by H. E. Bates
‘I think so –’
‘You think so, man. You ought to know. You ought to know that she’s been down to the bottom of the pit – God, man, you ought to realize that she’s got nobody but you and that taxi fellow. She’s got nobody else in the world – don’t you grasp that?’
It was as if I grasped it, I thought, for the first time.
‘It’s time you woke up to that, don’t you think so?’ he said. He gave me a series of piercing and condemnatory looks, searching my face, and when he stopped suddenly after saying, ‘You see, you – you could –’ I knew what it was he was trying, with so much difficulty, to say. I knew that he was asking me to give her, in some way, an outward expression of love. He stood breaking into minute particles a young rhododendron leaf, cracking it with his fingers. There was a curious feeling in the air of a question he had not actually framed in words. A barrier of stubbornness, really a barrier against feelings unbearably broken, seemed to grow suddenly stiffer inside me. I remembered how I had been so much in love that I could not eat for happiness; and how I had been so much hurt when love had been taken away that I had wanted loneliness because it was the only bearable thing. I could not explain all this. I felt only a screen of protection rise and harden inside myself against the possible renewal of deeper, harsher pain.
Perhaps he saw that I was choked by difficulties I could not express. Perhaps he saw it simply as an example of some tiresome youthful obtuseness that needed sternly rebuking: I don’t know. But suddenly he tossed the ripped fragments of rhododendron leaf into the air and said quite brutally:
‘Look. I’ll tell you this. I warn you. Clearly and plainly. If she doesn’t get the thing she wants – if something doesn’t happen soon – she won’t be there when you come up one day. Good God, man – can’t you see that it isn’t simply a question of some bloody organic adjustment?’
Savagely he plucked another rhododrendron leaf and began to crush it in his fingers and then threw it down, apologizing:
‘I’m sorry, old man. I blow up easily about these things. I’m most awfully sorry.’ He stuffed both hands with affecting awkwardness into his trouser pockets, kicking at the grass with his feet. ‘You can come up every day – whenever you like. Come and go. I’ll tell the nurses. You can come and go when you like and stay as long as you like. Never mind about anybody or anything – will you?’
I hesitated. I thought of Blackie, so mutely bound up in love for her that he became articulate only through the disintegration of mechanical things, of his limousine, his gaskets. He had nothing to offer but that. I thought I saw him suddenly as a personification of myself as I had been: wonderfully in love with a cold, fragrant face in the snow, with a young body in a hot summer bedroom. I knew, because it had happened to me, the kind of laceration he would know if, one way or the other, she were taken away from him: and how, unlike me, he would never be able to explain it all and never know why.
This too was something I could not bear to happen, and I said:
‘I’ll come as often as I can.’
‘I’m glad we had this talk,’ he said, as if suddenly everything were straightened and simplified.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There’s going to be a big dance here for the New Year. Let’s see if we can work her up to that, shall we? Make it the sort of goal – the deadline?’
The expression did not seem to me the happiest he could have used: but he was so pleased with the success of his talk that he did not notice it.
‘You used to be awfully fond of dancing, I believe, didn’t you? I think it’s rather an idea to work her back to that, don’t you?’
I said yes, and then as we walked back to the avenue I asked:
‘There’s just one other thing. Could she go for a drive? Johnson has his limousine. It’s pretty warm. I think that would do her good.’
‘Drive? – of course, anything. Let’s aim for the drive first and then the dancing,’ he said. His eyes were more cheerful and friendly with the exuberance of success. ‘Anything that’s real and positive. Anything that’s going to make the future real and living for her. The future – that’s what we have to have in mind.’
After that, as I promised, I saw her as often as I could. The autumn was long and soft, with days that cleared through pale apricot mists into delicate half-summery afternoons. She sat a good deal in the sun. A crop of walnuts fell into the damp, lush grass about the huts and the air was so quiet sometimes that we could hear the crack of squirrels’ teeth gnawing them among bushes of faded fawn-feathered michaelmas daisy and lilacs that had already lost their leaves. I brought to her almost exactly the tenderness of the shortening afternoons: warm and gentle and restrained and remotely shot through by the feeling of the half-lost heat of summer. There was hardly a day with cloud. In Evensford itself some of the feeling of gauntness, the skeletonizing of faces imperilled by the exhausting summer and the slump, lifted, leaving a sharp bright pause before winter. It was possible, up there, above the town, as the leaves turned and rained down and made flat patterns of yellow and coppery orange and all the colours of November in the grass, to feel, as at the Aspen house, that the town did not exist, that you were far away in clear, undesecrated country.
By the end of November she could walk about the hut. On the last Sunday of the month Blackie and I walked for a short distance, one on each side of her, up and down the path outside. She wore a long crimson dressing-gown and she kept saying:
‘It’s to hide my legs. They’re so hideous – they’re like match-sticks. I can’t bear anyone to see them any more.’
Blackie’s wonder at all this was inexpressible – inexpressible, that is, except by some reference to the inevitable limousine.
‘It’s like new. You wouldn’t know it. You wouldn’t know it, you really wouldn’t know it was the same job,’ he kept saying, with that unbearable lumbering repetitiveness of his. ‘Come down and see it, Mr Richardson. I’m going to have it photographed. For the hire work. Come down and see it one day.’
‘Yes, do,’ Lydia said. ‘He’s so proud of it. Go down.’
So I went down on a day in early December to Blackie’s garage, where I saw the car. They say that genius lets grass and weeds and moss and rust grow on the fabric of ordinary existence while it concentrates, in blind and sublime exclusion, on the single burnished jewel it is in process of creating.
With the old limousine Blackie had done the thing genius is supposed to do. It stood like a burnished and glittering hearse in a world of sordid dereliction. It seemed to flower, blue and chromium, from ghastly wastes of junk. All about it were still unobliterated scars of fire that had destroyed the landaus, the brakes, and the old carriage shed. The yard was littered with the piled wreckage of cars bought for scrap and left to rust, as if dropped and crushed by tornados, where they were. There was a shabbiness, an oily, mouldering junkyard decay over which town-cats pursued each other like scrawny tigers in a jungle of felled and desolate chassis.
But in the centre the limousine, in which old Johnson had so often tucked us up like a coachman at dances, stood refurbished and pristine.
Blackie touched it continually with his hands. Affectionately, with pride, brushing off the prints of his fingers with the sleeve of his jacket, he said:
‘Never know it, would you?’ He said this, I think, thirty or forty times. ‘Look at the inside, Mr Richardson. Like new. You’d never know. I’d like the old dad to see it. He’d never know it. He’d have a shock.’
The processes of this single-minded pride in a miracle of transformation began to wear so hard on me that I was relieved, at last, when he invited me into the house to have a cup of tea.
We drank it in the kitchen, on a bare deal table uncleared since breakfast, from a grey-blue enamel teapot and two saucerless cups, his own without a handle. His stepmother had died earlier that year and he kept explaining:
‘Mrs Meadows comes in from next door sometimes – does me up a bit. But it’s not as if ther
e was anybody here all the time. But I’ll get round to it a bit better now – now I’ve done the job.’
A smell of gas from old burners lingered acridly on air already clogged with the odours of stale grease and of petrol from the pump outside.
‘It’s not a bad old place,’ he said. ‘Good position too. Cars come by in hundreds. In a week thousands of cars come by – at the end of the town too, where you can catch them. Where you want to be.’
By the time I had finished my tea the dream had encroached again:
‘Just one thing I forgot to show you,’ he said. He dragged me joyfully back to the furbished chariot. It was to be photographed that afternoon, and as we went into the yard he held his hands out several times, flatly, to the sky, afraid of rain.
‘There you are,’ he said. He opened the back door, revealing an interior of spotless spaciousness in which, by each side window, were chromium goblets I had not noticed before.
