Love for Lydia (19 page)

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.

Those insignificant little things – the tea, the conversation on the window-sill, the thrush's egg held for a second or two in my hand and then tossed away, the cowslip threaded into my buttonhole – cannot possibly seem of very great importance, even together. But they were responsible really, for what happened a few minutes later. Together they delayed me just long enough to make it possible. Without them it could not have happened.

It takes about half an hour to walk from the last gate at Busketts to the centre of the town; and I had been walking, I suppose, about twenty minutes when a car slowed up alongside the curb. If I had walked on the other side of the street I should have been on the high causeway, eight feet up, and no driver would have bothered. But now a grey-haired man of about sixty with a strong Northern accent, leaned out of the driving window and said:

‘Excuse me – would you mind telling me is this the town with the church that has the Strainer arch?'

‘This is the town,' I said.

‘Thank you very much,' he said. ‘Is it far to the church?'

‘Not far,' I said. I began pointing ahead, giving directions. ‘About half a mile,' and then he said:

‘It's warm, isn't it? Hop in – if you're going that way, I'll be glad to drop you.'

He flicked the door of the car open and I got in, and inside three minutes – in those three minutes he managed to do all the talking, told me his name, which I forget, his business, which I rather fancy was in wool, and how keen he was on church architecture and brass-rubbings and that sort of thing – we were at the church. It is a wonderfully fine church at Evensford. A great spire of soft grey limestone with corner embellishments of chocolate-red ironstone rises up for two hundred and seventy feet from a churchyard of black yews and horse-chestnuts and an apostolic row of twelve pollard elms.

At the church steps I got out of the car. I thanked him for bringing me down. ‘Not at all,' he said, ‘thank you.' Then I told him that if he could not get in at the main west door of the church he would probably find the small south one unlocked. He got out of the car too. I walked up the western steps with him towards the churchyard. The horse-chestnuts were all in heavy blossom, littering the steps with fallen pink-white petals. I remember him remarking that it was like a wedding. ‘That's a wonderful spire,' he said. He stood for a moment or two longer looking up at it in admiration, before at last he lifted his hand and thanked me again and went away.

I felt rather proud of Evensford church at that moment; and I suppose I must have stood there, staring up at the grey and chocolate pattern of the great spire, for two or three minutes longer, before suddenly, on the south side of the church – there used to be a fine white acacia there, but they have cut it down now for the reason that they always cut things down in Evensford, that is no reason at all – I saw Lydia come out of the south door and walk round towards the eastern end.

She was wearing something I had not seen before. It was a light grey costume with black velvet revers. I hurried up the steps and went after her.

‘Lydia!' I called. By the time I got round to the south side of the church she was just going round by the last corner buttress of the eastern end. ‘Lydia!' I called after her. ‘Lydia –'

She seemed to hesitate for a second before going round the corner. But it was not until I got round the corner, running to catch her up, that she stopped and waited for me.

‘Lydia –' and then I stopped too.

For what seemed to me about five minutes I stood painfully staring at the woman in the grey suit with the black velvet revers. She was wearing large clip-on earrings of pearl. In one grey-gloved hand she was carrying a large black glacé handbag and her hat, which she had taken off, in the other. I must have looked incredibly, idiotically startled.

Then she smiled. It was not quite the way Lydia smiled, abruptly, with wonderful beautifying expansiveness, but it was very pleasant and very friendly.

‘I'm afraid you've made a mistake,' she said.

‘I'm terribly sorry – I'm most terribly sorry,' I began to say.

Then she smiled again, more generous and more amused this time.

‘I'm Lydia's mother,' she said.

I have no idea how long I stood there, under the church wall, staring and trying to think of something to say. But presently she laughed.

‘Don't look so alarmed,' she said. ‘I'm not a ghost. I haven't come to haunt anybody.'

I still could not think of anything to say. The only possible
thing, it seemed to me, was to apologize, and I began at last to say, ‘I'm terribly sorry, Mrs Aspen,' but she cut me short.

‘I'll tell you what I am though,' she said. ‘I'm thirsty. If you want to apologize really nicely you can take me and give me a drink somewhere.'

There was just time to walk down to ‘The Prince Albert' before the bar opened at six o'clock. Heat lay thickly along the south-sloping back streets and when we went into the lounge, all fern and palm and moulting deer-heads and carved barometers and pier-glasses, she gave a big sigh and took off the jacket of her costume and laid it across the back of her chair.

It was then that I saw how much like Lydia she really was. Her eyes seemed to me just as brilliant and intensely pellucid in their dark reflections. Only her mouth was different. It had crept, as it were, inwards, tightening until it was really too small and too narrow a bud for the rest of her expansive powdered face.

When the waiter came and I asked her what she would like she said:

‘Personally, if it's all the same to you, I'm going to have a very large whisky and soda.' She looked up at the waiter and smiled, and he in turn looked down at her and smiled too. ‘And when I say very large I mean very large,' she said, ‘don't I?'

‘Yes, madam,' he said.

‘I was in here to lunch,' she said, in a voice loud enough for him to hear as he went out of the door. ‘He knows me now.'

When the waiter came back with her glass she looked at it and then at him and said: ‘That's more like it. That's better,' and held three of her fingers against the side.

‘So you know Lydia,' she said.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Tell me about her.'

I think I repeated four or five conventional statements of the kind that people always do; and then she smiled.

‘Is she good-looking?' she said. ‘Very pretty?'

‘She's very handsome,' I said.

‘Just how I was,' she said. ‘I was a terribly gawky thing until
I was nineteen and then suddenly' – she did a queer little wriggle with her hands – ‘in and out in all the correct places.'

Perhaps I was staring at her merely in the hope of being able to think of something to say; perhaps I was sliding off into one of my daydreams, thinking of Lydia; but suddenly she said:

‘You've got the most unbelievably blue eyes, haven't you?'

‘So they tell me.'

‘Awfully bright and awfully penetrating.'

‘That's what Lydia says.'

‘Are you fond of her?' she said and I said yes, as simply as I could.

‘Oh! That's nice.' She laid her left hand with gentle impulsiveness on one of mine. ‘Oh! That's awfully sweet. I think that's wonderful. I think we have to have a drink on that, don't we?'

So we drank to that, at first with one drink and then a second; and then, although we had no fresh excuse, we had a third, for which she paid with a note from her large black handbag, afterwards holding up the bag against the light so that she could see her face in the mirror inside.

‘What does my face look like to you? Ghastly?'

She evidently did not expect an answer, and I did not give one. She patted her face about with a powder-puff and bared her teeth, shaping her lips again with lipstick that spread on the teeth small carmine stains.

‘Tell me,' she said, ‘about the family.'

I repeated, as flatly as I could, a few conventional things about the family.

‘What about that bastard Rollo?'

‘Well –' I said.

‘Perhaps that was an unfortunate word,' she said. She gave a last suck at her finished lips. ‘Eh? Unfortunate?'

I said that perhaps it was.

‘You do agree with people so, don't you?' she said. ‘Do you always agree with people like that? Do you agree with Lydia?'

‘Mostly,' I said.

‘That's probably because she's indulgent and generous to
you,' she said. ‘I'm sure if she's anything like me she has a generous nature.'

‘The path of wisdom is supposed to be the path of excess,' I said. It was a phrase Alex and I sometimes bandied about, thinking it profound.

‘Oh! steady on,' she said. ‘I can't cope with that stuff. I'm a whisky-and-soda girl. Not champagne. Lower the standard a bit – give a girl a chance.'

Laughing, she choked a little over her whisky. ‘I believe you're a bit of a character with those eyes of yours, aren't you?' she said.

‘I should find it hard to be a character with anybody else's,' I said, and that phrase too seemed to amuse her very much. She rocked from side to side with uneasy laughter spilling part of her whisky down the front of her blouse.

‘A drink certainly does liven
you
up, doesn't it?' she said. ‘Always does the opposite to me. I get all blank and cosy and warm – just like a warming-pan ready for the bed.' I thought this rather a good phrase and I smiled. ‘What are you smiling at?' she said. ‘I suppose you wonder why I'm here?'

I did wonder.

‘A little business with the family solicitor,' she said, ‘that's all. Once a year. Papers to sign – and that sort of thing. I don't always come down.'

She stopped speaking and took a long drink of whisky, staring down at last into the glass. The whisky seemed to flow back almost at once in a fresh spate of words that were, to me, surprisingly touching because they were not bitter:

‘You called me Mrs Aspen up there, and it quite shocked me. First time for years. I always go by my maiden name since we were separated. I've never been part of the family because I really never married into it. I suppose there was too much difference in our ages – Elliot and me – anyway it was one of those things and there you are.'

I am easily sorry for people and there may, perhaps, have been some sort of preoccupied expression of pity on my face to show that I was touched by what I had heard, because she said:

‘You're terribly sympathetic. I talk too much, don't I?'

‘No,' I said.

‘That means I do,' she said, ‘but I don't care. I saw all about the birthday in one of the papers. I hope she'll have a nice birthday. I hope it'll be nice. Will you be there?'

I told her everybody would be there.

‘All except me,' she said. ‘I shan't be there. But you might think of me if you can spare a moment, will you?'

I promised to think of her. All this time, as she grew warmer, drowsier, and more unthinking, more and more like some cosy inanimate object or, as she said herself, like a warming-pan ready for the bed, I caught inflections of her voice that, deep and throaty and disturbing, were so like Lydia's that if it had been dark I felt I might have reached out and touched her hands.

‘Well, I must push off,' she said. ‘What time would there be a train?'

I looked at the mantel-clock and said: ‘The next is at seven-thirteen. You've got eighteen minutes.'

‘Does that connect?'

‘Where for?' I said.

‘London.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘they all connect for London. Sooner or later.'

She laughed. ‘Just got time to have another,' she said. Then, not laughing but rather wearily looking at me from eyes that had begun to puff a little underneath with red-striped snail-like bags, ‘One-eyed hole, isn't it?'

I supposed she meant the town and I said yes, it was a one-eyed hole.

‘What sort of life does the girl lead?' she said. ‘Wrapped up? Cotton wool – you know?'

‘No. They like her to be free,' I said. ‘They've been very good about that. They didn't want her to grow up like –'