by H. E. Bates
‘That’s the trouble with us. We stew. They say Evensford is getting quite big. They even have Woolworths or something. Do they have Woolworths? I never go down there now.’ The large assertive blue eyes seemed to make an appeal to me, above the long, ugly attractive teeth, for my feelings about this. ‘That’s what I don’t want to happen to Lydia. To be cut off. What do you feel? Would you want a young girl to grow up like that? We don’t want her to stew. We want her to have friends.’
I did not know what to say to all this; I had not yet learned that her questions, almost all of them, were simply rhetorical bullets fired off in mid-air out of a fine-drawn nervousness. It was some time before I noticed the fluttering weakness of her colourless hands.
But now I was saved from answering by a voice at the door, a man’s voice, saying:
‘Was that the bell for dinner? Are you coming in?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Unless Bertie is. Are we, Bertie? Mr Richardson, this is my brother,’ she said to me, ‘Captain Rollo Aspen.’
The Captain was a thinnish, hooked man of six feet with a pronounced weakness of chest and loose inbred lips that seemed to dribble. From the tip of his hollow stooping body his hair, long and black, was constantly drooping down.
‘Foul day,’ he said, ‘don’t you think so? Plum awful.’
He was dressed for dinner in a velvet smoking jacket with large corded frogs across the chest that seemed only to accentuate his narrowness. He said several times that the weather, the snow, or something or other, was plum awful, and I noticed that neither Miss Juliana nor Miss Bertie bothered to reply.
He stood there for a few moments longer, weakly fingering the lapels of his jacket, the thickish, too red lips wavering in a search for something else to say. He gave a clipped laugh or two, half to himself, and then said at last: ‘Mackness says there’s a lime down in the avenue,’ and Miss Bertie stirred uneasily by the fire.
When I looked to the door again, some moments later, he was no longer there. Miss Juliana had finished her soup and now a maid, a woman in her scrawny fifties in all the appropriate get-up of fanning bows and cap and apron, came in to take tureen and plate away.
‘We’ll have the port now,’ Miss Juliana said. ‘Four glasses. I think Lydia will have a glass,’ and presently I was sitting with a glass of port wine in my hands. It too was dead cold and while I waited for some signal to drink it Miss Juliana pronounced:
‘I think things are changing for girls. I mean to say there’s no longer –’
At that moment she broke off with restless and brittle suddenness to look behind me, at the door. Her large teeth woke and leapt into the disarming smile that ought to have been so ugly but that was now more than ever affectionate and attractive and beautiful.
I turned too and for the swiftest moment I thought the Captain had come back. I felt I was the victim of a mesmeric sort of trick. The tall figure of the girl I saw there, as tall as Miss Juliana but not quite so tall as the Captain, had the same full lips and drooping hair. The angularity of her body was startling in the long black dinner dress that hung from her shoulders with the straight flatness of something suspended from a coat-hanger of curved white bone.
‘This is Lydia,’ Miss Juliana said.
As I stood up she came over to shake hands with me. Her own awful shyness, clear in the startled black eyes and the slightly retracted mouth, had the effect of doubling my own. I think I was more sorry for her than anything, draped in the long, low-waisted dress that was too old for her, and I could not say a word. The dress might have belonged to Juliana. It gave her the effect not only of being lost and unawakened but, as she lumbered to snatch my hand, of pitiful clumsiness.
