Love for Lydia Read online

  Anxiously Miss Juliana said, ‘Oh! my dear child,’ and I got up to open the door. The necessity of opening doors for ladies on all possible occasions had been brought acidly home to me on an earlier Sunday by Miss Bertie. ‘Young men do not seem to be very well trained nowadays,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s part of the general decay.’

  So now I had the trained promptitude of a dog in opening doors. I rushed forward to hold the door for Lydia and she seemed to sway slightly, I thought, as she went through it into the hall outside. I said something about her being able to manage by herself and then she swayed out into the hall and I went after her.

  ‘I haven’t been sick,’ she said.

  She stood there staring at me with a curious, rigid sort of smile.

  ‘I’m not going to church,’ she said. ‘Come back to the house.’

  She framed the words with her big wide lips soundlessly, in a sort of speaking smile, and before I could answer she went upstairs.

  At a quarter to six I said goodbye to the Aspen sisters and Rollo and walked across the park. A footpath led out to the south-east side of it through a plantation of old birch-trees and to a keeper’s house at the far end – twenty years later a tank brigade put a camp of cylindrical corrugated huts on it and later squatters moved in and hung from the few remaining birch trees their lines of frowsy washing – and I waited there until the church bells stopped and six o’clock struck and then I walked back to the house.

  She must have watched me all the way across the park and all the way back again. Coming up the steps of the south terrace I saw her wave from an upstairs window, and then she opened it and said:

  ‘There’s no one here, darling. Come up.’

  I had never been upstairs in the house before. A wide mahogany staircase wound up in a central coil of ponderous chocolate-red banisters to an amber skylight at the top. She was there leaning over the upper rail, waiting for me.

  When I ran up to her she ran a little way down the top flight of stairs to meet me. She could not wait for me. We fell against the banister rail in a frenzy of kissing. I could feel all the heat of the afternoon compressing and narrowing and refining itself until it was a needle that jabbed down through the two of us and held us together. ‘Oh, darling?’ she kept saying to me. ‘Darling, darling.’

  She held me there in this refined needle-like trap for some moments longer. We came out of it in an ecstatic daze. I remember thinking that the bedroom where we went was not even her own bedroom, but only some spare servant’s room in which a brass-railed monster of a bed glittered among piles of varnished travelling boxes. On the bed she begged me several times, in a dry tearless sort of a crying: ‘Kiss me harder,’ and I heard her fingers running with regular frantic scratchings across the old-fashioned cotton counterpane until she drew it up to her thighs and then let it go again with a sigh. I felt the impact of all this through the confusing softening complex of my web of feelings about her. I felt her voice struggling to free itself with the frenzied panic of an insect torturously trapped. Her fingers scratched at the counterpane over and over again and her voice beat at me the same dry harshness that had shed all tenderness, begging me to hurt her, until I could only break into half-sobbing against her body and tell her I could hurt her no longer.

  Some moments later her tenderness came back. Her hand, dry and slow, began smoothing my forehead in a continuous movement of great softness, calming me down. My web of feeling about her seemed to re-spin itself. Her harshness receded completely and I could not think it had ever been there, crying for me to hurt her.

  Later she shut her eyes. The lids, a deep olive colour, had a sort of smouldering look, and then as I lay there watching them they opened, sharp and black, and she said:

  ‘There’s someone walking about on the terrace outside.’

  She got off the bed, just as she was, and went to the window. She stood there in the light of the old-fashioned yellow window-blind like an amber silhouette, the fringes of her hair fiery as she pulled back the blind and looked down.

  ‘It’s Rollo.’

  ‘He went to church,’ I said. I could feel my heart thundering with fear.

  ‘He never goes to church.’ She went over to the door and locked it. She had forgotten even that as we came in. ‘Didn’t you know?’ And then: ‘You’re just as innocent as I used to be sometimes.’

