by H. E. Bates
Whenever I was alone with Nancy I grew slightly on edge, not precisely nervous, but defensive, and the back of my neck would start tingling. That evening I felt not only defensive, but strained and nervous inside. The bleak thought of rejection by Lydia came back and oppressed me. I kept forcing myself towards a notion that I did not want her. I felt I had made the impossible mistake of thinking that one of the virtues of love was permanence. Now I tried to persuade myself not only that it was not permanent but that it was best that it never should be.
The way out of this was flippancy. Already, as I arranged the roses and uncorked the wine and listened for the rain that seemed so long in coming, I had fired off one or two casual sparks of what I thought was bright conversation to Nancy, lost in vapours of beef and gravy in the scullery.
Presently she came out into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and said: ‘You’re far too bright tonight.’ I did not feel bright; I was conscious only of straining all the time against myself and I said:
‘It’s just the storm. It’s the electricity in the air.’
She took me by the sleeves of my shirt, and the back of my neck started tingling.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Listen to me.’ She looked steadily into my face. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘I’ve already kissed you once,’ I said, too brightly. ‘I’ve already blessed your declining years –’
‘I’m not asking for favours and I’m not asking people to burst themselves with wit, either,’ she said. ‘Just simmer down and listen.’
‘I am unsimmered,’ I said, and I felt bleak again.
‘All I want you to do is to promise to behave yourself,’ she said.
I said if she supposed I was going to behave myself in any other way than a perfectly natural one she was much mistaken.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ she said. ‘I just want you to behave’ – she hesitated, trying to select some more exact, incisive word, and at last she found, for some reason, the word balance – ‘with some sort of balance,’ she said, ‘otherwise the party will get lopsided and somebody will start feeling out in the cold and you know how it is –’
‘Naturally.’ I added some remark about feeling out in the cold in a storm temperature of about eighty degrees, and she said:
‘I’ve arranged it so that Tom is partnering Lydia. That’s what I want you to bear in mind.’
‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ I said.
‘Because –’ she said, and then she stopped, turning her head. ‘That’s the car now – I saw the headlights as they turned the bend.’
I felt I wanted to go out into the garden and remain there, watching the growing storm. But then I heard rain begin falling, at first in big, floppy, countable drops, and then in a sudden running hiss, with a sound like one of the pots in the scullery boiling over. A magical sweetness of dusty earth freshened by rain floated, a few seconds later, through the open door. As I breathed it I felt it turn sharply, inside me, into a dull, beating ache.
Then I saw car-lights flashing on the barley stack and across sliding thunder rain and on the stones of the yard. There was a banging of car doors and then Tom and Lydia came running out of the rain, under the shelter of a mackintosh he had thrown over their heads.
They came running into the doorway at a crouch, heads down against the rain, shaking the dripping mackintosh, laughing.
Flares of excitement beat at the ache inside me as Lydia lifted the mackintosh from her black hair and shook it free.
‘By Jove, that was a dash,’ Tom said.
I stood staring at Lydia. A few drops of rain had settled on her face. She looked at me in return and did not wipe them away.
‘Hello,’ she said. I felt, for some reason, a long way off. Her voice was very quiet. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m very well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
She looked at me calmly and clearly.
‘You look very well,’ she said.
I was so perplexed that I did not ask her how she was.
Then Nancy called from the scullery: ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Lydia dear. There’s a light upstairs if you care to go –’
‘I’m all right, I’m quite happy,’ Lydia said.
‘Get her a glass of sherry, you two,’ Nancy called. ‘I don’t want the gravy to go lumpy.’
‘That’s my job,’ I said. A prolonged torment of nervousness went through me as I fumbled about among bottles and glasses. Rain poured with splendid summer savagery outside, drowning the sound of my sloppings as I poured sherry into glasses.
‘Bless you all,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s nice to see everybody.’ Her voice was deeper, cooler, more adult than it had been. ‘And that goes specially for you, Nancy,’ she called into the kitchen. ‘Bless you, dear, and a happy birthday.’ I drank, nursing a private sense of roving despair.
‘What a night,’ Tom said. ‘Old boy, think that tomorrow we might start ploughing –’
As we sat at dinner rain beat with a great warm spout of savagery on the roof of the house and summer lightning continued to pour pale yellow sheets on the hill where the coverts were. I carved the meat, trying once again to carve it thinly and this time not to dream. Tom poured the wine and we toasted Nancy. The air was dripping with thunder heat and the heat of cooking, and the candlelight cast enormous shadows about us in engrossing confusion on our newly-painted walls.
It was probably not until this time that I noticed that Lydia was wearing black. Except for the first evening I had met her I had not seen her in black before. It was a very simple dress, with plain long tight sleeves and a close half-way bodice that fitted her well and showed her breast. It had on it a wide collar, oval and coffee-coloured, that relieved the blackness and gave it a pleasant dignity. Occasionally she had been rather loud, sometimes a bit wild, as at Milton Posnett, in her dresses, but now I thought she looked reticent and mature and womanish and cool. The last of adolescence had gone out of her. She looked, for some reason, older than any of us, and as if she could make up her mind, at last, about what she knew she wanted.