The effect vanished when she sat down. At first she did not smile; but her body, in its sitting position, seemed to soften and fold over. She took the glass of port and held it under her face. I saw her looking through it at the fire. For some minutes I heard Miss Juliana, really without listening to her properly, prattling on with masterful nervousness about ‘Mr Richardson says there is skating, Lydia dear. I’ve been telling him he ought to teach you. I think we have skates somewhere – I know I used to have skates –’ and sometimes the girl, rounded to girlishness in her sitting position, the tips of her long white fingers and the receding pale bone of her cheek made rose-clouded by reflections of firelight through the wine-glass she was holding, would smile. Her smile was always of the same kind, and it always had the same effect on me; it was one of those smiles that are not directed at anyone; it was not even directed at something undisclosed, a thought or an emotion, inside herself. It was not reflected at all. It was directed outwards: not to the two women or to me or the things that were being said in the too-large, half-freezing, half-scorching room, but to some unspecified moment of delicate and nebulous attraction, like a dream, something remotely projected, in the future. And the effect on me was exactly the effect made by the smile of the older woman: the sudden flash of plainness flowering impossibly, almost sensationally, and yet softly, into something beautiful.
‘Would you think it a great bore to take Lydia skating with you?’ Miss Juliana said. ‘You wouldn’t, would you? It would be such fun for her.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Would you like that, Lydia dear?’
‘I don’t skate,’ she said.
‘Opportunity comes with Mr Richardson,’ Miss Juliana said, and I thought Miss Bertie stirred by the fire with noises of approval.
‘And what about the impossible Mr Bretherton? Can that be arranged?’
‘I think so. There’s the police court tomorrow –’
‘Police court? Evensford has a police court now? You go to police courts?’
‘Not Evensford,’ I said. Evensford had risen too late in civic expansion to be favoured with the importance of petty sessions; the court was at Nenborough, a market town of iron-ore and railway yards, up the valley.
At this moment Miss Bertie made a pronouncement.
‘You know Evensford is not even a postal entity,’ she said. ‘It is still a sub-district.’ The voice had a clear, informative asperity, contrasting with a cold and surprising severity with Juliana’s nervous ripplings. ‘By standards of ordnance survey it is still a village.’
As she spoke she ruffled up in her chair and, no longer dumpling-like and rotund, seemed to be going through a process of an almost grotesque enlargement, fluffing herself out, sprouting wings. Like a hen about to spring up on a perch after laying an egg, she said:
‘If you look on the ordnance survey of even thirty years ago you will see that nothing of Evensford is shown but the church and this house. It is still a sub-district of Nenborough. It is still not even on the map.’
‘The town has grown all along the valley,’ I said.
‘Possibly so. But it is not shown.’
‘It is there,’ I said.
‘Possibly so. But for our part we don’t see it. It is not the Evensford we like. It is not the Evensford we knew.’
For a moment I was aware of a small clash, a grating of temperaments, hers and my own, hers and that of Miss Juliana, who was quiet now for the first time; but to my surprise she said, again in a most informatively level voice:
‘However, that isn’t what we wish for Lydia. We wish Lydia to be of Evensford. We wish her to know young people. We have grown up in our own way and this is how we are. But we feel it would not be right for her. Do you think so?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I think it is most extraordinarily considerate of you to take her skating,’ she said. ‘She will be busy tomorrow unpacking and you will be busy at the court. Then there’s your hand.’ Miss Juliana had forgotten my hand.
‘My hand makes no difference,’ I said.
‘Then you could take her on Saturday?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I began to say something too about the means of getting there, about the marshes being nearly two miles away, but Miss Juliana, absolutely silenced for so long, set dow
n her empty port glass and said:
‘There is the Daimler. They can go in that.’
‘I really don’t think so, Juley.’ It was again the clear deliberate voice, startling in firmness and incision. ‘I see absolutely no point in that. Is there a bus?’ she said to me.
Yes, I said, there was a bus.
‘Then I suggest you go by bus. Shall we say at two o’clock?’ she said.
With a swift and flapping sort of movement of her hands, exactly like the beating of a pair of peremptory wings against the arms of the chair, she got up. Her skirt fell ruckled over squabby woollen legs and a last glimpse of slipping bloomers.
‘Goodnight,’ she said. She crossed to Miss Juliana, who had run down into silence like a galloping clock, and kissed her on both cheeks, and then to the girl, who had not spoken once, and then kissed her too. In that moment the girl stretched up her hands, at the same time uplifting her face, pressing her lips upwards and outward in the act of kissing. Her arms emerged from the loose-cut sleeves with a roundness not distinguishable before. The lips, full and rather loose but not so weak as the Captain’s, suddenly produced in me a sensation more abrupt and startling than her smile. I felt as I had done when I first came into the room: poised on the edge of a knife, in a queer excruciating quiver of heat and cold, the blood pricking and thumping in my throat, my mind all the time frozen and yet excited.
‘I ought to go too,’ I said.
‘Have you no hat?’ Miss Juliana said. ‘You will catch your death without a hat.’
I had no hat. I shook her hand. The girl got up from the chair and shook hands with me too. All her tall angularity, undispelled even by the candle-shaped coils of black hair falling down to the shoulders of her black dress, was suddenly there at its most awkward again. She did not speak to me. With a dry and ghastly shyness I could hardly even look at her and I realized, fumbling among the draperies of heavy chenille to find a door that did not seem to be there, that all evening we had not exchanged a word.
‘Tell your Mr Bretherton I will deal with him myself,’ Miss Juliana said.
I heard the clang of the bell-pull and the jangling of the bell as she rang for the maid to let me out; but in the corridor, with its odour of ancient paraffin, its oil-light falling from the stairhead through a single chandelier of diffusing crystal on a path of moulting leopard-rugs, the Captain suddenly appeared and called to me:
‘Hello there, I’ll let you out.’
In friendly drooping attitudes he escorted me along the hall, pulling back in a hearty and rather too powerful gesture the heavy iron bolt of the door. I could see his breath and my own vapouring in almost solid bladders of white in the freezing air. When the door opened the air from outside was no colder. Beyond the porch a great expanse of snow whiteness, still and sparkling and smoothly settled, clothed the terraces and steps and slopes of the silent park. I stood for a second or two looking at it. A drowsy and almost fungoid whiff of whisky on an air savage in its starry and brittle frostiness floated past me as the Captain said:
‘God, it’s plum awful. Enough to freeze brass monkeys.’
In a weak, high-toned voice he laughed at the joke he made and then, for want of something to say in farewell, asked me if I did any shooting. Before I could answer I remembered suddenly, in brief panic, what I had come for. By this time he must have wondered too.
‘I’m very sorry about the elder Mr Aspen,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, you’re The Messenger chappie. Yes: bad blow.’
‘County Examiner,’ I said.
He took no notice of this and went on: ‘He died at his place in Leicestershire. He really liked it better there.’
‘Could you –’
‘It’ll be rather dull for Lydia here,’ he said. ‘Have to keep her amused somehow. Plum awful town, I think, Evensford. God, it’s cold.’
‘I’m sorry: I don’t want to keep you,’ I said. ‘But is there a Mrs Aspen?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. No.’ He slipped slightly on the frozen snowy steps as he backed towards the door. ‘No – well, in a way I suppose there was.’
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ I said. I knew Bretherton would say it did matter; and thinking of his rage I waited. ‘It was just –’
‘Well, you know how it is. It’s bloody delicate and I know the girls would prefer –’ I supposed the girls were Miss Juliana and Miss Bertie but I said nothing and his hand was already on the door as he went on: ‘She was a Miss Crawford. They sort of never hit it off together. She was a good deal younger. She’s – well, we assume –’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I won’t keep you. Goodnight.’
‘Not at all, old boy. Pleasure. Goodnight.’
In the moment before he shut the door I heard him give a curious sound between a grunt and a shiver, saying at the same time that everything was plum awful and didn’t I think so? The door closed before I could answer; and then a moment later I was walking across the snow-covered terrace and down the steps to where, between two great clumps of yew and cypress, the carriage drive ought to have cut across to the long avenue of lime, to a stream, and then copses of hazel and hornbeam and ash below. But snow, in its quiet level fall, had obliterated everything in a shining crust, and I could not find the way.
