Love for Lydia (11 page)

He started to repeat, after a moment or two, what I had said to him. His voice gave the effect, somehow, of being forced through a narrow tube.

‘Six people, nine o'clock, back at three,' he said. He hit the wrench, under the car, against the leaf of a spring, and I heard him draw stringy phlegm, nasally and then down through the mouth, before hacking it out in spit.

‘Well, you'll be unlucky, mister,' he said.

He might just as well have slung the wrench at me. I still hadn't seen his face but all the time, somehow, the impression of being hated grew on me. I didn't like the way he called me ‘mister' – perhaps it had something to do with that – and I didn't like the way he held conversation, as it were, at long range. It was that which made me stoop down, at last, and glare under the car, seeing his face, and his eyes especially, for the first time. It was a remarkably dark, swarthy, partially flattened face, with a heavy crop of oiled black hair. In a way it was a handsome face and the eyes, contrasting with the blackness of hair and eyebrows, were a most surprising brilliant blue.

‘What's up?' I said. ‘Car in dock?'

‘Well, it looks like it, mister, don't it?' he said.

I asked him if he hadn't another car, and he said, rolling half over on his belly, away from me:

‘No.'

‘Won't this be ready in time?'

‘No.'

‘What about coming down again this afternoon,' I said. ‘Any chance you'll have it done?'

‘No.'

Taxis were not very easy to get in Evensford in those days; taxis and places to eat – the young raw town seemed, for some reason, to regard them suspiciously.

‘Are you sure?' I said. ‘I don't mind coming down again.'

I saw his body muscles squirm, giving a faintly perceptible sort of leer.

‘How many more times've I gotta tell you the car won't be ready, mister?'

‘All right,' I said.

I stood up and he reached out a long black hand for another tool.

‘Sorry you can't oblige,' I said.

I walked past the old Schneider under its cart-shed of martin's nests, past the old wagonettes and station flies and hearses, and into the street. I was walking blind with anger when I suddenly came to myself and saw, driving into the garage front, old Johnson in his other car.

He stopped the car and spoke in his friendly craggy way through the window.

‘You wanna look where you're gooin', Muster Richardson,' he said. He always called me muster, in the old, now almost forgotten Evensford way. He had several bad teeth that showed up, tobacco-brown, when he grinned. ‘Is there anythink I can do for you?'

‘I wanted a car,' I said. ‘But your man says it's no go. It's for young Miss Aspen and myself and –'

‘Man?' he said. ‘That's Blackie.'

He stopped the engine and got out of the car. ‘You come along o' me,' he said, – men of his generation used to talk with a droll, rolling, soothing softness of accent that has almost gone now – ‘we'll see if we can git y' fixed up.' He walked a yard or two before me on thin horse-bowed legs and shouted:

‘Blackie!'

And Blackie came out from under the car.

‘How long you gooin' a-be on the spring?' Johnson said.

‘Job to say.'

‘There's a gentleman here wants a car for tonight,' he said, but Blackie looked at me and did not say a word.

‘Thought you'd git done be midday,' Johnson said.

Blackie wiped an oil-rag over his hands and then across his chest and then put it into his hip pocket. Now, when he stood up, I could see how thick and tall he was, the big packed muscles of his chest sewn tight and hard and curved like a blown football.

‘All right, if you say so,' he said.

‘I do say so.'

‘All right, you say so.'

There was something absolutely firm and quiet and final as a clenched fist about Old Johnson at that moment that I liked very much. He said, ‘Yes, and when I say so, I say so. Get that into your thick head,' and once again Blackie did not say a word. ‘You come on into the office, Muster Richardson,' old Johnson said, ‘and I'll book it down.'

In the dusty pine-panelled office, hung with advertisements for Michelin tyres and oil and pictures of ladies in veils travelling in open coupés, I watched him put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and wet his pencil with his tongue and then take down the times and places at which I wanted him to call. As he stood writing I had a sensation of uneasiness about something and said:

‘Will you be driving, Mr Johnson? or Blackie?'

‘I'll tek you meself,' he said. ‘Him? Nothing ain't fast enough for him. Motorbike hog.'

He closed his order book and took off his spectacles. ‘Git 'isself killed afore he's much older. Does a bit o' racing.' He sighed – I think he must have seen how, clear and inescapable, the forces of change were bearing down on the place and himself and the ways he cherished, but I thought he had wonderfully likeable and craggy stubbornness as he stood staring out of the window, saying at last: ‘All right, Muster Richardson, I'll pick you and Miss Aspen up at nine o'clock. Don't you worry – you enjoy yourselves and come back when you're ready.'

Out in the yard, by the Chrysler under which Blackie was at last wheeling and lifting a jack, Johnson paused in his slow way and said:

‘Is she Elliot's gal?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Bad job about her father,' he said. ‘How old would she be?'

‘She'll be twenty-one in the new year,' I said.

‘Will she? Lucky gal,' he said.

That night the six of us danced together for the first time, and I was bloated with pride and happiness, I think the quietest person among us, quiet in a folded, watchful sort of way, was not Lydia, as I had rather fancied she would be, but Tom's sister, Nancy. Her face was bland and soft and her arms were covered with glinting golden hairs that gave them the appearance of being covered with velvety down. She had clear, very English blue eyes of pronounced steadiness but whenever I looked at her I always felt the faintest uneasiness, as if the eyes were watching me too closely.

But that evening she did not watch me quite so much. She was always looking, with that puzzled curious reticence of hers, at Lydia. As the evening went on I remember it developed into a kind of shyness, almost a mask of inferiority. I remember too how Lydia was dressed, and when I look back now I rather think it was her dress that evening that made Nancy, in her simplified way, uneasy.

Lydia arrived, that night, rather as she had done for the skating. Her dress was a long affair of grey-pink, with a heavy lace attachment of oyster colour over the skirt. The bodice was very low but there was something shrunken about the whole affair that made me think it was one of Miss Juliana's, dolled up and revived. Her figure sprang from its tightness in full curves that were not possible in dresses where the cut was so straight, as it was then, and the waist so low. Her breasts seemed high and startling, in a way that was almost aggressive under the tight, old-fashioned cut of the neck. She had also brought a fan – it was of white and black lace and I remember she opened it once as we sat out a dance and how a woman gave a little giggling yap of astonishment at seeing such a thing – and one of those little corded booklets in which at one time, dances and partners used to be written down with a silver pencil on a cord.

After I had danced twice with her I danced with Mrs Sanderson – she was the lightest, most delicate person I have ever danced with, and she had a way of giving a tingling floating exquisiteness to everything she did – and then I danced with Nancy.

After Mrs Sanderson it was a little like dancing with a comfortable half-grown lamb.

‘Where have you been all summer?' she said.

I felt she knew where I had been all summer, and I did not answer.

‘You never came to see us once,' she said.

I felt Nancy was being a bore.

‘Anyway here we are again,' she said. I could feel that she had large, boned corsets under her pale duck-blue taffeta dress. They made her unsupple and slow and hard to lead. ‘And I might as well tell you I think she's very nice,' she said.

‘I never go with girls who are not nice,' I said.

‘You're always too clever for me.'

‘Nobody can be too clever for a woman,' I said; and I thought this was rather clever too.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I think you might have to be very clever for this one.'

Before I could speak again Alex Sanderson passed us, dancing with Lydia. As he passed he stretched out one hand and ruffled, very lightly, the top of my hair. Then he swung Lydia round and round in a pirouette, making her dress fly in a whirl, and said:

‘Cheer up, old boy. Don't look so damn serious. Some people are having a
wonderful
time!'

‘She's got you all running round like little boys,' Nancy said.

‘I'm glad you think so.'

‘The three of you,' she said. ‘You can't deny it either.'

I did not deny it. The room was now very crowded and warm and I could feel my right hand making a sticky fan of sweat where I held the hollow of Nancy's corsets.

‘Would you like an ice?' I said. ‘Alex says they're strawberry and very good.'

‘Now you're being very nice to me,' she said.

We had pink-coloured ices that tasted of borax or something just as indefinably unpleasant. They slid about, melting rapidly, on glass dishes that were too small for them.

‘Do you know it's been a year since we found the violets?' she said.

‘Violets? Oh! yes,' I said, and I remembered the violets.

On the edge of a spinney at the farm – ghostly and lovely butterfly orchis with lacy green-white wings grew there in July and once I had taken her to see them too – we had found one of those late freak patches of violets, in black-purple bud, that flower sometimes in favourable autumns, giving a second spring. I had pinned a small bunch of them on her dress. It was about the time I had gone into Bretherton's office, a month or two before the great frost began, and it seemed like a million years away.

‘They kept for weeks,' she said.

I felt it embarrassing to talk of them and I took another mouthful of flat ice-cream.

‘When are you coming up again?' she said. ‘Tom would love it.'

‘Some time,' I said.

‘Come on Sunday. It doesn't seem the same if you're not there,' she said. ‘We got sort of used to you coming up there and you know how it is.'

‘Yes,' I said. I felt that Nancy was exactly like a drink of milk that we used sometimes to take straight from one of the cooling-pans in the stone whitewashed dairy at Busketts, on a warm summer evening, after a walk across fields of eggs-and-bacon flower. She was fresh and clean and smooth, neither warm nor cool, neither flat nor exciting. She would turn, some day, into a buttery and solid woman with light golden hair, brown and shining every summer from work in harvest fields. She would have children with straw-coloured hair, like Tom, or else not marry at all and grow, more buttery and firm and plump every year, into an uncurdled, kindly and clovered middle-age.

‘Come up on Sunday,' she said again. ‘You can bring Lydia. We'd love to have her.'

‘Perhaps I might,' I said.

‘Oh! good,' she said. ‘We'll have curd-tarts. I know you like them.'

When we went back to dancing Tom was dancing with Lydia. As we passed them Nancy leaned back and said over her shoulder:

‘Tom. I say, listen. He's going to bring Lydia up to tea on Sunday.'

‘Oh! good,' Tom said, and his voice and manner, and the sweetness of his surprise were identical with hers, ‘we must have a bang at the wild duck one day. Crowds of them down at the brook.'

‘Will it be all right, Lydia?' I said.

‘I would love to,' she said. ‘I can escape from church,' and I saw her smile at Tom with that sudden expansion of the mouth that always revealed, in a curious and disarming way, her rather large shining teeth, and I saw him stare back at her, transfixed, almost blank, his pale blue eyes almost fierce with wonder, as he had done on the marshes when she first skated there.

‘He looks tired,' Nancy said. ‘Don't you think so?'

‘I hadn't noticed it.'

‘He's going to sit for an exam,' she said. ‘He's taking one of those correspondence courses in bookkeeping and that sort of thing.'

‘Tom? – bookkeeping? – he hates things like that.'

‘He wants to have a farm of his own,' she said.

As we drove home, after that first dance, at three in the morning, a large blown golden moon was setting across the valley through low cylindrical mists that charged the car in puffs of pale ochre. Old Johnson had tucked us up, like the coachman he really was, and as he always did afterwards, with many chequered horse rugs, and we sat snuggled and fuggled together, warm and intimate, arms about each other. The evening had been very happy.

‘I think we all should send a vote of thanks to the Miss Aspens,' Mrs Sanderson said. It was exactly the gracious and correct thing she would think of saying and which we should
probably have forgotten. ‘It was their idea and it's been wonderful –'

‘Hear, hear,' we all said.

‘Hear jolly well hear,' Tom said loudly.

‘Will you thank them, Lydia, please?' Mrs Sanderson said. I could see the flash of her earrings as she turned next to me in the misty ochreous light of head lamps, her face pale and distinguished. ‘Tell them what a lovely time we had.'

‘I will,' she said.

‘And I should like to say,' Tom said, and again it was rather loud, almost as if he were forcing himself, ‘that next time we take Lydia. It's on us. There's a Hunt Ball at Grafton on the third of next month and I vote we go. Agreed?'