and said:

  ‘I’m a bit worried about something – Lydia has lent him money to start up again.’

  ‘Good God,’ I said. I felt a little sick.

  ‘The trouble is I feel partly responsible.’ Now that she had begun to tell me what was in her mind her hands were motionless, tightly clasping her glass. ‘You see she came to Alex and asked his advice about it. That was sensible enough. And Alex said “Yes.” But I think he did it more because of –’