by H. E. Bates
‘I’ll go,’ he said, ‘I’ll go.’
He was out of the car instantly, plodding across snowy verges into the meadow where a small tributary brook ran and where, for a space of fifty or sixty yards, a patch of flood water had frozen between dark islands of sedge.
‘I’ll try it too,’ I said, but suddenly she kept me back, holding my hand again, in a new rush of tenderness, under the rug. A wave of disturbed feeling, tender too but troubled and complicated by something she could not express, came over her face and remained there. She could not disentangle it; and suddenly, as if it were the scarf that were bothering her, she pulled it back from her face and let it fall away, leaving her hair free.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I wanted to ask you something – are you happy?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Terribly happy? As happy as you ever were or could be or wanted to be – happy in that way?’
I could not look at her face. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Blackie, big and cautious, trying the edges of the ice pool with the toes of his shoes.
‘I wanted to ask you that – because you seemed a little strange or something. I can’t explain how it was –’
‘It’s been lovely,’ I said.
‘I kept having a queer feeling that some part of you wasn’t here,’ she said. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
From the meadow the sound of ice cracking and splintering came with a sort of thin exhilaration on the air. I looked out to see Blackie picking his way across the pool, arms outstretched; and as he saw me look he waved back at me.
‘I think it bears,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and see –’
‘I’m coming too,’ she said. ‘Don’t go without me.’
I held her hand while she picked her way through the snowy grass of the roadside. Anxious, tormented that she was acting incautiously or stupidly or that she would fall and hurt herself, Blackie came running across the meadow, from the ice, to hold her by the other hand. She laughed, shaking her dark hair free from her face in the wintry sunlight; her neck was white with the upward reflection of snowlight as she lifted it. There was no other sound in the air but the crunch of shoes in snow and the delicate bubble of brook-water flowing away through fields between banks of snowy, frozen reed.
After we had reached the ice together she suddenly litted her hands free from us and said:
‘Let me go on alone. I want to do it alone,’ and we let her go forward, across the ice, by herself. I saw then how thin her legs were: thin, fleshless, almost straight, unsupple from long illness until now they were as clumsy as they had been on the first day I had taken her skating. She moved so unfreely and stiffly that, like Blackie, I was frightened for a moment or two she would fall down.
‘Be careful! Are you all right? Let me come and help you.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Don’t come. I’m all right. I want to do it alone.’
Like that she walked, almost crept, to the other side of the ice, fifty or sixty yards away. When she got there she turned and threw back her head, laughing, in the sun. Her hair was very dark against the background of snowfields, above the loop of crimson scarf, and she laughed again in a triumphant happy way and called:
‘Come and fetch me, someone!’ and held out her hands.
Blackie did not move and I went with skating movements across the snow-crusted ice to fetch her. She came part of the way to meet me, her hands outstretched. Then as I met her she took my hands, crosswise, and we turned and came with a slow skating motion to where Blackie, on the grass now, stood waiting, watching us, his face faintly concerned.
‘Come on!’ she said. ‘You too, Bert. Come on! – it’s wonderful.’
‘I’m not sure it’ll bear the three of us –’
‘Oh! Of course –’
‘It cracks too much,’ he said. ‘It cracks all over.’
‘If it cracks it bears,’ I said. ‘If it bends it breaks.’
‘I’m not so sure – it seems to bend a bit too,’ he said, and Lydia laughed so much at him standing, hesitant and stiff and troubled, that eventually he crept on again and joined us.
After that we went across the ice several times together, holding hands, and at each turn he said: ‘Don’t overdo it. Don’t get tired,’ and then finally she said:
‘The last time. By myself. Once more – and then we’ll go.’
We stood watching her again as she turned and moved about the ice alone. A sky of pale blue had begun to tone down, above the edges of the horizon, to a blur of rosy apricot that seemed gradually to stain all the upper boundaries of distant fields of snow. As I looked at it and looked at her face, shining and with her hair falling dark and dishevelled and rather long from the thrown-back scarf, I remembered once again the afternoon I had first taken her skating. I remembered her awkwardness and her long awkward dress and the self-consciousness it had all imposed on me; I remembered the rosy apricot of horizons, more bitter then with frost until they became a fierce bronzy orange above the tanneries about the freezing river; I remembered Tom and his appearance of staggered wonder and then afterwards the weeks of skating, the walking home after darkness through streets of frozen snow under lighted shop windows and how she had wanted so much to know about each of them and how desperately and eagerly she had wanted to know about everything and everybody, myself most of all.
As I stood thinking of this she gave a cry across the ice and called:
‘Here I come! Somebody catch me,’ and partly in sheer obedience, partly out of fear, Blackie stepped forward on the ice and held out his hands, waiting for her.
She panted and laughed for a moment as he caught her, and then said:
‘Oh! My legs are like jelly. They won’t hold me – I think I’m going to fall down –’ And she looked for a moment tremulous and a little scared as she rocked on her thin legs and staggered.
‘You’d better carry her, Blackie,’ I said, and in a solemn, bewildered way in which there was no visible hint of whether he was suffering or glad or relieved or burning with wonder or anything else, he picked her up and carried her to the car.
We drove back slowly, in a world of snow freezing to branches under a sky deepening from blue to orange-rose and a final smoky-bronze. There was a great stillness everywhere. Snow no longer floated down through the white half-twilight from the trees. Her hands were warm under the rugs. Her body was quiet and relapsed and tired and she did not talk so much; but once she gave a great sigh from the recesses of the rugs and said:
‘Skating! – that’s something, isn’t it – That means I’m coming on, doesn’t it? And soon I’ll be dancing too. Are you coming to the dance? – you are, aren’t you?’
‘If you want me to.’
‘Of course I want you to. I want it more than anything. You’ll dance with me a lot, will you? Say you will.’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot? – all evening? – as long as my poor legs can hold me?’
‘What about Blackie?’ I said. ‘I think you should ask him too.’
‘I don’t think he dances,’ she said, ‘but I’ll ask him. Of course I will.’
For the last mile Blackie switched on the sidelights of the car; and as we came into the avenue I saw them shining faintly through the twilight on passing tree-trunks, on the gardens and on the snow. Then when he stopped the car and we got out I saw them shining on her scarf, her dark hair, and her face as she stood there for a few moments to say goodbye.
‘Oh! I think I’m going to kiss you both,’ she said suddenly, ‘for taking me. Yes I am – it was so lovely – so lovely and thank you,’ and in what was for him a moment of intolerable and blinding surprise, obliterating everything else, she turned and took his face in her hands and kissed him.
She could not have conceived, as she did so, that she had set a final and irretrievable seal on all his feelings about her: that if they had been fluid and tortuous and merely latent she had suddenly done something to shape them with the stamp of her own. T
here was nothing in his face to indicate that this was so. He merely made a mutely agonized dart towards and into the back of the limousine. I heard him stumbling about there for some moments and while he did so she turned away from the car lights, kissing me on the lips.
‘And goodbye to you,’ she said.
‘Goodbye.’
Her face was warm in the cold air as she put it up to me. Then she kissed me suddenly on the lips, for the second time.
‘Goodbye, darling,’ she said.
He came out from the car a moment later in a confused rush, carrying a rug in one hand and the hastily bunched violets in the other. He put the rug round her shoulders and she took the violets in her hands. In a voice of impossible choking self-conscious bewilderment he said:
‘I nearly forgot them – I didn’t want to do that –’
I let him take her into the building. As I stood waiting for him to come back I looked up, through snow branches, to the sky. It had no colour except the green print of stars. There was no sound in the air. There was a strange frozen emptiness everywhere and I had the feeling, exactly as she had said, that some part of myself had severed itself from me and would never come back.
