Polly Pilgrim

by Marie Joseph

  The storm broke late that afternoon. On the road running parallel to the river the bus had to plough its way through a foot of water. Lightning ripped through the sky, and just short of the village the driver had to make a slight detour because of a fallen tree.

  The Thomson cottage was in darkness, its tiny windows blinkered like bandaged eyes. Polly hesitated, then with her head bent against the driving rain, trudged on. At any other time she would have made her way up the weed-trimmed path, lifted the heavy iron knocker on the door, even pushed it open and called out. But all she could think about was getting home to Martin, alone in the cottage and terrified of the storm, cowering in the corner furthest away from the window, hands over ears, his entire body given over to fear.

  Gasping for breath, heart pounding, a stitch in her side as sharp as the thrust of a knife, Polly muttered to herself about the stupidity of Bella having the baby out in weather like this. The pram she used on short excursions to the small grocery shop in the village had a hood that wouldn’t stay up, and wheels that looked as if they’d belonged to something else, a long time ago. The baby dribbled so much he put people off bending down to coo at him, and his little knitted bonnet had shrunk and felted so much in the wash that it lay on his head like an extra layer of matted hair.

  Poor little Bella, counting her blessings when in truth she had none really worth the counting. Polly opened the door of the cottage and felt her mouth drop open in a wide ‘O’ of surprise.

  ‘Bella!’ she gasped. ‘What on earth . . . ? What’s happened? Oh, my God!’

  The blasphemy was instinctive as Polly went down on her knees by the rocking-chair drawn up to the fire. If she lived to be a hundred, she told herself, she would never forget that first sight of Bella’s face.

  Puffed up like a water melon, Bella’s sandy-lashed eyes were mere slits in the cushions of her swollen flesh. Her lips were twice their normal size and a thread of dried blood ran from one corner, giving her expression a grotesque twist. Bella sat on the very edge of the chair, staring straight ahead. Her hands were clasped over torn and muddied stockings, and when Polly touched her she shied away to clutch the familiar grey shawl closer round her throat.

  Martin, still in his school uniform, sat back on his heels from his position on the rug and his task of adding small cobs of coal to the already glowing fire. His blue eyes blazed with the excitement of finding himself the centre of a drama better than any he’d read about in his comics.

  ‘He nearly killed her, Mam! Jack went for her with a big stick, an’ she was unconscious on the floor for ages. That’s right, isn’t it, Bella?’ The words tripped over themselves in his effort to get them out quickly. ‘The postman called an’ when he saw he sent for the police, an’ they took Jack away to the hospital. The Institution where he works. You know, Mam.’ Putting a finger to his temple he screwed it around, trying to convey a meaning he obviously felt was too indelicate to put into words.

  ‘What is it, Bella?’

  Polly put up a hand and gently lifted a lock of the sandy hair falling forward over the terrible purple mask that had once been Bella’s face. ‘You’re all right now, love. You’re quite safe here.’

  ‘A straight-jacket, Polly. They put my Jack in a straight-jacket.’ A single tear slipped from beneath a reddened eyelid and ran down Bella’s cheek. ‘He’s gone mad, Polly. It’s being with those loonies all day. He’s catched it from them. Oh, my poor Jack.’

  Martin broke in eagerly. ‘He’s broken all the furniture, Mam, and all the pots! But he never touched the baby, did he, Bella?’

  As Polly looked round, he pointed importantly to the stairway. ‘I put him on my bed asleep. He cried a lot, but I carried him up the hill and he dropped off again. He’s got a dirty nappy on, Mam.’

  ‘You’re a good boy, Martin.’ Still hardly able to believe the evidence of her own eyes, Polly tried to pull the shawl away from Bella’s throat, only to have it firmly pushed down again as Bella moaned with pain.

  ‘It’s my back,’ she whimpered. ‘I tried to get the stick away from him, but he was too strong for me. Have a look what he’s done to my back.’

  Polly looked, then closed her eyes in horror. Bella’s blouse, ripped to ribbons, hung tattered from her thin shoulders. The grey shrunken vest had stuck to deep flesh wounds, the blood blackened into hard ridges in the pattern of the ribbing.

