by H. E. Bates
We skated in this way across two meadows. The wind had nothing to stop it in its long savage lick across the valley and by the time we came down towards the railway arches, over the old Queen’s Meadow, I was taking deep gulps of bitter air, like a swimmer. Against the thrust of wind I started to skate with my head down.
I suppose I skated like this for half a minute. Then I looked up to see her twenty yards from the bridge. I started shouting. I felt anxiety, then fear, then pure cold horror hit me more savagely than the wind and in another moment, trying to skate faster, I fell down.
In the moment before falling down I remembered seeing her bright scarlet sweater flashing into the left of the three archways of the bridge. When I got up again it was no longer there. I skated wildly forward, yelling her name. Then I hit the bank just in front of the bridge, fell half-forward on my hands and began to scramble like a sort of frozen spider along the tow-path, still yelling her name in shouts that hit ice and bridge in hollow slapping sounds that echoed and re-echoed back to me.
The bridge was supported with round iron pillars, under which the concrete tow-path ran. When I half-skated, half-fell underneath it she was leaning against one of the pillars, waiting for me. Her body was pressed back, its lower shape in the too-tight skirt thrust outward, so that the long line of her thighs was hollowed and clear. She stood there very quiet for a moment, looking at me with amused dark eyes. Then she began laughing, with a flash of white teeth, because she saw that I was frightened. I was so relieved and shaken that for a second I staggered about, half-losing my balance, so that she had to put out her hands to stop me.
‘Lydia,’ I said. ‘Oh! Lydia, for God’s sake –’
A moment later she stretched out her arms and drew me slowly towards her. I wanted to ask her what had happened and how she escaped, but I did not say another word. I could hear a small continuous lapping of loose water over thin ice under the bridge behind her and I listened to it, in fear, all the time she kissed me. Her stretched long body tautened itself in a curious curve as she kept her balance and folded me against her, kissing me at the same time.
‘Did you think I’d gone?’ she said. ‘Did you think I’d run away?’
I pressed my mouth against her cold fresh skin and could not answer.
‘Not yet, my darling,’ she said, and again I could not speak for happiness.
Spring came to Evensford about the end of April with shabby flowerings of brown wallflowers on allotment grounds, with dusty daffodils behind the iron railings of street front gardens. Earth everywhere had been pulverized by black frost to a saltiness that blew grittily about on dry spring winds, cornering fish-and-chip papers in Evensford’s many alley-ways. In the town there was hardly anything to distinguish what was now the spring from what had been the winter except that the days were longer and not so cold and that the view across the valley showed ice no longer. There were now only broken lakes of receding water to which swans returned for a last few days in great white flocks, before they too broke up and paired for summer nesting.
Behind the walls of the Aspen ground, all across the park, spring came so differently that it was another world. Rooks did not begin nesting in the old chestnut trees behind the lime avenue and in the big elms above the gate-house until the middle of April, cawing all day in slow-greening branches. Everything was late that year. The brook thawed and all along its wet banks white anemones came fluttering into bloom, together with big soft white violets, pure as snowdrops, and primroses among blobby islands of king-cups under yellow hazel boughs. Whenever I went through the gates and along the avenue there was a wonderful belling chorus of thrushes that expanded under a closing framework of branches, madly and most wonderfully in the long pale twilight when the air was green with young leaves and the acid of new grass after sunset and spring rain. Nearer the house there were random drifts of pale blue anemone, bright as clippings of sky among black clusters of butchers broom, and then, under limes and in grass along every slope leading up to the house, daffodils in thousands, in crowds of shaking yellow flame. Some earlier, far-sighted Aspen had planted great groups of blue cedar about the place and they rose in high conical groups, greyish after winter, to be touched, as spring came, with young delicate sprouts of blue-green fire. Acres of grass flowed away under plantings of horse chestnut that flared, by the end of April, into thick blossom that soon became scattered by wind into rose-white drifts on paths and terraces and even as far as the elm avenue that Jed to more spinneys of primroses and hazel and white violet on the western side.
