by H. E. Bates
‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Lydia, where are you going –?’
‘I’m riding in front,’ she said.
All the rest of the journey – we went a little slower, perhaps, but not much, with Alex swearing bloody murder all the way, his mother too dazed and sick to listen or utter a sound of reprimand – I watched her, through the glass, talking to Blackie. I saw her face turning, white above the brown ruffle of fur collar in the upward dash-board light, remote and disturbing and cut off from me, in continual conversation. She seemed to be making a sort of speech to him, but whether it was annoyed or kindly or categorical or explanatory I never knew. I only know that he did not turn his head, once, in answer.
It was very gay at the hotel when we arrived. Strings of coloured lights, red and blue and yellow and green, had been looped in chains between rows of dipped limes in front of the big white columned hotel porch, and I could see the naked twigs glistening as if coated with soft burgundy-coloured paint in the dry night air.
We were all a little shaken by the journey and by the time we were out of the car, stiffish and groping under the dazzling lights, Lydia was already standing by the driving wheel, talking to Blackie.
‘You can get supper and a drink for yourself and put it down to us,’ she said.
‘I got seven more jobs,’ Blackie said.
‘We want you to stay here,’ she said. ‘That’s the way your father does.’
The engine was still running, and I heard Blackie move the lever into first gear with a slight purposely grated push.
‘Your father always waits for us,’ she said. ‘It’s always been like that.’
‘I’ll be back at three,’ Blackie said.
He revved the engine. Tom and Nancy and Mrs Sanderson had gone into the hotel. Alex and I went over to Lydia and Alex said:
‘Is there some argument? – because if there is –’
‘Get yourself some drinks and supper and wait for us here,’ Lydia was saying.
‘I got seven jobs,’ he said. ‘I told you.’
Her voice had no anger in it, nor had her face. It seemed to me only rather curiously set, not at all unlike that set and confused expression of Tom’s.
Then she took a pound note from her handbag.
‘Does that help?’ she said.
She held it up for a moment, bluish, crisp, in front of his dark face. He said, ‘I’ll be back at three. I got jobs,’ in the flattest, most arrogantly neutral sort of way. The car began to move slightly forward and her insistence – I had seen her clumsy and excited and selfish before, but never quite like this – reached a point of embarrassment and panic as the car actually gathered a little speed and moved past her.
At that moment she suddenly threw the pound note into the driving seat and called:
‘Get yourself a drink with that and park at the back –’
The car moved away under the limes. It did not strike me until long afterwards how curious it was that she did not ask for Alex’s and my own support. I was preoccupied with the look on her face. As she stood watching the car turn at the end of the hotel drive I saw in her eyes a flat, perplexed but still not angered look, not really pained or stunned, but full of bewilderment and hurt. She must have known, I think, that she had hurt herself and she did not know why.
At last I took her arm and Alex said: ‘I could have hit the bastard – and probably some day I will,’ but she did not hear, and Alex took her other arm and we went into the hotel.
The dance band had come from London that night and everything was exactly right. I do not think we missed a single dance before supper time and I thought there was a kind of fine-drawn exhilaration about everything in the big white colour-streamered hotel room under the exquisite chandeliers. Mrs Sanderson was one of those women who imprint charm and taste on everyone about her, and very soon there was nothing about her to tell that she had been so miserably sick in the car, and soon the whole affair, except for Lydia, faded out of our minds.
At twelve o’clock we drank champagne in an annexe supper-room and toasted each other.
‘First time I ever drank champagne,’ Tom said.
‘How does it strike you?’ Alex said to me, and I said with vanity: ‘Slightly on the dry side, perhaps,’ and Alex said, ‘I was going to say the same. But we shall bear up –’ And we all laughed and drank and said things like ‘Happy New Year’ and ‘Many of them’ and ‘Bless you all.’
‘Oh! this isn’t a toast-list, is it?’ Mrs Sanderson said. ‘This calls for something better, doesn’t it?’ and she held my face in her hands and kissed me.
Then Alex kissed Lydia, setting down his champagne glass in order to do so, and then kissing her in his gay-dog, slightly ironic, debonair fashion. Then I kissed Nancy. Someone began at that moment to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and we joined hands together and sang it too. Several women, as they always do, had tears in their eyes, and Nancy, as we went back to have supper, was one of them.
‘It’s been a wonderful year,’ she said. ‘I hope there’ll be another one.’
‘Tom didn’t kiss Lydia,’ Alex said, and we all agreed that that was right.
‘Kiss her,’ Alex said. ‘Or may I have your turn?’
‘We ought to get some grub before there’s a rush at the tables,’ Tom said, and we all said no, no, he was not going to get out of it like that.
‘Take a long drink of champagne and close your eyes, Tom,’ Mrs Sanderson said, and we all spilt our champagne, laughing. All the time Tom stood smiling, awkward, and very sweet in his large shyness, and then suddenly Lydia took his arm and said:
‘Come on, Tom. Let’s go down and see if the driver has had his supper.’
‘Oh! cowards,’ we said. ‘He’s not there anyway. It’s a rotten excuse to be alone.’
‘Oh! he’ll be there,’ she said.
