by H. E. Bates
‘No,’ I said.
The word mocked her a little and we both laughed, the tension gone.
Across the ice, all that afternoon, the sunlight was a wintry apricot, deep and fiery above the edges of flat horizons smoky-blue with frost. Skates sang shrill and then deep and thrilling across empty meadows in the lovely air. There were a lot of people there that I knew that day and whenever I passed them they stared at me, not speaking, because of the strange new girl I had with me.
She moved through all the early afternoon like a girl whose limbs have never been used. Her hands were quite fierce and terrified as they clutched at me. She held her head too high, too stiff and too far backwards, and her body went forward as if on stilts. All her in-breeding, her seclusion and what I took to be a genteel physical frustration came out that afternoon in a painful wooden awkwardness that made her more clumsy than ever. We fell down every ten yards or so. Everywhere people were falling down in the same way, shrieking and laughing, but she did not laugh when she fell down. She got to her feet every time with a look of remarkable intensity, with dark eyes fixed ahead.
She did not speak much during all this and she did not tire. We went round and round the long marsh twenty or thirty times without a stop except for the pauses when we fell down. A small wind, touched with keenness, the old wind that always came in from the direction of the sea, sprang up about mid-afternoon and blew into our faces whenever we turned and skated east to north. But she did not mind the wind. It seemed simply to stiffen her face into fresh determination. It did not even appear to chill her. Instead it seemed to drive the blood through her body with pulsations of heavier excitement, so that I could feel the heat of it through her sweater and the warm moisture of it on her hands.
In the middle of all this a voice began hailing me and I saw Tom Holland come skating across from the barge-house. Tom was a big gentle boy with heavy masses of fair hair, rather a slow-speaking boy, a farmer’s son, warm and friendly and earnest, with large pale blue eyes.
As I introduced them Tom raised his brown tweed cap and said ‘Good afternoon,’ holding out his hand. She did not take it, and I thought her shyness seemed to come back. There was some sort of half-acknowledgement of him, for a second, in a sideways twist of her head, but it was like something coming from beyond a screen. A sort of gauze, something of her own veiled intensity and distraction, seemed to drop down in front of her eyes, blinding her, so that it was as if she simply did not see him there.
‘I think people get on better when they go alone,’ Tom said.
‘I think she’s getting it gradually,’ I said, ‘I think she’s beginning to feel her way a bit –’
‘Take me again,’ she said ‘Once more –’
I took her by the hands and this time we skated for forty yards across the marsh without falling down. Then we turned and I let go her hands, holding her only by the tip of a single finger. In the distance I saw Tom Holland, his head more coppery than yellow in the bronzy setting sun, framed handsome and very fair, blue-shadowed, against slopes of snow. I have no idea if he was really waiting for her or if she, in turn, had a sort of snow-blinded, half-conscious feel that he was there. But all at once she began skating. She went forward in a flash of release, suddenly, as everyone does, all alone, clear and confident at last and free.
Like this, tentative but balanced and feeling her way, she skated for about twenty yards. And then, in a freer, wider swing of her arms, she lost her balance, but she regained it, bringing her feet together so that she could glide. In this moment I heard her laughing. The impetus of her strokes had taken her rather fast from thin unbrushed snow into ice that had been swept clear. She was going too fast to stop. Then I saw Tom Holland laughing too, holding up his large hands, ready to stop her. In another moment he was holding her by the red sweater and she was laughing on his shoulder.
‘Wonderful! It’s wonderful!’ she screamed. ‘I can do it! I can stand!’
She flung out her arms, grabbing wildly at air. For a moment she lost balance again but Tom caught her and held her with large hands until she regained it and could stand.
What emotion there was on his face as he stood there grasping her with his large golden-haired hands, still dark brown from summer, I did not really know at that moment, though I thought of it often afterwards. The colour of the frozen afternoon, all apricot and bronze, came levelly across the ice in a startling horizontal fire, full into his large pale blue eyes. My impression was that it was this that dazzled him. All the life of the very pale retina seemed to vanish, leaving them transparent, so that he stood staring exactly like a big muscular statue into which the eyes have not been carved.
