Love for Lydia Read online

  Love for Lydia

  H. E. Bates

  To Laurence

  The ‘I’ of this story is purely fictitious, as are the characters he describes

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note from the Family

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  If, as a smitten fifteen year old, I’d have known that one day I would be asked to write an introduction to Love for Lydia, my excitement would have known no limits. It was, and remains, one of my favourite novels.

  This is a work that cannot fail to intrigue, delight and influence; and, if caught at the right time, to make its mark on the mind. It is also one that, read as a teenager trying to write, was influential to me as a novelist in ways I have only just fathomed. Characters who are not what they seem have always fascinated me, and I now wonder whether the contradictory Lydia wormed her way into my psyche without me realising. Anyone who is reading the novel for the first time is to be envied.

  Love for Lydia is so exquisitely written, so accurate on both the glorious and dangerous aspects of obsessive love, and so precise in its portrait of a era and place, it seems to me to be timeless. I re-read it last summer for the first time in years, and I was once more enchanted and addicted. I also saw the character of Lydia in a very different light.

  The narrator, Richardson, is a local reporter in the small Northamptonshire town of Evensford, based on H. E. Bates’s own Rushden. Love for Lydia is, by Bates’s own description, his most autobiographical work, and his own favourite among his Northamptonshire novels. His portrait of the leather factories, the alleys and cramped houses, and their contrasting surroundings of lush English countryside, are breathtaking. It’s those scenes, depicted with such extraordinary lyrical powers, that have lasted in my mind.

  Once Richardson is dispatched to the Hall and meets Lydia, a fatherless aristocrat sent to live with old aunts, she intrigues both him and the reader. This is where reading the novel in both youth and adulthood makes for very different experiences. Lydia’s ostensible timidity and gawkiness are supremely identifiable with as a teenager. To me, it meant that we shy, awkward girls who said nothing and hid our faces behind our hair could one day transform ourselves into man-slaying minxes. We could, like Miss Aspen, progress to become consummate flirts, party girls loved by all men, even heiresses. What could possibly be better?

  Lydia is the central focus of the novel, as Richardson himself recedes and becomes largely an observer. As she pushes him away, we see how far he – and other men – will go for her love. Here is a woman framed by the beauty of her setting, in a fashion reminiscent of Hardy. As a fifteen-year-old, I considered the siren Lydia a marvellous role model: an exemplar of the hair-tossing adult life that lay ahead. But then Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff appeared to be the ultimate romantic hero instead of a wife-battering sadist, and George Eliot’s Dorothea was a touch dull, instead of a woman of high intelligence and integrity.

  On the contrary, what strikes me now is Lydia’s dangerous narcissism. Her charisma, her wilful and at times histrionic nature wreak havoc until her self-serving actions can seem quite monstrous. The gradual realisation that she is fickle, heartless in some ways, and a tireless flirt, makes the novel a fascinating study of a personality type. As more men join her group of admirers, we get a sense of both her power, and of the strength of friendship clinging on through the blows of love and lust. Where I once found her enchanting, I now find her equally tiresome, but the truth is, of course, that she is both.

  This is a novel of nuances, not of absolutes, and Lydia is flawed yet ultimately comes into her own. There is soul under the flapper’s artifice, and this only emerges when she makes her eventual choice. The novel shows that wildness is romanticised by our culture, but ultimately selfish.

  The themes of decaying aristocracy and of class differences – between Richardson and friends, Lydia, and Blackie – are all well handled, while that sense of youth wanting more than their parents: circumscribed by setting and circumstances, but determined to have better and to tell authority figures where to go, is one that plucks at the young reader’s sympathies.

  When I first read Love for Lydia, Young Adult literature didn’t exist: there was literature for children and for adults. But there were novels, like this one, that spoke to youth. So Alain-Fournier, Rosamond Lehmann, Rumer Godden, Laurie Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald could all be delighted in, both for their fine prose, and for their romanticism. The belief in love being one’s life’s work, transcending all, making a character noble even, is what the teenage heart responds to, and it was this that made me read and then re-read Love for Lydia in those years.

  The men in Lydia’s life are not just dupes. There is something touching about Blackie the chauffeur’s consistency and pride, and the tragedies that unfold are unforgettable. The novel appears to be a slow burn, beautifully written and as leisurely as the seasons it describes, but then its twists and surprises are all the more powerful. As a reader, I didn’t see tragedy coming, and it was all the more effective for it.

