Love for Lydia (3 page)

The only house of comparable size in all Evensford was the
Sanatorium. It stood high up, almost within sight of the Aspen house, behind a barricade of trees, on the south side of the town. It was always full, and there seems to be no doubt that it was more healthy there.

When the maid let me in at the high rounded front door and said to me, ‘If you'll wait a minute I'll tell Miss Aspen you're here. The Press, is it?' the fingers of my sprained hand were so cold and shaking that I held them inside the overcoat, trying to warm them with the other hand. I could feel a draught of east wind clear as a knife as it whipped under the door, and then with something of the same level steeliness a voice called in a piercing accent from a room at the end of the hall:

‘Mr Bretherton, is it? Is it Mr Bretherton there?'

‘It's Mr Richardson,' I said.

‘Mr who?'

‘Mr Richardson.'

‘Mr Richardson? What Mr Richardson is that?'

‘I'm Mr Bretherton's assistant,' I said.

‘What is it you wish to speak to me about?'

‘The late Mr Aspen,' I said, ‘if you would be so kind.'

She did not answer. A moment later the maid came out of the room, into the long cold hall, and beckoned me in. The voice pierced the air loudly again as I went over the threshold into a room draped everywhere, it seemed, with curtains of plum-red chenille.

‘What is the matter with Mr Bretherton?'

‘Nothing,' I said.

‘He doesn't like me,' she said. ‘He sent you instead.'

The two sisters were sitting by the fire, one on either side, Juliana still wearing the high mauve scarf pinned round her neck and Miss Bertie still sitting, as she had done in the Daimler, like a pale round dumpling. I began to say something about not disturbing them when I saw, or rather heard, Juliana eating soup from a basin. She took it in with deep broad sucks from a spoon. There were large pieces of bread in the soup and each piece of bread was a suck, short and determined and ferocious.

When she stopped sucking to speak to me, to turn on me a pair of remarkably blue assertive eyes, she said:

‘How do you get on with Bretherton? What are you doing there?'

‘I'm supposed to be a reporter.'

‘Supposed? Don't you like it?'

‘No,' I said.

She seemed, I thought, to like the candour of this.

In the moment before taking another suck at the bread she smiled, showing her teeth. They were very long, fang-like, unfortunate teeth. Her lips could not cover them. They were prominent and ugly and yet, whenever she smiled, swiftly, spontaneously, they made her attractive.

‘You needn't stand up. This is my sister. Does it snow?'

Miss Bertie nodded her head to me. It was not until afterwards that I knew she was the elder. Her skin, distended and gentle and rosy, had a curious bloom of preservation on it that misled me. She had a sort of dampness about her round soft face, a certain dewiness, that made her seem self-effacive, without power. She was not eating soup. She sat poised instead, rotund and gentle and as if watchfully expectant about something, on the edge of a low chair, her skirts up, so that I could see a pair of soft elephantine calves encased in thick fire-coloured stockings, with sometimes a glimpse of pale brown bloomers falling from above.

No, I said, it was not snowing any longer, and Miss Juliana took a passionate suck at her soup and said:

‘What have you done to your hand?'

I told her about the skating. The division of heat and cold in the room was so sharp that when I sat down I felt as if I were perching on a knife. I gave an involuntary excruciating shudder, my face hot from the fire, the back of me iced by the steady whipped draught that came in somewhere through the thick curtains behind.

‘You had better slip off your overcoat,' she said. ‘You'll feel the benefit when you go out again.' She sucked passionately and ferociously at bread and soup as I took off my overcoat
and laid it on the back of the chair. ‘You look awfully thin. You ought to have hound's-tongue for your hand.'

As she stood up to take more soup from the tureen keeping hot in the hearth I saw that she was very tall. She stood bony and large and monolithic, the mauve scarf round her long neck, her long teeth ugly and attractive and glinting. She belched once or twice with genteel reservation into the fire as she ladled her soup, saying between each belch and its suppression: ‘We both of us caught our deaths yesterday.' Her angular body rumbled again as she sat down. ‘We are going to have a glass of port when Lydia comes down,' she said. ‘It will probably do you good to have one too.'