  I did not think I was awfully innocent and it hurt me, with one of those minute touches of anger I always felt when she spoke to me so peremptorily, to hear her say so.

  ‘You poor dear,’ she said. ‘He never goes.’

  She came back to lie on the bed. She curled her body and lay sideways, looking at me. All her tenderness had come back into the deep dark eyes.

  ‘I could lie here all day with you,’ she began saying. ‘All day and all night – all tonight and all tomorrow –’

  ‘Yes, but for God’s sake what about Rollo?’ I said. I was astonished to see she was not afraid.

  ‘He’s spying on us. He’s always spying on us. He knows about the summer-house. I thought he did, that day.’

  I could not speak.

  ‘I loathe him,’ she said.

  She began to slide her body nearer to me; she started to spread out her hands to touch me.

  ‘I ought to go,’ I said. ‘How the hell am I going to get out with Rollo there?’

  She came nearer, smiling: ‘I don’t think I’m going to let you go,’ she said.

  I said something about being sensible and she said:

  ‘Hold me. Who wants to be sensible?’

  As I held her she brushed her mouth across my face.

  ‘There’s no need to worry,’ she said. ‘Rollo has a woman down in Corporation Street.’

  ‘What?’ I said. Corporation Street ran squalidly down by the brook, its rows of smoky brick and slate backing on to old culverts. ‘There? How did you know?’

  ‘Don’t sound so outraged,’ she said. ‘I found out.’

  ‘It’s just a tale,’ I said.

  ‘She’s one of the keeper’s daughters. She married and then he died. Rollo keeps her. He’s been doing it for years –’

  ‘I suppose some people would believe that.’

  ‘Her name’s Flo Welch,’ she said. ‘You see you’ve lived in the town all your life and you know nothing about it. He calls her Boodles. Everybody knows.’

  I was reminded painfully of all my incompetence with Bretherton. It was true, in a way, that I had lived there all my life and that, after all, I knew nothing about it. It was perfectly true that there was a sort of innocence about me. Perhaps my awareness of this put a touch of anxiety into my face that I did not really feel, because the next moment she said:

  ‘Don’t look worried. Nobody’s afraid of Rollo.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was afraid of Rollo.’ I felt a stab of annoyance and I tried to get off the bed. She smiled and held me back.

  ‘Anyway next year I’m twenty-one. I shall do what I like then.’

  She gave an odd sideways reflective glance into the air.

  ‘That’ll make him sit up,’ she said. ‘Until then he’s one of my guardians – that’s what makes him spy round on us all the time.’ She flattened her body suddenly, flexing her legs downwards with a long quiet sigh. ‘Poor dear, he hasn’t any money of his own. That’s what makes it so funny.’

  I began to see, now, that her mind was growing too.

  ‘He put all his money into some wretched rubber shares or something,’ she said, ‘and all he can show for it is a drawer full of papers. He knows he has to behave himself with me.’

  I still had no particular wish to meet Rollo on the stairs and I said so.

  ‘You really are frightened, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re as nervous as a kitten because we’re up here.’ Her power to hurt me with sentences like that was so sharp that the words would cut into me with jabs of physical pain. ‘Don’t worry – I’ll go down and look.’

  She stirred again and then
lay still.

  ‘I don’t want to go – it’s so nice up here. We had such a lovely time, didn’t we? You wouldn’t have thought of it, would you?’

  I did not answer. She laughed, asked me to hold her. I held her and she said:

  ‘It takes me to think of things like that. I thought of the summer-house, too – do you remember?’

  I remembered how she had thought of the summer-house. She bent over me, kissing me several times on my face, her body ripely warm and taut where it touched me. ‘You’re like someone half-asleep,’ she said. ‘Wake up, you old dreamer. Do I have to do all the love-making? Hold me a little while longer before I run down and see where Rollo is –’

  She kissed me again several times, mocking me about Rollo. Nervously I thought of the Aspen sisters coming out of church, a short sermon, a parlourmaid running home to lay supper; and at last, after about ten minutes, hot and driven by fear, I went downstairs. Before I went she begged me several times, in a voice growing slightly hoarse again with excitement, not to be the old dreamer – ‘Love me, darling, make the most of it while we can –’ while outside, beyond the yellow blinds, the hot evening flamed in pure white-golden light, in a singing summer silence, without a breath of wind. I said several times how late I thought it was and how I ought to go but she did not mock me again. ‘I’ll save it all for tomorrow,’ she said and her mouth began searching my face in probing eager stabs of excitement, ‘only sometimes I can’t wait for you – I can’t wait – I feel I’ll go mad with waiting –’

  In the moment before I went out of the room she lay there looking at me with restless tender eyes that were the only moving things in the golden body laid centrally taut on the monster glittering bed.

  ‘You know what to say to Rollo if you see him?’ she said.

  I had no idea at all what to say to Rollo; I felt I could do no better than turn and run.

  ‘Ask him how the sermon was,’ she said. Her face broke for the last time into an abrupt transfiguring smile. It made her suddenly into a very young and girlish person of infinitely simple and tender feeling, all light and sublimation, all lovable, completely happy.

  ‘Say you love me,’ she said.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Near and far and always and everywhere and everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got to say it,’ she said. ‘If you don’t I’ll hate you.’

  I said it. It seems unreal and embarrassing and stupid now, but there were tears in my eyes as I repeated it all. There was a breaking of the unbreakable tension of young agonies across my chest as I spoke the words she made me repeat to her, and I trembled with a joy that now seems unreal too as she turned her body for the last time, holding the pillow against her big young breasts, saying:

  ‘That’s how I want to be loved – near and far and always and everywhere –’

  It was striking seven by one of the French mantel clocks in the big sitting-room as I went downstairs. I went through the small drawing-room and on to the terrace outside. It was in my mind to say to Rollo that I had forgotten a book and had come back for it, but Rollo was not there.

  Five minutes later I met him coming out of the spinney path across the park – exactly as if he had been waiting for me.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ I said.

  We stood staring at each other. I noticed, I think really for the first time, how very small his eyes were. They stared out brown and retracted and petrified as the brain behind them tried to work out some kind of answer to what I said. His two-inch choker collar lifted up in a startled way the face that was grossly scribbled with many small cabbage veins of purple-rose, the lips like a bloated central vein.

  ‘How was the sermon?’ I said.

  He made no pretence of answering. The small eyes were cast downwards.

  A moment later I saw that he was looking at my feet.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that you have a shoe lace undone?’

  It was perhaps not a coincidence that Miss Bertie spoke to me on the following Sunday. ‘You are the great one with flowers, Mr Richardson,’ she said. ‘I want you to give me your opinion on the winter irises. It’s my belief they’re dead.’

  We walked, after tea, into the great square of box-hedged garden that ran southward from the house. It extended from walls draped with trees of Maréchal Niel down to long stone pergolas of dripping rambler rose, hot crimson above urns of pale blue agapanthus lilies on paths of sun-baked stone. The gardens were very large. In those easy, undistressful days opulence and amplitude and calm loveliness spread with lushness everywhere about long lawns broken by cedar-shade pools of intense blackness; it was part of the air you breathed in wide rose-gardens, in hot walled compounds filled with peach and nectarine and vine, along terraces illuminated with spires of ivory yucca bells.

  That afternoon the leaves of the stylosa irises lay like withered whips under a long south wall.

  ‘I shall be most intensely grieved if they’re dead,’ she said. ‘They’re so beautiful – you know them, don’t you?’

  ‘Like orchids,’ I said.

  ‘Could they be dead? Do you think so? – what do you feel?’

  I told her how I thought they were not dead and how beautifully, because of the long summer baking, I thought they would flower again in the early year.

  ‘I am intensely relieved to hear you say so,’ she said. ‘And now there’s another thing’ – she began to walk away from the house, across the hot, springy lawn, beyond blossoming yucca spires – ‘there’s a tree over here of which nobody seems to know the name –’

  We walked in hot sunlight. One of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, for her acceptance of me was because, as she said, ‘You like flowers – you have a feeling for these things.’ I could smell all the drowsy opulence of July, as we walked there, in a deep cloud of lily scent floating across the lawns. She caught it at the same time and said:

  ‘The summer has been very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It’s so often the way – after the long hard winter the lovely long summer.’

  ‘I’ve never enjoyed a summer so much,’ I said.

  In this rather formal fashion, through a sort of gently-stepped conversation on weather and flowers and the general beauty of things, we reached the far side of the lawn. Suddenly she turned to me and said:

  ‘You’ve seen a lot of Lydia this summer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I think perhaps you’re fond of her, aren’t you? Very fond of her – would that be right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure you ought to get too fond of her.’ I felt miserably sick and embarrassed; I knew suddenly that the talk of flowers and weather and summer beauty was all a blind. I remembered Rollo and my shoe laces and the hot evening in the bedroom. ‘There are ways of being too fond, and ways of being not too fond.’

  I said nothing; she went on:

  ‘She’s rather excitable. You know that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite often she doesn’t stop to think. And then quite often she has the sort of thoughts that run away with her.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘Of course she’ll be twenty-one next year.’

  I could not understand, for a moment, what that had to do with it. We had reached borders where, in full hot sun, seed pods of Peruvian lilies were cracking off like miniature artillery, shooting golden seed. Her dumpy body, bouncing past regiments of phlox and petunia and summer daisy and delphinium, all flabby with heat, distended itself and puffed before she spoke again.

  ‘She comes into – well, her legacy.’

  I did not answer. Heat stung the crown of my head and there was no sign of the tree whose name, as she said, no one knew.

  ‘We have to think of that,’ she said. ‘Of course she will have good advice and all that sort of thing. That is taken
care of. But it will be a time of difficulty for her and added responsibility and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You probably think I am being a fussy old wind-bag and so on and so forth – do you?’

  I said I did not think so.

  ‘You have been very sweet to her,’ she said. ‘We liked you from the first. You have been just the person for her.’ Uneasiness took her bouncing on, always a yard or two in front of me – ‘You see until we met you we were in a way handicapped. We didn’t know young people. We’ve rather got out of the run of things. We didn’t want her to live a life of absolute stuffiness with us and we didn’t want her to know nobody but people like the Orme-Smyths’ – the Orme-Smyths lived five miles away with crested and shabby hauteur in a square mansion lost in derelict parkland, too poor for the rich and too gilded for the poor – ‘who are such fatuous snobs, taken all in all. Don’t you think so?’

  I said I did not know the Orme-Smyths.

  ‘Well, thank Heaven,’ she said. ‘Young Beauchamp would have been certified long ago if his father had a brain in his head. Florence I knew, forty years ago – her brain never developed after she was fourteen.’

  We stood looking across from where yew hedges had been clipped into curved saddle-backs to reveal, beyond, blistered slopes of parkland. There was no sign of the tree that had been her excuse for coming there and she said:

  ‘It isn’t easy to have a young girl thrust on you like that – we wanted to save her from having one of that sort of awfully circumscribed existences’ – she hesitated – ‘of course it would have been different if her mother hadn’t died –’

  In a moment of intense stupidity, before I could stop myself, I said:

  ‘I thought her mother was still alive?’

  ‘Oh! no, no.’ She turned startled eyes on me, the pupils blobbing and frightened. ‘Oh! no, no, no. That’s quite a mistaken idea. No, no. No.’ And then still again: ‘Oh! no, no, no.’

  I said something, hurriedly and awkwardly, about being sorry I had had a wrong impression about a painful thing like that, and she snapped: