by H. E. Bates
‘The sweetest thing happened. The gardener’s apprentice boy brought strawberries for Lydia. No one knew of it – he did it all himself. Kept it quite secret. Wasn’t that wonderfully sweet? Don’t you think so? Don’t you think she has nice friends? The drawing-room is full of presents. Quite wonderful ones.’
She gave me no time to answer; I got no further than ‘Yes’ before she went on:
‘That’s greatly because of you, isn’t it? It’s been simply wonderful the way she’s grown up. Don’t you think so?’
We were now at the far end of the paved garden, where the roses began. A sour convulsion leapt up through my throat, leaving me for more than a minute in speechless constriction; but at last I said:
‘Miss Aspen, there was something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘ask on. I don’t see buds on the roses there, do I? Do I see buds?’ – she almost let go my hand, peering among wine-brown rose leaves, almost sizzling her words through her large protuberant teeth – ‘Yes, buds on them! – look! – and would you believe it, already greenfly –!’
‘Miss Aspen,’ I said, ‘I wanted to ask if I might marry Lydia.’
She did not seem to be listening. She turned on me a face so remarkably flattened by indifference that it was more stupefying to me than any anger could have been.
‘My dear boy, I thought you’d already asked her.’
‘Oh, no. I wanted –’
‘Then why on earth did she come and talk to me for an hour last night with mountains of wretched innuendoes?’
I began to feel there was something wrong with my brain. Pulses of bewilderment and excitement rocked my head as she said:
‘The child talked and talked and talked. Have you any money?’
I almost said eighteen pounds fifteen, but I told her: ‘A little. Very little,’ instead.
‘There you are then. That’s exactly what I mean. Why else should she come and talk to me in half riddles about women marrying men without money if it wasn’t because of you? When are you going to ask her?’
I was aware of the beginnings of a sort of nebulous delirium at the back of my head.
‘You should ask her tonight,’ she said. ‘Then we could announce it. Don’t you feel that? Isn’t that what you’d like? I think we should go straight back and ask Bertie and then you can ask Lydia, can’t you? Don’t you feel that? Don’t you agree?’
She seemed to be very excited. I do not remember, now, at this distance, much of what I felt as we went back through the gardens to the house. It had something of the blind delirium of a race. I only now remember her saying:
‘You must speak to Bertie. Now – without delay. Plunge forward’ – I remember that precise expression because she said it as she half-stumbled up the steps of the iris garden and it made her give a great sharp, almost portentous drawing-in of her breath – ‘and while you speak to Bertie I will have a word with Lydia myself –’
Then, as we came to within sight of the main terrace, she looked up and said:
‘Ah! arrivals. Isn’t that your nice Mr Holland and his sister? I can’t see very well. Isn’t that them? Isn’t that the town clerk’s wife too? – Mrs Fitzgerald and her sister –?’
We went on to the terrace, and were immersed, a few moments later, in a pool of friends.
When I look back it is not difficult to see that displays of volcanic and fluttering fire like hers were the product of a mind that was also forgetful. There was, as I see it now, a kind of endearing flippancy about her. All these warm tangents and gravitations of her temperament were the result of sickness; perhaps the heart telegraphed its own nervous pulse-warnings to the brain. I know now that if I met her again I should not take her so seriously; the heart may have been tired and I am sure it was warm and true, but it was also untrustworthy, from no fault of its own. Now I should be amused by her only for what she was, a sweet but sick eccentric. But that day I was too young, too excited, and too obliviously single-minded to know all this; and I felt that all she said was true.
Partly because of this, perhaps entirely because of it, the first words that Lydia said to me, when we met five minutes later, had no real effect on me:
‘Where’s Blackie? Have you seen Blackie? He’s supposed to be bringing people up –’
‘His father died today,’ I said. ‘It may be difficult –’
‘Difficult? Why should it be difficult? They’ve got their living to earn just the same, haven’t they?’
‘Did you get my present?’ I said. I had sent her a pair of garnet earrings, set in a three-quarter oval, that were like soft dark raspberries. In order to do so I had sold my bicycle. I felt the garnets would somehow go well with her high colour, her temperament, and her black thick hair.
‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘You’re a very darling person and I like them and thank you.’
‘I hoped you’d wear them.’
‘Not at the party,’ she said. ‘They’ll come unscrewed and get lost and you know how it is –’
A vague delirium was still beating at the back of my head.
‘Will you put them on later?’ I said. I stood there, feeling my head rock and not knowing quite what I was saying or what impulses were driving me. ‘Alone somewhere? – for me? Because I want to see them and I want you and I’ve got something to say to you.’
‘What a speech,’ she said.
As I stood staring at her, in what I think could only have been a lost and hungry and desperate sort of fashion, because I wanted her so much, she laughed and said:
‘No: I won’t put them on.’
‘No? Why not?’ I felt my brain ready to flare up in a final shot of delirious anger. Then she laughed again and bent her head.
‘Because you can put them on for me,’ she said.
I felt wonderfully happy then and a moment later we were once again immersed in a crowd of friends.
For almost all the rest of that evening – and perhaps I should not have expected otherwise, since the gardens were so crowded and the day was so much her own – it was never possible to be alone with her. All evening an orchestra played for dancing and it was a wonderfully gay, crushed and, in the end, rather noisy party. There is something wonderful about the thin sound of a string orchestra, on a summery night, in the open air; there is really a sort of starriness about the sound. Now and then somebody would send over to the orchestra, down below the terrace, asking them specially to play something, a waltz or a fox-trot, and once Alex’s mother sent across for a minuet of Mozart. All evening there hung over us the warm scent of drying clover and because of it all I was caught up again, tangled and lost, in the most trembling, bemusing web of happiness.
Some time after supper Alex started to get charmingly, intelligently drunk. An exaggerated and ironic gaiety came over him. And suddenly I heard Lydia saying to him:
‘Alex dear, will you do something for me?’
‘No,’ Alex said. ‘You have a whole orchestra of second fiddles down there – ask them.’
‘Alex – please.’
‘No.’
‘Alex, you nice person’ – she was wearing a long dance-frock of pale clematis-mauve silk with small gold spots on it, and now she drew herself up and touched his arm and looked him in the face – ‘not even if I let you kiss me?’
‘No,’ he said. He bowed with affectionate irony, staggering a little. ‘I get precisely the same effect, dear lady, from a glass of champagne –’
‘All right,’ she said. It was easy to see that it was all light-hearted and unangered and unimportant. ‘I’ll ask Tom.’
‘In that case I hope you’ll kiss Tom?’ Alex said. ‘No favouritism.’
‘I expect I shall,’ she said. ‘If Tom can bear the pain.’
Tom, I think, was very happy too that night; and presently when Lydia took his arm and they went away together I saw her head close to him as they crossed the terrace, whispering into his ear.
Tom owned an old Morris-Ox
ford coupé that he shared with Nancy. It always seemed to me that the exhaust was cracked because, from cold, it exploded like a gas-engine. Five minutes after Lydia had walked across the terrace with Tom I heard the car start, firing its gun-shots down the avenue.
At that moment I was dancing with Nancy. ‘That’s Tom, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Where on earth could Tom be going?’
‘He’s probably running an errand for Lydia,’ I said. ‘I saw her take him off, that’s all.’
‘I think he’d jump in the river if she asked him,’ she said. I shrugged my shoulders and she turned on me with great scorn. ‘And don’t shrug like that. So would you.’
‘Let Tom take care of himself,’ I said, ‘and let me take care of you.’
She said something about my being in rather a bright mood and then:
‘By the way, has Alex’s mother spoken to you? It seems there’s a wonderful dance on midsummer night at Ashby – she wants us all to go.’
And then, very suddenly: ‘I can’t think for the life of me where Tom’s got to.’
I felt once again that Tom was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. But I did not know until some long time afterwards, until he told me himself, where he had gone to, suddenly, that evening of the party.
Lydia had sent him with a note to Blackie Johnson. A strange driver had turned up with the limousine, bringing relays of elderly people who could not walk. He was simply a man hired for the day. There was no sign of Blackie. It was supremely typical of her to ask Tom to take that note – Alex having refused – and it was equally typical of him that he took it without question.
When he got to Johnson’s garage the only light in the place was a naked gas-flare hung over the sink in the kitchen. He heard a sound of voices quarrelling inside. He stood for a moment or two in the yard before knocking at the door. Then he knocked several times and got no answer. It seemed an odd time for people to be quarrelling, he thought, with Johnson dead in the house, and then the voices grew so loud that presently he could pick up the voice of Blackie shouting at his stepmother. It seemed they were quarrelling as to where they were going to bury old Johnson. Then Tom heard Blackie shout, ‘He’ll be with his folks, that’s where he’ll be. Where you can’t rob the damn grave,’ and then Tom knocked on the door again, more loudly. To his astonishment it was yanked open at once and Blackie Johnson stood there, bare to the waist, his face streaked with shaving soap and a naked razor in his hand, glaring out into the dark at Tom:
‘How much longer are you going to stand there hammering?’ he said. ‘Who is it? – oh it’s you.’
Tom, not saying a word, gave Blackie the note and then stood there, waiting. Lydia had told him expressly to wait for an answer. Behind, in the kitchen, the stepmother began crying, and Blackie, slitting open the envelope with the razor so that a mess of beard-blackened soap smeared itself like lard along the edge, shouted for her to shut up. She went on crying, not exactly crying but whimpering, dryly and stutteringly, Tom said, as if trying to make herself cry. Then Blackie stepped a pace or two back into the kitchen so that he could read the note more easily under the gas-light. The soapy razor, naked, stuck out from the hand that Blackie leaned against the door, and the big chest, a mass of bearskin glittering hair from throat to navel waving over a dark-golden pack of muscle, heaved for a moment or two out of sight. Then the woman cried again, annoying Blackie a second time so that he shouted that if she didn’t shut up he’d do something he’d be sorry for. There was a smell of old grease and car oil and burning gas and Tom felt sick. It revolted him to feel that death was in the house and that people were quarrelling over the dead; and as he stood there, dumb and shocked in his absolute decency and impotently horrified by it all, I think that probably his ultimate feelings about Lydia began to take shape. A dark ugly flare of something threw up, in paradoxical relief, the slow, beautiful beginnings of his final emotions about her. It was strange that it needed something exactly like that – something of quite incidental ugliness and revulsion to project, at last, in recognizable clarity, feelings that were to break down, ultimately, all his diffidence and fear.
But I did not deduce any of this until he spoke of it much later, under the pressure of another circumstance. It is quite possible that he was not even partially aware of it himself. All he saw that night was Blackie reading the note under the gas-light, the razor sticking out, the black chest naked and glinting; all he heard was the quarrelling, the whimpering, the bawling about under the same roof as the dead and then, at last, Blackie Johnson crackling Lydia’s stiff notepaper like an egg-shell in his hand and saying, before he shut the door:
‘No answer. Tell her no answer.’
He told me afterwards that he stood for some time outside, in the old yard with its wagonettes and landaus and its curious straw-oil odour of two worlds, afraid to go back. He was afraid partly because he felt he saw some terrible menace in the quarrelling and the naked razor, partly because of an idea, typical of his utterly simple decency, that he had failed Lydia, even though he loathed what he had seen and what she had asked him to do.
And finally when he did go back it was perhaps lucky that he could not find her. By that time I had found her myself, and was alone with her, in a room upstairs.
Many of the spare upstairs rooms in the Aspen house were being used that evening as cloakrooms; but in the room where we went, one storey above, it was dark and comparatively quiet and no one bothered us. There were still, even then, gas-fittings in several of the upper rooms, mostly of brass-scrolled mantel-lights with globes of coloured glass, but we did not need any light in the room because, from the terraces below, the lights of the party shone up, in a greenish-golden glow, through the windows.
It was nearly midnight before I managed to get her there. We stood by the lighted window and she took the earrings, in their maroon leather box, from where she had hidden them between her breasts. I could feel the box warm from her body as I held it in my hands. Afterwards I used to think how odd it was that I stood there, trembling and tenuous with excitement, aching and fired and nervously happy, while almost at the same time Tom stood watching Blackie, razor in hand, reading the note she had sent him. But I did not know of this at that time. I simply took the earrings from their box. Then, because I could not very well hold box and earrings at the same time, I put the box back between her breasts, touching the crest of them for a moment at the same time.
‘I said you could put the earrings on,’ she said. ‘Nothing else. Don’t be greedy – anyway it’s no time for lingering here.’
‘I think it’s the perfect time,’ I said. She looked so dark and lovely in the semi-shadowness of the terrace lights from below, that I kissed her suddenly and for a long time.
‘That’s all,’ she said. ‘Now put the earrings on and let’s go down.’
I did not want to go down; and I was determined, at last, that nothing would make me. As I put the earrings on I trembled and fumbled a little and then, in a rather hot and clumsy gesture, kissed them both, and she said:
‘I believe you’re the smallest bit tiddly. It’s the champagne.’
I held her tightly against me, making her body press itself forward from the waist.
‘This is the same room where we came once,’ I said. ‘That Sunday – do you remember? – the Sunday you didn’t go to church?’ And she said, in a rather shortish voice, that she remembered.
Down inside me I felt that a well of feeling had been unlocked. As it came rushing up through my body I heard the orchestra across the lawn lightly beginning a new dance, and I felt once again the same starry sort of beauty in the sound of strings in the half-dark air.
Presently she moved restlessly in my arms and I could see the earrings shining, dark rose-rich blobs, as she moved. She said something about not holding her there any longer and how late it was and how we ought to go down. At that moment I thought she seemed more wonderful than ever; and then as she moved with final restlessness by the window I could be
ar it no longer and I said:
‘I’ve got something to ask you. I’ve asked Juley but I haven’t asked Bertie yet.’ Now at last when I said it my voice seemed flat and strained. ‘Would you marry me?’
She did not answer for a moment; she looked sideways with deep black eyes through the window. Across the lawns people were calling ‘Goodnight’ to each other. I could hear their voices rising after a silence of the strings.
Then she said: ‘No.’
‘Lydia –’
‘I don’t think I could,’ she said.
From the back of my head delirium began to pound at me again.
‘Oh! but my God,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to. I want you so much – you’ve got to –’
‘I haven’t got to do anything.’
I could not speak. Outside, across the lawn, the orchestra did not begin again. In the silence I stood there still holding her. I looked at her face, but she did not look at me, and I stared down at the small ear-ring box between her breasts. The orchestra still did not begin again and presently I said what, I suppose, everybody says at these times:
‘Will you think it over? Will you think about it?’
‘Of course I shall think about it,’ she said. ‘It’s the first time –’
‘Don’t you love me any more?’ I said.
‘Love you?’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Would you kiss me?’ I said.
She lifted her lips and I felt I achieved something, sterile though it was, as I kissed their unresponsive flatness. Then at last, down below, the orchestra started up again, making her break away.
‘Let me go now,’ she said.
‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘Lydia, please don’t go –’
I held her for a few moments longer; and then it occurred to me what the orchestra were playing. People were singing too.
‘For she’s a jolly good fellow – for she’s a jolly good fellow – which nobody can deny –’
‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘Let me go – they’re singing for me.’