Love for Lydia Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€˜If you are not going to work with Bretherton,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do?’
    â€˜I’m not sure.’
    â€˜Does he drink as much as ever?’
    â€˜About as much.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Nineteen,’ I said.
    â€˜Just Lydia’s age,’ she said.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Ah yes,’ Juliana said; and for a single moment, for the firstand 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:
    â€˜The hyacinths are very beautiful –’
    â€˜They are Bertie’s. It’s Bertie who’s the one for flowers. Aren’t you, Bertie?’
    â€˜You like flowers?’ Miss Bertie said. ‘Oh! I can see you do. How nice – it’s not often men like flowers.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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:
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You are Church?’ she said.
    â€˜Chapel.’
    â€˜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 breathof ice crept across the room from under the chenille door-curtains, which shuddered distinctly. The