Sixpenny Stalls

by Beryl Kingston

  The house was in darkness. Even the lantern above the front door was out. It took him a long time to get his key into the lock and let himself in. Then he stood in the hall with his fists in his pockets, quite unable to move, as the tears spilled out of his eyes and rolled down his cheeks and fell onto the filth that covered his greatcoat. Although he didn’t know it, he was groaning with grief.

  Nan came out onto the landing almost at once and was down the stairs soft and quick, with Bessie hobbling behind her, candle in hand.

  ‘My dear, my dear,’ she said. ‘What is it?’ Putting her arms round his neck, pulling his head down and down until it lay on her shoulder. ‘Tell your old Nan.’

  ‘Father is dead,’ he said, and then he was too choked with sobs to say anything else.

  She took charge of him, as he’d known she would. He was undressed, still weeping, and the blood and grime was washed from his face and hands and he was put to bed and given a beaker full of bitter liquid to drink. And gradually, bit by bit, his grief subsided and he told her the story, because she was attending to him so gently and listening so calmly.

  She said very little, nodding her head, waiting, patting his hand. She didn’t question and she didn’t comment, she simply listened. And when he’d told her all that he could bear to, she kissed him and tucked him in the covers comfortingly as though he were a child who’d been confessing to some schoolyard brawl. ‘Sleep now,’ she said. ‘We will talk again tomorrow.’

  Her bitter brew was drowsing him. I shouldn’t sleep, he thought, not after all that, but he was already far away.

  When she was satisfied that her opiate had taken effect, Nan turned the gaslight down to a bead and she and Bessie went softly back to her bedroom.

  Then it was Bessie’s turn to comfort, for neither of them could hold back their own grief any longer.

  ‘I have lost my right arm, Bessie,’ Nan wept. ‘My right arm. He was the best of the bunch.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Easter mum. You have. You have.’

  ‘It en’t right, Bessie.’

  ‘No, mum.’

  ‘He should have survived me, my poor John.’

  ‘Yes, yes, he should.’

  ‘That foreman will never work again. I swear it!’

  ‘I’ll get the fire lit, shall I mum?’ Bessie said. ‘Your poor hands are as cold as ice.’

  Her practical concern drew Nan away from the anger of her grief. ‘We’ll light it together,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly six, and there’s a deal to do. We must start the day, howsomever we feel. There’s letters to write and clothes to prepare. Oh, my dear heart alive, I never thought to wear mourning for my Johnnie.’

  So they lit the fire, kneeling before the grate together, and they drew Nan’s fireside table right up close to the fender. Bessie left her to write her letters, while she set a kettle on the hob, and warned the waking household, and saw to it that all the blinds in the front of the house stayed drawn, and bustled about the bedroom looking out Nan’s mourning clothes and preparing a bowl of warm water for her so that she could wash and dress.

  They were difficult letters to compose, to The Times to announce the death; to Frederick Brougham to urge him to write and tell her how he was, and to drop a hint that there were ‘things’ she had to attend to in London that would keep her for ‘rather more time’ than she’d intended, that one of those things was a death, and finally after much preamble, that it was John who had died, for she couldn’t tell him the truth straight away, not in his weakened state; to Billy and Matilda and Edward, and Annie and James, oh so carefully worded, for they had to know what had happened, but not too suddenly or shockingly; to Annie’s two daughters who’d always been so fond of their uncle; to all the regional managers who’d worked with him for so long. And each letter was worse than the last. Dreadful, impossible letters.

  ‘Shall you write to poor Caroline?’ Bessie asked when the last envelope had been addressed and trembled upon the pile.

  ‘No,’ Nan said. ‘I shall take the closed carriage and go and tell her myself. It en’t a thing she should hear in a letter. She’ll take it hard, poor child, after that foolish row.’ She was bowed under the weight of this nightmare, her shoulders drooping, her face drawn, her eyes shrunk to half their size, and the lines on her cheeks and forehead etched dark grey even in the gentle glow of the gaslight.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ Bessie said, lovingly. ‘Could you fancy anything to eat?’