By May the spinneys were thick with bluebells. The air all day long was soaked heavy and sweet and almost too rich with the scent of them and the juices of rising grass. The earlier Aspen who had planted the cedars had also planted great shrubberies of lilacs that by now had grown into old rambling woodlands heavy with white and rose-pink flower. He had planted many white acacias too and it was he also who had built a small two-storeyed summer-house on the south side of the park, at the crest of a walk of yellow wild azaleas. They too broke into flower about the time of the bluebells, the lilac and the chestnut flower, clogging the air with a haunting, drowsy perfume that still rises, above all the smell of grass and bluebell and lilac and primrose, to mark the spring and summer that I spent there.
By this time I had stopped using the main gate that led into the park from the centre of the town. I used to walk round the long wall and come instead through the spinneys on the south side. The spinneys are all gone now. New streets of houses built of prefabricated slabs of stucco-concrete, with concrete paths and concrete line-posts and concrete coal-sheds, with television aerials sprouting everywhere like bare steel boughs, have taken their places; but in those days there was a carriage gate to the spinneys and a riding that went down through them until it forked one way to the house, down the long avenue of elms that concrete tank emplacements killed as sure as a poison twenty-three years later.
It is very hard to say exactly what happened to us that summer, to express in terms that do not seem foolish how for a long time we did nothing but meet in the summer-house and lie on the old cane long-chairs in the small upstairs room and look through the little arched diamond windows down on the path of azalea flowers, where it was so quiet that we could watch pheasants feeding a yard or two away on the corn we put down and see a partridge bring up her brood of thirteen there, fussing about with her own small brown circus under her wings.
That summer was very hot and I remember the thick dry strawy heat stifling under the little roof. I remember the scent of azaleas and the hot feeling of tension when Rollo, walking up with his gun one afternoon, tried the door of the summer-house down below us with twenty or thirty or even forty keys, as it then seemed, rattling them one by one in the lock. I remember the thundering thump of my own heart as Rollo tried the keys and how every beat of it got bigger and hotter and more choking with every key. I can see Lydia, lying back in the chair, her chest leaping up in deep gasps that seemed to lift her breasts painfully, and I can feel the grip of her hand on the wrist I had sprained while skating. The grip was so tight that the blood, held back, stopped flowing to the fingers and I could feel them gradually grow colder, until they seemed frozen again with their old familiar winter pain.
When Rollo had gone I sat on the edge of the chair, dangling my dead, bloodless hand, pained by the flow of blood coming back to it.
‘Did I hold you too tightly?’ she said. ‘Did I really? I didn’t know –’
‘It’s the wrist I sprained –’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let me hold it for you.’
‘Gently,’ I said.
I sat there watching her for some time while she gently held my fingers. Her body, flat in the chair, was still heaving with excitement. She had grown up very rapidly since the first evening I had seen her in the black dinner dress. The girl I had taken skating, with the low waist, gawkily throwing all the angular body out of proportion, with the almost monolithic straightness of Juliana h
erself, was not there any longer. Flesh had begun to spread on her bones with the effect of making her seem much less tall. She was warmer, rounder, softer, lovely in a way of which there had been no hint on the days of her scrawny skating in the winter. Her mouth too was firmer. Its fleshiness and breadth were still there, but it was soft now without being loose and it revealed, even more than the rounded breasts, how quickly she had grown.
‘Dare we open the window?’ she said. ‘It’s so hot in here.’
‘I’ll open the back window,’ I said.
‘I’m stifled – let’s have some air.’ She let go my hand. ‘Why don’t you take off your shirt? The sweat’s pouring from you like water –’
The back window looked out from a tiny landing where the stairs came up. I went through to open it. Through the small casement, as I threw it back, came the heat of July, clear and fierce, sweet with light undertones of hay still being turned in fields outside the park. I stood breathing it for a moment, listening to the beat of a hay-turner, undoing the front of my shirt so that air could cool my chest.
When I went back to her she had taken off her dress. She was sitting up in the long-chair, unrolling her stockings. They peeled from her thighs like another skin, leaving the flesh wonderfully white and without blemishes.
She lay back in the chair. I touched her thighs with the light tips of my fingers and began to say something about how much I had wanted to touch her and how –
‘I wondered if you ever would,’ she said. ‘If you ever wanted –’
She was smiling a little, her lips parted. I could hear the hay-turner beating somewhere across the park. Then my heart started thundering again as it had done when Rollo had tried the keys in the lock.
‘Don’t be shy,’ she said. ‘I’m not shy –’
She rolled her body sideways in the chair, tenderly and heavily, pulling me towards her with both hands. One of the straps of her slip fell from her shoulders and she let go of me for a moment to pull the other one down. Her skin had begun to mature with the waxen stiff whiteness that goes sometimes with deep black hair and it seemed to melt as I touched it with my hands.
‘Oh! darling – don’t stop loving me –’ she said. ‘Don’t ever stop loving me –’
I promised I would never stop loving her. ‘I promise I never will,’ I said. ‘Never. I promise I never will.’
Some time later she lay in a sort of day-dream, quieter, looking at the sky. The hay-turner spun softly across the hot afternoon. The scent of her hair had something strong and aromatic about it and I remember that too as I think of her suddenly sitting up in the chair and bending over me and saying a most curious thing to me:
‘Even if I’m bad to you?’ she said.
‘You won’t be bad to me.’
‘Even if I were bad to you – would you? – will you always?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you want to go on like this – always? For ever and ever?’
‘For ever,’ I said.
‘I wonder if we shall,’ she said.
I stretched up my hands and put them against her body. Its roundness, I felt, was all mine; it was I, in a sense, who had made it grow up; I was quite sure it was I who had woken her.
‘Do you like my body?’ she said. ‘Did you think I’d grow like this? Is it the first time you’ve seen a girl?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
She laughed and said: ‘I’m growing up and it feels queer – it feels terribly queer – it goes pounding and pounding through me.’
She laughed again lying with her mouth across my face, her voice warm with tenderness and rather hoarse, and I felt all summer spin together, through the sound of the hay-turner, the warmth of her voice and the heavy repeated turn of her body, into a deep and delicate wonder, into what was really for me a monstrously simple, monstrously complex web of happiness.
By this time I had got another job. My father more than anyone was disappointed at my failure with Bretherton. ‘But it’s no use if you’re not happy,’ he said. ‘Better to take a job in the trade and be happy than get above yourself and be miserable.’
It was he who got me the job of clerk to a one-man leather factor’s business run by a man named Arthur Sprague. ‘Arthur’s a very sound fellow,’ my father said. ‘He’ll treat you well.’ Trade had begun to decline with the seasonal slackness of summer. ‘You’re lucky to fall into a job like that too,’ he added. ‘There are a lot of unemployed. All you have to do is keep the books in order and unpack the leather as it comes in and answer the telephone. You’ll be done every day by four.’
In this way Lydia and I were able to meet in the summer-house almost every hot afternoon of that summer except Sundays.
On Sundays Miss Bertie and Miss Juliana, true to the Evensford tradition, invited me to tea. It used to be part of the sanctity of Sunday for Evensford to meet over heavily laden tables at four o’clock, after a sort of High Street fashion parade, talking of what anthem was going to be sung at chapel, listening perhaps for the voice, crying drably through the streets, of a late watercress man – ‘water-cree-ee-ee-es! – water-cree-ee-ee-es! – fine water-cree-ee-ee-es!’ – and the sound of an early brass-band battling with discord against the sound of pianos played by open parlour windows.