When he recovered he shook his head slightly and his sight came back. It was all over in a second or two and he said:
‘You’re all right now. You won’t need anybody now. Once you’ve got the feeling of it – once you know –’
He let her go without finishing his sentence into the big rushing outer wheel of skaters. We watched for a few moments the slow red sweater as it joined them and revolved too. ‘She’ll be all right now – she’s got the feeling,’ I heard him say, and the sweater, like a blob of scarlet paint, went slowly round, not falling, on the outer wheel.
The sun went down a moment later in a plunge of wintry magnified fire that left on the ice, the snowy meadows and the cold sky a wonderful after-glow. A lichen-like green hung above the sunset, and the shadows, all across the snow, became of indigo brilliance before finally dissolving. A biting moment of dispersing day, exhilarating and almost cruel, hung in the pure stark air before the first star sparked into green sky above the sunset.
I turned to say something about this and found that Tom had gone. I saw him skating across to the barge-house – big and easy, as he was at everything, a beautiful swimmer and a good tennis player, heavy but never rough, immensely healthy and shy and warm-hearted: my oldest friend, as decent and solid and lovable as earth.
When I joined Lydia, two minutes later, she had nothing to say of Tom. It is very probable, almost certain, that she was less than half-aware of him as a person that afternoon. Somebody had stretched out a pair of supporting hands to stop her from falling and this was as much as she knew. She had no name, at least I think until much later, for whoever it was. She simply laughed at me:
‘It’s wonderful! I can do it! Oh! It’s the most marvellous thing!’
And then, as we skated, something happened that I knew was bound to happen sooner or later. Miss Juliana’s skates, with their old-fashioned runners set in boxwood and unoiled probably for a quarter of a century, could not stand the strain. A screw rusted to the thinness of wire snapped suddenly, throwing one skate so that it flapped like a slipper.
On the river bank, under the curling line of doddled willow trees growing opposite the tow-path, Lydia sat down while I took the skate off and looked at it. The air was growing very cold and her lips were rather more tightly set as she said:
‘What is it? Can’t you mend it? Can’t you hurry? – I want to skate again –’
‘You’ll have to have new screws – probably new skates,’ I said.
‘But I want to go now.’
‘There might be somebody over at the barge-house with a screwdriver and an odd screw or two,’ I said, ‘It’s getting late but –’
‘All right, all right, all right,’ she said.
I did not say anything and she seemed, all at once, to become aware of my resentment about this. I looked up and she smiled. I suppose I was to see her smile in exactly that way, engaging and disarming and transforming, hundreds of times afterwards, but it never failed to have the same effect on me. It had some curious quality of combining tenderness with a flash of compelling uneasiness. It was like sunlight on the surface of a knife.
As I skated over to the barge-house she ran with me, in her eagerness to get there. The skaters were thinning out a lot by now and out of the half dozen men who had been screwing on skates only one, an old n
ightwatchman named Hoylake, was still sitting there.
‘Screws are rotten,’ he said. ‘Old as Adam –’
‘It’s a simple thing to put new ones in, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Not tonight, miss.’
‘I want them tonight. Now,’ she said.
‘Well then, miss, you’ll have to want on,’ he said. ‘You can’t have everything you want –’
She stood glaring at him with impatient anger. She had come up for the first time against a true downright Evensford character who, in his droll dry way, did not care a damn for her or anyone else. She did not know at all what to make of him and suddenly he said:
‘You’ll git plenty o’ skating, miss. Weeks of it yit. Don’t whittle your breeches out – the skates’ll be here tomorrow morning as soon as you are.’
I saw her face soften a little; I found myself almost eagerly waiting for it to break into a smile.
‘What time’ll you be down, miss?’ he said.
