by H. E. Bates
Outside the school-house Lydia and Nancy and Nora Jepson were waiting with Tom. I think I murmured something to Alex about his being an awful damn fool to have hit Blackie, and then I said, ‘Let’s get home – even if you have to drive the car yourself,’ but he did not answer.
Nor, for some time, did anyone else speak. Nancy was crying a little; Nora Jepson stood with a hurt, wistfully sick look on her face – she went into the sanatorium later and then married a young doctor there after he had finally cured her by patient after-care – and she must have wondered why on earth she had ever been dragged along. I wondered greatly myself; and then I wondered still more as I stood there, confused and panting, and staring at Lydia, whose face was still transfixed with excitement, as if she were enjoying it all.
Someone, at this moment, blundered out of the schoolroom, banging his hands on the thighs of his trousers. It was Blackie: but whether he was aggressive or apologetic or furious or repentant I never had time to discover. Because at the same moment Lydia, with an awful cry, broke down.
‘Oh! Tom! Oh! Tom!’ she said, and she rushed to him and put her arms about him. ‘I’ve had enough of this. Oh! Tom dear – take me home.’
And Tom, with that same curious bewildered look on his face as I had seen on it at the ice a year before, took her into his arms without a word.
Chapter Five
Alex’s simple cure of the vacuum of Evensford’s Sundays was to stay in bed all day. And it was typical of him that on the Sunday following the dance at Milton Posnett he was up by nine o’clock, perhaps for the first time on a Sunday for many years, dressing himself in the tasteful dove-grey suit of narrow herring-bone that fitted him so well, with the white spotted crimson tie, the handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket, and the red-enamelled cuff links, a present from his mother, sparkling on the pale blue shirt-cuffs that revealed themselves just the necessary three-eighths of an inch below his sleeves. Alex loved dressing well and he hated getting up; he dressed slowly and meticulously and then infuriated his friends, both male and female, by keeping them waiting. But that morning he was at the Aspen house by ten-fifteen, asking for Lydia, so that he might apologize.
And it was typical of her – in several ways, only one of which I grasped at the time – that she was sweet with him. He had gone to see her in the remorseful, barren mood of a man who had done something unpardonable in drink and could not remember if it were worse than or only as bad as he feared. It was characteristic of her that she made him feel that it was neither. I think she was really expecting him. It was what she must have felt would happen; and it was what she really wanted.
It gave her, too, another opportunity of bringing Alex and Blackie together.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘if you’re going to apologize to me then Blackie is going to apologize to you. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other.’
‘And so,’ Alex said to me, ‘we went to see Blackie.’
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘At first he wouldn’t apologize.’ There was something so inherently gentlemanly in Alex that I think he had probably been shocked by that. Men to whom you apologized, even with reluctance, in cold blood, or in bad grace, ought naturally to have the decency to apologize back, even if they still hated you – otherwise they are rotten.
‘Not even to her?’ I said.
‘The funny thing is I think he was shy,’ he said.
‘A drink was called for,’ I said.
It was a casual and pointless remark, but Alex said:
‘As a matter of fact we had one. And that was damned interesting. We went over to “The Prince Albert” at twelve o’clock.’
‘And you put your hand deep in your pocket and all was well –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Not quite like that.’
A curious puzzled seriousness had begun creeping into his voice. He began to ruckle the veins of his brows. ‘As a matter of fact I felt damn sorry for him – you know, that isn’t his mother. He lost her – old Johnson married again.’
I said I couldn’t see what that had to do with Alex, Blackie, Lydia, or myself; and he said:
‘Old Johnson’s dying – pneumonia and complication with the arm – did you know?’
The thought of old Johnson dying shocked me. I could not speak; and Alex, in his bemused, serious way, went on:
‘Blackie says the second wife has gradually been milking the old man of all he’s got – there’ll be nothing left for him. He’ll probably have to wind the business up. He’s been trying to get the old man to reorganize it on modern lines for years, but the old man couldn’t see it. And now there’ll be damn little left to organize.’
‘It’s wonderful what a drink will do,’ I said.
‘Well, we did have several,’ Alex said. ‘Lydia insisted on buying several.’
He paused again, looking troubled, and then said:
‘You know I don’t know that Blackie is quite such a bad egg. I think we misjudged the bloke. He looks miserable and difficult, but I think he’s really worried to death. After all it’s a bit too much to see what’s really yours being taken away from you.’
‘How many drinks did you have?’ I said.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll grow up to be a damn cynic or something perishing awful like that. I’m only trying to see it from Blackie’s point of view.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘You see, the bloke has got the right ideas. The horse-and-wagonette age is over. The future is with cars and motorbikes and road transport. Nobody can deny that.’
I was not very interested in cars, but I did not deny it.
‘You know,’ Alex said, ‘I wouldn’t mind that garage business – as a sort of spec. There’s money there. It needs three or four thousand putting into it and then in a few years – main road and everything, more and more cars.’
‘Is that Blackie’s idea?’