But he was not there; and it was only long afterwards that I understood why she had taken Tom down with her to see.
As the night went on all of us, except Mrs Sanderson, drank the cold champagne too quickly, and it must have been nearly two o’clock when Alex came sliding across the floor to me, sideways, his mouth springing about elastically to frame his words, and said:
‘Let’s go and find that bastard Johnson. Let’s give him a bloody good do –’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘The two of us.’
As we went downstairs and outside and began to grope about, starrily, in the fierce air of the winter night, looking for Blackie Johnson, Alex kept shouting:
‘Johnson! Come on out, you rotten bastard.’
We walked several times up and down the lines of parked cars and then down a side avenue to where, at the bottom of the hotel gardens, the river ran, but Blackie had not come back.
‘Anyway, we know one thing,’ Alex said. ‘We’ll never have him as a driver again. That’s certain.’
‘Never in your life,’ I said.
Then we stood under a tree, looking at the sky, the dark branches, the stars, and the fallen crispness of their frosty reflections in the river below us and Alex said:
‘God, it’s so beautiful. Look at it, old boy – it’s so beautiful.’
I stood looking across the river. There was a wonderful unblemished purity of winter starlight over the dark water, and the air, I thought, was full of a strange distant frosty singing. I thought of Lydia and Johnson again. For a second I was ripped by spasmodic hatred of Johnson. Then Alex fell over and said, still sitting on the frozen ground:
‘Damn. That comes of thinking too much of her.’
‘I was thinking of her too,’ I said. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking – Oh! God, never mind.’
Starlight and frost and champagne and affection swam together in my head and I said:
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. She isn’t. Haven’t you ever looked at her face? –’
‘You only know her face,’ I
said.
‘I doubt if any one of us knows her,’ he said.
Solemnly he got to his feet and we linked arms, winding back to the hotel through the lovely, bitter star-light air.
‘She always does the things you don’t expect of her,’ Alex said, and we stumbled back into the hotel, laughing in a sudden gay hysteria of friendship, slightly forced, perhaps because I had nothing else to say in answer.
Blackie Johnson came back, as he had said he would, at three o’clock. Alex was three parts asleep when we put him into the car. Mrs Sanderson had a lovely drowsy suspense about her, saying over and over again: ‘Tom, I’m going to put my head on your shoulder.’ Nancy and I had floated out of the champagne into a period of second wakefulness; and Lydia, without asking or saying a word, got into the front of the car again with Blackie.
‘She’s tamed him down a bit,’ Nancy said. She moved her body and slipped down beside me on the seat. ‘He’s not driving so fast this time.’
As we drove along I stared dully at fences and hedges, wraithed in pale frozen grasses and wands of old meadowsweet and willow herb and thistle flowing past like things stark in salt wastes. I could hear the crunch of ice as we slid over it and I remember thinking that soon there would be skating again. I saw Lydia’s face turning pale, fur-framed, in the dash-light, and once a movement of Blackie’s in answer.
‘Perhaps next time she can get him to remember the rugs,’ Nancy said. ‘It’s much cosier – it’s awfully cold without them,’ and she put her arms round me, curling her body and holding it down against me.
‘Oh! I’m so cold,’ she said. ‘Hold me – bring my coat over my shoulders.’
I held her, bringing her coat over her shoulders. She was not cold; but something inside myself was, and it had begun to pain me like a wound.
Chapter Three
As the winter went on I began to be more and more uneasy about her; I did not think she looked at me with the same fondness as before.
Sometimes when we drove to dances she did not sit with me. She would sit with Alex, or even, sometimes, out of spite as I thought, with Blackie Johnson, beyond the front glass screen. She was always gay and talkative and high-spirited and full of expressive friendliness with us all. I did not recognize then that all these things were part of her growing. I thought it was her way of taking her love away from me; I was hurt because she did not belong to me alone any longer. And because I was hurt I began to grow jealous of her. I could not bear it if she looked at Alex with friendliness, or if she teased Tom in his presence so that Alex too would show in his own expression the slightest fear that she was doing it to taunt him too. I had forgotten how much a prisoner she had been: how exciting and unbalancing and lovely it must have been for her that winter, to live a life broadening to full freedom with young people like us. I wanted her only for myself, exactly as I always longed, hungrily and painfully, in the appalling drabness of an Evensford winter, for the intensified tenderness, the warmth and the loveliness, of a summer day.
Then I noticed that she began to get bored with the dances. ‘They are all the same,’ she would say. ‘It’s always just us and we just dance with each other. It’s all got terribly respectable and stuffy.’
Then I began to think that perhaps her boredom with the dances was really only the expression of her boredom with me. I thought that slowly and inevitably she was growing away from me; that soon she would not want me any more. It did not occur to me that she could possibly be in love with Alex; that she might be attracted, even without really knowing it, to a man like Blackie.
Then one evening I ran into Alex as he came off the London train. I thought he seemed taut and strung up and tired. There was always a fine, stretched pallor about his face, a high-strung tension about the thin cheek-bones and the long elegant chin that gave him an appearance of handsome nervousness. But that night his eyes were smoky and hollowed and exhausted and he said to me:
‘You weren’t meeting the train, were you? I mean you didn’t come down specially or anything? – you know? –’
I began to say that it was all by chance I happened to be there, but he interrupted.
‘For Christ’s sake let’s get a drink,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down to “The Prince Albert”.’
He coughed several times, his breath catching the night air. He swung his briefcase from hand to hand. Then as we reached ‘The Prince Albert,’ the only hotel in Evensford, a double-winged Edwardian house of red brick with long lace curtains and rows of winter palms in the lobby and a tarnished smell of liquor and train smoke in all the rooms, he said several times:
‘In the lounge, in the lounge. It’s quieter there.’
In the lounge I sat down by the fire and he rang the bell, twice, impatiently, for the waiter.
‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Beer. I’ll have beer. And in a tankard – I hate it in a glass. Bring it in a tankard. I can’t drink it in a glass. Bring it in a tankard.’
Perhaps I looked startled at this, because he turned on me sharply, protesting, as if I had said something:
‘It’s cooler like that. It tastes different. Altogether different –’
When the tankard came, set down by a waiter who looked slightly puzzled and startled too, Alex shouted after him:
‘And a double gin too. I’ll have a double gin. I’ll have a chaser,’ and then gripped the tankard with both hands, so that his knuckles shone as bare and polished almost as the silvered pewter.
‘I’m damn glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Damn glad I ran into you –’
In my affection for him – and it remained, through everything that happened afterwards, the same affection, only rarefied by events – I felt that perhaps all this had gone far enough.
‘What’s got into you?’ I said.
‘Ever hear of a place called Milton Posnett?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Nor has anyone else,’ he said. ‘Except Lydia.’
The waiter came with the gin and Alex said: ‘Bring me some lemon in it. I like lemon in it. Bring Mr Richardson one too,’ and then when the waiter had gone:
‘It’s some dead-alive hole out in Huntingdonshire. We’re going to dance there.’
‘What dance?’
‘It’s just a hop. A village hop. A bob-a-time Saturday night shindy. I know one thing – I’ll not take my mother there.’
I did not speak. I could not see what so simple a thing had to do with his attitude of complex nervousness. He sat quiet for a few moments, his body screwed up, his face down almost to the level of the table, above the tankard. I waited; he did not speak either, and I said:
‘What’s all this about? Who told you?’
‘She did,’ he said. ‘Lydia. It’s her idea.’ He looked at me with pitiful embarrassment. ‘That’s what I wanted to say – what I wanted – I took her out to dinner last night.’
He looked so pained about this simple fact that I did not know what to say.
‘Place on the Great North Road,’ he said. ‘Eaton something – Blackie took us. Eaton something – Eaton –’
‘Eatanswill?’ I said.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What? No – that wasn’t it,’ and the bitter, sickly joke was lost on him.
‘She telephoned me,’ he said. ‘It was her idea,’ as if he thought this brought the improbability of the whole thing into reasonable fine with truth. ‘She wanted to talk about something. This dance thing. She’s tired of it. She’s fed up. She thinks it’s got awfully stuffy –’
‘Perhaps it has.’
‘She wants to go somewhere new. For a change. You know? – sort of –’ He looked at me with gin-smoky, fuddled eyes. ‘So when we were coming home she suddenly pulled the partition and said to Blackie: “Blackie, you know all the places. Where could we go? Somewhere different? For fun? Somewhere we don’t have to dress – where we could let go.” And then he suggested this place. It’s some bloody awful hole – you know what those villages are – I think he comes from there.’
‘Perhaps she’s right,’ I said. ‘We can’t go on doing the same old round for ever.’
‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘Have another drink? I’m going to have another one. Waiter!’
The waiter did not come and after that, for some minutes, Alex forgot him. Then what he said next, sucking the words with fumbling lips out of the tankard, seemed very amusing and I laughed.
‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘I think she’s flirting with Blackie.’
‘How many did you have in London?’ I said.
‘A few, a few,’ he said. ‘Not many.’ I laughed again, and he seemed acutely pained.
‘What’s so funny about it? When you look at him he’s bloody handsome – in his way.’
‘That doesn’t mean it’s her way.’
‘No? You can never tell,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure. They get attracted by people you loathe. You wonder how the hell they can – you can never be sure.’
I asked him if there was anything that could possibly make him sure, and he said:
‘She made me kiss her good night in front of him. Deliberately –’
I felt sick. ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
‘Deliberately,’ he said.
I said I thought he had had enough. I added that I thought I had had enough myself. The trivial obsessions of a half-drunk, even a friend, did not seem very amusing. He called again for the waiter. Then he got up and rammed a blundering forefinger several times into the bell. It rang insistently far away in the bar, and he said:
‘She sees something in him – I can tell by the way she looks at him.’
‘She’s excitable and impulsive,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘I’ll knock the bastard down if he even looks at her,’ he said.
I suddenly felt sick with fear and doubt and uneasiness that all he was saying might be true. The arrival of the waiter made me get up. Alex was staring into the pier-glass above the fireplace and the waiter asked me if anyone had rung. I said it was all a mistake. We were sorry to have bothered him. We were going home.