  Caroline and Euphemia were up early that morning too. Nobody in the house had slept very much during the storm, and now that the rain had stopped and the wind had died down, they were all eager to be out and about, to inspect the damage and see what help their neighbours might require. There was a plane tree lying across the centre of the green, torn up by its roots, which was very exciting, and the house on the corner had a gaping hole in its roof, and as Matty said, there was no knowing what might have happened just around the corner.

  The two little boys were thrilled to be going out so early. Everard, who was four and very venturesome, looked happily at the fallen tree, telling baby brother Manny, ‘Us’ll climb up there Manny, shall us?’

  So they had an early breakfast and were just about to put on their coats and caps when Nan’s carriage drew up at the gate.

  All four of the adults assumed that she had come to tell them about the storm, but her opening words and the expression on her face soon alerted them to something worse.

  ‘I think these two babbas should be in the nursery,’ she said.

  ‘We’re a-going to climb a fallen tree,’ Everard told her importantly as their nursemaid led them away.

  ‘Yes, my love. Presently.’

  ‘What is it?’ Jimmy said when the two little boys had been coaxed out of the room.

  ‘Someone has been hurt,’ Matty guessed.

  But Caroline, all sharp wit and intuition, knew the worst. ‘Someone has been killed,’ she said. ‘Tell us quickly.’

  ‘It’s your father,’ Nan said, and told them quickly, while they could cope with it.

  The howl that Caroline gave when she understood what was being said was too awful to hear without weeping. ‘No, no, no!’ she cried. ‘He can’t be dead. I haven’t said sorry to him. He can’t possibly be dead. He can’t. He can’t.’ And she put her head in her hands and ran from the room, howling and howling.

  ‘Leave her,’ Nan said, when Euphemia began to run after her. ‘Let her get over the first of it on her own. Sympathy’ll make it worse.’

  But the extremity of Caroline’s grief persisted. She cried all the way back to Bedford Square and she continued to weep for three more days, refusing food or comfort, even from Euphemia, sitting in a twilight of drawn blinds and hopelessness in Nan’s empty parlour on the ground floor of the house.

  On the second morning when letters of condolence started to arrive, she wouldn’t look at them. And the next day, when a letter from Henry arrived, addressed to Nan, she merely glanced at it and let it fall. Nan was most upset, particularly as the letter was written with an honest regret she found rather touching, given the young man’s circumstances.

  ‘He would like to visit,’ she said to her granddaughter. ‘What shall I tell him?’

  ‘What you will,’ Caroline said listlessly. She was so unlike herself it was really rather alarming.

  So Nan wrote back by return of post to tell Mr Easter that he could call whenever he liked, and privately hoped that he would make it soon. Perhaps he could cheer the poor child.

  He was on the doorstep at eleven o’clock the following morning. And not a minute too soon, for a mere half an hour before his arrival Billy brought them a letter from the company solicitor, which had stirred Caroline’s guilt and misery all over again. It enclosed her father’s will, which she and Nan and Will and Billy had read together, and in which he asked to be buried at Rattlesden ‘alongside my darling wife Harriet’ and instructed that his fortune should be divided equally between ‘my dear son Will and my d
ear daughter Caroline so that they may live in comfort and without worry’.

  ‘I was so unkind to him,’ Caroline sobbed, when the last word had been read. ‘I said I would hate him till the day I died. And now he leaves a will so that I won’t worry. How could I have said such a dreadful thing to him when I loved him so? I shall worry about it for the rest of my life.’

  ‘We all say things we don’t mean,’ Nan tried to comfort.

  ‘But I did mean it. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it. I haven’t said sorry to him. That’s the awful thing. I’d have said sorry when he sent the book if I’d known this was going to happen. I should have said sorry when he sent the book. But I didn’t, and now he’ll never know. Oh, I wish I hadn’t said such dreadful things.’

  ‘He knew you didn’t mean them, Carrie,’ Billy said, patting her shoulders. ‘Told me so himself.’

  ‘Did he?’ she asked, turning swimming eyes towards him.

  ‘Yes, my dear. He did. He said you were the most loving child alive and he knew you didn’t mean what you said and he knew you’d be reconciled. Told me so himself.’

  But that made Caroline weep more passionately than ever.

  ‘Don’t cry so, Carrie,’ Will begged. ‘You’ll make yourself ill. ‘But he couldn’t bear her grief because it unleashed his own so terribly. ‘Please don’t cry.’

  But her tears seemed endless. So Nan and Will were very glad when Henry Easter was ushered into the darkened room.

  He was completely composed and to Nan’s surprise and interest he seemed to know exactly what to do, as though he’d been comforting grief all his life. He took his weeping Caroline into his arms and smoothed her hair out of her eyes and wiped her face with his handkerchief and told her everything was going to be all right. Then he led her to the sofa and coaxed her to sit down, which he did without words by simply sitting down himself, very gradually and with his arm still about her waist so that she swayed, following the movement of his body, and finally sat too. It was skilful and it was loving. Nan approved of it all very much.

  ‘We will leave you,’ she mouthed at him over Caroline’s bent head. And when he nodded, she and Will walked quietly out of the room and closed the door behind them.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ they heard him say, ‘but it will pass, believe me my darling. It will pass.’

  ‘I was so horrid to him,’ she wailed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in the same composed voice, ‘of course you were. You wouldn’t have been human if you hadn’t been. We’re all horrid to people at some time or another, I know I am. But you were loving to him too, don’t forget that. You loved him dearly.’

  ‘Oh, I did. I did.’

  ‘There you are then. Dry your eyes, my dearest.’

  ‘What an excellent young man!’ Nan said as she and Will went upstairs to the drawing room. ‘If they marry, he will make a splendid husband.’

  ‘I suppose they may marry now,’ Will said, ‘since Papa ain’t here to disapprove.’ It was the first time he’d spoken of his father since, and it pained him that his first words should be so critical, as Nan could see by the strained expression on his face.

  ‘He’d have come round to it in time,’ she assured him. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said bleakly. ‘A very good man. How shall we manage in the firm without him?’

  Neither of them had given the firm a thought until that minute.

  ‘I shall go in this afternoon and see how things are,’ Nan said. ‘It’ll be the quarterly meeting soon. We shall have to make plans, find a replacement. There’s a deal of work to be done.’

  And I suppose I shall have to do it, Will thought with weary resignation, for who else is there? He would have to turn down that job with Mr Dickens. And he sighed most miserably. ‘Should I come with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Not today,’ she said kindly. ‘Time enough when the funeral is over.’

  Downstairs in the parlour Henry was urging Caroline to get out of the house too. ‘We will walk out into the countryside,’ he said. ‘The air will do you good.’ The countryside would cheer her. She might see a fallen tree or two but there would be few damaged buildings to remind her of her loss. ‘And tomorrow we will ride together. If you sit about brooding everything seems worse.’

  In her listlessness Caroline agreed with him. It was the oddest sensation to be taken care of, when she’d always been so independent and so sure of herself, but it was very comforting. Oh, how dear he was, her Henry, how very dear.

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever feel happy again,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ he assured her. ‘You will. Things will start to get better once the funeral is over. You’ll see.’

  ‘But how shall I ever make amends to him?’ she said.

  ‘We will find a way,’ he promised.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked, impressed and intrigued by his confidence, for it was a side of his character she’d never seen until now.

  ‘I am an orphan too, if you remember,’ he said, smiling at her.

  ‘You felt like this when your father died,’ she said, understanding.

  His grief hadn’t been at all the same. He’d been afraid of his father who’d always been distant and unapproachable and often cruel. But he didn’t tell her. It wasn’t the right moment. ‘Something similar,’ he compromised. ‘Now get your coat and bonnet and we will take a walk.’

  ‘Should I be chaperoned?’ she wondered. If Bessie had to come with them they wouldn’t be able to walk very far.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Your sorrow is chaperone enough.’