Chapter Five
Sometimes as we danced together on the last evening of the year she would look up at me and say, ‘Couldn’t you look at me sometimes? Just a bit? Must you always keep your head up there?’ and I would smile at her in turn and apologize, trying lamely to show in my face some expression that seemed spontaneous. But the feeling that I had no love to give her and did not know why, that some part of myself had been driven away, perhaps destroyed forever, and now would not come back, was behind everything I did and felt and said. And it was made more difficult not only because I could not explain it. I knew that, in her excitement, she did not know it was there.
‘I think not more than half a dozen dances,’ Baird had warned her, and she said promptly:
‘And just for that you’ll only get one of them.’
‘And none after midnight.’
‘I shall do exactly as I like,’ she said. ‘In any case you’ll be so busy with Nora you’ll never know.’
‘My spies will be watching,’ he said.
But she took notice of him; and in a gay-coloured room where dancers rustled through fallen streamers with a kind of long dry whisper we did not dance much. We shared a table with Baird and Nora. All the time Blackie was watchfully attendant in the blue serge suit he always wore on Sundays, a steadfast bemused smile on his face as he drank the champagne Baird had been good enough to provide and waited, like a dog waiting to be taken for a run, for his turn to dance with her.
There was a great happiness in his face whenever she threw him a crumb of conversation, and sometimes I actually thought his mouth, opening to smile at her, seemed to snap at whatever the morsel was, again exactly like a dog.
From time to time he wandered out to the men’s room and once he came back to tell us that snow was falling again. A few flakes melted starrily on his black hair and the shoulders of his jacket. Solemnly he spoke of the car as if it were an animate creature he had just watered and fed for the night, and she teased him delicately by saying:
‘I believe you’re frightened that car will run away.’
‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Oh! no! It’s all right. Dr Baird let me put it in with his –’
‘You and that car,’ she teased him. I saw the subdued shadow of a kind of pleasurable pain cross his face. ‘I daren’t think what would happen if it ran away,’ she said, and I knew that it was not the car of which he was afraid.
Then Baird came back, to say, with jocular pretence at severity:
‘Is she behaving herself? Is she keeping her word?’
‘She is indeed,’ she said. ‘After all, you’re not the only one with spies. We’ve got spies on our side. Very faithful ones too.’
‘And what do the spies report?’
‘Three dances,’ I said.
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said. ‘How’s the champagne?’
‘We shall need another bottle for the great occasion,’ she said. ‘When is it to be?’
‘In the supper interval.’
‘That gives us time for one more dance,’ she said to me.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ he said. ‘You know why.’
As we danced I slipped away into bemusement again, involved in my own reflections. Suddenly I was aware of her looking up into my face, hearing her say:
‘And do you know why?’
‘Why what?’ I said.
‘Couldn’t you come down to earth for a minute?’ she said. ‘Just to help me?’ and after I had made another pretence at spontaneity, with a smile, she said again:
‘Do you know why I have to behave? Why I promised I would?’ And then before I could answer:
‘Because if I’m good I can go out of here. Perhaps in a month. Anyway very soon. Aren’t you glad? Don’t you think it’s wonderful?’
I thought it was very wonderful, and I said I was very glad.
‘Then act as if you were glad,’ she said. ‘What is it with you tonight?’
Quickly I said: ‘I was wondering how you would find it back at the house. With no one there but Rollo –’
‘I’m not going back,’ she said. ‘I’m never going back there again. I don’t want that big house and all that goes with it and doesn’t go with it – I don’t want it any more than you do.’
‘Where will you go?’ I said.
‘I wanted to ask you that,’ she said.
I said something about how I thought she ought perhaps to go away, for a change and a rest, a month perhaps of convalescence in the spring, somewhere by the sea.
‘The sea?’ she said. ‘Would you come with me too if I went to the sea?’