‘For flowers,’ he said, and I knew that that was the peak, the crown of it all.
Before Lydia rode out in this chariot – he was going to turn down flat, he kept saying, every other job that came along, simply because he wanted her to be the first to ride in it – Miss Aspen died. A cortège, consisting of Rollo, alone, florid as if rawly bruised, in a solitary family coach, and then a few dignitaries of the town in other coaches, went through a smoky December silence of factory streets to a cemetery shabby with wet chrysanthemums. There were many wreaths. I saw Bretherton, coughing, mackintoshed, greasy-hatted, scrambling and treading about them, scribbling his notes for a piece about the last of Evensford’s aristocracy. Behind the tones of the burial service came a continuous cough, hard and harsh, of factory engines, and above the flowers a smell of leather hung in the air.
Lydia took the death of her aunt very quietly. In a meditative way that offered me the first notion that the Aspen sisters had been like two trees, overshadowing, protecting, and keeping each other up, she said:
‘She never had anybody to prop her up again. She never got over that.’ And then: ‘Now there’s only Rollo and me. And there very nearly wasn’t me.’
A week later the weather turned very cold, and the valley was covered with snow.
Chapter Four
For four days snowless dusty winds blew up the valley, dark with ice, freezing shallow furrowed tongues of water about the marshlands. The last of the leaves were down. The sky held its snow away from us, in a northern bank, grey like a blight, and then gradually the wind began to fall away. As it fell it left a sky solid with iron-coloured cloud that thickened without movement and was very quiet, without the whipping of dust among the blown fish papers and the last shrivelled leaves of Evensford’s gutters.
Snow began to fall on the morning of the day we were to take Lydia for her first outing. It fell for about two hours, in a thick silent flurried storm that transfigured everything by noon. Then suddenly it stopped; the sky had across it a pale yellow rent that folded back and became a lofty tender blue. By one o’clock the sun was shining. There was a great sparkling everywhere of blue-white branches and patterned fences and high-crowned shrubs in street gardens, everything transformed. It was suddenly no longer cold and on a thin smooth layer of snow the sun was dazzling.
When we drove away from the sanatorium about two o’clock, out into the country, there was almost a touch of reverence about the departure largely because Blackie was so overwhelmed by it that he could hardly speak to us. He seemed to become invested, that day, with some of the old courtesies of his father. He stood by the limousine with folded rugs on his arms, decent and awed and solid and immensely proud.
He insisted that Lydia and I should sit at the back of the car, and he tucked us up there, as his father used to do, with elaborate care, under four or five rugs, fussing continually.
‘You’re sure you’re all right? You’re sure you don’t feel any cold? Tell me if you feel any cold. You make her tell me if she’s cold, won’t you Mr Richardson?’ he said, ‘because the one thing she mustn’t do is to get cold.’
‘I can feel the sun through the glass already,’ she said.
From somewhere he had managed to find a bunch or two of violets, which he had arranged in the chromium tubes by the back windows of the limousine. The scent of them was lovely in the air and with it was a delicate softness of the perfume she was using and the powder she had put on her face.
‘Now, where would you like to go?’ he said. Even his smile had a sort of stiffness about it. ‘You tell me where. I won’t drive fast. You needn’t have any fear. The snow won’t hurt – there’s nothing to worry about with the snow. Where would you like me to take you?’
‘Just anywhere,’ she said. ‘Just go anywhere. If we see something we like very much we can stop –’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive steady out into the country. You needn’t worry. And don’t get cold. You’re sure you’ve got enough rugs? Don’t get cold.’
The sun was warm on the glass of the limousine as we drove away into a countryside light with fresh-fallen snow, under trees that dropped, through the warmer afternoon air, floating bobs of whiteness in shaken little blizzards that gradually left everywhere a clearer skeleton of branches. Bullocks blew snowy steam above yellow piles of hay in farmyards. There was a wonderful diffusion of snow-light on the shining car, the violets, and the red silk scarf one of the nurses had lent Lydia to tie over her head.
