Love for Lydia (24 page)

‘If you're not coming I think we'd better go,' Mrs Sanderson said. ‘Are you coming?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Leave him,' Nancy said. ‘He'll get over it. He's in one of those moods. He thinks he's too good for us all.'

‘Clever of you to recognize it at last,' I said.

After this witless remark Mrs Sanderson wound up the window. For one prolonged moment, before Blackie revved up his engine, I hated everything. I hated myself, I hated the yelling fatuity of Alex's pose on the bridge parapet; I hated the cold sober faces in the taxi; I hated the voice of Nancy telling me the truth about myself. The train tooted its whistle across the meadow. I hated it all and I wanted to go on in loneliness, alone.

At this moment the front window of the car went down.

‘Won't you come?'

It was Lydia speaking. Her voice was very soft; she had not spoken to me in that soft, fond way for a long time.

‘No,' I said.

‘I wish you would,' she said. ‘It would be better.'

I could hear her voice coming with a deep disturbance of tenderness from the depth of her throat. I caught a glimpse of the upper part of her dress, pale mauve in the dash-light. From the bridge Alex yelled something incomprehensible but exactly as if she and I were alone she took no notice of it and simply said: ‘It would make me very happy – in fact it would make all of us very happy –'

I did not answer. I knew that I had taken up a position I could not sustain. It seemed to me I heard someone, Nancy I thought, crying in the back of the car. But I only stood stubborn, transfixed, hateful while Lydia said:

‘For the last time. Please.'

‘No,' I said. ‘There's one thing I'll do though – I'll give you the chance of getting out and walking with me.'

‘I can't do that,' she said.

In answer I made another witless remark, born out of my impossible attitude: ‘There's no such word as can't – you
could
–'

‘It so happens I don't want to,' she said. The weeping of someone in the back of the car became, in that moment, my own weeping, cruel, private, lonely, desolate inside me. ‘I've made up my mind about it. It's all made up. I don't suppose you understand it and I don't blame you. But that's how it is – so please will you –'

She never finished speaking that sentence, Alex slipped at that moment on the parapet, yelling as he did so. I heard the scrape of his dance shoes on stone. I turned just in time to see him slipping down on his buttocks over the bridge. It seemed like the action of a man who had simply grown tired of standing and was going to sit down. For one second he actually did sit down – and then his body straightened out and fell.

‘Alex!' I yelled. ‘Alex –'

I heard him strike his head on the upper arch of the bridge as he fell. His white evening scarf fell off. The splash of his body striking the water was flat and uncontrolled. When I ran forward I saw him float down, under the arch, downstream, to the other side.

Some seconds later I saw Tom poised for a moment in his white dress shirt on the bridge. I heard Nancy scream: ‘I knew something would happen – I knew it would –' and then she shrieked incoherently, running pointlessly up and down.

This shriek was answered, exactly like an echo, by the train waiting for its signal across the meadow. Then I saw Blackie running. I jumped the end parapet of the bridge, landing on the tow-path, and began running too. From there I saw Blackie dive. For a few moments I heard two bodies swimming without seeing them. Then I saw two pairs of detached white sleeves thrashing dark water between islands of reeds and I heard Tom yelling what sounded like:

‘Just where you are – just there – mind the weed –'

Suddenly all my latent childhood terror of the river came back. I saw Tom come up and dive again. Then Blackie dived. I could not see Alex. On the bridge Nancy kept running up and down, hysterical, until Lydia and Mrs Sanderson caught her and made her quiet. Beyond them a faint light began to appear in the sky. The arches of the bridge were ovals of paling grey.

At last Tom came up. Nancy saw him and began screaming his name. ‘Tom! Tom! Tom! T – om –!' in a long wail of terror. I saw him shake his thick wet blond hair, roping it back with his hands. He trod water. No one else appeared on the water and suddenly he went thrashing over, perpendicular, in
another dive. Then across the fields the train tooted its whistle again and the sound of it woke me and I began to run down the tow-path.

