Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

Perhaps I ought not to have been surprised that Bretherton came to see me two days later. In the summer evening he stood on the doorstep, notebook sticking from his pocket, small pink-lidded eyes blinking like a pig that wakes in a glare of sun.

‘Thought you might be able to do us a good turn – give us a line on things.’

I had neither a good turn to do nor a line to give, that day, on anything in the world.

‘You know – personal stuff. Do you think he did do it?’ They were still dredging, that day, for Alex’s body; the river had always been quick to take people but equally slow to give them up again. ‘Any reason? – you know?’

I did not know. Alex was dead and a great part of myself – that day I felt almost all – was dead with him. But Bretherton took my silence as tacit acquiescence to the idea that Alex had killed himself.

‘You know – strickly’ – As he said ‘strickly’ he took his pencil from his breast pocket. ‘Strickly between our two selves. In confidence – under the Old Pals’ Act.’

I had nothing to give under the Old Pals’ Act either. I stared past him and said:

‘It might just as well have been an Act of God. It probably was.’

‘You know, you’d have made a good reporter if you’d cut out the idealism,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been too idealistic. Now how did it happen? – strickly –?’

I had nothing to say.

‘You were there,’ he said, ‘you ought to be able to describe it, didn’t you? That was a wonderful effort of young Holland’s – we’re playing that up. Did you go in?’

‘I don’t swim. I’m too idealistic,’ I said.

‘No need to come the old mild and bitter if you are,’ Bretherton said.

‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. I began to shut him out, suppressing some further words about the Old Pals’ Act, a good turn and strickly between ourselves. ‘It’ll all be in the records, Mr Bretherton,’ I said, ‘all you want to know –’

‘Yes, that’s all right. But I wanted to get the human side –’

I shut him out at last. I had nothing to tell; I could not explain. I could not explain that Alex had been killed not so much by a fall from a bridge as by an accumulative process of little things, of which some were gay, some stupid, some accidental but all of small importance in themselves. Perhaps he had died on the icy evening when Lydia had first taken notice of Blackie; or on the occasions when she had led him on, or had appeared to lead him on, exactly as she had sometimes led on Tom and myself. Perhaps then, perhaps later. Perhaps on some other occasion. I didn’t know. He might even have died under the Old Pals’ Act, under the pressure of our own affection for each other, in our secret loyalties. We had been very good pals: that might have been it.

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