I stood for some moments looking for the path. There was no wind, and snow had frozen in stiff flower-like panicles to the great mass of branches that hid all of Evensford, even the church spire, with complete extinction, from the house. Above the trees a mass of winter stars, glittering with crystal flashes of vivid green, then white, then ice-clear blue, flashed down through a wide and wonderful silence that seemed to splinter every now and then with a crack of frost-taut boughs in the copses, down where the drive went, above the frozen stream.
After a few minutes I found the path. I felt suddenly very hungry. I had not eaten since midday, and in a curious lightheaded sort of fashion, from the tension of hunger and snow and frost and starlight, I began to run.
Two days later it all began.
Chapter Three
The southern escarpment of the valley sweeps down beyond old railway tracks through allotment fields bordered by brickworks and stuck about with tool-huts of corrugated iron and past rows of tanneries that break from an otherwise bald, low-toned landscape like eruptions of crimson brick. At the broken curve of the slope there is a sudden redness in the soil, the strata of ore emerging in warm brown tones, something of the ginger-brown of iron-mould. The last farmhouse, half-stone, half-brick, looks down on giant dredgers scooping a dripping sugar-brown gravel from pits in what once were green meadows and then farther on to the last barge-house, empty and abandoned and overgrown with nettle and elder, like the barge-path that weaves across the marshes with the river. It was on these marshes that I taught Lydia skating on the following Saturday afternoon.
She appeared that day in a sort of black cloak that was half a mackintosh, half like the kind of garment, cowled over the head, that nuns or nurses wear. She brought her skates in a leather case with interior linings of green plush into which the skates and the skating boots of white buckskin fitted with snug perfection. The skates, old-fashioned, with under-supports of polished wood, had belonged to Miss Juliana, and the Aspen monogram was embossed on the case outside.
There were two ways down to the river. You could keep in the bus to the very end of the lower town, and then walk through a hundred yards of street to where, at the bottom, the old barge-house stood. Almost everybody went that way. A potato oven still stood there in those days at the end of the road where the ice began, and men screwed your skates on for twopence a time. But you could leave the bus earlier, at the top of the hill, and walk down by footpath, between hedges of sloe smothered all winter in reeds of partridge-brown, coming on to the marsh where flood water ran thin between islands of sedge and frozen to salt-white cat ice along the river-side.
That afternoon I took her the second, isolated way because of a growing terrible shyness of her.
She did not speak to me in the bus. Down the footpath there was no room for us to walk abreast and I felt it polite to walk ahead of her because she did not know the way. She was so quiet that several times I turned round to make sure that she was there and the third or fourth time her face expanded, exactly as Juliana’s did, into a grave and beautifully friendly smile.
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
Her voice was one of those deep, rather heavy voices that frame their syllables with odd hesitation. Time after time it seemed as if she were going to speak with the slightest stutter. But the words always came, at last, from deep in the throat, heavy and thick, as if the blood in her was sleepy.
When she took off her cloak that afternoon she was wearing an old scarlet polo sweater underneath and a long black skirt that was too tight for her because she had grown out of it. When she took off the cowl of her cloak I was horrified to see her hair emerge from it in the stiff candle-straight clusters that had first made me think she was only fifteen. She must have caught that look on my face because, a second later, she took a wide strip of vermilion ribbon from her skirt pocket and held it in her mouth for a moment and then looped it through the mass of her hair. It bunched up the hair in a tight drawn coil, something like a horse’s tail at a fair, and the red of the ribbon did not quite match the red of the sweater. But when the hair was drawn away from her face, leaving it clear, rounded and not girlish any more, she looked at me and smiled and said:
‘There. Is that any better?’
‘I like it better,’ I said, and when she gave her hair a final shake it shone, blue-black, rather wiry in the sun.
‘It makes me look older, doesn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s rather silly not to be able to cut it or do it up or anything, don’t you think?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Don’t always say yes,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to.’