I remember not bothering to unlatch the tow-path gate, but vaulting it. I heard what I thought were the wheels of the train cranking. The sound clacked hollow across the fields. Then I knew it was the fall of the signal I had heard. Steam squeezed in a long hiss across the meadows and one by one the truck buffers hit each other, irregular chock against chock, until the train was pulled straight and began to move away.

By the time I turned and vaulted the gate again I could see Tom swimming in to the bank, bringing somebody with him. I fell down the bank and we lashed together in shallow water, above a shelf of reeds. I dragged somebody through the reeds, half out of water, and I saw that it was Blackie. Tom was drawing his breath in long grating gasps. He took a single wild look at Blackie as I pulled him through the reeds. He seemed surprised, as I was, that it was not Alex. Then he dived again in a long spoon-curved sort of action that took him half across the river.

From the bridge Lydia ran down and we laid Blackie on his face. He was sick, spewing water in coughs on the grass. She did not speak a word. Across on the line the signal flapped back to danger behind the receding train. Blackie turned slowly on his face, the hairy pack of his chest muscles black and wet and faintly shining in the growing daylight, and I heard the train drawing farther and farther away.

A patch of floating mist in the river seemed to grow white. It was really Tom, struggling to free himself of his shirt before he made another dive. On the bridge Nancy screamed his name again, Tom! Tom! ‘T – om!' in a long wail, and then went on screaming it at each successive dive.

Then I saw him appear in a new place. He was clinging to a buttress of the bridge. He was hanging, on alone, against the current. It was not strong but his own strength was going and I saw the river beating him, pulling his body out from the tips of his fingers. Lydia called:

‘There's a rope in the car,' and I rushed up to the bridge.
The car tow-rope had a hook on it and I paid it out over the parapet to Tom. ‘I felt it tauten as he held it. Then I caught a new sound. It was the engine of the car, still running, the exhaust puttering softly like sobbing breath.

Something hit me in the face, and then hit me again, on either cheek, and then afterwards so many times that I lost count of it. It was Nancy. She struck me over and over again until I could only go on holding the rope and bow my head and let her hit me just as she would.

I think it was Mrs Sanderson who finally stopped her and took her away. In a stunned fashion I walked along the bridge, feeling the rope taut as Tom held it. I knew by that time that there would be no Alex. Mrs Sanderson did not cry. The last sounds of the goods train climbing slowly through the valley met the sounds of returning echoes and then faded away. Blackie lay on the bank and coughed for breath, sick, and spitting, and Nancy cried piteously, alone now, against a gate in a field beyond the bridge, weeping: ‘Tom, oh! Tom – oh! Tom – my God, what have we done?'

I pulled Tom by the rope through the reed shelf. He crawled up the bank and lay on his face beside Blackie. Rising pale grey mist left the black skin of water as clear and still as if no one had touched it.

I turned Tom on his back and knelt by him and wiped water from his face. The light of the sky was growing clearer every moment. The under arcs of stone cast sharp ovals of white on the water. The sound of the receding train had ceased entirely and as weeping hatred went through me I began to shake all over again, asking myself, as Nancy did, for God's sake what had we done? Then Tom staggered to his feet and said:

‘One more try – I think I could get him,' and then, with a cry of exhaustion, fell down.

Some time later the light in the east came to full strength. Sun threw yellow patches on a river that was not black any longer, and I realized, very slowly, that we had only just begun the longest day of the year.

Perhaps I ought not to have been surprised that Bretherton came to see me two days later. In the summer evening he stood on the doorstep, notebook sticking from his pocket, small pink-lidded eyes blinking like a pig that wakes in a glare of sun.

‘Thought you might be able to do us a good turn – give us a line on things.'

I had neither a good turn to do nor a line to give, that day, on anything in the world.

‘You know – personal stuff. Do you think he did do it?' They were still dredging, that day, for Alex's body; the river had always been quick to take people but equally slow to give them up again. ‘Any reason? – you know?'

I did not know. Alex was dead and a great part of myself – that day I felt almost all – was dead with him. But Bretherton took my silence as tacit acquiescence to the idea that Alex had killed himself.

‘You know – strickly' – As he said ‘strickly' he took his pencil from his breast pocket. ‘Strickly between our two selves. In confidence – under the Old Pals' Act.'

I had nothing to give under the Old Pals' Act either. I stared past him and said:

‘It might just as well have been an Act of God. It probably was.'

‘You know, you'd have made a good reporter if you'd cut out the idealism,' he said. ‘You've always been too idealistic. Now how did it happen? – strickly –?'

I had nothing to say.

‘You were there,' he said, ‘you ought to be able to describe it, didn't you? That was a wonderful effort of young Holland's – we're playing that up. Did you go in?'

‘I don't swim. I'm too idealistic,' I said.

‘No need to come the old mild and bitter if you are,' Bretherton said.

‘I don't know anything,' I said. I began to shut him out, suppressing some further words about the Old Pals' Act, a good turn and strickly between ourselves. ‘It'll all be in the records, Mr Bretherton,' I said, ‘all you want to know –'

‘Yes, that's all right. But I wanted to get the human side –'

I shut him out at last. I had nothing to tell; I could not explain. I could not explain that Alex had been killed not so much by a fall from a bridge as by an accumulative process of little things, of which some were gay, some stupid, some accidental but all of small importance in themselves. Perhaps he had died on the icy evening when Lydia had first taken notice of Blackie; or on the occasions when she had led him on, or had appeared to lead him on, exactly as she had sometimes led on Tom and myself. Perhaps then, perhaps later. Perhaps on some other occasion. I didn't know. He might even have died under the Old Pals' Act, under the pressure of our own affection for each other, in our secret loyalties. We had been very good pals: that might have been it. If we had not been very good pals we should never have talked, as young men do, in terms of starlight and solemnity and bravado and fun and all that self-centred sort of holiness that is so wonderful when you are young. Everywhere there was a confusion of reasons. We shouldn't have been idealistic. We should have known better. Lydia could have killed him. His mother could have killed him because in her generous and charming way she had treated him with too much indulgence, giving him too much money, letting him drink too much. It didn't matter. I myself could have killed him, and I believe that Nancy, like myself, thought I had.

I went slowly through a summer without affection; I invented a sort of sterile and loveless vacuum for myself. When I walked it was always out of the town on the east side, where we lived, and never south towards Busketts, or south-west, towards Lydia and the Aspens, or towards the station, behind which the Sandersons lived in their Edwardian villa in a cul-de-sac of poplar trees that screened the branch line trains. I did
not want anybody; I had given up my job. The summer was very hot and whenever I could I used to stuff sandwiches into my pocket and walk, mostly across fields, by path and green lane, into country I did not know. I was away early in the morning and back after the factories closed at night. It was suffocating and hot in the streets about the factories that summer, and the ploughed lands about Evensford, on heavy yellow clay, began to dry up. By late July clergymen had started the usual business, in churches, of offering prayers for rain. There was no rain and by August the tips of the elms on the high clay-land were scorched yellow, then brown and dry. Corn began to catch fire by railway tracks. Sheep stood under long hawthorn umbrellas, sheltering from the glare of an otherwise treeless countryside, panting in the bony hollow way they have under the distress of heat, painfully convulsed and shuddering, snatching for breath. In bean-fields you could hear the splintering crack of exploding pods, burnt black by heat, and one of the commonest sights was the water-carts hauling slowly across simmering horizons, to and fro from the brooks, carrying water about the farms.

One August afternoon I was coming home across fields to east of Evensford, about three miles away, where a country of open land for a brief space suddenly closes in, tightened up by a range of small fox coverts, the last before the ash-tracks of the town begin. This is the country where, ten years later, they carved an airfield with bulldozing ruthlessness through every fox-covert and farm and pond and pigsty until nothing but a grey circus, with a perimeter five miles long, a trapeze of radio towers and landing lights, and a herd of black flying-elephants, remained above the steeple of a tiny church below. But that day war was still a long way off and there was only heat to trouble me.