‘Warm enough?’ Blackie pushed back the glass division behind the driving-seat and in proud anxiety looked back at us. ‘Not feeling cold, Mr Richardson, is she?’
‘You’re not cold?’ I said to her, ‘are you?’
‘Feel of me,’ she said, and I put my hand under the rug and felt of her hands. They were very warm, and as I touched them she caught my own and would not let me draw them away.
‘She’s melting already,’ I said. He laughed with a wonderful satisfaction as he closed the glass division and left us alone again and shut away.
‘What made you say that?’ she said. ‘Because that’s how I feel – melting and warm after being frozen up. Thawing out and living again. You don’t know what it is to feel like that, do you?’
‘No.’
‘It feels very wonderful,’ she said.
We passed flocks of grey geese that, as they snouted and burrowed about the snow, looked almost black-feathered against the glittering pure whiteness of otherwise deserted fields.
‘It will soon be Christmas,’ she said. ‘If the geese escape they’ll feel like I do – it isn’t nice to be a goose, is it? or it wouldn’t be if you knew you were one – what am I saying?’ She laughed in gay, brittle tremors. ‘I was a goose anyway. It wasn’t nice and they nearly killed me.’
I held her hands under the rug, letting her talk as she wanted.
‘When you’ve nearly died once it’s funny how it doesn’t frighten you so much again,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’
I did not know that either.
‘Well, it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘I should have thought you’d have known. You were always so good at knowing how people felt – you had a way of guessing.’
I could not answer: it seemed to me that I had made more mistaken guesses about her, perhaps, than anyone living.
‘Anyway you hold my hand very nicely.’ She squeezed me impulsively, with a rush of tenderness, under the rug. ‘You do that very well.’
We drove on at a dead slow pace into narrower lanes, between high-piled hedges of snow, where no other vehicles had been. Under the car wheels the snow crackled beautifully, with a sharp nutty sound.
‘All we really need to make it perfect is a sleigh with horses and bells and that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘Then we could imagine –’
‘You’ve got a chariot,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t imagine anything nicer than that.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she said, but Blackie at that moment pushed back the glass division and said:
‘Tell me if
you get tired, won’t you? Tell me when you feel you’ve had enough and don’t want to go any further.’
‘Oh! we’ve hardly started –’
‘You mustn’t overdo it,’ he said.
We passed two small boys and a dog racing about a frozen pond, under a farm wall. I could hear the boys shouting and the dog, as it slithered over the ice, barking excited and sharp in the still afternoon.
‘There’ll be skating,’ she said. ‘That would be wonderful – skating for Christmas. Everybody loves the idea of skating for Christmas. Everybody waits for it and it hardly ever comes.’
We came to a small hill where the road made a passage between spinneys of oak and hazel above the valley of a brook. The delicate branches of hazel, fingered already with pale stiff catkins, were snowless under the high protective screen of oaks. Where the sun caught them the catkins were pale greenish-yellow, almost spring-like, and I could see primrose leaves piercing a crust of snowy oak-leaf under thin blue shadows. The hill was not very steep but Blackie put the car into lower gear, driving with a new excess of caution, so that we crept down into the valley at less than walking pace, the ghostly, glittering chariot making hardly a sound in the closed avenue of hazels.
Then we were clear of the woods and suddenly, delicate and transfigured and untouched, the river valley of snow-meadows, with small lakes of frozen flood water lying darker about it, was there below us. It appeared so suddenly and was so, beautiful, full in sun, the snow deep blue below the paler blue of sky and between the tawny-purple lips of frosty horizons, that she sat bolt upright in her seat and let go my hands.
‘Oh! stop – let’s stop here! That’s so lovely –’
He stopped the car immediately, gently, and then slid back the partition to ask:
‘Nothing wrong is there? You’re all right? – not too cold?’
‘Oh! there’s ice by the brook,’ she said, ‘You can see where the birds have been across it – we ought to see if it bears – we really ought to see –’