‘Oh! no – oh! God, no,’ Alex said. ‘That’s what I think. After all there are only two other garages in Evensford and one of those is kept by that shyster Pratt – after all, Evensford is growing and in a year or two –’
Alex, behind the well-dressed and casual and sometimes catarrhal air of someone who was a little elegant for a small town and not very strong, was really very shrewd. At seventeen he had been given by his father a single-storeyed warehouse and fifty bundles of fivepence-a-foot goat-skin and glacé kid and a few foot of orange and crimson calf that no one would buy. In five years he had built himself a prosperous and expanding little business as a factor, employing a dozen people and a series of attractive office-girls who all left him, in turn, because of broken hearts.
Just then, as I now remember it, I suddenly thought of Lydia’s attitude to all this.
‘Wasn’t she bored?’ I said.
‘Oh! no. On the contrary,’ Alex said. ‘Not a bit. She was fascinated. We talked about it the whole way home.’
I seem to remember saying something about being glad that the whole affair had ended so amicably. Perhaps I had misjudged Blackie; I did not know till afterwards. Perhaps he was, as Alex said, really a terribly self-conscious person, very shy. I was not interested. Neither cars nor business, leather nor money excited me very much. While other people slaved over stitching machines or clicking boards or tanning vats I preferred, for reasons that baffled most of them except Alex and Tom and Nancy and I suppose Lydia, to roam the Aspen park or the fields beyond Busketts and attach what now seems perhaps an over-serious importance, but that was then an exultant and beautiful and precious one, to things like the arrival of the first primrose. I was apt to go off into dreams about these things and I was probably dreaming when Alex said:
‘I think she’s sorry for him. I think she probably twigged instinctively about things being a bit rough for him long before I did. Women do that, don’t they? They think in another way.’
‘They don’t think. They feel,’ I said.
‘Do they? I suppose they d
o,’ Alex said. ‘Anyway, one thing’s certain. The set isn’t going to break up. I would have felt a damn stinker if it had broken up because of what I’d done.’
‘It was my fault,’ I said.
‘Don’t start that,’ he said. ‘It’s all over now.’
‘Except,’ I said, ‘that Blackie didn’t apologize.’
‘He was shy. He was tongue-tied. And anyway Lydia did for him,’ he said. There was a sudden renewal of excitement about her in his face as he said this, ‘And that makes it even as far as I’m concerned.’
So, in this way – it was almost springtime now and already on evenings of pale green twilight there was a brittle-sweet heartbreaking singing of thrushes that carried on into darkness – we kept together until Lydia’s birthday in the last week of May. But before the birthday – it was perhaps a week before because I remember there had been some controversy about the cutting of the horse-chestnuts in the churchyard and how in the end they were not cut that year but were specially exquisite and rich in the warm May weather – a curious and unexpected thing happened.
It did not cause anything, and I do not think it had any effect on any of us except myself. It seemed to be purely an incidental thing and I did not speak of it. But it was, even so, the last thing in the world I should have thought of happening, and it helped me to see things as I should not have seen them otherwise.
In the first week of May that year we moved into another house; we left the thundering presses of the factory terrace and went to live in a pleasant square-bayed villa with a garden of apples and raspberries at the side. It seemed an extraordinarily large and opulent affair after the neighbourhood of Joe Pendleton, the tarred backfences and the pigeons. I was glad because it seemed to indicate that we were rising in the world; I was glad too because I was able to take a week off for the flitting and then spend the last part of it walking about the countryside.
I was coming home one afternoon from behind Busketts – a gated footpath ran between cow-rubbed hedges of hawthorn and then dipped across fields and finally broke out into the Evensford Corporation rubbish-dump and became a cinder-track winding through gas-tarred backyards, – when I heard Nancy’s voice calling me from the plum-orchard that lay partly up the hill behind the farm.
‘I’ve got something to ask you,’ she called.
She was wearing a white summer dress, probably her first that year, because I could see how neatly and sharply the ironing creases showed on the sleeves above her elbows, and when I went over to her she said:
‘Stranger again. Where do you get to all the time?’
Perhaps the thing that slightly irritated me about Nancy, more than anything else, was this rather tart passion for asking questions to which she perfectly well knew the answer.
‘Anyway, I’m awfully glad to have seen you because Tom wants to know what you’re going to wear for the party. The great birthday.’
‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘You need somebody to look after you,’ she said. ‘You just can’t turn up in anything.’
‘I don’t propose to,’ I said. ‘I shall wear whatever Tom and Alex wear.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and that’s exactly what Tom wants to know. What shall he wear?’
I was glad when she ended this rather pointless conversation by asking me in to tea.
‘How many lumps? I always forget. And do cut the curd-tart yourself. Cut it. Take a good piece for yourself – take a real man’s piece,’ she said.
We sat on one of the window-seats, in the long room that faced the garden, to have tea. The window-seats were painted white. Above them the casement windows were open, so that when she sat by one of them, leaning her head back in the corner, there were small stirrings of breeze in her blonde, light-textured hair. She looked very attractive that day, in something the way a brushed and soft-eyed domestic animal looks attractive, in rather the way a light-haired dog lies on a carpet, waiting to be stroked.
We talked of the beautiful weather.
‘More tea? More to eat?’ I think I had four cups of tea; I had been out since morning, walking, with nothing but sandwiches, and I was hungry and thirsty. ‘I’ve had my bedroom done up – they’ve made a wonderful job of it. It’s plain white, with crimson – but when you’ve finished tea I’m going to take you up and you can see it yourself.’
We fluttered like this through tea, and then after tea – the unexpected incident of which I have spoken had nothing to do with Nancy; it was simply Nancy who was the cause of it – we went upstairs. Her room was composed of two attics thrown together on the south side of the house. Two casement windows looked across the Busketts fields, all green that day with rising corn and glittering yellow with buttercup and knotted with rope-like hedges of hawthorn, and she sat on the window-seat of one of them and said:
‘You can see Souldrop Church from here. And the ventilators in the tunnel at Long Lays.’
She sat there looking sideways. Her pale, golden neck arched itself and turned, tender and fleshy in the May sunshine. Her room was pure white and fresh, with curtains on which were loose designs of scarlet peony. I could smell strong new paint in the air. She said, ‘Come and sit beside me,’ patting the white-and-scarlet cushions on the window-seat. ‘You’re so far away –’ and finally I went and sat beside her, staring too across the fields.
‘It’s the nicest view in the world,’ she said. ‘I love it – every springtime I love it more.’
I loved it very much too: not simply for what it was but because this, I knew, was the kind of land that Evensford had taken away from us. It had taken the pattern of white hawthorn, the gold and the white, the dark steely brown of ploughed earth and the green of corn, and had left us ash-heaps. In place of primrose spinneys of nightingales we had been given backyards of gas-tarred fencing and croaking hens. For these reasons alone what we looked at that day, across the Busketts fields, in the May sunlight, was trebly precious to both of us, and presently she said:
‘There’s a nightingale down in the spinney there – he’s singing all day long now. You can hear him now – hark! – you can hear him, there he is –’
She turned her head sharply to listen. The nightingale gave a startling pellucid whistle, thin and piercing and exquisite, down in the oak spinney; and I suddenly leaned across and kissed Nancy on the lips at the very moment the high note flew to its complete pitch across the still afternoon.
It was not a very long kiss; it was pleasant and I did not mean it seriously. She was quiet and she did not move her body to respond. I remember how Alex had once said that the moment you kissed Nancy you began to think of some other girl; and I had hardly touched her lips before I began to think of Lydia.
‘Why did you do that?’ she said.
At first I did not say anything. If I had been honest I should have told her, simply, perhaps laughingly, that I loved her because, like Tom, she was part of the view.
Instead I touched her face with my mouth and laughed. ‘It was just the first kiss of summer,’ I said.
‘Why did you do it?’ she said.
When I look back I wonder sometimes if what I said in answer, or rather perhaps what I didn’t say, was not of more importance than anything else that ever happened between us. I said simply:
‘Because I like you. You know that.’
There are girls who would have shrieked at that; or perhaps, in fury, have slapped me across the face. Nancy did not do anything but stare down at her hands.
I stared too for some moments at the fine golden hairs of her arms glinting in the sunshine and then I said:
‘How’s Tom? I haven’t seen the old –’
‘He’s all right,’ she said.
‘What about the exam?’ I said. ‘Did he ever take it?’
‘He takes it in July,’ she said. ‘He gets worried about it and thinks he’ll never pass.’
‘He’ll pass,’ I said, and then she glanced down at the oak-spinney again and said:
�
�I wake in the night and listen to that nightingale. And then I start thinking and I can’t get to sleep again.’
So much depends on the course of small conversations that, at the time, do not seem to mean very much, and I did not ask her why she could not sleep and what kept her thinking so much as she listened to the nightingale.
‘I ought to be going,’ I said.
‘If you must go I’ll walk as far as the stile with you,’ she said. ‘It’s so beautiful out of doors.’
We walked down from the farm through fields of buttercup and rising moon-daisy, in a strong golden May light, through air clotted with the scent of great hawthorns.
At the road, just before I turned to say goodbye, I saw the empty shell of a thrush-egg, about the size of a blue-enamelled thimble, lying in the grass. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand and said:
‘It’s wonderful how strong they are. There’s a theory that if you drop one from fifty feet on to grass it won’t break –’
‘It’s because it’s so light,’ she said.
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘Sometimes the most fragile things don’t break,’ she said.
She bent down to the ditch and picked a cowslip and twisted it in her fingers.
I tossed the egg-shell away and as it fell into pillowy sprays of hawthorn, hanging there like a speckled blue petal, she said:
‘How’s Lydia? I forgot to ask you.’
‘She’s very well,’ I said.
‘She sent me a sweet letter about her birthday party. She’s getting very excited. Apparently everybody is coming –’
‘Everybody,’ I said. ‘As far as I can gather. Well, I must go–’
‘So must I,’ she said ‘Goodbye,’ and I smiled at her brown, clear-eyed face and said goodbye. And then, at the very last moment, as if she did not want me to go, she stopped and threaded the cowslip into my buttonhole.