  Swallowing the nausea rising in her throat, she spoke quietly: ‘I’ll have to bathe your vest off, love.’ Nodding to Martin, she motioned to him, telling him to push the kettle on its trivet over the leaping fire. ‘It will hurt, but we’ve got to get it clean. I think there’s a tin of Germolene in the cupboard. Harry always swore by Germolene. It’s antiseptic,’ she explained, getting up and going over to the dresser. ‘But first you must drink a cup of tea.’

  ‘With a lot of sugar in it,’ said Martin, still feeling the weight of responsibility. ‘I learnt that when I was in the Cubs.’

  With the dropping of the shawl, Bella’s childish breasts were exposed, no bigger than walnuts, mere swellings in the flatness of her narrow chest. Polly glanced quickly at Martin.

  ‘Go up to my room, there’s a good boy. Light the stove and start your homework. See, I’ll light this lamp, then you can take the one from the window.’ She was making signs at him from behind Bella’s back. ‘The storm’s passed over now, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ When he set his face determinedly, she raised her voice. ‘Martin. D’you hear me? Bella won’t want you here when I bathe her back. You’ve been marvellous, and when I write and tell your dad he’ll agree with me, but just for now do as I say. You don’t want to upset Bella, do you?’

  ‘I won’t look, Mam,’ Martin whined. ‘See. I can sit here at this end of the table and I can’t see nothing. Don’t make me go upstairs, Mam. Please?’

  Polly shook her head from side to side as if wondering what to do with him. This precious son of hers, brave to the point of heroism about things he felt could be explained, such as a man beating his wife almost to death, but as nervous as a puppy about thunder and things that went bump in the night. She gave in weakly, then set about taking a bowl down from a high shelf and tearing a clean tea-towel down the middle in readiness for the task she was dreading with all her heart.

  The effort of drinking the hot tea was too much for Bella. As soon as she put her lips to the rim of the cup she cried out in pain.

  ‘I’ll put more milk in it.’ Polly handed it back to her. ‘Try again, please, love. It’ll make you feel better. Just a sip or two. . . .’

  ‘Jack’s ill.’ Bella’s hand trembled so much she could hardly hold the cup. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing.’ The dignity, the proud withdrawal was there again. Polly recognized it immediately and marvelled at it. ‘It’s been coming on him a long time.’ The pale eyelashes quivered like butterflies’ wings. ‘They’ll make him better at the hospital ’cos they’re used to dealing with what’s wrong with Jack. He’ll be put to bed and they’ll give him food, proper food, not bread and scrape like what I’ve been giving him. He’s not been giving me hardly any money of a Friday, ’cos of spending it all on the drink.’ Just for a moment the treble of the tiny voice hardened. ‘How could I get fat like he wanted me to be when he was drinking all the money away?’ She glanced down at her skinny chest. ‘They’ll calm him down with special medicine, Polly. You’ll see.’

  Polly turned round from pouring hot water into the bowl. ‘It may take a long time, love. Minds don’t heal as fast as bodies.’

  The purple rubbery lips chewed on nothing. ‘Aye, that’s right. The doctor told me you can be sick in your mind as well as in your body. He wasn’t in a hurry or nothing. He just sat down and talked to me when they’d taken Jack away.’

  ‘In a black van,’ said Martin at once, only to bend his head over his books again at a look from his mother.

  ‘And you showed him your back?’ Polly knew the answer before it came.

  ‘No. I never let on. I k
ept me shawl on.’ Bella put the cup down and pressed joined hands over her heart. ‘I wasn’t going to let them take me away as well. Not from the cottage.’ She coughed. ‘I’ve got to get back home when you’ve done me back, Polly. I’ve got to set things to rights.’ She glanced at the dresser with its row of blue willow-patterned plates, and in spite of her pain her small face hardened with envy. ‘I’ll save up some money somehow. I will! Then when the pot fair comes to the market at Easter I’ll get some cups and some saucers. With flowers on and gold rims. You just see if I don’t.’

  Polly squeezed out the cloth and, holding her breath, tenderly applied it, steeling herself against the sudden stiffening of Bella’s whole body. ‘I’ll find you some bits and pieces, then when you’ve had something to eat I’ll go down with you and help clear things up. That’s if you wouldn’t rather stop on here. You can sleep with me and we’ll put the baby in a drawer lined with a blanket. I’ll go down and get his things.’

  ‘No!’ All Bella’s wavering strength went into her refusal. ‘I’ve got to go home. Jack might get worse in the night, and if they send for me then I’ve got to be where they’ll come looking.’ She shuddered. ‘They won’t be hard on him, will they, Polly? That policeman wanted me to speak against him, but I wouldn’t. Jack’s wife kept on hounding him through the courts, an’ I won’t do the same. I couldn’t be that cruel.’

  At the mention of Jack’s wife, Martin’s head came up. ‘Has Jack got two wives then, Mam?’ His eyes bulged. ‘He’ll cop it if he gets found out, won’t he?’ The stretched eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Mr Dennis said Jack was going the right way for real trouble, didn’t he? You know, Mam. Yesterday when Jack nearly broke our Jim’s leg.’

  Hearing his name, the little dog perked up his ears and cocked his head to one side in a listening position. ‘I told Bella about Jack frightening our Gatty,’ Martin went on in a conversational tone. ‘I told you, didn’t I, Bella?’

  ‘Gatty asked for anything she got.’

  Polly, intent on shutting Martin up before he came out with any more revelations, said in a tired way: ‘What did you say, Bella?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Bella clenched her teeth together to stop the hurt making her sick all over Polly’s multi-coloured rug at her feet. She chewed her lips trying not to speak out of turn, but she’d had enough of Gatty Pilgrim hanging round the cottage pretending she’d come to see the baby when all the time it was Jack she was sweet on.

  ‘All the girls fancy their chances with Jack.’ It was all too much. The stinging agony as Polly applied the ointment, the finding out that Jack had been in the woods with that Gatty when all the time his dinner was drying up. She put a hand over her swollen mouth and began to sob. ‘It’s with him being so good-looking.’ She cried aloud with the agony of it all. ‘He laughs at them if only they knew it. Silly young buggers, he says. An’ then he laughs. Ha, Ha, Ha.’

  The sound of laughter was terrible. Polly set down the bowl.

  ‘I’m going to find you one of my blouses, Bella,’ she explained. ‘Then I’ll take you home.’

  Upstairs in her bedroom she set the candlestick high on the dresser. Gatty’s blouses would fit Bella better, but somehow she couldn’t. It wouldn’t seem. . . . She put a hand over her mouth in a small gesture of comfort, swaying to and fro.

  Gatty wasn’t like that. Her own daughter wasn’t like Bella had implied. She wasn’t. Oh, dear God, it just wasn’t true! Polly held up a striped blouse, her face reflecting her thoughts. Her mouth quivered. Jack had behaved badly, abominably, but Gatty had egged him on. She was sure of it. Polly knew that her imagination was running riot, the way it always did when she was worried, but at that moment she had no control over it. She forced herself to face the unpalatable truth.

  There was something inherent in her daughter, a trait glaringly obvious even when Gatty had been no more than twelve years old. Gatty liked men. Anything in trousers, as Edna would have said. Before she’d decided her parents were beyond the pale, she had flirted with Harry, making him laugh by the way she sat on his knee, leaning back against him, fluttering dark eyelashes when she wanted her own way. Innocently, of course, but the inference had been there. Sexy. Polly’s mind shied away from the very sound of the word in her head. Connecting it with her own daughter was tantamount to blasphemy, but such things did happen. She closed the drawer and took up the candle. There’d been a girl at school when Polly was in the fifth form, a girl who dyed the front of her hair, bleaching it to a candy-floss over her forehead. Once she’d had to go in front of the headmistress for putting pancake make-up on her face. She boasted about her conquests with the boys at the Grammar School to her own circle of friends, and laughed at Polly when she saw Polly’s interest owed more to curiosity and nothing to envy. She was expelled in disgrace when the box pleats of her gym-slip divided because of her bulging stomach, the rumours being that the baby she was expecting could have had any one of four schoolboy fathers.

  But Gatty? Oh, dear God, not Gatty.

  Polly walked to the door, giving herself a mental kick, telling herself to stop exaggerating. Talk about Samuel Grundy, born on a Monday. His day had been one big laugh compared to this. Bella, sitting there in Harry’s chair, had said things not even remotely true, trying pathetically to take the edge from her own despair.

  Holding the candle high, Polly resisted the overwhelming urge to glance up at the ceiling, knowing that if the light was there she wouldn’t be capable of finding a rational explanation for it. Not today.

  When Gatty came home she would talk to her, spell it out, woman to woman: no glossing over words, using euphemisms, just straight questions, demanding straight answers.

  But when she got back later that evening from Bella’s cottage, tired half-way to death, Gatty had piled her tea things in the sink, leaving them unwashed and gone up to bed. She lay there apparently so fast asleep that Polly hadn’t the heart to wake her.

  The next morning, with the rush of getting them all out of the cottage in time, with Martin doing his Maths homework at the breakfast table and Gatty mooning into her porridge, the events of the day before took on the semblance of a nightmare, better ignored, easier forgotten.

  Jack Thomson had been put away. Not for a long time, perhaps not ever again, would he walk the woods soft-footed, cap pulled low over mocking green eyes. With Jack gone, life could surely return to normal, the way it had been before Harry went away.

  The red-haired woman answering the door early that morning heard Harry out, then shook her head.

  No, she was sorry but she did the garden herself, apart from a little man who came to do the lawns every other week in the summer. She closed the door firmly in his disappointed face, and went back to the telephone to carry on with her conversation with a friend in Guildford who had been telling her about a day dress she’d got from Dickens and Jones in Regent Street. Lilac angora wool with a small shoulder cape, and a flat bow looped through a slot high on the bodice. Then taking a taxi to Harrods’ Food Hall, she’d ordered a whole ham in time for Christmas, which at fourpence a quarter she felt was good value. Didn’t her friend think so?

  By the time the red-haired woman had put the receiver down, Harry had knocked at four more doors down the long winding avenue, getting the same answer each time.

  ‘Nothing. No, thank you.’

  Raised eyebrows at Harry’s broad Lancashire vowels, sometimes even a hint of amusement in a curled lip before yet another door slammed shut.

  At the end of the avenue Harry stopped by a high privet hedge, bowed his head, and gave in for a moment to the sense of hopelessness flooding over him, leaving him trembling with weakness and anger.

  He wasn’t begging! For God’s sake, he wasn’t asking owt for nowt! All right, so late November wasn’t exactly a good time for gardeners to find work, but there were fruit trees needing root pruning and useless bushes burning; strawberries to be put under forcing frames, crops lifted for storing, and stable manure to be stock
ed. Not forgetting bulb planting, even if it were a bit late for that. Dahlias to be dried and put away for the winter, gladioli and montbretia to be stored, lawns to be swept clear of leaves, and compost heaps to be nourished. Perennials to be bent down, never cut if you wanted to preserve their crowns, and chrysanthemums put in frames to give cuttings later.

  The list was endless.

  Harry held his hands out in front of him, turning them over and over. Idle hands, blue with cold, the same hands that could work outdoors all day in the worst weather the elements could throw up, without ever feeling or looking the way they were today.

  Coughing, shivering, his mind overwhelmed with despair, Harry forced himself to turn and walk up yet another driveway. Turning up the collar of his jacket – what did it matter if it didn’t look as smart as when laid flat – he asked himself why he had never felt the need of an overcoat in his whole life before coming down here? Even with a cutting wind sweeping down from Pendle, he’d managed to work on with maybe a piece of sacking across his shoulders to keep out the worst of the wet. Raising a hand, he lifted the knocker on a mock-Tudor door, and saw a lace curtain twitch slightly.

  The cold was inside him. It was a chilling half-death creeping through his bones, a part of the anger and bitterness he couldn’t control. Harry told himself that if he’d been a man of violence he would have kicked at the black and white door, scarring it with his boots, yelling at the woman to come out from behind her blasted lace curtain to tell him to his face that she thought he was the scum of the earth.

  ‘I fought for you!’ he wanted to shout. ‘You and your kind hung over my stretcher when I was lifted down on to the platform at Victoria Station in 1918. You wiped my forehead with your little white hankies, you gave me chocolate and a packet of fags. I nigh on choked for you, and now you hide, too toffy-nosed even to open the door. . . .’

  As he walked back down the path, Harry looked like a drunken man weaving his way to the next pub, the next pint, craving his whisky. But in his case it was the craving for work setting him literally off balance, guiding him as if walking through water to the next disappointment. The thin whippet lines of Harry’s face deepened into creases, etched by the hunger of his despair.