South Riding (30 page)

In spite of her preoccupations she found time to visit Lydia Holly. One day she drove along the Maythorpe road, stopped at the Shacks, and found Lydia, in a torn overall, feeding hens with some dank-smelling mash. She called, and the girl came towards her, slouching and reluctant. Sarah spoke crisply, asked how she was getting on, praised the plump hens, mentioned Lydia’s school work, asked how her mother was, and observed the girl’s awkward diffident answers.

She felt snubbed by the lack of response, but would not force a confidence. She ended by asking Lydia to tea on Sunday, and determined to collect a group of girls to serve as an excuse for the party. She drove away, depressed and quite uncomforted; but as she turned her car she thought she saw in the doorway of the coach a woman’s drooping figure, heavily pregnant.

Is that it? She wondered. Is that what’s worrying Lydia? Still—Sarah could not see it as a tragedy.

She could not know that the moment she had driven away, Lydia rushed to the unoccupied railway coach used by her as a study. There, wrapped in old coats and sacking, she had found privacy throughout the winter. There she could read and write and copy out her home-work. Candles had spilled grease from the bottles in which she stuck them on to the table-flap of pot-ringed deal. Scraps of torn paper, dog-eared books and well-chewed pencils bore witness to her efforts. This was her own place.

But there was no longer joy in its seclusion. Its promise was betrayed, its treasure rifled. Her mother was going to die. Lydia must leave school. She must come home and look after her small brother and sisters and the new baby too. There was no choice. Her mother’s sisters were both busy harassed married women with families of their own. Her father, characteristically feckless, had no kin. She would have to do it.

She was not a religious child, and did not pray about it; she was not a self-deceiving child, and did not try to tell herself that it would be all right, that her mother would get better, and she would return to school; she was not an irresponsible child and did not dream of escaping from her obligations.

But she saw all too clearly what must happen. “These slum children know too much,” Miss Jameson said. Lydia knew too much. Her lively imagination ran ahead and lived through the days which very soon would face her.

Quarter to five, wake father. Put on the kettle, get his breakfast, the cocoa, the margarine, the bread. Tidy the living-room; go and wake the children; get their breakfast. (Why isn’t there no bacon? Lydie, can’t we have treacle?) See them off to school; look after Lennie and baby; tidy the bedroom, peel the potatoes, get the dinner ready, feed the hens, the pig—if they could keep one; give the children their dinner when they came home from school, noisy and ravenous. Lennie still needed his food shovelling in with a spoon; he was a slow eater; the baby would want a bottle. Wash up the dinner things; then do the shopping, pushing the pram along the dull road into Maythorpe; get the tea ready, the children are coming shouting across the fields; Daisy has fallen and cut her knee; Gertie is sick again. Bert back. Lydie, what’s for tea, old girl? Bacon cake? I’m sick of bacon cake. Can’t we have sausages? Washing the children.
The heavy shallow tubs, the tepid water. Where’s the flannel gone? Don’t let Lennie eat the soap now! The tap stood up. two feet from the ground on a twisted pipe twenty yards from the door. The slops were thrown out on to the ground behind the caravans and railway coaches. Rough weeds grew there; damel and dock and nettle soaked up the dingy water, drinking grossly. Broken pots splashed in it. Rimlets of mud seeped down from it. The rusting tubs were heavy. Lydia’s strong arms ached from lifting, carrying, coping with the clamorous, wriggling children.

And throughout this day of servitude there would be no mother to applaud or scold, no draggled lumpish woman whose sharp tongue cut across tedium, whose rare rough caress lit sudden radiance. Only her father’s maudlin misery or facile optimism would punctuate the days.

And all the time the High School would be there, the morning prayers in the hall, the girls in rows, white blouses and brown tunics, neat heads bowed and lifted together; there would be the hymns, the lesson, the word of command, the note struck on the piano, then the march out to a brave tune,
Pomp and Circumstance
, or
The Entry of the Gladiators.
There would be the classes, scripture, history. This term they were going to “do” Nehemiah, the book about the gallant young prophet, the King’s Cup Bearer, who roved by night among the ruins of Jerusalem. They were to “do” the Civil Wars. Miss Burton had told them to read Browning’s
Strafford
, “Night hath its first supreme forsaken star.” There would be botany, physics, glorious smells and explosions in the stink room. Teasing Siggles. Good old Siggles with her fading wisps of hair. There would be tennis. Cricket. Prize-giving. Essay prize, Lydia Holly. Maths prize, Lydia Holly. Form prize. High average for the year, Lydia Holly. Sports junior championship, Lydia Holly. Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Other girls, Other girls, others who cared nothing for all these things, could have them. Jill Jackson, who only thought of hockey, Gladys Hubbard, who was going to be a singer, Doris Peckover, who has as much imagination as a clothes-horse— these would gain the marks, win the prizes, take the scholarships, be clapped at prize-giving, go on to college.

It isn’t fair. None of them care like I do. None of them could do what I could do. I hate them.

I hate Sarah Burton. What did she want to come here for? “Are these your hens? Is this your little brother?” As if that was all I should ever be good for again—the hens, the little brother!

Why did they ever let me go to school? What’s never seen is never missed. “Your work is really interesting. You have imagination.” For what? For what? “It takes an intelligent person to be kind,” Red Sally told her. And Lydia had been kind. She had sat up for her mother when Gert was taken bad; she had got her dad his tea.

And that did for her. Kindness had done for her. Using her imagination had done for her.

“Oh God, oh God, how am I to
live
?” cried Lydia.

But she saw no respite, in rebellion. With slow unchildish deliberation she dried her swollen tear-stained face on her torn overall, and made her way to the railway coach across the littered turf.

It was the dead end of the afternoon—three o’clock and the Mitchells were both out. Mr. Mitchell on his bicycle, Mrs. Mitchell shopping with her baby.

Lennie, crouched in his pen, chewed a dirty rag-book. The older children had gone off birds-nesting.

Unwillingly Lydia opened the door and entered. Her mother had not finished the ironing. She had left the irons on the oil stove, the shirts and drawers rolled in the broken basket. She was not standing at the table. She was not in the bedroom.

Lydia, surprised but not perturbed, went across to the Mitchells. Mrs. Holly was not there. She was not speaking to a tradesman at his van on the road.

“Mother! Mother!” called Lydia.

No one answered.

“Mother! Mother!”

Then Lennie, in his pen, affected by the inevitable melancholy of the human voice calling unresponsive emptiness, began to whimper: “Mum! Mum! Mummie!” beating with his pebble on the bar of the pen.

“Mother! Mother!” called Lydia.

There was no one. She turned from the grey unwelcoming camp to the grey unwelcoming field.

“Mother! Mother!”

In a sudden panic she ran to the edge of the cliff.

“Mother! Mother!”

An ashen sea swung silently against the crumbling clay.

“Mother, where are you?”

Round the field ran Lydia, terrified of horrors beyond her imagination.

“Mum! Mum! Mum!” cried Lennie, shuffling round and round his pen.

Near the hedge, behind the caravan, Lydia found her. She lay in the tangled clump of docks and nettles. In falling she had cut her head against a broken jam-jar. The cut bled. She moaned a little, her distorted body shaken by intermittent paroxysms of pain.

“Mother!” cried Lydia.

She knelt beside her, not even feeling the nettles that stung her arms and legs. With a child’s panicking fear she shook her mother. “Mother!” But it was with an adult’s acceptance of inexorable anguish that she saw the woman’s eyes open slowly, fix themselves on her face, and reveal the effort towards consciousness.

Mrs. Holly fought for self-mastery and won.

“It’s all right. I only tumbled. It’s come. Get someone,” she gasped.

Strong as she might be, Lydia could not lift her mother. She left her and ran through the empty camp to the Maythorpe Road and stood there looking up and down it for help.

The dead chill windless afternoon received her cries and muffled them in distance. Sea birds flew squawking and wheeling above her head; they mocked her impotence, then swung with effortless grace towards the town.