We always had tea in a small, bay-windowed, overcrowded room on the south side of the house, adjoining the conservatory. Its walls were papered in patterns of pink and silver roses and its furniture was in a style of ponderous cabriole, touched with ecclesiastical. The legs of chairs and tables, in the shape of claws, grasped everywhere at balls that were like mahogany cannon shot. The upholsterings were mostly of a bright prawn pink unfaded by sun because at the slightest touch of it all blinds and shutters were drawn. The Aspens were not Catholics, but there was a prie-dieu in blue beaded petit-point in one corner; nor were they very musical, but in another corner was a grand piano, a rosewood music stand inlaid with strips of ivory, and a cello in a case by the wall. Sometimes if the afternoon was very warm we sat at open french windows, through which all the scents of the park and the gardens came to us in exquisite waves, rose with azalea, pink with hawthorn, some wonderfully indeterminate breath of high summer and strawberry with a drowsy flavour of hay.
There were rarely, I think, more than the five of us there: the two Aspen sisters, Rollo and Lydia and myself; and it suited my vanity to be so very privileged. A maid with her appropriate dragonflies of starched apron strings brought tea at four o’clock and Rollo lit the burner under a small silver methylated spirit kettle. Either Miss Juliana or Miss Bertie poured tea, one on one Sunday, one on another. ‘It’s Juley’s Sunday,’ they would say, or ‘it’s Bertie’s Sunday.’ Rollo and I handed round plates of thinnest triangular bread and butter in three varieties of white and brown and a pleasant sugar-browned loaf of currant bread. Sometimes Rollo called me ‘Old fellow’ or made a remark about pheasants or spoke of how plum awful something was. Miss Juliana, in her assertive jolly way, rattled on about this and that until arrested with firmness by Miss Bertie on some point of dry, irrefutable fact about the nature or history of the town. Most of the time Lydia and I sat looking at each other.
There was an amazing, beautiful frenzy about these quiet tea-times. There was a sort of suspended inner fieriness about us both that was painful and lovely. Sometimes we could not bear any longer to look at each other and I felt myself caught up again in a sort of entangling web, enraptured and baffled. She always wore dresses of silk on Sunday and their smooth peel-like softness, growing tighter all the summer as her body filled out, was drawn over her breasts with startling clearness whenever she moved.
Tea was always over by five o’clock. There would then be half an hour of latitude, in the garden perhaps, or on the terrace outside, before Miss Juliana and Miss Bertie and Lydia went to dress for church and I said goodbye and thanked them for having me. During this time Rollo drew himself off and smoked a cigarette in the conservatory. Then he got ready for church. Then the s
ervants got ready for church. As he smoked that cigarette in the conservatory Rollo always had about him something of the uneasy and chained-up look of a dog that has had no run all day. It was not until late summer that I discovered why. There was a look of unhappy costive strain about him as he paced up and down among the ferns and begonias and dracenas with his long amber-green cigarette holder, in his two-inch collars and his cravat of dark blue, with horse-shoe tie-pin, in the style of twenty or thirty years earlier. He always looked rather like some advertisement for Edwardian bicycles, a dried-out dandy waiting, dog-like, abject and eager, for a girl.
Punctually at ten minutes to six the Daimler came to the front door to take the three women to church. Rollo, even when it was raining, preferred to walk. It was not until the third Sunday in July of that summer that I discovered he did not go to church at all.
That Sunday was a week after Rollo had tried the door of the summer-house and Lydia had said that curious disturbing thing to me: ‘Not even if I’m bad to you?’
It had been very hard to look at each other during tea that day. Summer had burned up into hard flaming heat, into a torrid afternoon of white reflections springing back from the stones of the terrace and the glass panes of the conservatory outside. Twice during tea Lydia complained about the heat and finally she got up and said, ‘I feel rather queer,’ and went outside.
When she came back, five minutes later, she did not sit down. She ran one of her hands backwards and forwards across her face. Her white dress was pulled, as it always was, tight across her figure, which seemed flushed and swollen by the heat of the day.
‘I think I’ll go and lie down,’ she said. ‘I’ve been rather sick.’