It struck me several times that she had not the faintest idea what I had come there for; and I hoped she would not ask me. I had some sort of story to make up about Elliot, the dead brother, and in the morning Bretherton would either rage, in jaundiced ironies, because the facts were wrong, or forget it altogether. I need not have worried about these things. Passionately sucking, blowing and belching, monolithic and almost masculine, Miss Juliana failed to let any word of Elliot come between us as we sat there.

‘If you are not going to work with Bretherton,' she said, ‘what are you going to do?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Does he drink as much as ever?'

‘About as much.'

‘You're frightfully thin,' she said again. ‘You ought to live in the country. You need country air. You'll be better when you're twenty-eight – that's the fourth cycle of seven and if one can get over it it's all right. All men go through that. How old are you now?'

‘Nineteen,' I said.

‘Just Lydia's age,' she said.

‘Oh! No,' Miss Bertie said. She spoke for the first time, and I caught in her voice an irresistible precision, calm and firm and so unlike the rosy gentleness of her dumpling face. ‘Lydia's nineteen and eight months. She'll be twenty-one next year.'

‘Ah yes,' Juliana said; and for a single moment, for the first
and only time, her changing enthusiasms were stopped and subdued.

At once there was an awkward silence, the smallest touch of antagonism in the air. I became aware, after a moment or two, of the scent of hyacinths. Until then I had not noticed deep Chinese bowls of them, pale mauve and pink, in full flower, in the far corner of the room. Now I saw them and said:

‘The hyacinths are very beautiful –'

‘They are Bertie's. It's Bertie who's the one for flowers. Aren't you, Bertie?'

‘You like flowers?' Miss Bertie said. ‘Oh! I can see you do. How nice – it's not often men like flowers.'

‘I am very fond of them,' I said. I felt the conversation, through flowers, spring a little further out of formality. ‘It's one of the things in our family. We all like them. My father especially.'

‘Do I know your father?' she said.

I said I did not think so; I said he sang – it was the first thing I could think of in possible identification – in the Orpheus Choir.

‘Is that the choir that sang at the Coronation?' Miss Bertie said; but because the Coronation had been in 1912 and myself a baby at the time I said I did not remember. Miss Bertie declared at once, assertively:

‘I rather think it must have been. I feel quite sure. They sang on the terrace here. I thought they sang most beautifully. I remember it very well. It was quite lovely – there is something so beautiful about the sound of men's voices in the air.'

For a few moments she seemed to consider all this, and I wondered if she were satisfied.

‘You are Church?' she said.

‘Chapel.'

‘I see.'

She seemed to weigh it all up, the skating, the flowers, the singing, the chapel, my father and last of all myself. She seemed to be on the point of deciding whether I was a satisfactory person or a dubious person. She looked hard at me for some seconds and I looked steadily at her in return. A breath
of ice crept across the room from under the chenille door-curtains, which shuddered distinctly. The scent of hyacinths faded perceptibly. I could hear the whine of wind through tree boughs in the frozen darkness outside and then it was Miss Juliana who said:

‘We ought to get the port. We ought to have Lydia down,' and Miss Bertie cut in, cross-wise:

‘I find it rather a refreshing manifestation in a young man to like flowers. I find that something of a phenomenon these days,' and I felt she had gone a great way towards accepting me. She seemed to have decided, above all, that I was intensely respectable.

‘Pull the bell,' she said.

Two great enamelled bell-pulls, like the lids of enormous soup dishes, were let into the wall on either side of the fire that scorched us and yet left us icy, and when Juliana pulled one of them I heard the bell jangling down long cold passages through the house.

‘We must tell Lydia about your skating,' she said. ‘I don't think she skates. You ought to teach her. Where can one skate in Evensford?'

‘On the old marsh,' I said. ‘Anywhere on the flood water.'

‘Where is that?' she said. I caught in the words the mark of her isolation. She did not know that for forty miles the floods were frozen, as they had not been frozen for many years, in a mile wide lake. Her life behind the stone walls, in the island of trees, shut her away from such things. But she startled me at once by saying:

‘That's the trouble with us. We stew. They say Evensford is getting quite big. They even have Woolworths or something. Do they have Woolworths? I never go down there now.' The large assertive blue eyes seemed to make an appeal to me, above the long, ugly attractive teeth, for my feelings about this. ‘That's what I don't want to happen to Lydia. To be cut off. What do you feel? Would you want a young girl to grow up like that? We don't want her to stew. We want her to have friends.'

I did not know what to say to all this; I had not yet learned
that her questions, almost all of them, were simply rhetorical bullets fired off in mid-air out of a fine-drawn nervousness. It was some time before I noticed the fluttering weakness of her colourless hands.

But now I was saved from answering by a voice at the door, a man's voice, saying:

‘Was that the bell for dinner? Are you coming in?'

‘No, I don't think so. Unless Bertie is. Are we, Bertie? Mr Richardson, this is my brother,' she said to me, ‘Captain Rollo Aspen.'

The Captain was a thinnish, hooked man of six feet with a pronounced weakness of chest and loose inbred lips that seemed to dribble. From the tip of his hollow stooping body his hair, long and black, was constantly drooping down.

‘Foul day,' he said, ‘don't you think so? Plum awful.'

He was dressed for dinner in a velvet smoking jacket with large corded frogs across the chest that seemed only to accentuate his narrowness. He said several times that the weather, the snow, or something or other, was plum awful, and I noticed that neither Miss Juliana nor Miss Bertie bothered to reply.

He stood there for a few moments longer, weakly fingering the lapels of his jacket, the thickish, too red lips wavering in a search for something else to say. He gave a clipped laugh or two, half to himself, and then said at last: ‘Mackness says there's a lime down in the avenue,' and Miss Bertie stirred uneasily by the fire.

When I looked to the door again, some moments later, he was no longer there. Miss Juliana had finished her soup and now a maid, a woman in her scrawny fifties in all the appropriate get-up of fanning bows and cap and apron, came in to take tureen and plate away.

‘We'll have the port now,' Miss Juliana said. ‘Four glasses. I think Lydia will have a glass,' and presently I was sitting with a glass of port wine in my hands. It too was dead cold and while I waited for some signal to drink it Miss Juliana pronounced:

‘I think things are changing for girls. I mean to say there's no longer –'

At that moment she broke off with restless and brittle suddenness to look behind me, at the door. Her large teeth woke and leapt into the disarming smile that ought to have been so ugly but that was now more than ever affectionate and attractive and beautiful.

I turned too and for the swiftest moment I thought the Captain had come back. I felt I was the victim of a mesmeric sort of trick. The tall figure of the girl I saw there, as tall as Miss Juliana but not quite so tall as the Captain, had the same full lips and drooping hair. The angularity of her body was startling in the long black dinner dress that hung from her shoulders with the straight flatness of something suspended from a coat-hanger of curved white bone.

‘This is Lydia,' Miss Juliana said.

As I stood up she came over to shake hands with me. Her own awful shyness, clear in the startled black eyes and the slightly retracted mouth, had the effect of doubling my own. I think I was more sorry for her than anything, draped in the long, low-waisted dress that was too old for her, and I could not say a word. The dress might have belonged to Juliana. It gave her the effect not only of being lost and unawakened but, as she lumbered to snatch my hand, of pitiful clumsiness.

The effect vanished when she sat down. At first she did not smile; but her body, in its sitting position, seemed to soften and fold over. She took the glass of port and held it under her face. I saw her looking through it at the fire. For some minutes I heard Miss Juliana, really without listening to her properly, prattling on with masterful nervousness about ‘Mr Richardson says there is skating, Lydia dear. I've been telling him he ought to teach you. I think we have skates somewhere – I know I used to have skates –' and sometimes the girl, rounded to girlishness in her sitting position, the tips of her long white fingers and the receding pale bone of her cheek made rose-clouded by reflections of firelight through the wine-glass she was holding, would smile. Her smile was always of the same kind, and it always had the same effect on me; it was one of those smiles that are not directed at anyone; it was not even directed at something undisclosed, a thought or an emotion,
inside herself. It was not reflected at all. It was directed outwards: not to the two women or to me or the things that were being said in the too-large, half-freezing, half-scorching room, but to some unspecified moment of delicate and nebulous attraction, like a dream, something remotely projected, in the future. And the effect on me was exactly the effect made by the smile of the older woman: the sudden flash of plainness flowering impossibly, almost sensationally, and yet softly, into something beautiful.