Should she run up the road for help? Back to her mother? Or should she wait there, risking the chance of a stray motorcar?

“Oh, come! Come! Someone. Someone must come and help me!” she sobbed, beating her hands on the gate. “Oh, help me!”

And then she heard far away the sound of a motor approaching from the south.

It was Mr. Huggins, driving one of his own lorries, who nearly ran down her gesticulating body.

“Hi, now. What’s this? What’s this, my girl?”

“My mother. She’s fallen. You must come.”

There was no mistaking this genuine distress for mischief. Huggins followed Lydia across the field and saw enough. He was a family man.

“Pity you can’t drive a car. No. We can’t move her. You run in and put on kettles to boil, and get some clean sheets on the bed. Had your mother made any preparations, think you? I’ll send a woman. Yes, an’ I’ll get doctor.”

He was gone again, but Lydia felt no longer isolated. She flew between the coach and the moaning woman; she filled kettles, she sought sheets. She hardly noticed when a neighbour sent by Huggins sprang from her cycle, when cars arrived, the lorryman, the doctor. The camp, which a few seconds ago contained only her fear, her anguish and her mother, seemed now overful of hurrying people.

They kept her out of the coach, minding Lennie, getting tea for the children in Bella Vista; she became conscious of other things, of her father’s worried face, rather cold and injured because it wasn’t his fault that he was at work when Annie was taken bad; of the Mitchells’ chickens, scratching in disappointment at an empty enamel basin, fouling its side with scrabbled claw-marks; of the kindly Mitchells, trying to keep the younger children quiet, of Bert, rushing off on his cycle to the chemist.

They called her at last.

“You’d better come. She wants you.”

“Is there a baby?”

“Yes. A little boy.”

She did not ask of her mother, “Will she get better?”

She knew already. She had always known.

The interior of the coach was very hot. It smelled odd. Mrs. Holly’s grey drained face lay on the pillow case that Mrs. Mitchell had provided.

She turned with fretful effort.

“A boy.”

“I know. Don’t worry, Mum.”

“You’ll have to look after him.”

“Yes, yes—don’t you talk now.”

“You’ll have to let the parish bury me.”

There was no hope and no reprieve. Lydia and her mother waited for the death that delayed nearly another hour, held off by the woman’s stubborn spirit.

Before she died, Mrs. Holly spoke once again, now fully conscious and recognising the full measure of her defeat, aware of the wreckage her death must cause, accepting it as something beyond remedy.

She opened her heavy eyes and looked straight at Lydia, and said quite clearly: “I’m sorry, Lyd,” and died.

It was the first and only apology that she had ever made.

M
RS
. H
OLLY
’
S
death may have seemed to her friends and family a private matter, but it had public repercussions which she could not have foreseen. Whatever misfortunes, weaknesses, passions and infirmities may have caused it, it set in motion a sequence of events which were ultimately to change the history of the South Riding.

The first was an odd little encounter between Sarah Burton and Alderman Mrs. Beddows.

On the Sunday before the summer term opened, Mrs. Beddows was dozing after lunch on the drawing-room sofa, a bull’s-eye bulging in each cheek and a wild west story open face downwards on her stomach, when Sybil came in to say that Miss Burton was on the telephone.

“Ask her to tea,” mumbled Mrs. Beddows, sucking peppermint.

“Aunt Ursula’s coming.”

“She won’t bite her. Go on, dear. I want forty winks now, or I can’t face the family.”

Thus Sarah, who wanted a quiet interview, found herself at a Beddows family tea-party.

She joined in the stern procession to the dining-room. Tea was tea at Willow Lodge, a meal served at a solemn well-spread table, below photogravure pictures portraying those scenes of carnage so popular in Edwardian dining-rooms. Horses lashed about in agony, soldiers fell face downwards in the snow unable to answer roll call, cavalry charged across the trampled corn. It was a fashion which Sarah found unsuitable and barbarous, but the Beddows family ate with excellent appetite, quite undisturbed by hate and slaughter.