  When the television adaptation was broadcast, I found it tremendously exciting, as though allowed a peek into adult life. ‘That young man will go far,’ said my mother of a novice Jeremy Irons. I still have my copy of the novel with the actress Mel Martin on the cover.

  Reading it now, I feel strangely rejuvenated. The novel really does capture so many of the emotions of young love with startling accuracy, and the prose continues to take my breath away. When Bates writes of ‘golden clarified sunlight’ or ‘the long pale twilight when the air was green with young leaves and the acid of new grass,’ I am lulled into a sense of peace, a simple revelling in his lyricism.

  Unusually for a male writer of his generation, Bates does nothing to upset later feminist sensibilities. Lydia could all so easily be an Eve or a Magdalen poisoning bucolic innocence, yet the men’s foolishness is just as obvious as her manipulations, and no fingers are pointed. Above all, the novel leaves the reader with a sense of the very significant differences between thrilling yet tormenting romance, and mature love. In Lydia and Richardson’s case, one is not possible without the other, and the resolution is as convincing as it is rewarding.

  The novel should be better known: it is a finer, more realised work than the more famous The Darling Buds of May, and I’m a lifelong admirer. If youth is wasted on the young, at least it can be revisited in the imagination. Love for Lydia plunges us into its midst and it’s hard to leave.

  Joanna Briscoe, 2016

  A Note from the Family

  My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

  My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and
novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

  There are hundreds of stories to discover and rediscover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

  If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H.E. Bates Companion – a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found. I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

  Tim Bates, 2015

  We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  After the death of their elder brother the two Aspen sisters came back to Evensford at the end of February, driving in the enormous brown coachwork Daimler with the gilt monograms on the doors, through a sudden fall of snow.

  Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice from the north-east, beating in at that end of the town where for a few hundred yards the High Street runs straight, past what is now Johnson’s car-wrecking yard, under the railway arches, and then between the high causeways that make it like a dry canal. It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from the valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain.

  Frost had begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. All the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods. There was no snow with it until the afternoon the Aspen sisters came back; and then it began to fall lightly, in sudden flusters, no more than vapour, and then gritty and larger, like grains of rice.

  It began falling almost exactly at the moment the heavy brown Daimler drove past the old Succoth chapel, with its frozen steps like a waterfall of chipped glass, opposite the branch offices of The County Examiner, where the windows were partly glazed over with a pattern of starry fern. It came suddenly on a darkened whirl of wind that flowered into whiteness. The wind seemed to twist violently in the air and snatch from nowhere the snow that was like white vapour, catching the Daimler broadside at the same time. Through the windows of The Examiner, where I stood nursing the wrist I had sprained while skating, I saw the car shudder and swerve and twist itself into a skid and then out again. From a confusion of leopard rugs on the back seat the younger Miss Aspen, Juliana, seemed to shudder too and was swung forward, snatching at the silken window cord with her right hand. The elder one, Bertie, bounced like a rosy dumpling. They were still both in black. But round the neck of the younger one was pinned a violet woollen scarf, as if she had caught a cold, and it was when she jolted forward, clutching the scarf with one hand and the window cord with the other, that I saw Elliot Aspen’s daughter sitting there, between her aunts, for the first time.

  She had long coils of black hair that fell across her shoulders, so that she seemed to be wearing a hood. I saw only part of her face, jerked forward above her raised coat collar, startled but not frightened by the skid. She did not lift her hands. It was her eyes instead that seemed to stretch out, first to one window and then another, in an effort to get her bearings, as if she did not know exactly where she was. And in that moment, before the car straightened and righted itself and went on, she seemed, I thought, about fifteen.

  It was my first mistake about her.

  In the back office the kettle was on the gas-ring and Bretherton was asleep by the stove. On the table were the remains, set about on torn and greasy paper bags, of Bretherton’s lunch, several pieces of bread and butter and a mauled pork pie.

  When Bretherton woke, beer-flushed, with belches of discomfort, at the sound of the caddy spoon on the side of the teapot, he looked like one of those model porkers, fat and pinkish, squatting on its hind legs with an advertisement for sausages in its lap, that you see in butchers’ windows. The sausages were his fingers. They glistened, a pink-grey colour, as they grasped tremulously at each other and then at his tobacco-yellow moustache. They were tipped with black moons of dirt that presently scraped at the forefront of his thinning scalp while in the first startling unpleasantness of waking he banged his squat scrubby elbows on the desk, his thick white fingers flapping.

  ‘Tea,’ I said, setting the big white cup on the blotter in front of him. He attacked it where it stood, in a stooping gurgle of his mouth, sucking at it in pig-like fashion. Tea dribbled brownly over desk and blotter and down his shirt front and over his ready-made bow tie that clipped into the shirt with a brass stud, leaving on his Adam’s apple a bright green stain.

  And then, in this slopping stupor, he remembered his favourite word for me.

  ‘Come here, Clutterhead!’

  I stood before him at the desk, while, for the second time, he soaked his lips in tea.

  ‘Didn’t you have something on, Clutterhead? Don’t I seem to remember –’

  ‘Bazaar,’ I said. ‘Four o’clock. Congregational Rebuilding Fund.’

  ‘Then for Jesus’ sake get there!’

  ‘It’s just past three,’ I said.

  ‘Three, two, four, eight, bloody midnight – what does it matter? Be there, never mind – be there, get there –’

  ‘They’re all the same,’ I said. There were times when it seemed to me I had written up a million bazaars. ‘One bazaar is like another –’

  He sucked incoherently at the cup again. I knew that he was incapable of answering because he began grating his teeth. Brown tea seemed to pour back through his eyes, filtering and dribbling down to his moustache. It poured out of his mouth in pale and sticky spit that he sucked swiftly back again.

  At this moment I could not look at him any longer and I turned instead to stare through the back window of the office. Snow was falling now in softer, larger flakes, covering already the steel-blue roofs of tanneries and factories, lining the frostdark corrugations of backyard hen-houses and coal-sheds. I saw it already beginning to transform, with wonderful delicacy, the harsh flat of the town broken only, in the middle distance, by the iron-stone church spire, and farther away, in the south, by the great chestnuts of the Aspen park.

  ‘Look at me, Clutterhead,’ he said. ‘Could you? For one moment. Does it strain you?’

  I turned and looked at him, nursing my sprained wrist, not speaking.

  ‘Tell me if the strain is too great for you.’

  Rage and tears of tea-brown moisture had left the eyes brighter and narrower. They pierced me as the thick little fingers repulsively waved again like tied sausages.

  ‘It must be so interesting out of the window,’ he said.

  I did not speak.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ he said. ‘Could you? Tell me what interests you.’

  There was nothing to see but roofs
and the corrugated tops of hen-houses and coal-sheds and snow falling across them, obliquely, thickening, borne on a dark wind from a dark sky.

  ‘I was watching the snow,’ I said. ‘It started ten minutes ago.’

  ‘And from the front window?’

  There was nothing to see from the front window except the Succoth chapel with its wind-torn list of preachers and Dancy’s furniture shop and Jimmy Thompson’s hairdressing saloon.

  ‘You must have stood there an hour,’ he said. ‘Tell me about that.’

  There was nothing to tell.

  ‘It’s Thursday afternoon,’ I said. All through the street the blue and green and yellow blinds of the shops were down. ‘It’s always the same on Thursday afternoons.’

  ‘Always the same,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing happening. Always the same.’ He picked with a black-nailed finger at one of his teeth, staring at whatever he had found embedded there.

  ‘Nobody in trouble?’ he said. ‘No suicides?’

  I did not answer. Suicide was an unkind, embittering, excruciating point between us. A week before a girl had leapt from the fifth floor window of a factory; she had quarrelled first with her foreman lover and then had jumped from the crane doors on to frozen concrete below. It ought to have been my business to have discovered these things about her long before I did. Negligently, instead, that same afternoon I had sprained my wrist while skating.

  Remembering it and staring at the snow again I remembered too, suddenly and uneasily, the big Aspen Daimler coming up the street, skidding in the first fluster of snow. Bretherton seemed sharply aware of my new uneasiness. He flicked a finger in the air. ‘Nothing?’ he said, and looked sideways with a drab yellow smile at the falling snow and then at my face again.