Love for Lydia (37 page)

‘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 –'

‘Oh, he's just my watch-dog,' she said. ‘Did you see the way he sits and looks at me?'

‘Yes,' I said.

She laughed. ‘He reminds me more than anything in the world of a watch-dog. It's wonderful how people change, isn't it?'

‘Not everybody changes,' I said, and I stooped to kiss her goodbye.

This time she turned her lips to me. As they brushed my face
there was a dry flakiness about them and for a single unbearable moment I wanted to hold them there, deeply and for a long time, but she whispered:

‘Off you go, now. Nurse Simpson will be chasing you. She's severe. You will come again, won't you?'

I smiled. ‘And still she wished for company,' I said.

‘What's that?' she said. ‘One of your quotations?'

‘Goodbye,' I said.

She looked suddenly tired from exertions of over-gaiety and conversation. As she lay back on the pillows she gave me a distant smile.

‘You haven't changed at all,' she said. ‘I don't think you have.'

Some minutes later I went into a world of departing visitors, dispersing either on foot or by taxi, to hear Blackie Johnson, at the sanatorium gates, politely and stolidly refusing two anxious elderly fares who wanted to catch the down-express to Leicester.

‘I'm very sorry,' Blackie said. ‘I've got another job.'

The old Chrysler limousine was standing in the road, with Blackie solid and Sundayfied in the driving-seat. As he saw me he called:

‘Here you are, Mr Richardson. Thought you were never coming. Jump in.'

Mystified I got into the front seat. He leaned over and shut the quaking upholstered door with a bang.

‘I hoped I'd catch you,' he said. He grated in the clutch and the Chrysler growled heavily down the hill. ‘Is there somewhere I can take you? Can I run you home?'

‘I wasn't going anywhere,' I said.

‘Do you mind if I run you round in the country for half an hour?' he said. ‘If you can spare the time? There's something –' He broke off, fumbling at the gears, big and nervous, unable to frame the words for a situation that was clearly the greatest trouble to him.

We drove on for some miles in silence, out of the town, into bright sunlight, past trooping Sunday walkers, and gradually
into lanes of rising wheat behind hedgerows of emerald and snowy may-cloud. The air was humid behind the closed glass of the Chrysler, and at last he partly opened a window and said:

‘What do you make of her, Mr Richardson? What do you think of her?'

‘I think she looks well,' I said.

‘Do you?' he said in agitation. ‘You do really?'

‘I think so –'

‘I don't know what to make of her,' he said. ‘Sometimes –'

He pulled up the car with harsh abruptness in a side lane along which children had strewn, in broken sheaves, numberless naked bluebells, the blanched white sockets limp in the hot sun. He opened the window a little wider. I could smell the rising summer in the scent of grass, in the clotted vanilla of masses of hawthorn and in the sweetness of bluebells still alive in small oak copses.

‘You think she's all right?' he said. ‘I keep trying to get hold of Dr Baird to ask him – but you know how they are – doctors –'

‘Well, if Nora's anything to go by –'

‘Nora's different,' he said. ‘Nora's not the same. You can't go by Nora.'

‘Baird seems confident,' I said.

He sat staring down the road. A cuckoo, breaking from a copse, called its way over dark-green sunlit wheatfields, pursued by another. I watched them for some time, out of sight, before Blackie said:

‘The first time I saw her I couldn't sleep all night – I couldn't get to sleep for thinking of her. She couldn't speak to me that time. They let me have three minutes with her, with a nurse there – that's all – and she couldn't speak to me.'

I stared down the road, not speaking. It seemed to me that he had waited a long time for the chance to lift a private troubled load of something off his chest, and now that he had begun he could not stop himself:

‘You didn't see her then, Mr Richardson,' he said. ‘You didn't see her before that, either. You didn't see it all coming
on, last winter and last summer and the winter before that. After Mr Holland – that's when it started – after that –'

I let him go on, staring through the dusty windscreen of the car at golden clarified sunlight steeping like warm liquid the wheatfields, the copses, and the high hedgerows of hawthorn. His voice unwound itself from light coils of recollection that hurt him as distinctly as if he had been unravelling a tortured knot of veins inside himself.

He somehow extracted from this tangled mess of his own pain the story of the two winters and the summer, of the long binge about which she had spoken. Several times he got it, as Tom had had a habit of doing under extreme emotion, in disorder, backwards, turned in on itself, hopelessly repetitive, so that he had to start again. I didn't interfere with him; I suppose he talked for about an hour. He spoke of Nora sometimes, but never of Lydia: only, with an awful sort of respect that had the effect of making his distraction about her more troubled and sometimes most poignant, of Miss Aspen. It was Miss Aspen ordering the car every night, Miss Aspen crazy to go to new places, to try new dances, to go farther and farther, later and later, and more and more often. It was Miss Aspen, wild and hungry for company, who would never stop and never tire. Through it all ran the word ‘business,' like the beat of an unnecessary justification.