Before I could answer the band stopped playing. I saw Baird mounting the dais, smiling and raising his hands. I heard him begin to say, locking and unlocking his large muscular fingers with sudden nervousness, how he was not very much at speech-making and how there would now be an interval for supper, but before the interval there was something he wanted to say. His voice, pitched slightly high in its nervousness, quietened the last rustlings of feet among the fallen streamers about the floor. Then he spoke, with a sudden rush of feeling and a smile, of the future Mrs Baird, and as Nora stepped beside him on the platform the room became swollen with high laughter and applause and people shouting. Then the band began to play ‘For they are jolly good fellows’, and Lydia took my two hands with impulsive affection in hers, looking up into my face.
‘She lived for that,’ she said. ‘All the time that’s what she lived for – come on, let’s be the first to drink to them.’
At the table, as we held up our glasses and drank to Nora and Dr Baird, saying over and over again that we wished them luck and how we hoped they’d be very happy, I thought I heard the occasional sniff of a nurse’s tears among the laughter. It reminded me of the time when Lydia and Tom and Nancy and Alex and his mother and myself had danced together, also on New Year’s Eve, and had toasted each other and wished each other luck, also in champagne.
I came out of this recollection to hear Baird say:
‘I hope you’ll be the first to come and stay with us, you two.’
Still half lost in the thought of Alex and how that night, in our headstrong stupidity, we had hated Blackie, I did not answer, and Lydia said:
‘He means us, silly. You’re not listening again.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m listening. Thank you very much, both of you.’
‘It’ll be open house for you two,’ Baird said. ‘Any time –’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You haven’t kissed Nora,’ Lydia said, and in response I dutifully kissed Nora. Then Baird kissed Lydia. At this point somebody remembered Blackie, a slightly self-conscious odd-man-out, a dog waiting to be noticed when the rest of us thought fit. Lydia seemed struck too by that same appearance of watching hunger.
A rush of pity came over her and with impulsive charm she took his face in her hands, kissing him.
‘Oh! I want to kiss everybody,’ she said. ‘You too – all of you,’ and she pressed her lips against my face. ‘All of you – it’s nice – I feel so happy.’
I knew, presently, that I could bear no more of this. I felt I could not face any longer the affliction of a dilemma in which I could see, every time I looked up, the reflection in Blackie’s face of the love for her I was incapable of giving. I could not stand any more the idea of being false to her.
As I made some excuse and went out, leaving her there with Nora and Dr Baird and Blackie, I felt very much as I had done on the night Alex had died: stubborn and lonely and bewildered and incapable of dissuasion. I went into the men’s room to wash my hands. A burly young man combing his hair at the wash-hand basin asked me how my father was and if I remembered how nice, that warm May evening, the singing had been. ‘It put a lot of life into me,’ he said, ‘that singing. Do you remember? – I was the one who asked if they’d sing The Golden Vanity.’ As we talked for a few moments he smiled a lot into the mirror, very meticulous with the comb as he ran it through his hair. He said several times that they’d put two stone or more on him since he’d been in there, and then in a touching moment of private confession:
‘I never thought I’d be able to look at my own face again. They gave me a mirror one day in bed and there was somebody else staring at me. It wasn’t me at all. It’s a terrible thing when you look in a mirror and you see somebody you don’t know.’ And then he added, as they all did, ‘I’ll soon be out of here.’
As I left him and went out, through the entrance corridors, on to the deserted terrace, I saw that it was still snowing. I stood watching the big flakes curling down through shafts of window light, into a world already deep and soft with snow. In the air there was a curious after-breath, gentle and almost warm, that snow seems to bring down with it after the coldness of cloud has been broken. Flakes that were soft and blown and shining made a line of wetness where they ended on the gleaming bricks of the terrace. Then as I stood watching them I felt rather like the young man in the washroom, looking into his mirror, startled by a reflection he did not know, troubled by being a stranger to himself.