She admired the little farmhouse very much that night. She kept arching her neck and asking questions about it, looking about her at the groping, engrossing shadows roaming on white walls and simple brickwork and low black beams.
‘And you two did it,’ she said. ‘I call it wonderful. Just you two – you men.’
‘Men,’! said drearily, ‘are sometimes capable of odd flashes of achievement. Here and there –’
‘I want to see it all,’ she said. ‘Tom – you must take me all over.’
So after dinner Tom took her over the house. He had fitted up an inspection lamp from a battery on the landing, and he carried it from room to room. Rain beat with thundery violence on the house, hissing across the yard. I made coffee and Nancy, in the scullery, piled the dishes.
When the coffee was ready I went to the foot of the stairs, calling Lydia and Tom. There was no answer. And then I saw the inspection lamp cable trailing up into the attics. I did not wait. She was determined, that night, to see every inch of the house, and Tom, equally determined and fussy as a houseproud hen, must have shown her every brick and sill and board of it.
‘I think it’s the sweetest place,’ she said, when they came down again, and her eyes were shining. ‘You really feel you could live here – you feel it when you come inside,’ and then Tom showed her the photographs we had taken, before and after the renovation, and she was absorbed, her head close to his, as the pictures passed from hand to hand.
‘Just listen to that rain,’ Nancy would say. ‘Just listen.’
We drank a lot of coffee and talked and listened to the rain. About ten o’clock a gap seemed to open in the hot sky just above the house, letting down an obliterating solid deluge.
Tom actually leapt up in the centre of the room as the spout of rain hit the house. ‘A cloudburst,’ he said, ‘that’s what they call a cloudburst – you’ll never get h
ome in this.’
‘That’s all right,’ Nancy said. ‘Who’s worrying about that? You’ve got spare beds and Lydia and I can sleep together.’
Rain struck the house with the power of a mountain torrent, so that for some seconds we could not hear ourselves speak. Then it became cut off, like a tap, and only the distances roared with watery echoes.
‘I’ll make more coffee,’ I said.
When I came back from the scullery from making coffee Tom was not there.
‘Where’s Tom?’ I said.
‘He’s gone to telephone from next door,’ Nancy said. ‘He’s gone to tell Mother and Lydia’s people we’re going to stay the night.’
‘If he can slosh all the way up to McKechnie’s,’ I said, ‘he could just as easily have driven the car.’
‘Really men are dense sometimes,’ Nancy said.
I began to pour more coffee.
‘Not for me,’ Nancy said. ‘I’m going to make up the bed – no, stay where you are, Lydia, I can do it.’
So Lydia and I, a moment later, were left alone together, and I started trembling. She was sitting on the floor, leaning back against a chair, holding her coffee cup in her lap. Only the table candles were still burning, and her neck was ivory in the black dress. All about the house, hissing and weaving, the lessening rain spun a web of sound that was more like a heightened and oppressive form of silence in which we had nothing to say to each other. I looked at her body and felt as I had done on the evening I had first met her: poised on a knife edge, insecure, trembling, icy and yet burning inside.
For about a minute she did not look at me, and I began trembling even more. At last I could not bear it any longer, and got up and took the empty coffee cup from her. She lifted her face for a second or two, holding it there, remarkably cool and unexcited and yet exciting me.
Suddenly I bent down and kissed her. With my mouth I pressed her face against the chair. She lifted her hands, pushing them against my shoulders, very lightly and gently holding me back. I felt her lips, slightly hard at first, gradually relax and take me into them, a little acquiescent as I thought, and more tender.
When I drew away she looked at me. Her eyes were indecipherably dark in the candlelight and I could not tell what she was thinking.
Then I began asking her when she was going to see me again. She seemed to think about it for some moments, letting her head fall softly to one side. ‘Please,’ I said, and she smiled in a sort of absent way and looked beyond me.
‘No more,’ she said.
I felt a shock of misery go through me.
‘Just because you kiss people it doesn’t mean that you love them. That isn’t love,’ she said.
‘It isn’t very long since you did love me,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ she said, and I knew suddenly that to her it already seemed very long.
When she opened her mouth to say something else I began kissing her again, and what she had to say never came. I pressed her down in the chair and ran my hands over her hair and breast and face.
‘Now you know how I feel about you,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s it, you see. I don’t.’
It was like lying down and being trampled on.
Ineptly and flatly I said: ‘How is it you don’t know? Tell me –’
‘I know I just don’t, that’s all. It isn’t why or how or anything of that. It’s something you know without thinking and you can’t explain.’ And then she said something that was the key to the whole affair:
‘People do all sorts of odd things and they never know why.’
What I said next was bound to come sooner or later, and I said it with marked even bitterness:
‘Don’t tell me you’ve found out why with someone else. Perhaps with Blackie?’
She remained very quiet and calm.
‘I felt terribly sorry for Blackie,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I know you don’t see it like I do and probably you never will,’ she said. ‘But then you’re not me and I’m not you and how could you?’
