Love for Lydia (29 page)

Tom took a good long look at Pheley. He could see nothing different. She stared at him, all fiery and sandy-eyed, with a
blazing impression of being overstrung about something and on the verge of tears.

Then suddenly she whipped off her hat.

‘Good God,' Tom said.

‘Now you see,' Pheley said; and he saw that she had cut her hair.

Perhaps it seems ridiculous to recall, at this distance, the heart-burning intensity of days when girls were constantly whipping off their hats and saying to young men, with grief or triumph or some other high emotion, ‘There! I went out and had it off,' and some poor stunned fellow would stand there trying to frame out of his incoherence a word of enthusiasm for a transformation that had reduced his lover to the level of a newly-barbered boy. It seems impossible now that homes were being torn apart by great rifts of anger and shock because fathers returned from offices to find daughters bobbed and shriven, with trembling mothers standing ready to placate and pacify men who grieved impotently for locks and curls they felt they would never see again.

When Tom looked at Pheley he was reminded of a girl he had known, at school, who had had her hair cut off because of ringworm; and how, for him, she had never really become a girl again.

‘Well,' Pheley said. She spoke with a sort of doom-like abandon for which her high astringent voice was not fitted. ‘It's done now. Whether anybody likes it or not. It's done now.'

It seemed to Tom that there was nothing much to make a fuss about. He could not see much difference, as far as attraction went, between a long-haired Pheley and one who seemed to be wearing a red stage-wig. Then she rose in pure blasphemy.

‘Grief, there's been hell to pay.'

Tom did not know what to answer; she had a curious naked look of unreality, all red and stagey and slightly embarrassing, as she stood there doubly fired by the setting sun.

Then wild, pressed, sandy-shot tears started springing from her red-rimmed eyes, and she said, whimpering:

‘He whipped me.'

Tom stood terribly stunned. He had not grasped that the cutting off of Pheley's hair might be, to McKechnie, a sin second only in outrage to something like a damnation of the Holy Ghost.

‘He came upstairs and whipped me.'

She hung her head, a grown woman of twenty-eight, beaten and turned child, crying desperately. For some moments Tom experienced a terrible sorrow for her. It was all so monstrous and infamously typical of narrow sectarian prejudice that he did not think for one moment it had anything to do with himself.

‘Don't cry,' was all he could think of saying. ‘You mustn't cry.'

She stood there crying a little longer, and then he took her to the house. He made a pot of tea, and they sat at the kitchen table, drinking it. Tears had reddened and enlarged the almost hairless lids of her eyes until they were as puffed and swollen as her mouth.

After a time she spoke, tremblingly, of her awful discontent. He began to get some idea of the monstrous iron that bound the McKechnie household. No cooking on Sundays, no music, no jokes, not even much talking, no papers, no reading except of sectarian things. A prayer-meeting once a week and often, especially in winter, twice or three times; a long dry scouring word of the Lord before breakfast every day. A hardness, an enamel of twice-fired prejudice and precept, held the family, the eldest son, a man of forty, in a kind of isolated and awful fealty. Pheley had never been to a dance, a cinema, a theatre, a public-house, or a public place where music was played. She did not know what these things were like. An inculcated horror of them bound her like a fear of disease. It not only seemed monstrously outdated and unreal to Tom but about as fatuous: a fatuity that left him shocked and disbelieving and amazed.

Pheley poured all this out to him and he listened. She drank tea slowly, dazed, as if her lips were bruised, and once or twice she stirred uneasily, with a corresponding tightening of her lips, in her chair.

After a time Tom asked her if she felt better and she said:

‘Except for my back.'

Tom grasped the meaning of this slowly. Her earlier remark about beating had shocked him, but he had not thought of it as being so harshly literal as that. He took it to mean a boxed ear, a few slaps of a hand about the head perhaps, not more.

‘Your back?' he said, and she got up from her chair and said:

‘I'll show you.'

She reached over her shoulder and undid the clasps of her dress and spread the panels of it outward with her two hands. She wore even then an old-fashioned camisole instead of a slip, and something had ripped it down the centre. Underneath it the flesh was so much like pale alabaster that where the strokes of beating had cut into it the lines seemed raised and crusted, already more blue than red. They might have been laid there with a hot and accurate bar.

When she sat down at the table, her shoulders naked, she started weeping again. Tom felt a wave of sickness that was exactly as sour and mortifying as the one he had felt when hearing Blackie Johnson and his mother quarrelling over the dead. The two things belonged to the same strange world of monstrous impossibilities. They did not happen. They were odious incongruities in a life that had never given him anything but decency and happiness and an immortal trust in the decency of others. He believed in that as profoundly as McKechnie believed in whatever God it was he believed in – and after that Tom didn't think it was much of a God – and he came as near to hating McKechnie as he had ever hated anyone at all.

It was like him, too, to be practical.

‘You must put something on that,' he said. ‘Some ointment, some hound's-tongue or something –'

Pheley smiled a little between her crying.

‘You don't quite grasp it yet, do you?' she said. She looked more than ever like a pasty, red-eyed doll with an ill-fitting crop of stiff sandy hair. Tom did not know what he had failed to grasp and she said:

‘You don't get it. If I'm beaten I must bear it. I mustn't heal
it. It must heal itself. If you deserve the affliction you mustn't anoint the affliction. Otherwise it has no value. Now do you get what I mean?'

Slowly Tom, shocked again, got what she meant. She cried again, this time, as on most of the others, not through pain but through the humiliation of being a grown woman, bludgeoned by chastisements she must have known were archaic and monstrous and which she found it hard to explain. Her face became a smudged and desolate mass of tear-marks that stained the pale auburn skin like a rash. She broke down a little, biting the fingers of both hands in order to quieten her tears, and then put her head at last on Tom's shoulder.

‘We'll see about this,' Tom said. ‘I'll get ointment tomorrow. You can come down in the afternoon and put it on.'

She stayed a little longer, and then gave a curious secrecy to it all by saying:

‘I'd better go now. Otherwise they'll be looking for me and they'll find the two of us here together. They'll think it has something to do with you.'

It did not occur to Tom that it had anything to do with him. Nor did it occur to him, even remotely, until some long time afterwards, that the cutting of Pheley's hair and the beating of her back might be two things by which Pheley and McKechnie might try to hold him to something, as it were to a promise, a solemn imputation of affection, he had never intended should be there.

When I first met Pheley we were down in the barley field; and in her first words there was a sharp thin-lipped hostility.

‘Oh! Who's the friend?'

She was quick to notice my small hands, inadequate and much stabbed by barley ears.

‘Ye'll have to learn to make the sheaves half-size,' she said, ‘won't you?'

‘I'll make them twice as big,' I said, ‘and then you can lift them.'

‘Ye never will!' she said.

One afternoon she brought us, with the girdle-scones, a large
blue can of tea. As we stood drinking it she took up the rake and began raking up big rustling rolls of barley. She had very long, freckled and, as it were, red-nosed arms that went right round the sheaf in a pale, sinewy, expert lock. She made a dozen of these sheaves in, as it seemed, no time at all, leaving them like fat lolloping sheep among my rows of skinny lambs.

‘That'll give ye some idea,' she said, and the point of this was not lost on me.

But the point of it was lost, that day, every other day and even for some time after she had cut her hair, on Tom. He accepted her simply as the pointed expression of the McKechnie character. It did not occur to him that she was any more than another boy, flat, angular, several years older than himself, who wanted to show a decent and generous neighbourliness to a newcomer.

To me, at first, she was a sexless barb that irritated.

‘Ah! here comes the friend,' she would say.

‘And here,' I got to answer, ‘comes the enemy.'

In this way we tried unsuccessfully to hate each other off the place.

By the time we had the party for Nancy's birthday Tom had grown to accept her as something awkward on the landscape that had to be tolerated. Her high voice, crow-like, cawed at us through the afternoons. Tom paid his dutiful calls to the farm house in the evenings, taking back a washed tea-can, using the telephone, asking advice from McKechnie. Whenever and wherever he went Pheley was there.

Once he saw it in an amused light. ‘I was having a look round for Sir Roger,' he said, ‘and I damn near had a shot at something red. It was a McKechnie!'

After that I used to say: ‘Here she comes, Tom. Here's your vixen.'

When Tom went up to use the telephone on the night of Nancy's birthday most of the McKechnies had gone to bed; but Pheley, her mother and father and an elder sister named Flora, married to a console-operator in an Evensford factory who had deserted after six months, were still in the parlour, waiting for the storm to subside.

The McKechnies had electricity in the house. Naked bulbs were suspended at economic points from opaque white shades, of the kind used in offices, so that a harsh glare pierced here and there the ecclesiastical fumed-oak gloom. That night, as Tom was telephoning, the entire system fused, plunging the house in darkness.

Tom called that it was probably nothing to worry about – perhaps a transmitter had been struck by the storm somewhere – and the two McKechnie girls, Pheley and Flora, went groping upstairs for candles.

By the time they came down again Tom had finished telephoning and it was Flora, not Pheley, who said:

‘I see there's a light in your house, Tom. Upstairs.'

‘Oh! it's Nancy making up the beds,' Tom said. ‘She and Miss Aspen are going to stay the night.' He treated it all very naturally and then said:

‘If you showed me the fuse-box I could find out what's wrong for you before I go back. It might not be a transmitter – there's always the chance it's a fuse.'

Half-way down the whitewashed cellar steps Tom was shown the fuse-box by McKechnie, who stood on an upper step, holding a candle so that Tom could see. The main house fuse had blown. In the two minutes it took Tom to mend it McKechnie said:

‘Who did you say was staying the night with you?'

‘My sister and her friend.'

‘Just the three of ye?'

Tom said I was there too, and McKechnie asked:

‘Richardson? Would it be someone I knew?'

‘Probably not,' Tom said. ‘Used to work on the county paper. You know – the offices in Evensford High Street.'

‘Ah! yes,' McKechnie said. ‘I know. I used to see the light in there on Sundays. Always burning away there after we came from chapel.'

A moment later Tom plugged in the fuse. The naked economic bulbs flared harshly about the gloom. At the foot of the stairs Pheley, a delighted, candle-bathed, eager figure, stood overwhelmed at Tom's swift excellence with fuses.

‘Ah! Tom, ye're so quick. That would have taken Ian or Jamie half an hour or more –'

‘Take your candle and go to bed,' McKechnie said. His voice too was like a switch, snapping out all conversation. ‘You too, Flora. It's after ten,' and the two sisters, wordless except for almost inaudible goodnights, cowed as recalcitrant children, turned and went after their petering candles upstairs.

Tom said ‘Goodnight,' and then remembered the telephone and asked if he could pay the call.

‘Y'owe me nothing,' McKechnie said. ‘Goodnight'

For a few eager days Tom was lost in a world that contained nothing but Lydia. I withdrew myself from it with unobtrusive excuses that I do not think he even heard. It was late September. The countryside had begun to be embalmed in soft eggshell light, under skies of drowsing turquoise, with delicate settling night mist that began to give back to the grass-lands a first renewal of green. It was warm and cloudless by day and during my absence Lydia came up to spend a whole day at the farm with Tom. They cooked lunch together and afterwards sowed grass-seed in a rectangular plot in the front garden, beyond the porch. ‘This will be our lawn,' Lydia said, ‘this is where we shall sit – we shall get the sun here all afternoon.'

Lunch had been a howling failure. ‘Literally howling,' Tom said. ‘I never laughed so much for years.'

The meal was to have consisted, it seemed, of fried steak and potatoes, with tinned apricots and cream. I doubt if Lydia had ever cooked a meal in her life. She put the frying-pan on the oil-burner, flopped the steak in, without fat, and hoped that presently God, or someone else, would announce it ready. While it heated she got herself absorbed with Tom in the other room. I think he was still too shy to make advances, and a blinding flash from the oil-stove, ten minutes later, could have done nothing to help him. He flew into the scullery and discovered that a sort of dry explosion had blown the frying-pan from the stove. There was a horrible odour of blue-flamed steak and Tom said something about the outlook for young farmers' wives, to say nothing of young farmers, was not very
rosy, and Lydia said ‘It's nothing but your beastly stove,' and chased him with the frying-pan.