Love for Lydia [antikvár]

Part One 1 After the death of their elder brother the two Aspen sisters came bacic to Evensford at the end of February, driving in the enormous brown coachwork Daimler with the gilt monograms on the doors, through a sudden fall of snow. Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice from the north-east, beating in at that end of the town where for a few hundred yards the High Street runs straight, past what is now Johnson's car-wrecking yard, under the railway arches, and then between the high causeways that make it like a dry canal. It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from the valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain. Frost had begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. Al) the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods. There was no snow with it until the afternoon the Aspen sisters came back; and then it began to fall lightly, in sudden flusters, no more than vapour, and then gritty and larger, like grains of rice. It began falling almost exactly at the moment the heavy brown Daimler drove past the old Succoth chapel, with its frozen steps like a waterfall of chipped glass, opposite the