‘I was very glad of the business, Mr Richardson, when it started I was very glad of the business. She had tried to be very kind to me before that – you remember that, don't you? She tried to put business in my way – she tried to lend me money and all that. I couldn't see it then – I'm a bit pig-headed. It takes me a long time to see a thing like that. Then when I did see it I was sorry. I wished I hadn't acted like that. But I didn't see her. I didn't get a chance to explain. And then she rang me up one day and it started and I was glad of the business. I was very glad of the business.'

From time to time he would break off, saying: ‘I wish I hadn't done it now. I wish to God I'd never started it.'

All through the two winters and the summer there would hardly be a night, except Sundays, when she and Nora did not
hire the car. Besides the dances there were a number of clubs, opened mostly by dubious colonels and their wives or mistresses up and down the river, offering some sort of food and drink and high-pitched company and a brittle, searing brand of fun. They found them all, beat their way hungrily through them, exhausted them and went farther away for others. He did not say much about men. He supposed there must have been men, in the same way as there was a good deal of drink and rowdiness and such idiocies, popular at the time, as games of stripping down to brassières on dance floors. But the thing that stuck in his mind, troubled him most, was the deadliness. An awful deadliness. There was no joy in it; only a deadly, awful pointlessness. The two girls went through everything with the same, wearing hunger. They even brought it to a thoughtless brand of insolence, leaving him alone in the car for five and six and seven hours at a time, until three or four o'clock in the morning, which in summer meant the break of day.

Then one day he found he had had enough of this; after several months of it he was getting worn out himself. Most nights he managed to get a little sleep in the car, but it was never enough and always, next day, he began to feel drowsy and brainless and incapable of doing the work he wanted. His business – ‘I'm not all that hot on it anyway. I'm no business man' – began to fall off. His accounts fell behind and got into a mess. Then one night after crawling home for hours in a river-fog and narrowly missing the river at one point he found he was really frightened. A queer idea of impending disaster stuck itself into his head and he could not get it out. It haunted him all next day, and that same evening he said to her:

‘Miss Aspen, I'm afraid I can't take you any more. I'm afraid I shall have to give it up.'

She didn't answer that – there was no protest or anger or remonstration or question about it at all. But that night, when she at last came out of one of the dubious colonels' clubs, he saw her stagger about sightlessly in the lights of his car, half-supported by Nora, until she suddenly lurched forward and fell down.

He wasn't shocked by the fact of seeing her drunk. He picked
her up in his arms, and it was more as if she were sleeping. He even felt a sense of relief about it. He tucked her up with rugs, beside Nora, who was in a state of stony suspense, at the back of the car. Then he drove carefully home. It was a little foggy again, in dangerous patches, but in places there were stars. Then as he drove his sense of disaster came back. He found himself appalled by the idea that she might have fallen and hurt herself or wandered stupidly about and got lost in the river.

‘So I knew if she was going on with it I had to go on,' he said. ‘I was frightened about her.'

Later, after he had taken Nora home, he drove to the park with Lydia. She was still asleep in the car when he stopped by the gates. He tried to wake her by gently calling her name. ‘Miss Aspen, Miss Aspen,' he kept saying to her, ‘Miss Aspen, you'll have to wake up. We're home now – you'll have to wake yourself, Miss Aspen. Come on.'

Like this he tried for about half an hour to coax her into wakefulness. Then he decided to drive the car across the park, to the house, and try to get her indoors and settle her for the rest of the night in a chair. He drove the Chrysler quietly to the door of the house. Then he shut off the engine – and it was the shutting off of the engine, at last, that woke her.

She stirred among the rugs and opened her eyes and looked at him, not knowing what had happened or where she was. She looked very confused and she touched his face. She asked him where had they been and where was Tom? Wasn't Tom with them? She had some sort of idea that they had left Tom behind somewhere, alone and forgotten.

It was when she touched his face again that she remembered. She began crying quietly, deeply, out of a terrible emptiness. She begged him to take her home. He said gently: ‘Miss Aspen, you are home. We're here. This is home,' and she simply shook her head, crying desperately.

Finally he lifted her out of the car, still in the rugs, and took her into the house, picking his way with a torch from the car. She hid her face in her hands as he carried her, sobbing deeply, not speaking again until he laid her on a chair in the drawing-room.
He got an impression of her suffering from a strange gap in her memory. She seemed too to be trying to fill it, because she said:

‘Where am I? Where have we been? Who was with us?' and she asked him again if Tom was there.

He shaded the torch with his hand, and her face seemed grey in the diffused light of it, only her eyes, as he said to me, yawning at him, black and lonely – ‘awfully lonely,' he said several times, ‘awfully – terribly lonely.'

Then he asked her, ‘Will you be all right, Miss Aspen, if I leave you here now? Do you think you'll be all right?'

Suddenly she sprang into a single bright moment of wakefulness and said:

‘Yes. I'll be all right. You go now.'