‘Oh! early – early,’ she said. ‘Won’t we?’ she said to me. ‘We will, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I watched her face, excited, framed in the folded cowl of the cloak. Suddenly the smile I had been waiting for, swift and disarming, spread over it softly, transforming it completely.
It charmed even old Hoylake, who actually got up and touched his cap to her.
The skates were ready next morning by ten o’clock. She gave the astonished Hoylake ten shillings without asking and we skated all day.
It was something of a triumph for her to have escaped in order to come with me. Every Sunday the Aspens drove down twice to church in the big closed Daimler, transferring themselves to the big closed pew that was theirs by three or four centuries of tradition. They worshipped apart; and then drove back, both at noon and in the evening, to meals religiously served cold in the interests of parallel devotions in the servants’ quarters. Four-fifths of the rest of Evensford prayed in its pine pews, offering strong devotion through five sorts of Methodism, three of Baptist, two of an obscure Adventism and one, in the oldest of chapels, the Succoth, a powerful Calvinism that at least two Scots families accepted as the nearest joyless substitute to a Presbyterianism the town could not otherwise provide.
Because of all this an embalmed hush, once the church bells had finished, settled on the town, casting a grey anaesthetizing skein over the shuttered shops, the factories, the unopened pubs, the long cabin-like rows of houses where men pottered on grey ash-paths in carpet slippers. It brought down on the noon streets an after-church emptiness that was like a suspension of living, the last husband trotting home from the bakehouse with his steaming baking tin of beef and Yorkshire pudding, the last drunks turning out and arguing at street corners before staggering home, the last young girl hurrying through empty streets with shining agitation and a prayer book in her white-gloved hands.
From this strange, embalming, gripping vacuum there was no escape except through long walks into a shabby, windy countryside, into clay-lands where spring came late and very reluctantly. There was still a feeling that Sunday ought not to be violated by anything more active than eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – separately, pudding first, beef afterwards – at midday, and vast teas, such as I used to eat at the Hollands’ farm, Busketts, at four o’clock. There was still a feeling that things like skating on Sundays were, if not wrong in themselves, rather like laughter at a funeral service – something the right people did not do.
So as we skated all that Sunday, on into the evening by the light of fires and the headlamps of cars and lastly by a white bitter moon, she could not have suspected anything of the feeling of escape I knew. What she felt was simply the joy of the first mastery over something that was new to her. She was thrilled by the first steps of her growing up.
By afternoon she was beginning to skate quite well and we stopped once, over a thermos flask of tea I had brought, to drink and rest and gaze at the freezing river. The wind had dropped but the air was so still and bitter that I could hear the river creaking as it froze. It was only once in twenty years, perhaps longer, that the river froze, but that day we watched the ice joining and hardening across the narrow central passage of water that snow had stained a deep smoky yellow.
‘Shall we go on?’
As she spoke she slid down the snowy, frost-smooth bank on her skates and stood at the edge of river ice, looking across. She could do even this without falling. She was full of confidence in herself.
I did not follow her. ‘It’s eighteen feet deep,’ I said.
‘Shall we?’ She turned her body with suppleness, looking back at me, keeping her balance, smoothing her hair back with her hands. ‘Dare you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I can put my foot on it. It bears.’
‘Come away,’ I said.
I made a snowball and threw it into the stream. It hit the central core of half-formed ice and sank slowly in like a pill.
She turned and laughed at me. ‘Did I scare you? Did you think I meant it?’
She began to climb up the bank, her face shining with rosy brilliance under the black hair. ‘You did think I meant it. You really did.’
‘No.’
‘I believe you did – the way you stood there. I really believe you did.’
I caught her hand and dragged her up the last few feet of the bank. I had grown up with the river. It was the grave of too many suicides, half-swimmers and small careless boys for me ever to trust it too much. It flowed deep, on rapid currents, on dark whirlpools beyond mill-races. I was frightened of it. I was afraid too that she would see that I was frightened and I said, joking:
‘We’ll let Tom Holland try it. If it bears him it’ll bear us.’
‘Tom who?’
‘Tom Holland. The boy you saw yesterday.’
‘Oh,’ she said and it was clear that she did not even remember his name.
‘Let’s skate again,’ she said, ‘shall we? With crossed hands.’
I took her hands in mine; she held my sprained wrist gently. She was wearing big fur gloves so that I could not feel her hands properly and they gave me a feeling that she was wrapping me snugly into herself. I felt glad about it and we skated some distance into an afternoon of blue harshness, against a coldness, growing deathly towards sunset, before she spoke again.
‘If it freezes – will you? Dare you come on?’
‘We’ll see,’ I said.
She laughed and began to skate a little faster, dragging me along.
‘I shall make you,’ she said.
After that we skated every afternoon. Overnight I left my skates at the barge-house and if there were assignments from Bretherton I did them quickly or did not do them at all. I suddenly did not care about anything but the marsh, the skating, the frost, the freezing river and the girl in the cloak and the scarlet sweater.
Every evening we walked home through the town. Sometimes a little light brief snow came floating out of the upper darkness, through the green light of street lamps and then lacily, in crossed white knots about her face. I carried her skates for her and she would be muffled up, warm and dark, with the hood over her head. Because of the skating she began to lose some of the stiffness of her body; she began to be easier as she walked, with the big cloak-folds giving her a swinging and plushy appearance on the streets of snow.
Whenever we came up from the river we walked slowly. I was always tired after skating and she brought an excitement to the town that at first I could not share. She wanted to stop for a cup of coffee at dreary little places like the Geisha café, by the station, or Porter’s Dining Rooms farther up, or at the Temperance Hotel, where there was a hot twang of naked gas and frying cod in the air among the aspidistras. She was thrilled by these things. All the lights in the shops would still be burning and one by one she would make me stop by them, telling her which was which and who was who, and she was thrilled again because I knew them all.
That winter everything in the town was ne
w and strange and exciting to her. I had grown up with it and I could not see it that way. To me it was ugly and I was locked in it. It was a shabby little prison and there was nothing in it I wanted. It took me some time to grasp that she had been in a prison of her own.
The house in Leicestershire had been a mid-Victorian so-called shooting lodge set in a grim clay countryside of elm and grass over which hounds wailed with big hunts, on long unbroken runs, in winter time. She had been brought up in a world of barrack-like stables and bow-legged grooms and stable boys and horses chocking out to exercise across granite stableyards. She was frightened of horses. She had been thrown very badly as a child and after that her father had been frightened too. He replaced the horses by a governess, a Miss Crouch, a fragile yes-woman who taught simple subjects and saw that Lydia kept her hair in pig-tails. By means of a curriculum of appalling unadventurousness they went stiffly hand in hand through primary mathematics and restricted history and feebler French and a few exercises in simple sonatas on the piano. Her father hunted or rode inexhaustibly. She sometimes did not see him for a day or two or an entire weekend.
At sixteen she was still dressed in the kind of dark-blue garment, hardly a dress, that in its entire absence of waist-line or frill concealed the fact that she was a girl. It was not surprising that she had seemed to me, nearly four years later, like a child of fifteen, and on that first afternoon on the ice like a person who had never used her body. She had never been aware of having a body in the sense of being curious or surprised or excited about it. Miss Crouch had hinted heavily once or twice that there were circumstances or experiences or trials or shocks or even pleasures that awaited girls, for unspecified reasons, in later years, but there was never any fuller explanation. Her father – I took him to be rather like an elder, more assertive Rollo, fanatical in a desire for frequent exercise, so wholly insensitive to a motherless daughter that he developed a sort of highly refined absentmindedness about her – had been a man of fifty when she was born. He never seemed to grasp that she might need the company of other girls, except at her birthday and at Christmas time, when he arranged a schoolroom party for the children of neighbouring houses: a party at which she invariably broke down and wept hysterically in sheer frustration at having so many to share in what she wanted.