Love for Lydia

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I must go now, Miss Aspen. Was there any song you wanted them to sing?’

  She did not answer. For some moments it was so quiet that I could hear the piercing note of a swallow, fine-drawn and delicate, scratching the evening air outside.

  ‘Miss Aspen,’ I said, ‘was there a song?’

  Her voice sounded far away, a little as if smothered by something, as she answered:

  ‘No. There is nothing I want,’ she said. I waited, and she went on: ‘I was never very strong in music. I don’t know any songs.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Miss Aspen.’

  She did not say goodbye; but for one moment, as I closed the door, her voice lifted itself a fraction for the last time.

  ‘Tell your father it was very good of him to come.’

  I went downstairs, pursued by impressions of an intense loneliness that remained with me during and for some time after the singing of the final song. I told my father she preferred above all the song called The Golden Vanity. The men sang it with great feeling, with a splendid air of melancholy tenderness that flowed about the decaying terraces in the evening air.

  When it was all over Lily hobbled out on to the terrace, bringing us cups of coffee. The younger maid served us with cake and cheese. There was no sign of Rollo. Several times Lily said how beautiful the singing was and how it was almost like old times to have us there, and my father said how everyone had enjoyed it and how he hoped it was satisfactory.

  ‘Well, shall we go?’ he said to me at last. ‘Are you going to walk down with us?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll walk home the other way. Across the park.’

  By the time I reached the top of the park, where the path went through the spinneys near the summer-house, the sun had gone down. I stopped and looked back at the long slope of grass, greenish-gold and burnished already with buttercup and smouldering with sorrel-flower. Hawthorns, like solid crests of foam washed into hollows of grass, shone even brighter in the darkening evening air than the separate high flames of chestnuts. A flight of homing pigeons, flying over from the town, cloud-grey and hardly distinguishable in the receding light, flew across spaces between trees of yellow oak-flower, and somewhere down by the house a thrush, in a high-spun continuous thread of notes, was still singing brilliantly.

  I looked for a long time at the house, red and big and unshapely with its additions of cupola and bay and pepperbox. I felt suddenly as if I were seeing it for the first time. It seemed all at once impossible and outdated and as I stood thinking of the people in it, a drunk, a querulous lonely woman bitten with a decay of persecutions, a tearful maid and the bloated Labradors, I remembered some words of Rollo’s, ‘There soon won’t be any people like us,’ and then some others of Miss Aspen’s, ‘After all it might be the last thing of any consequence we shall be able to give her.’

  I remembered too how she had persisted that Evensford was not on the map. It had taken me a long time, aided by the stench of three bloated dogs among the moulting leopard rugs and a song or two of my father’s sung under the bedroom windows of a woman who had no song to ask for, to grasp that it was not the town, but the house, that really had no existence there.

  Chapter Two

  Summer began to unfold with a green splendour that affected even Evensford. Glistening white crops of moon-daisies appeared on railway cuttings that drove into the town through colonies of slate-topped terraces and black-tarred fowl-huts, in the flat riverside district whose cathedral was the gasworks. In occasional oases, at street corners, laburnums blossomed, yellow and brilliant against old wintery congealments of brown leather-dust on factory windows. There came a brief flowering of snowball trees, pure and sterile, in shady chapel-yards.

  About the sanatorium a circular forest of full-leaved oak and walnut and lime and even beech, a rare tree on that cold clay soil, threw a green screen that cut off, as in the Aspen park, all sight of Evensford, making another oasis where it was possible to believe you were shut away in the pure light of open country.

  The sanatorium was very full that summer. There is a certain long narrowness of jaw in a typical Evensford face that seems to put one face in every three into the category of incipient illness. All through the slump the surgeries of Evensford doctors were always crowded with men coughing over knotted mufflers and with young girls who, like Lydia and Nora Jepson, were coming to the end of lost races against gaiety. There were too many people with transfixed bright eyes in Evensford that summer and with skins that seemed to carry just under the surface a haunting glow that gave them a strange transparency.

  In all this a compensating passion for living showed itself, mostly in a love of flowers that was not only typical but very touching, and after the long difficult winter there was a keen hungriness in the narrow faces of workless men taking small white terriers for long walks into the morning countryside of waking summer and coming back, in the early evening, carrying bunches of marsh-marigold and bluebell and the first pink sprigs of honeysuckle and hedge-rose. There were always streams of people climbing the short hill to the sanatorium on visiting days, and on Sundays especially, carrying bunches of flowers plucked from gardens and allotments or from woods and fields. There were always taxis bringing elderly relatives from a distance or young factory girls, sprightly and beautiful and vibrant because the race for gaiety was just beginning, arriving to visit other girls who had lost the race and were now lying in a private world beyond a screen of trees, troubled and subdued but not always sad, thinking it over and wondering why.

  When I went to see Lydia for the second time that spring I was one of a long stream of Sunday afternoon visitors carrying flowers.

  ‘She has another visitor,’ the nurse who met me said. ‘But it will be all right. She is the sort of person who responds to people. We like her to have them when she can.’

  All across the grounds of the sanatorium there was an irresistibly beautiful fragrance of lilac, sweet in the late hot May afternoon, that reminded me of the Aspen park. There was still a miraculous singing of blackbirds in high walnut trees and a wonderful freshness in the tender broken overtones of many greens that had still not been merged to the single darker tone of summer.

  When I got to Lydia’s hut Blackie Johnson was sitting in the chair by the bed. He was holding a bunch of flaming orange marigolds in one big stiff hand.

  ‘Hullo, there you are!’ Lydia said. ‘How nice – what a lot of people – everybody coming to see me all at once!’

  She was sitting propped up by pillows. She did not look very thin, but there was a rosiness about her skin, under the dark hair, that seemed unreal and puffy.

  Blackie rose with stiff and diffident heaviness to shake me by the hand.

  ‘Hullo, Mr Richardson,’ he said, ‘how are you?’

  He stared at me in a crushed, stupefied sort of way, almost as if in self-imposed humility.

  ‘Hullo, Blackie,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not to call him Blackie,’ Lydia said. ‘His real name is Bert. You have to call people by their proper names.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Richardson,’ he said. ‘Everybody still calls me Blackie.’

  ‘Then they mustn’t,’ she said. ‘I’m going to convert them.’

  Blackie gave a curious embarrassed smile, the sort of smile that seems so often to be sheer pain on the faces of big muscular men, and then changed his bunch of flowers from one hand to another. His blue serge suit was too tight for the solid muscular pack of his body, and there were already marks across his thick neck where the starched edges of his collar had rubbed against the flesh.

  ‘Oh! more flowers!’ Lydia said. ‘Irises – yellow ones! Do you remember how they always grew on the other side of the rose garden? Aunt Bertie always loved them. Did you see Aunt Bertie? You see, I know where you’ve been –’

  ‘Yes, I saw her,’ I said.

  ‘How is she? – she wrote me a long letter about the singing.’<
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  ‘She’s well,’ I said. ‘I think she’s well.’

  ‘You think?’ she said. ‘Well; isn’t she? You saw her, didn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I talked to her through a door.’

  ‘Oh! well, don’t stand up there nursing your flowers. Put the flowers somewhere and come and sit on the bed and talk to me.’

  ‘I’ll put them in your water-jug,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘Bert will put them in. Bert can do it. Put them in, Bert, won’t you? And the marigolds too’ – and then, as Blackie rose with queer subdued obedience to take my flowers and his own to the water-jug on the washstand in the corner: ‘What was that horror Rollo doing? On a blinder again?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘You think so?’ she said. ‘You mean he was. Why do you always have to say you think so?’

  ‘Thinking is a thing I go in for sometimes,’ I said.

  She laughed and said that was exactly like me. Blackie fumbled awkwardly with the flowers. Then she reminded me, in a rather forced voice and with a tense gesture on her face, that I hadn’t kissed her. So I kissed her, in the briefest and most formal way I could, on one cheek, and she said:

  ‘Now sit down, both of you, and in a few minutes they’ll bring us tea. No, they won’t – because I didn’t know you were coming,’ she said to me, ‘and now they’ll only bring it for two. We’ll have to tell them – Bert, you’ll have to go and tell them. Find Nurse Simpson –’

  Blackie, coming stiffly from the business of trying to arrange the flowers in the water-jug, looked, in his tight dark serge, with his choking collar, like a manservant waiting to take an order.

  ‘Find Nurse Simpson,’ Lydia said, ‘there’s a dear. She’s the nice one with the frizzy hair – you know her, don’t you, the frizzy blonde? Tell her it’s tea for three now, not two.’

  Blackie left the hut and began to walk, on bright creaking black shoes, down the path between the huts. But after seven or eight paces she called him back:

  ‘Bert! – wait a minute. It would be nice if we could get Nora over. Ask Nora if she’d come over. She came on Wednesday – they allow her now. It would be like old times if Nora came. Wouldn’t it?’ she said to me.

  I did not answer. I did not think it could possibly be like old times, then or ever, and I was glad when she said:

  ‘He’s comic, isn’t he? I think he’s enormously comic. He comes every Wednesday and every Sunday. He has done – all through – all the time –’

  ‘It’s very nice of him,’ I said.

  ‘I know. It isn’t that. It’s the way he does it. He just sits here in his best suit and stares and sometimes we have the most awful job to make any sort of conversation.’

  I sat thinking of the big muscle-packed aggressive Blackie lying with a spanner in his hand under a car in Johnson’s yard, and she echoed my thoughts by saying:

  ‘Isn’t it awfully queer sometimes how people change?’

  ‘Very queer,’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t think he was the same person, would you? Not in the least the same person. As soon as he heard I was ill he started to come and see me – except the first few weeks when Dr Baird wouldn’t let me have anybody.’

  She screwed up her eyes and asked me how you could account for that, and I said:

  ‘You encouraged him. That’s how.’

  She lowered her voice to answer me:

  ‘I didn’t encourage him. I’ve done all I can not to encourage him. What have I ever done to encourage him?’

  I sat thinking. The thing that had not changed about her was her hunger for people, her impulsive thirst for company.

  ‘After all,’ I said, ‘you lent him money.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ she said. ‘I didn’t. I offered to lend him something and he wouldn’t take it. That was the trouble that night at Ashby. He was too proud – too proud or too shy or something. I was so sorry for him when his father died and he had the fire. I wanted to help him.’

  She began to search under her pillow for something; she could not find it and she said:

  ‘That was all we were talking about that night at Ashby. When you stormed out and went home and wouldn’t wait –’

  She broke off, and in her silence I could feel, even though she did not intend it, a suspense of accusation – ‘if only you’d waited. You see, you’re so impatient. You won’t wait to have things explained. You storm away and then things happen –’

  She broke off again to search under her pillow, and I said:

  ‘What are you looking for? Can I–’

  ‘My comb.’ Her distraction at something in the past was consumed by her small distraction at not finding the comb. ‘I must have a look at myself before Nora comes. Nora’s a stunner. You wouldn’t think so, with that long thin body, would you? But she can break them all.’

  ‘Your comb’s on the dressing-table,’ I said, ‘and your brush too,’ and as I reached over to get them for her she said:

  ‘I tried to get Bert interested in her, but he wouldn’t look. In the end she’ll probably have Dr Baird.’

  She stopped talking at last. The quality of over-excitement in her voice and her eyes became transferred to her hands. She unfastened them nervously and began to brush her hair. She said only once, ‘You see, my hair comes out – in handfuls,’ and she held straggling, dark strands of it for me to see. Her hair, as she slowly brushed it down over her shoulders, reminded me of the first time I had ever seen her, looking so impossibly young that she had succeeded in cheating me, and then she finished looping back her hair and said:

  ‘Throw the pieces outside. The birds will fetch them. I lie here and watch them. They fetch them for their nests. That’s a thought, isn’t it?’

  It seemed to me rather a nice thought; but I had no time to answer her before Blackie came back, bringing Nora and Dr Baird.

  ‘I’ll give you strict injunctions, all of you,’ said Baird, a fair Anglo-Scot with an athletic presence and a strength that revealed itself most notably in hairy, antiseptic, commanding hands, ‘she’s to stay half an hour. Not a second longer.’

  ‘Oh! Dr Baird,’ Lydia said. This is a gathering of old flames –!’

  ‘Then damp the flames down,’ Baird said, ‘or put them out altogether.’

  From this remark a brightness developed that lasted through tea. Perhaps its real cause lay in Nora, who had now begun a series of progressively extended walks every day in the grounds and who said, several times:

  ‘The most wonderful thing of all is to have a dress on – and stockings – it’s marvellous to feel you’re a girl again. Not just a stick of bone in a bed.’

  Through all this I saw Blackie staring at Lydia: steadfastly, hopefully, with patience, like a dog trained out of a puppy-hood of snarling resentments into a calm obedience that had the same touching, inexpressible canine devotion.

  Even when he was shaken out of this by Nora saying that she had gained seven or eight pounds in weight and demonstrating, by holding her frock to midway up her thighs, how the shape of her legs was coming back, fuller and nicer even than before, I felt he looked at her less for herself than because he saw in her body the approaching pattern of Lydia’s. I felt he longed for the day when she too would walk in the grounds, in the sun, and hold up her dress to show that the grace of her body was coming back.

  ‘I’m getting terrific,’ Nora said. ‘I can even do a twirl with my skirts.’ She revealed glimpses of pale underwear and thighs of slim delicacy like pale mushroom stalks under the pink gills of her dress.

  ‘Wait till I get up,’ Lydia said. Through dark fixed eyes, she gave the impression of having been pushed a little out of the picture. ‘Just wait till I stand there –’

  ‘You’ve got to go carefully,’ Blackie said. His voice had the methodical solemnity of a man who has created a creed for himself. I heard it so often afterwards that it came to have a pitiful, bludgeoning profundity. ‘You know you’ve got to go
carefully. We can’t have you going back.’

  ‘Oh! she won’t go back!’ Nora said gaily. ‘Who ever thinks of her going back?’

  ‘She’s got to go very carefully,’ Blackie said.

  ‘If we’d been careful, Lydia, we shouldn’t have been here,’ Nora said, ‘and then I shouldn’t have known how lovely it is to feel I’ve got nice legs again.’

  ‘Nor should we,’ I said, and Blackie, absorbed in his creed of care, was the only one who did not laugh at the joke I made.

  Punctually to the half hour, Dr Baird rejoined us.

  ‘It’s time, little girl,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘She’s a big girl. She’s been showing us where, too – she’s been dancing!’ Lydia said. ‘Nora! – do it again for Dr Baird –!’

  Blackie put a check on this excitement by suddenly starting to say goodbye to each of us in turn, formally shaking hands, saying, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Jepson. Good afternoon, doctor. Good afternoon, Mr Richardson,’ and finally:

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Aspen.’

  ‘He will call me Miss Aspen!’ she said.

  ‘You play rugby?’ Dr Baird said. ‘You ought to play rugby, man, with that pack of weight on you.’

  ‘No,’ Blackie said. ‘I’m afraid not, doctor.’

  ‘He used to play motorbikes,’ Lydia said, ‘but he’s given that up.’

  ‘Nobody plays rugby in this damned town,’ Baird said. ‘I can’t get a damned soul interested –’

  ‘I must go now,’ Blackie said. ‘Good afternoon, all.’

  ‘Goodbye, Bert,’ Lydia said. ‘It was so nice of you to come.’

  Afterwards, when the three of them had gone, she looked at me and said:

  ‘It was nice of you, too. Come again, won’t you?’

  ‘Not if you’d rather I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I want you to come.’

  ‘I didn’t know Blackie came and if you’d rather there weren’t the two of us –’