by H. E. Bates
‘Home be damned,’ Alex said. ‘Two more. Two more, waiter. Let’s have two more.’
‘I’m going,’ I said.
I walked angrily out of the hotel. Blundering and groping in the darkening night air beyond the lighted steps, Alex ran after me.
‘Don’t go off in a bloody huff,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
He waved his hands expansively and uncertainly in air.
‘It’s a bad habit of yours,’ he said. He laughed with wry, shaky good humour. ‘Going off in a huff. Storming out like an offended bloody old cockatoo.’
‘You’re sozzled,’ I said.
‘Bad habit,’ he said. ‘Terrible weakness.’
He laughed again and I caught a glimpse of his face, half-drunk, careless, taut but amusing and lovable under the grim light of a gas-lamp. My annoyance with him vanished suddenly and I laughed too.
‘I’m sorry I stormed out,’ I said.
‘Bad habit,’ he said. ‘Something you’ll have to grow out of.’
‘I flare up,’ I said. ‘I feel something flare up inside me.’
‘Eh?’ he said. ‘Feel what?’ He laughed again and then with a sudden grave mannerism that might have been a mockery of himself if I had not noticed that his teeth were gripping hard together, pulling his mouth into a bloodless line, he shook hands.
‘Don’t know what I should do without you,’ he said.
His hand was cold. He stood for a long time in the street, holding my hand, gripping it with wiry fingers. He said several times how good it had been to talk and how he felt better because of it. His eyes were uneasy in their bright depression of fatigue under the street gas lamp. He might have been ill except for the constant twisted smile on his mouth and once as he waved his hands in a more exaggerated show of relief and affection for me he staggered and almost fell down.
I wished very often afterwards that he had fallen down. We might then have had a good laugh together. We might have seen the funny side of something that, in the narrowed magnification that youth brought to it, seemed to him only intensely muddled and taut and tragic.
Instead he suddenly turned and looked at me, very curiously, the smile gone from his face, leaving the eyes once again smokily troubled.
‘I keep getting a feeling something bloody awful is going to happen,’ he said.
‘Who to?’ I said.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the least idea.’
As we walked the rest of the way home he did not speak of it again. He did not speak of Lydia either. But that night I lay awake for a long time looking into the mild winter night sky, very bright with stars over the jetties, the alleyways, and the dark roofs of the town, troubled and sleepless, thinking of what he had said to me.
‘I keep getting a feeling something bloody awful is going to happen,’ he had said, and I knew that the worst that could happen to me, then or in the future, was that either the love I felt for him or the love I felt for Lydia, or even both of them, might somehow be taken away.
The following evening, when I went up to the Aspen house, I knew how stupid I had been to think of all this.
‘If that’s our Mr Richardson,’ Miss Bertie called, ‘bring him in at once. I want to scold him severely.’
The voice sailed with dry and starchy assertiveness along the main corridor of the house as I entered with Lydia. Unless we were dancing or I had an invitation to dinner I went up to the house soon after eight o’clock. The Aspens dined at seven; I would join them afterwards for coffee. If it were not raining Lydia came down the long drive to meet me, and that evening she came down with her coat slung sleevelessly over her shoulders. She ran the last twenty yards or so down the slope of the avenue, running into my arms to kiss me, and I said:
‘You had dinner with Alex. I know. You didn’t tell me.’
‘He rang up suddenly and asked me,’ she said. I did not comment on this. ‘It wasn’t anything. Are you jealous?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good – I wondered if you would be.’
She laughed softly and then said something about my having to get used to sharing her with people and that the world, after all, wasn’t composed simply of ourselves. I suddenly felt oddly uncertain about everything and she seemed to sense it and pulled me against her. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said, ‘and I do love you.’ Then she drew her mouth warmly across the side of my face. ‘Let’s stand a minute – I want you to hold me.’