‘Don’t ask me to tell you why,’ she said after a moment. ‘It was something I felt and I can’t explain.’
I felt too miserable to say anything, and she said: ‘Don’t be bitter. I’m not the first girl to think she loved people and make a fool of herself a few times before she found the right one,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing very odd, is there, in that?’
‘Nothing odd,’ I said.
‘Well –’
‘Only something miserably and damnably and rottenly painful for those who don’t happen to be the right ones,’ I said.
She did not answer that. She let her head fall sideways, staring past the candlelight with inexpressible contemplation of some distant point or thought or conclusion that I could not share.
A few moments later Nancy came downstairs, and then almost immediately Tom came back.
‘Had a bit of a job to get through,’ he told us. ‘Some lines down somewhere. McKechnie says there’s a tree down too on the Caldecott road.’
‘I think it’s as well we stayed,’ Nancy said. ‘Anyway we can all sleep late tomorrow and then have the beef cold for lunch, with baked potatoes and horse-radish sauce.’
‘Just like Nance,’ Tom said, ‘to shut the stable door when the horse-radish has bolted.’
‘Tom’s suddenly very witty,’ she said.
‘That,’ I said, ‘is because he’s very happy’ – a remark that, profound as I thought it was, nobody seemed to understand.
It was after midnight when we went to bed. As we said goodnight to each other I saw all the reality of my remark about happiness and wit come to life wonderfully in Tom’s face. His eyes were pellucidly tireless and shining. In them was a glow, a maturer, brighter version of the expression I had first seen on the day I had taken Lydia skating. It had seemed to indicate, then, a transfixed bewildered state of wonder. Now the eyes were vivid and awake with joy.
It was past midnight when he preceded her, solemnly courteous, up the stairs, carrying candles, to show her to her room.
‘I’ve put her in the room next to you, after all,’ Nancy said. ‘The bed in my room isn’t very big for two.’
I said something about there being times when small beds were preferable, and she said:
‘Shut up. Don’t forget we’ve got Presbyterian neighbours. They’re probably spying now.’
‘It was one of my jokes,’ I said.
‘We didn’t have many tonight, did we?’ she said. ‘It was Tom who was on form.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did I behave?’
She picked up the final candle to go to bed.
‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘I wasn’t here for the important part of the time.’
I let the rain hiss my answer.
In bed I lay listening to the church clock, across the fields, striking hollow quarters through the steaming rain. My mind, fired and wakened by too much coffee, raced brilliantly and desperately about, thinking of Lydia and Tom and even Alex in a sequence of bright distortions. Tom and I slept on two iron hospital-like beds that creaked like loose metallic corsets as we turned from side to side, and after a time I heard Tom tossing and turning about, sleepless as I was.
‘Awake?’ he said and I said ‘Yes,’ and damned the coffee.
He sat up in bed. Rain, lessening a little now, was falling in a gentle autumnal stream over dark fields and I could see a little far-distant lightning still panting across the sky above the bronzy coverts.
‘We had a nice evening,’ Tom said. ‘Well, more than nice – wonderful.’
‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Lydia loved the house, didn’t she?’
‘She loved it,’ he said.
The air was humid and I threw back the clothes, stretching out, listening to the dying rain.
‘Not raining so fast now,’ Tom said.
‘No, not so fast,’ I said.
For a few moments he did not speak ag
ain. Then he said something else about the rain, and I replied. We went through a series of these deadlocks. I knew then that he was trying to tell me something. He moved several times nervously about the bed. Presently he got out of bed to open one of the windows, which we had closed against the rain. I heard him breathing the cooler rain-washed air. He said he thought the rain was stopping now and how wonderful the air always was after the rain.
He started to speak several times. There is nothing like the complexity of a straightforward mind that finds it cannot express itself in a straightforward way. He made several more false starts, and then got as far as ‘That night she asked Alex to do something for her – at her twenty-first. I never forgot that. Do you remember?’
I said I remembered, and then he began. He unwound it from inside himself in a series of tortured repetitions. He went over and over it: like a man trying to get a speech right. He spoke in humble confusion about his feelings as he had driven down to the garage with the note for Blackie – how he had not wanted to go, how he wished Alex had gone, how he wished to God something had come up to get him out of it. Then he came to the scene there – the two people quarrelling with, as it seemed to him, such brutal disrespect over old Johnson, dead upstairs, and Blackie with soap-grey razor, big and dark, and offensive under the gaslight. He must have gone over this scene again and again, re-enacting it for himself in the light of later and tortuous reflection, reliving it under the high glare of his own conclusions, his outrage, and his troubled decency. All the time he had wanted to be sick. He was sick with the odour of grease and gas-light and petrol fume. He was sick at something brutally casual, at something of revolting physical grossness that he could only feel and could not describe. ‘God, you couldn’t begin to think – you couldn’t bear it,’ he said several times. ‘You couldn’t bear it, I tell you –’ I thought the sky began to turn copper-coloured as we lay and talked there. For a few moments there seemed to be no sound of rain. Then he got out of bed and went to the window and said: