by Marie Joseph
Libby rippled the closely written pages and read on:
‘The day is placid in its going, to a lingering motion bound, like the river in its flowing; Can there be a softer sound?’
Then scribbled at the bottom of the page; ‘Wordsworth’s poems, each time I read them, seem to be so simple, so fresh, it is as though the dew were still on them . . .’
The book lay on the coverlet as Libby put both hands to her face to feel the tears slipping down her cheeks. Had he copied them out, the tall thin man, at a time when he felt unhappy? And had they helped him, as they were undoubtedly helping Libby now, to release the tensions of an emotion-filled hour with the comfort of tears?
CHAPTER TWO
THE LANE LEADING to the main road from Westerley was May green, fields glittering yellow with buttercups stretching away to one side, flanked on the other by the dark brown of ploughed earth. In the soft spill of sunshine the air was scented with hawthorns, and the horse-chestnut tree on the corner had patterned the grass verge with pink petals.
It was a morning for slow lingering, but both girls pedalled away furiously, the wheels of their bicycles turning in unison. Carrie’s face was pale beneath the upturned brim of her hat, and Libby was unusually silent.
‘Thank goodness Father got away before we came down to breakfast. I couldn’t have borne a scene before breakfast.’
Libby put up a hand to hold on to her hat, dislodged by a sudden gust of wind, and the bicycle veered dangerously close to her sister’s front wheel.
‘I’m not afraid of Father,’ she shouted. ‘I admit I might have been at times, but not any more.’
She pressed her lips tightly together at the memory of him creeping soft-footed up the stairs to the upper floor, her concentration slipping again.
‘Careful!’ Carrie wobbled towards the kerb. ‘See, there’s no tram there. We were right to get our bicycles out. The men must have come out on strike.’
‘They’ve got pickets down at the depot.’ Libby started to freewheel as the road sloped downwards. ‘They’re to get seventeen shillings and sixpence strike pay. How about us going into the recruiting station at the Public Hall and volunteering as conductors? It would be a bit of a lark, wouldn’t it?’
‘Whose side are you on?’ Carrie shouted the words back over her shoulder. ‘Last night you were talking Bolshie, now you’re on the other side. Come on, our Libby. Whose side are you on, really?’
‘Both, I suppose.’ Libby was loftily unperturbed. ‘I was talking to a man on the market place last night. He wasn’t a Bolshie, but he knew the miners couldn’t go on and on talking. After five years of trying they’ve had enough!’
For the next mile or so they pedalled on in silence. Carrie was busy with her own tremulous thoughts. Soon she would leave Libby to turn into the rhododendron-fringed drive of the Park School. Already pupils wearing the scarlet blazers and caps with black velvet trimmings were hurrying in twos and threes along the wide pavements. The majority of them were girls from the big houses on the outskirts of the town, their fathers the business men, lawyers, bankers and professional men who could afford the fees to have their children privately educated. Soon she would wheel her bicycle into the shed at the back, hurry through the back door of the red-brick building and up the wide oak-panelled staircase to the staff room, taking off her hat as she went, her heart beating in anticipation and hope that Mungo McDermot, the English master, would be their alone. Anticipating the smile on his lean face as he turned and saw her.
When it actually happened it was almost like the re-run of a film, except that this morning he broke their rigid rule to take her in his arms and kiss her mouth.
It was not a very long kiss, and, terrified of being caught, Carrie did not respond. Instead she pushed him away and went to stand at the other side of the room with the width of a table between them.
‘You mustn’t do that here! You promised!’ Her face was full of fretting anxiety. ‘I passed Mr Eccles on the stairs, and Miss Clayton has arrived. I saw her bicycle in the shed. I came on mine,’ she added desperately, trying to channel the conversation into some sort of normality. Mr Eccles, the headmaster, had once sacked a woman teacher on the spot for coming to school in too short a dress, only to have her reinstated the week after by the intervention of her father who was on the board of governors. Besides, Carrie knew she was no Libby, defiant just for the sake of being defiant. What was happening between her and Mungo McDermot sent the blood flowing nervously through her body with an emotion that was half fear and half thwarted passion. She steeled herself against the slumbering desire in his eyes, making a determined effort to change the subject.
‘Isn’t the strike awful? Libby went down to hear the speakers on the market place last night, and she says it will go on for months. Father’s workers are joining in unofficially before they are even called out. Libby says she doesn’t blame them.’
Mungo wasn’t in the least interested in the strike or in what Libby Peel might say or think. Ever since the day he had seen the two sisters together, walking home from church in the dusk, and had raised his trilby hat to one of them without being completely sure it was Carrie, he had disliked intensely the inescapable fact that she was an identical twin.
To Mungo, Carrie Peel was unique – she had to be. He felt the familiar stirring of desire as he watched her take off her short jacket and saw the high swell of her breasts straining against the button fastening of her cotton dress. His Carrie was as clean and fresh as bleached linen, and when he held her close she smelt of sun-warmed apricots. He took a step forward, only to see her back away as she picked up a blue-covered register and held it in front of her like a shield.
‘I hate it when the evenings grow lighter,’ he whispered with one eye on the door. ‘But I have to see you alone. Meet me after school.’
There was no need to tell her where. As the long cold winter had turned into spring they had found a place and made it all their own. It was an old summer house, nestling behind a high brick wall in the grounds of an eighteenth-century manor house, too neglected and overgrown with ivy and trailing weeds to be of interest even to stone-throwing boys. There had been talk for years of turning the manor into a school or a nursing home, but with every passing year it grew more derelict, seeming to sink deeper into its shroud of ivy.
There was an inside bolt on the door of the tiny summer house, an ancient bamboo lounging chair, a relic of glories long since past, and two small windows over which Mungo sometimes fastened pieces of corrugated paper. Once through the rusty gate and inside the summer house they were totally private and excitingly alone. As it was no more than a quarter of a mile from Westerley, and as no one ever thought to query the time a teacher stayed late after school, it was the perfect rendezvous.
‘I can’t meet you today,’ she whispered frantically. ‘I’m meeting Libby in town.’ She put up a hand to the tidy bun at the nape of her neck. ‘We are going to have our hair cut short.’
‘Oh, no!’ Mungo forgot to be circumspect, raising his voice as he leaned across the table. ‘I won’t allow it! Not your beautiful hair!’ He had noticed the way she had said ‘our’ hair, not ‘my’ hair, and his hands clenched into fists as he thumped them on the table. ‘Let your sister do as she likes, but you stay the way you are.’
‘Then I will never again mistake one of you for the other,’ was what he really meant. ‘Tomorrow then,’ he whispered as Miss Clayton, the gym mistress, burst into the room, bouncing on her crêpe-soled plimsolls, her shiny face eager with suspicion as she darted quick glances from one to the other.
‘Good morning, Miss Peel. Good morning, Mr McDermot.’ She walked over to the cupboard, her shoes making little sucking noises on the parquet floor. ‘What’s the matter with him? He looks as if he’s lost half a crown and found a sixpence.’ She stared at the door as it closed behind Mungo. ‘Bit shirty, is he, because we teachers haven’t struck?’
‘He isn’t always very well, Miss Clayton.’ Carrie
walked towards the door with the register, deciding to tell Libby she had changed her mind about her hair, yet knowing that when the time came she would follow her sister and submit to the scissors like a sheep submitting to the shears.
In the mean streets surrounding Libby’s school no birds sang. There was no rhododendron-fringed drive leading to the squat two-storey building, its grey stones weathered with grime, just a square asphalt playground penned in from the street by iron railings. The children wore mostly hand-me-downs, and the only sport was drill, with the pupils marching round and round the playground, swinging their arms to the shouted instructions of whichever teacher happened to be on duty at the time.
The three classes for the younger children were held in one big room, split into sections by sliding glass doors, and because Libby’s class of seven-to eight-year-olds was at the far end it could only be approached through the two outer rooms.
Margaret Bottomley, the infants’ teacher, was already at her desk, sorting through a pile of grey colouring paper, her neat head with its two earphones of plaited hair bent industriously over her task.
‘Well, did you go?’ She pulled at the drooping skirt of her brown jumper suit, torn between the desire to look modern and the shame of showing her fat knees. ‘I heard there was a bit of a to-do. You would have been far better coming with me to the Labour meeting. They let us in with the men. You’d be surprised how much money they’ve collected from their ha’penny a week door-to-door collections. We’re going to win, Libby, make no mistake, this time we’re going to win.’ She lowered her voice. ‘There’s a rumour that Ellen Wilkinson might be coming up to give us a talk, and you know what they say about her? She’s a woman for women all right.’
Libby wrinkled her nose at the sour smell which always seemed to be at its worst in the infants’ classroom. It was the smell of neglect, of ammonia, of clothes not washed often enough, and made worse by a flannel of cress growing sourly from one of the high window ledges.
‘I can’t join, Margaret, not while I’m living at home.’ She rubbed the side of her face reflectively, remembering with shame the sharp sting of her father’s flat-handed slap. ‘I’m with you all right, but I can’t openly flaunt my faith.’ She stared down at the bare boards of the classroom’s slightly sloping floor. ‘It’s different for you. You’re independent.’
‘You mean I live at home with a mother who couldn’t care less? You mean I haven’t got a man? Not a father nor a fiancé to keep me in line?’ Margaret Bottomley’s thick neck flushed an unbecoming red. ‘Especially a father who is a capitalist.’ She glared at Libby with an expression of contempt. ‘You are only playing at it, Libby Peel! You think you can identify, but you can’t. You didn’t have to leave school at thirteen, then work in a factory by day and swot at nights for years and years to get your place at college. Then when you were there you didn’t have to exist on a grant so small you were patching the inside of your shoes with cardboard. Libby Peel, it took me six years to be a teacher, so no wonder I am independent!’
She banged the register down on her desk, and made no attempt to pick up a pen when it rolled to the floor. ‘You should be thinking of joining the Conservative Club, not the Labour movement. Stanley Baldwin’s more of a Labourite than you!’
‘Have you heard of a man called Tom Silver?’
Libby had no idea what had made her say that. All she knew was that somehow she had to put a stop to her friend’s chip-on-the-shoulder tirade. She liked and admired Margaret Bottomley, knew that her life was drab, her out-of-school activities given over to caring for a querulous invalid mother and her newly found burning enthusiasm for the women’s section of the Labour Party. But the flushed quivering face with its thin tight lips filled her with distaste.’
‘I met him last night,’ she went on miserably. ‘He was hit by a flying cobblestone, and I thought that as he seemed to be . . . as he was so obviously wrapped up in the cause . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Tom Silver? Tom Silver?’ Miss Bottomley pursed her top lip so that her incipient moustache darkened into ugly prominence. ‘I should think I do know him. He’s been victimized twice for what he believes. He’d die for his members.’ Tom Silver would. He’s a Father of the Chapel, and turned down the offer of a job as Secretary of the Trades and Labour Council not long ago. Was he speaking, then?’
‘No.’ Libby turned her head towards the windows as the playground bell clanged out. She was furious with herself for mentioning the name she had seen written inside the front cover of the small notebook, and could not think why it had just popped out like that. Now Margaret Bottomley would worry at it like a puppy with an old slipper until she found out more. For someone who boasted she could get along without a man, thank you very much, Margaret took a marked interest in them, Libby thought uncharitably. She imparted a bit more information with an obvious show of reluctance.
‘I don’t think he was too badly hurt, though he looked awful. He was knocked unconscious, and his face was bleeding.’ Her eyes half closed at the disturbing memory of that grey face and the blood trickling down the side of his nose. ‘He dropped a book. I’ve got it at home as a matter of fact.’ She sighed. ‘His name and address were in the front.’
The children were marching into their classrooms now, to stand by their desks for morning prayers before the slides were dragged across by the boy monitors from the top class. Miss Thomson, a large John Bull type woman, was easing her ample behind on to the piano stool, but Margaret would have her say, and Libby knew it.
‘Bring the book tomorrow.’ The pale eyes shone with eagerness. ‘I have to go up to the infirmary in the evening to visit a friend. I’ll take it off your hands, find Tom Silver and explain. Save you posting it on.’
‘I hadn’t quite decided . . .’ Libby turned away, knowing that as far as Margaret was concerned the matter was settled. She moved through into her own classroom.
She paid no attention at all to the religious doctrine gabbled by the children. She sang ‘Fight the Good Fight’ with her head held high, her lips moving without any sound coming from them. Damn and blast Margaret Bottomley with her interfering nosiness! Libby closed her eyes as the morning prayer washed over her. She hadn’t even finished reading the poems penned in that neat firm handwriting. And the ones she had read seemed to be such an antithesis of the man himself. She remembered his teasing laughter, his scorn of her middle-class ignorance and all he thought she stood for, and she remembered the feel of his arm holding her in tight protection against the swaying crowd. She had thought . . . she must have thought subconsciously that she would return the book herself. To thank him, that was all, merely to thank him for helping her, and maybe to show him that she was serious in her need to identify with the strikers. It didn’t matter, of course, what he thought of her, one way or the other, but it would have been – it might have been interesting, at least.
‘Amen,’ intoned the headmistress, and Libby went to take her place on the raised dais which supported her desk. She waited until the children were seated, hands on heads, patiently obedient.
‘Take out your arithmetic exercise books.’
As the dividing glass slides were dragged back into the closed position, thirty-eight children banged back their desk lids. Libby began to set out the sums on the blackboard while the ink monitor, a smug boy wearing round spectacles and an air of gloating power, walked round the desks with a tray, dropping the grey inkpots into their waiting wells.
The squeaking of the chalk on a greasy patch of blackboard set Libby’s jangled nerves quivering. She felt suddenly penned in, trapped, as if out there through the high windows things were happening, wonderful, terrible things that could change the course of the country’s history. She made a mistake and rubbed at it furiously with the board duster. Banners were being paraded, open-air meetings held, blacklegs routed, picketing organized, collections raised for those without a few pennies put by. Miners, railwaymen, transport workers, engineers, weavers and spinner
s, all united in the common cause.
And the only futile pathetic gesture of defiance she, Libby Peel, was going to make that day was to have her hair cut short at half past four . . . She pressed too hard on the chalk and it broke into two pieces in her fingers, causing her to whip round in anger at the girl in the front row who had dared to laugh.
‘Do you two know what you look like?’ Oliver Peel’s lips curled with sarcasm, and his words had a slurred edge to them.
He had been drinking before dinner, Libby concluded, shutting himself away in the billiard room straight from his return from the mill, scarlet-faced and glowering. Carrie shot her a warning glance, so with difficulty Libby held her tongue.
Because each twin possessed an identical unruly cowlick at the hairline, Libby’s on the right and Carrie’s on the left, the hairdresser had trimmed the front of their glossy hair into fringes, club-cutting the rest to jaw length so that it swung forward into their cheeks.
Mesmerized by the two faces staring at him from-the long mirror, he had snipped away, first at one head then the other, matching each snip so that the end result had been to make the two girls look even more alike than when they had first walked into the newly thriving salon in the town’s main street.
‘Like two bloody peas in two bloody pods,’ he was to tell his wife that night. ‘Till the cheeky one smiled, then you could tell the difference. But before that there were no difference!’
Now Oliver faced them across the dining table, with Martha Cardwell serving the roast lamb in her usual fluttery manner, her movements jerky and disconnected. Had a glance passed between the peak-nosed girl and Oliver as she hovered by his shoulder with the jug of mint sauce? Libby shivered with distaste. Or was Mrs Edwards, out in the kitchen sliding the milk jelly on to a platter, counting the hours till her maister crept up the stairs again? Disgust sharpened her voice so that Carrie looked up in dismay.
