Love for Lydia Read Online Free Page B

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:
    â€˜We ought to get the port. We ought to have Lydia down,’ and Miss Bertie cut in, cross-wise:
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜On the old marsh,’ I said. ‘Anywhere on the flood water.’
    â€˜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:
    â€˜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 learnedthat 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:
    â€˜Was that the bell for dinner? Are you coming in?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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