I stood with my back to a lime tree, holding her against me. As I pulled her to me she put up her arms and her coat, sleevelessly draped about her shoulders, fell off, and I felt all the hollowed shape of her body in its dress, hard and soft, warm and strenuous, pressed against me. The night was profoundly still and quiet and unwintry again and she said:
‘Shall I tell you a wonderful, marvellous, exciting, terrific thing?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘They’re going to talk to you about my birthday,’ she said. ‘And then next week they’re going to London, looking for a present for me. They’re going for two days.’
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You poor simple – it means we can be in the house alone together – you and I,’ she said.
A flare of excitement, dispelling all the fear I had, went through me fiercely. ‘It’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I’ll arrange it all,’ she said.
It was because of this – and there was a wonderful feeling of personal sweetness, lovely and tender and almost naïve, in the way she told it to me – that I put Alex, Blackie, and all the vacuous dreary thoughts I had had about them the previous evening completely behind me.
‘Give me one of those long kisses of yours – do you know it’s a year since I first kissed you and then I had to make you?’ she said. ‘And then we must go.’
I kissed her for a long time and then, on the way up to the house, she stopped and said one more thing:
‘What would you say I ought to do for my party?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s my party. It’s I who am twenty-one – it’s nobody else – it isn’t you or Aunt Bertie or anybody, is it? What do you think?’ she said.
I told her I thought she ought to have the kind of party she wanted, and she threw her arms about me, with a sort of whispered shriek of delight.
‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘Of course! Oh! I’ll love you for ever for saying that. I’ll love you all the time they’ve gone away –’
Up in the house, in the drawing-room, Miss Juliana had her neck swathed in flannel and pins and sat in a rather mopey fashion, sucking honey from a teaspoon, before the fire. I thought she cringed a little, putting her hand to her face to touch its tender nerves, as Miss Bertie greeted me with sharp and friendly firmness:
‘Come along in, Mr Richardson, and let me scold you! – you promised to come and give your opinion about the ixias, and that was a week ago.’
Miss Bertie was always having difficulties with freesias or cyclamen or amaryllis or some other flower of which she felt I knew the secret; she thought all her gardeners had wool in their heads and wood in their fingers. ‘They’re so awfully hide-bound you see, so fixed,’ she would say to me, ‘you would think it was their garden, their conservatory.’ It was I who had spoken to her of the delicious many-coloured ixias that would make a change, as I told her, from the everlasting bowls of narcissus and daffodils.
‘What about the ixias?’ I said.
‘The ixias do not like us,’ she said. ‘They sniff and sulk. They reject us.’
‘Perhaps the gardeners don’t like them,’ I said.
‘Possibly there is something in that.’
I began to say something about affection breeding affection, even in plants, when she said:
‘Oh! That’s altogether too profound for me. It’s far more likely someone has been over-dosing them with dung-water.’ She fussed and laughed her way across the drawing-room. ‘Anyway we shall go and have a loo
k at them. You go on ahead and put on the light for me.’
In the delicious night humidity of the conservatory, all heavily and delicately fragrant with hyacinth and narcissus and small cowslip-like primula among ferns, I could not see that the ixias had much wrong with them except perhaps a touch of fly on the thin gleaming leaves.
‘It’s a little early for them perhaps,’ I said. ‘They need only the gentlest forcing –’ But I could see suddenly that, after all, the flowers were really a secondary thing. She was not really listening. Suddenly she gave one of her hen-like fluffings that always preceded some pronouncement of her intentions and said:
‘Mr Richardson, there was really something else I wanted to ask you – do you mind? – what do you feel about Lydia’s party? – say with utmost frankness what you feel.’
I made a pretence of thinking for a moment or two about it; and then I said I thought that, since it was her own party, she ought to have the party she herself wanted.
‘You really feel that? Did she say that to you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It makes no difference if she did. The point is she wants a rather large party – she wants to have dancing on the lawn in the evening for the whole town, and a great many people and so on. How does that strike you?’
Then I remembered how Lydia had so often said that she was getting bored with dances; and it made me say:
‘I think every girl wants to have something wonderful on that day. There’s nothing quite so big and exciting for her again – except when she’s married –’
She played sadly with the leaf of a narcissus.
‘I remember my own twenty-first,’ she said. ‘My birthday is on the thirteenth of August and my father thought it was fitting to have grouse, with a claret of ’53, I think it was. The grouse was bloody and’ – she suddenly looked at me with a kind of melancholy mischief, rather wistfully – ‘and I’m bound to say the claret was bloody too.’
In that moment I felt that I liked Miss Bertie very much.
‘After that we were allowed to play bezique,’ she said. ‘You never played bezique, I suppose?’ She made a sour little face. ‘With grown-ups?’
I said I had never played bezique. I did not even know what bezique was. But she made it sound like a complaint of the liver; and then she said:
‘That’s all I wanted to ask you.’ She smiled, and it was that same curious expansive smile that all the Aspens, even Rollo, sometimes gave, quite enchanting and yet disenchanting too.
‘I think we’ll give her the party she wants, won’t we?’ she said.
‘It ought to be very lovely in May,’ I said.
‘You never know,’ she said, ‘it might be the last nice thing, really nice thing, we could give her,’ and with that she turned out the light above the flowers.
When we got back to the drawing-room she gave me a glass of port, pouring it out for me herself. Lydia, who also had one, looked very pleased about something and then puzzled for a moment as I lifted my glass and said:
‘Well, here’s to bezique and no grouse,’ a remark that seemed to bring some life back to Juliana, who sat gaping and grey as an old landed fish in her chair. She had been rather croaky and poorly all that winter and the eyelid she turned and, as it were, unpeeled at me was yellow at the edge.
‘What have you two been hatching up besides flowers?’ she said.
‘I thought you were going to bed,’ Bertie said to her. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
Afterwards I fancied Lydia had, perhaps, been wearing both of them down about the party, and that Juliana, the weaker, had been the first to crumple up. But now a brightness began to assert itself in Juliana and she actually said:
‘I rather think I’ll have a glass of port too.’
‘It’s congestive,’ Miss Bertie said.
‘Then, let it be congestive,’ Juliana said. ‘My belly has had nothing inside it all day.’
Then Miss Bertie suddenly turned to me and as if it were the newest possible subject between us, said:
‘Mr Richardson, my sister and I wanted to ask you something’ – she looked quite grave and flat-faced – ‘it was the question of Lydia’s party. For her twenty-first – what sort of party do you think she ought to have?’
By that time I knew my one-sentence piece so well that I actually hesitated.
‘Be quite frank and say what you feel. Speak with the utmost frankness.’
Lydia gulped nervously at her port, and I said:
‘I think she ought to have exactly the kind of party she wants to have.’
Miss Bertie wagged her jowls – they did not quite form a dewlap, but they had a certain dog-like floppiness that made her facial expressions sometimes seem convulsive, giving the impression that she was laughing when she really wasn’t – and then said:
‘Thank you – that’s just exactly what we were thinking too.’
Lydia gave a shriek of joy. She threw her arms round Miss Bertie, calling her the dear pet. Miss Juliana put up pretty, ill, protective fingers, murmuring nervous warnings about things being catching and then let Lydia kiss her on the hair.
‘Oh! I could kiss you all,’ Lydia said and then looked swiftly about her and said to me – ‘You too –’
And suddenly she did kiss me, lightly, with a shy sisterly sort of art.
‘Well!’ Miss Bertie said. She began to jog up and down like the bonnet of an old motor car, laughing. Then Miss Juliana gave a croaked, congested giggle, and Miss Bertie said:
‘What about us?’
I then kissed Miss Bertie’s dog-like, semi-dewlapped mouth, feeling the crisp brush of her moustache as we blundered together. Then I made for Miss Juliana, who croaked ‘Not me! You’ll catch your death!’ and Lydia said:
‘Oh! Aunt Juley, let him. He kisses beautifully,’ and Miss Bertie said:
‘Oh! so it wasn’t the first time!’ and we all laughed with great relief and gaiety together.
These twitterings, so trivial and timid, seem stupid now; perhaps the sisters were not, after all, as obtuse as they sometimes seemed; perhaps in their old-fashioned diffidence they had their own way of doing things. At any rate we began to discuss the party Lydia wanted. The air was clear at last.
She knew, as I discovered later, perfectly well what she wanted. But that night she spoke of first one thing, and then another, as if they were surprise packets, quite unexpected:
‘Oh! yes! and then the band on the terrace, and everyone dancing on the front lawn.’
There was first of all, it seemed, to be a reception in the house for invited guests. ‘And champagne!’ she said. ‘We must have champagne – I liked it so much at the New Year party. It always reminds me of that.’
And then the grounds would be open – they had not been open since the Coronation of George V, a date I often remembered because it was for many years the one and only time I had ever seen the Aspen house, except that I had not even the vaguest recollection of strings of fairy lights seen from the wicker hood of the family pram – and then the town would come in for dancing, which Lydia would start at nine o’clock, I hoped with me of course, although as a matter of fact she did not do so.
At ten the invited guests would have supper in the house – we did not work out all these details that first evening: Lydia let many of them fall out like casual afterthoughts, sometimes weeks afterwards – and there would be large cold buffets, with perhaps a speech or two.
‘And all the town must come,’ Lydia said. ‘Everybody. We want everybody. We must put it in the papers.’
‘That means your horrid Mr Bretherton,’ Miss Juliana said.
‘Oh! he’ll get drunk,’ I said.
‘I think I shall get drunk,’ Lydia said.
‘Lydia!’ they said.
‘Well, Rollo will,’ she said, ‘if nobody else does – and probably Alex will, if somebody teases him enough – won’t he?’ she said to me.
‘I shouldn’t tease Alex,’ I said.
‘I t
hink it’s such fun to see the look on his face,’ she said.
‘Don’t tease him,’ I said.
‘No?’ she said. ‘All right – then I’ll be serious with him – how does that suit you?’
There was just one more thing she wanted. She thought of the old people. Many old people, she thought, would not be able to come unless they were fetched in cars.
‘Knight could fetch some of them in the Daimler, and Mr Johnson’ – she did not once mention Blackie – ‘could fetch some in his car.’
The Aspen sisters thought it a nice idea; it touched them, in these days when the young, as they often said, were getting indifferent and disrespectful and even callous about their elders, to think that she had been thoughtful enough to remember them.
Then Miss Bertie said – and I thought it seemed to point so conclusively to the end of the proceedings that I got up, at last, to go – ‘All we need is a fine day.’
‘It should be lovely,’ I said. ‘May-time – nearly the end of May – nearly June.’
‘May-time – the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,’ she said, and her floppy face became alight with the most touching pleasure. ‘I think it will be wonderful – I’m sure it will.’
Lydia came to the front door to say goodnight to me and we stood for a few moments on the dark porch outside.
‘Clever man,’ she said.
I did not think I had been very clever about anything, and I did not know when or how.
‘Clever,’ she said. ‘You’ve got those bright blue eyes and they see right through people, don’t they?’
I was not, as a matter of fact, ever more obtuse in my life. But it warmed and pleased me to hear her say these things, and especially:
‘I like the others – Alex and Tom and all of them, but you’re the one with character. You’re the deep one, aren’t you?’ She said these last words in a whisper; and then also in a whisper: ‘Goodnight, darling. I’ll love you every minute – and next week every second,’ and with wonderful tenderness she kissed me goodnight in the dark winter air.
On the way down through the park, in the avenue, I met Rollo. He began shouting: