Men On White Horses

by Pamela Haines

  God’s doing. An act of God. Late afternoon and walking up to Auntie’s to make sure they knew Fanny came tomorrow. She went a long way round, twisting and turning through the alleys. As she came out near the house she saw some milk had been spilt. It ran blue-white. She stepped aside to avoid it, then looking up again saw the house door open. Ben came out. He was carrying a large jug. They stood awkwardly, looking at each other for a moment. ‘Jack’s off somewhere,’ he said. ‘I’m away to fill this for her –’

  ‘Can I go with you?’

  He’d begun walking already. ‘I’ll not stop you –’ They didn’t speak all the way to the public tap. She watched his face all the time. Halfway back he said, ‘It’s not so fancy, what they’ve put you in today.’

  ‘I don’t have to wear my best frock every moment. And anyway I dress myself –’

  ‘Do you then?’ They were at the door already. It was like before, only water now, not ale. He held the jug carefully.

  ‘Be my friend again,’ she said, agitated, desperate. His face altered. He had put the jug down, was pushing the door in. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘I was never owt else,’ he said.

  ‘Of course Mother favours one butcher,’ Mabel said, ‘and we another. We have to hide from her that the mutton is bought from Mr Crossley or she would leave her food quite untouched (“untouched,” said Victoria). And she will use the same plumber that Our Father always used, not realizing that it is his son who has the business now. And he is no good…’

  ‘Whoever are they?’ asked Fanny, walking away from them along the beach; Aunt Adelina at her easel continued to give them half her attention. ‘I’m not spending my holiday listening to their troubles –’

  It was the old Fanny. Edwina had feared that piety might have taken over completely. She was to be there for only about ten days. They shared an attic bedroom, talking far into the night every night: Edwina in a small bed under the eaves.

  ‘Your uncle,’ Fanny said, picking her way carefully amongst the stones and the weed. ‘He’s – wonderful. when I first saw him there at the station. It’s such a Christ-like face. I wonder, perhaps, if he’s suffered terribly? He is – I’d never have guessed how he was from the photographs.’

  ‘He’s not at all like John McCormack,’ Edwina said.

  ‘Oh, that old potato. Your aunt though – I don’t like her.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Edwina. The next ten minutes were spent most enjoyably, listing her horrid traits.

  ‘Do you think they’re happily married?’

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ Edwina said, surprised. ‘I think so.’ Fanny was pensive. Edwina said: ‘Once when my mother was very angry about something she said to him, “manage blanc, Frederick?” And he said, “What if it is – we are happy.” ’

  ‘White marriage,’ Fanny said. ‘Everyone gets married in white – the woman, that is. I think that’s a silly remark.’

  A gull flew into the sun. Edwina said: ‘Ben’s promised to put us two in a boat, if you want. One day when he’s free and the tide’s up.’ She paused. ‘when he has his own boat he’s going to name it after me.’

  ‘My family,’ Fanny said. ‘Heavens, they are boring.’

  In the evenings they made music. Uncle Frederick sang: Loewe, Schumann, Schubert. Aunt Adelina accompanied him always. From the horsehair sofa across the room Fanny, chin in hands, hung on his every syllable. Last of all Edwina played herself, often for an hour or more, while Fanny yawned on the sofa. Or so she told Edwina. ‘I could have been upstairs praying. Your aunt at least has her embroidery.’

  Aunt Adelina had her watercolours too, for the daytime. Her first finished paintings filled Edwina with horror. The convent and the Roman fort, although larger than life, were at least recognizable. But there on the sea was a galleon in full sail, while from the north peak rose turrets, battlements – a fairytale castle. when Edwina protested, she said in astonishment, ‘But why, Edwina, it is the custom. Many artists make so. Now it is more pretty, more charming – no?’

  No. Fanny, however, thought they weren’t bad. ‘At least they’re interesting,’ she said. But the donkey pulling Matussi’s ice-cream cart had an opinion nearer to Edwina’s – for as Aunt Adelina was stroking him that very afternoon, standing just a little too close, he kicked her.

  The damage wasn’t serious, mainly her ankle and her nervous system, but it was enough to make her an invalid for at least a week. Lying on the horsehair sofa, cushions under her leg, she talked to Edwina about Rome: ‘… You see my cousins certainly. But in campagna of course – when you are coming it is not season in Rome… Taddeo is the baby, you will find him very charming. And Ersilia, she is to be married this December. Maddelena, you don’t see also, she is married woman in Siena. Stefano is oldest of all. One day he is Marchese. Eugenio we speak of with sadness. All is not well with him. He is child still, Edwina… Nine or ten in the mind, you understand?’

  Each morning also Edwina read to her for half an hour. But most of the time Uncle Frederick sat with her. Fanny had gone back now. All three of them feared that Mabel and Victoria would hear the news and pay a call of condolence.

  Long hot July days and Edwina was free. Freer than she had ever known. Fanny’s aunt, black apron over red and blue striped skirt, sat on the house steps knitting in the sun. Edwina would sit beside her and talk. Some afternoons she took Mercy down on the beach. Often she was round at Ben’s house. It was good, Uncle Frederick said, that she had these friends. He asked after the lovely little boy, Jack.

  They were used to her in the village, she thought. Some days she looked across the bay at the convent, hardly able to believe in it, so different a world did it seem.

  ‘I could walk it,’ she told Ben. ‘If I wanted.’

  ‘It’s nowt. when tide’s down –’

  She said: ‘The farthest we ever got on a school walk was Mill Beck. And we had to wear our gloves of course.’

  He looked at her wonderingly. She pulled a face and they both laughed. He’d finished for that day although it was only two or three: ‘Seals were after salmon. We’d nowt.’ She arranged then to come back with him for tea. ‘That’s what I told them, my aunt and uncle, I’d be doing anyway.’

  ‘Bye! Cheeky. How d’ye know we’ll have you?’ She made as if to strike him but he dodged her.

  They rested for a while on the cliff top, amongst the furze and the green bracken. She felt breathless, overheated. The sun had been high all day. White horses, their manes streaming, rode out over the blue-green sea. Nearer the shore they reared – frolicked.

  ‘What’s it like then, there? I can’t rightly imagine – ‘ He grinned: ‘Do they beat you?’

  ‘It’s just – We start off our day with a girl coming round the dorms and…’ She heard her voice running on. Then as she finished her story: ‘Of course a lot of what Fanny tells is make-believe. If you’ve been listening to her – ’ She turned towards him: ‘Of course I can’t imagine being you, either. Do you like it?’

  ‘I never thought on it –’ he was smiling. She persisted. ‘Do you like your life though?’

  ‘Well, I’ve – times I’ve thought – there’s some in family go to sea and some fish.’ His hands were drawn up round his knees. ‘I might try for summat with Turnbull Scott. Furness Withy. Them.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you be away ages – ’

  ‘Could be nigh on four years. And everyone’s hand rag at the start. If we were away up foreign I’d not be allowed home. If I got my ticket though –’

  ‘Ticket?’

  ‘Captain’s ticket. So you can sail a ship. There’s nowt here in Bay, not really. It’s a great fight. Wi’t’ sea.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be beastly seasick? I –’

  ‘Seasickness, that’s soon done with.’ He screwed his eyes up in the sun. ‘I can’t recall like – I were on’t soon as I could pull an oar.’ He turned: ‘What of you then?’

  She told him all about the piano and how she was going t
o be famous. ‘That’d be summat,’ he said.

  ‘Would you be proud?’

  ‘Aye, I would.’

  ‘If I couldn’t play, I’d die.’

  Then you’ll have to –’

  ‘What, die?’

  ‘Nay, daft. Play piano. I don’t sing bad – And Robert – At Bay Fair, he won contest. They’d one out on quay.’

  Silence fell. The sun beat down on her bare head, her hair ribbon hung limply in the heat. She supposed she should have worn her hat; Aunt Adelina would be appalled.

  He said suddenly: ‘I was thinking –’

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  That time when you spoke of – when we fought like. I didn’t do right.’ He buried his head casually on his knees. That man –’

  ‘It was the music teacher. This girl said to tell no one about it. I know he shouldn’t have done what he did but I didn’t know why he shouldn’t.’

  ‘It depends like who’s doing it – I mean if you’re wed or you’re courting – it’d be a different –’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry then. You know, for the way I were.’

  Below them the tide was right down. She watched the sea, wondering what she should say, feeling suddenly very grown up. A slight breeze blew saltily the thin grass where they sat.

  ‘You said just now – if you’re married or you’re courting – But what do people do then?’

  ‘Find somewhere quiet, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘I mean, what do they do?’ It was Arthur all over again. She blurted out: ‘I don’t think I understand because Fanny or someone said about babies coming out when girls had periods but the man could stop them coming out –’ her voice tailed away. She felt the colour flooding her face.

  ‘I don’t know much about what happens – about what they get each month. But t’other –’ he looked down at his hands – ‘did you want me to say? You’re not – it’s not a tease?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I do terribly.’

  He didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘That thing a boy’s got, he puts it – there’s a place for it she’s got. He leaves summat and that makes a bairn grow. If he’s not taken care –’

  ‘Is that all you have to do to get a baby?’

  ‘I reckon so.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Mebbe – if no one’d been that way before. I’ve not –’ He wasn’t looking at her. He said, his voice a little husky, ‘I’ve not been with a lass. I were a short while fancying – she’s gone now. She lived up Bank. But it were nowt. A kiss and a cuddle.’

  They were both silent. She looked down at her hands, free now of the dread eczema. His were clasped round his knees. He was gazing away right, to where the cliff path led through to Mill Beck. His hands were brown, short-fingered, square – just the thumbnails bitten, on the left hand a cut half healed. She was unable to take her eyes off them. The light breeze had gone again and the air was once more still, close so that an insect buzzing nearby seemed suspended in a cocoon of sound. She too felt suspended, timeless.

  She put her hand out suddenly and felt for his. It was dry and very warm and fitted hers perfectly.

  Locked together they sat without speaking, without looking at each other. Such long minutes. Afterwards she was to think they had been hours.

  She went with Uncle Frederick to see Franz. She played first, and then sat with Cristina while he saw Franz alone. Afterwards they all had tea together. Some of the talk was about the trouble in Europe – Franz said, ‘I am such a person always to fear the worst –’ but most of the conversation was light-hearted. Afterwards Uncle Frederick told her that Franz had been full of ideas as to whom she should study under. A Martin Kaiser in Berlin had been mentioned.

  The day after the Scarborough visit, a Sunday, Aunt Adelina was fit enough for her first walk out. They processed solemnly, Aunt Adelina grumbling about the state of the road. It was not permitted to make jokes about donkeys.

  At the Dock, standing with a group of others, she saw Ben, Jack, Robert. Becky and Sal were there too. Ben was wearing a new navy-blue guernsey and looked hot. He saw her and grinned, even before she’d led Uncle Frederick and Aunt Adelina over.

  ‘You are cousin to Frances? No?’

  ‘Aye.’ He’d coloured but he was smiling, at Aunt Adelina. She was staring at his guernsey. Edwina had watched his mother complete the knitting only last week. It had been done on very fine needles, the pattern intricate; Edwina had marvelled.

  ‘But Frederick –’ she turned – ‘such a design? She was staring at Ben’s chest: ‘They make me at home, in Florence. What do you call this?’

  ‘A gansey,’ Ben said. She repeated it after him. ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘They copy for me. Embroidery. I have then cushions so or to hang on the wall. But first I draw this. You will bring it to our rooms?’

  Edwina was embarrassed, full of shame. She looked at Uncle Frederick to see how he was taking it. But his gaze was fixed on Jack who, lanky and self-conscious, was moving restlessly from one leg to the other, head on one side, awkwardly graceful.

  ‘So, that is arranged?’ Aunt Adelina said. Ben was to bring it up that evening. Edwina was determined she would ask him to stay and hear her play.

  ‘A lovely boy,’ Uncle Frederick said, walking slowly back up, Aunt Adelina a few steps behind them. ‘Jack – is it? Fanny’s little cousin. I think I remarked the first day. The Italian boys – they’re lovely, but of course very different. Smoother, more polished. This is like a colt, and furry, downy, like a peach.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘It’s the northern air –’

  She said, ‘But what about Ben?’

  ‘Ben?’ He remembered: ‘Oh, Ben. But he’s a man,’ he said, puzzled. She was puzzled too.

  ‘Some are church,’ Ben said, ‘and some are chapel. That’s all about it.’

  It was the old confusion: the Norman church up the steps, Father and Philip and Aunt Josephine. The chapel in Glare’s house. Only this was different: Chapel with a big C. All part of what the nuns called ‘non-Catholic’. People minded one way and another. She’d asked Fanny once: ‘Don’t they mind in Bay that you’re a Catholic?’ and Fanny had said, ‘I’m never there on a Sunday. And anyway if Marmee and everyone was kind enough to bring me up, then I’ve to live their way, haven’t I?’

  Edwina had walked up to the church once by herself (hoping to catch a glimpse of the vicar: ‘He’s a one,’ Ben had said, ‘all t’lasses, they’ve to curtsy for him…’). Opposite she saw the closed doors of the parish hall where she was to play in the Visitors’ Concert next month. Where Ben would hear her.

  She was cross with him. ‘Why did you bring the guernsey just when we were sitting down to eat – so you didn’t get asked in?’

  But later when Aunt Adelina had copied the design Edwina had been the one to take it back to him. All the night before she had had it lying on her quilt. She’d put her hand inside it, where he had been, and kept it there until she slipped into sleep.

  He took her up to the old church, up on the Whitby Road. A great many of his family were buried there. He showed her the graveyard almost as some proud possession. ‘The daffodils in spring – champion. You ought –’ All around them gravestones, old and tilted, fallen, salt-etched and scoured, the writing darkened and scarcely to be deciphered: It must be wonderful, buried within sound of the sea.

  ‘I’d like that – to be buried here. Would you?’

  ‘It’d depend like – how it came about. If it’s close in, if I’m washed ashore –’

  ‘But you could die in bed –’

  ‘Me? I’ll not die that way.’ Then he grinned. ‘I’ll show you me Auntie Ada. She was that keen was Auntie to lie here. One day at our house, she’s on about daffies. “Eh, but they’re lovely,” she says, “I shan’t mind going there.” Then me dad tells her, “But there’s no place, Ada – You’ll have to get cremated and that’s all about it.” “Aye,” she says, “aye, that’s right,” and me dad goes on, “But you’ve to go all of fifty miles for that
, Ada.” “Well,” she says, “never mind then. It’ll be a nice ride…” ‘

  He pointed to a newish inscription: ‘She had her way though…’

  It was beautiful, all of it. And such peace. The hot sun beating down, but a gentle breeze off the sea ruffling the grass, the harebells fluttering. Years ago Aunt Josephine had read Wuthering Heights to Grandma Illingworth, dying in the big bed.

  ‘And when Sergeant Death in his cold arms shall

  embrace me…’

  Standing, blouse sleeves rolled up, collar turned back in the sunshine, she shivered.

  ‘Quite a little oversight really,’ said Mabel. ‘We came because I think they have forgotten us. Although we volunteered our services (“Services,” said Victoria). It is to be a Visitors’ Concert after all…’

  Uncle Frederick asked what exactly was their piece?

  The Nurse scene from Romeo and Juliet. By Shakespeare, you know. We have seriously thought of joining a local drama group in Hornsey – to raise the tone, you know – but while Mother takes so much of our time… I play Juliet and Victoria plays the Nurse (“Nurse”). It’s a piece that Our Father particularly enjoyed – we know it well and are completely word perfect.’

  Uncle Frederick said that he would see what he could do.

  The word ‘War’ – which like King’s Beck had run through the village, now hidden, now visible – came out into the open. On the shore the tide beat against it, reinforcing it.