  Upstairs in the bedroom she shared with Caroline, Euphemia sat at the window with her sewing. It was difficult to see the stitches in the half-light of those drawn blinds, so from time to time she held her work to the window and lifted the nearest blind just an inch to get a better light. Which was how she saw Caroline and Henry leaving for their walk.

  Thank heavens, she thought, watching them as they strolled through the gardens, she so pale and small and woebegone in her heavy mourning clothes, her black gloved hand in the crook of his elbow. It had upset Euphemia to see such a change in her lively cousin. Now that Henry had come to visit her, perhaps she would regain her spirits. And she decided that she would go downstairs and see if she could find Will and tell him what she’d seen. If he knew that Caroline was a little less unhappy, it might cheer him a little too.

  He was in the library, sitting at the table with a lamp lit beside him and a blank sheet of paper before him, gazing miserably into space.

  ‘Will?’ she said, tip-toeing into the room.

  He turned his handsome head towards her wearily, as though it were too heavy to be moved with ease. ‘I’ve been trying to write an article about the storm,’ he said, ‘and I can’t do it.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course you can’t. Not now. You shouldn’t expect to.’ But how dear and foolish he was to try.

  ‘It’s a commission,’ he said. ‘For Mr Dickens. He suggested it when he offered me the job. I thought …’ But then he hesitated, looking away from her, seemed confused.

  ‘What did you think?’ she encouraged.

  ‘You will say nothing about this to anyone if I tell you.’

  ‘You have my word.’

  ‘I thought that if I could write the article I might still be able to take the job. Oh, it’s all folly. There is no real hope of any such thing. No hope at all. I do know that. Everything is changed now, I’m afraid. I must work for the firm. It is inescapable. Who else could replace Papa? But I thought …’

  How much this job means to him, Euphemia thought, yearning with sympathy. ‘It might be possible,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There is no chance of that. I must face reality.’

  It would be unkind to argue with him, Euphemia thought. And she decided to change the subject. ‘I have some good news,’ she said. ‘At least I think it is good news. Caroline has gone out for a walk with Hen
ry.’

  He pulled his mind from his troubles to hear of it. ‘Has she though? That’s an improvement.’

  ‘Yes,’ Euphemia said, admiring the effort he was making. ‘It is.’

  ‘They will be able to marry now,’ he said. ‘Poor creatures. What unhappiness there is in store for them.’

  ‘Unhappiness?’ Euphemia said. ‘Oh, surely not. I think they will be very happy together.’

  ‘While they are together perhaps,’ Will conceded. ‘But they cannot be together for ever. One of them will die, sooner or later, and the survivor will suffer the torments of the damned. Like Papa. He lived in misery for more than nineteen years. In misery. Well, you saw how it was. He wouldn’t change a thing in that house, the wallpaper faded on the walls, the clocks didn’t work, the furniture split, there were legs off the chairs, but he wouldn’t change a thing. He was locked in misery because Mama had died. It is always the way.’

  ‘Oh, not always, surely,’ she tried to argue. ‘He didn’t seem miserable to me.’

  ‘Always,’ he said, with the terrible, unreasonable finality of his grief. ‘Always.’

  ‘Not all change is for the worse,’ she said, trying to reason with him because she could see that it was grief that was making him speak so wildly. ‘My life changed out of all recognition when I came to England, and that was a change for the better, you must admit.’

  ‘But that was different. That wasn’t due to a death.’

  ‘No,’ she admitted gravely. ‘But then death is not always a bad thing. It hurts us all most terribly but it is natural, part of a natural cycle, birth, growth, decay, death. We have to accept it. Plants die, just as we do, and yet new plants grow from the compost of their leaves. There is always rebirth, always new life.’

  ‘There is always death.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘always death. But life goes on, Will, truly it does.’

  ‘The phoenix from the ashes, eh,’ he said, giving her the faintest flicker of a smile. ‘You are such an optimist, Pheemy.’