Her action was so quick that she had the picture out of his hands and was tearing it in two before he could draw a second breath.
As he watched her tear it again, then again, the tears came to his eyes. He blinked them away and his lips pressed tightly over each other for a moment before he said, brokenly, ‘It doesn’t matter, I can draw another one; and I will, because I love her.’
The blow sent him flying. He felt himself toppling backwards; his head hit something sharp; then as if he had dropped off to sleep he went into nothingness …
When he came to he was lying on the bed and her face was hanging over him and she kept dabbing his brow with a wet flannel. His mind was still muzzy and her voice seemed to be coming from a distance as she kept saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Joe. I’m sorry. Oh, if you could only understand. You’re all I’ve got now, all I’ve got, and I don’t want your life ruined by sluts. You can do anything you choose if only you put your mind to it; you’re like me inside, I know, I know. Come, wake up, wake up, Joe. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I love you. Don’t you understand, I love you?’
As her voice dragged him back into full consciousness he thought, it had been a strange day, everybody he had spoken to or listened to had talked of love. It had started early this morning when he overheard Bernard Paxstone talking to Rob Burnip. Bernard was saying that the master was in love with Miss Southall and it wouldn’t surprise him a bit if they got hitched. In some sort of a way he had connected this news with his mother and it gave him the reason why she had been acting odd lately. He recalled that she hadn’t seemed happy for some time and especially so from the morning he inadvertently went into his uncle’s office and found her on the floor and his uncle with his chin bleeding. He had sensed a great unhappiness in her then.
Nobody seemed happy, nobody; yet it was all connected with love and love should make you happy. He knew now he would never see Carrie again, for they would surely send her far away to that place in Howdon. The loss within himself linked up in a strange way with the loss his mother was experiencing, so he could forgive her for hitting him; but he wasn’t so sure if he could forgive her for hitting Carrie.
Carrie had walked by her father’s side through the grounds to where the garden ended and the grassland and the hills began. There was one hill still within the grounds and when they reached the top he made for an outcrop of rock where three sheep were grazing. They had evidently jumped the wall at some point. Another time Dick Smith would have shooed them down by the side of the wall until he found the gap or perhaps a section where the top had crumbled, and then shooed them over it. But today he took no notice of the sheep, which ran away at their approach. Standing with his back to the rock, he looked around him. There in the distance, to the right of him, ran the thread of the river; away to the left, spreading onwards and onwards, were hills and more hills showing great swards of reddy-brown heather merging into purple in the far distance. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead as he spoke to his daughter, saying, ‘You’ve never told me a lie in your life, have you, Carrie?’
‘No, Da.’ Her voice was a whisper.
‘And you’re not going to start now, are you?’
‘No, Da.’
‘Well then, tell me exactly what happened back there ’safternoon. Exactly mind, bit by bit.’
‘Well!’ Her voice still small and each word seeming to hold a trembling note, she began, ‘It was like this, Da. Our Mick came and said Master Joe had to go to school the morrow and would I like to go and say goodbye to him, and I said, “Aye, I would”. So I went and…and…’
‘Aye. Go on.’
She went on, giving him a minute picture of everything that had happened as she remembered it, and when she stopped speaking he looked down at her and asked quietly, ‘But did he touch you?’
She blinked her eyes, stared up at him and seemed to consider for a moment, and his voice urged her by repeating, ‘I said, did he touch you?’
‘Yes, Da. Well…’
‘Well what?’
‘Well, he caught my hands like this.’
She demonstrated. ‘And when we fell over on the bed he…put his brow against mine, like this.’ She poked her head forward and looked towards the ground, and when she lifted her eyes to him he was looking away from her again and what he said was, ‘Aw, hinny. Hinny.’
‘I’ve told you the truth, Da.’
‘And I believe you, lass.’ He was nodding down at her now. ‘And what you told me only goes to prove what I learned a long time ago, that women are like vampires. You know what a vampire is?’
‘No, Da.’
‘Well, it’s something that sticks to you and sucks your blood, lass. And women are like that…and young lasses are like that. A lad or a man has no chance against them, once the urge gets them.’ He bent his head now towards her, bringing his face close to hers, and he said, ‘You’ll soon be a young lass, Carrie. You mightn’t know what I’m gettin’ at now but, later on, just remember what your da’s saying at this minute, and he says to you this: no matter what your feelings, try to keep them to yourself until the right time comes. And you’ll know when the right time comes, and it doesn’t always come through going to church or chapel and having a ring put on your finger. ’Tis better that way for respectability like, but it doesn’t always bring happiness. Can you follow what I’m saying?’
She stared at him for a moment in silence before she said, ‘I think I can, Da. You’re telling me I’ve got to be a good girl.’
‘Aye, that’s it, you’ve got it, that’s what I’m tellin’ you. Now, I’ve got to tell you something else. I’m sendin’ you to Howdon. You’ll be better there in all ways. As you know, your Aunt Alice and her husband Stan haven’t any bairns. You remember them, don’t you, when they came and visited us?’
She gulped and nodded.
‘Well, they’ve always fancied you, and it was our Alice who put it to me last year that she’d like to give you a chance in life. Your uncle’s got a good job; he’s a gaffer in a glass works and he comes from a very respectable family. They brought him up well. He plays the piano lovely. An’ they’ve got a big house, well, not like the big house here’—he jerked his head back—‘but a biggish house in a street, a terrace, it is. Besides a big kitchen, they’ve got a dining room and sitting room and lavatory to themselves. What do you think of that?’
Whatever she thought of it she made no comment; she couldn’t speak.
‘Don’t cry, lass,’ he said, ‘don’t cry. It’ll finish me if you cry.’ He gulped in his throat, ran his forefinger under his nose, then muttered, ‘We’ve come up here a lot, you and me, over the years, and this will be the last time we’ll look towards the hills together until you come on your holidays, or visitin’ like, and so I’m gonna tell you something now, me bairn, an’ it’s this: of all me brood I’ve loved you the best.’
‘Oh, Da! Da!’ She had her arms around his waist now, and his hands were cupping her fair hair and his eyes were moist as he turned and looked towards the hills and only his tightly pressed lips stopped the words coming out: And you’re one she won’t send whoring.
Five
‘Ellen, you’ve got to face up to it. I mean to marry Vanessa.’
Ellen was sitting at the side of the fireplace in the drawing room. Her knees pressed tightly together, she was sitting more like a man would, her hands covering the kneecaps, her body bent slightly forward, her eyes directed towards the blazing logs. She didn’t speak, and Arthur went on, ‘I’m doing the very best possible for you and the boy, you must admit that. The house is nice, charming. I wouldn’t mind living in it myself. I wouldn’t have the responsibility of this one then.’ He swept his hand backwards while keeping his eyes on her. ‘I know it’s going to be a wrench for you, I understand that, because you’ve grown to love this place and you’ve managed things so well over the past years; no-one could have done it better, but there won’t be room for two women in it. You know that yourself. Your suggestion
that you stay on here as a kind of housekeeper wouldn’t work. You know it wouldn’t. Anyway’—he jerked his chin upwards—‘I couldn’t stand that kind of situation, not after what has happened between us.’
For the first time she turned her head towards him and her voice was quiet as she said, ‘You admit then that there has been something between us?’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Ellen.’ His voice was almost a bawl. Realising this, he looked down the room towards the door; then taking a step nearer to her, he said, ‘Don’t make me angry.’
‘Don’t make you angry!’ There was a note of bitter laughter in her voice. ‘You have nothing to be angry about; you’ve had the best of both worlds, you’re going on having the best of both worlds. No’—she cast her eyes towards the fire again—‘that isn’t correct. You won’t allow yourself a mistress and a wife, the prig in you wouldn’t countenance that, would it?’ Again she was looking at him, and he remarked somewhat grimly, ‘No, it wouldn’t.’ Then almost beseechingly he bent down towards her and said, ‘Look, Ellen, don’t let us spend your last few days in the house warring. Vanessa will be here at any minute; don’t, I beg you, make it awkward for her. She’s been very good; she understands the situation.’
She was on her feet now confronting him, her face ablaze, ‘You mean to say you’ve told her?’
‘Yes; yes, I did. At my age she wasn’t expecting to find me a monk.’
‘How long has she known?’
‘Oh, I think she must have guessed pretty much from the first, but I came clean only a few days ago.’
‘You unthinking, callous, garrulous, stupid individual!’
‘Ellen!’ The name was drawn out. ‘You go too far, and if you have hysterics this time, I warn you, you won’t be the only one who’ll use their hands, for I’ll slap you down. Now just think on that.’
As they glared at each other, it was evident to him that she was making a great effort to control a spasm of her ungovernable temper. It amazed him that anyone so composed on the surface could lose control to such an extent as to appear almost insane. Sometimes he was made to wonder if there wasn’t a streak of insanity in her.
He turned from her now and walked towards the door saying angrily, ‘I won’t expect to see you at lunch.’
It was a dismissal, and she felt in this moment that he was placing her on a level with the Smiths. Her suppressed rage rose up, her face became almost purple, and she swung around as if looking for a way to escape. Yet it was because she didn’t want to escape, never to escape from him, that she was feeling like this. It wasn’t to be borne. She told herself this repeatedly: it wasn’t to be borne. The thought of that young girl and him made her feel physically sick, she wanted to retch. She hurried up the length of the room and stood as if meaning to leave by the French windows, but she stooped in front of them and placed her flat palms on the frost-grimed glass. In this moment she had the desire to crash through it, to break something, see the fragments flying through the air, broken, finished in the way she saw her life from now on. She tried to remember that she still had Joe to live for; but she had also seen a fulfilling of a different part of her life, the ambitious part. She wanted for him, even craved for him, the things, the position, that she had missed. At one time she had imagined herself becoming fulfilled in that way through him. However, her love for her son was only part of the whole of her; the love she had for Arthur came under the heading of passion, a burning body demanding passion, a consuming flame that refuelled itself each day and which she felt would never die out.
Lifting her head from the window pane, she stared through the glass onto the terrace and down over it to the gardens to where, in the distance, lay the dim outlines of the hills. Everything was covered with frost. It had held since yesterday. As she continued to gaze out of the window her mind kept saying: ‘What am I to do? What am I to do?’ Then slowly the germ of an answer came to her. It came in the shape of a car which had emerged from the belt of trees, continued round the drive, and was now passing along the front of the house.
Miss Vanessa Southall had arrived in her sporty MG. She was so young, so tough, she hadn’t even bothered to put the hood up; that she had arrived in a car at all and on a frosty day like this, when the roads would be unsafe, showed what kind of person she was, resilient, fearless in a way. Other people in this part of the world put their cars away for the winter, but not Miss Vanessa Southall.
She turned from the window and went down the room towards the door, repeating the name to herself as she went: ‘Miss Vanessa Southall. Miss Vanessa Southall.’
Joe looked at his two cousins standing before him. They were in Martin’s room and although it was a large room furnished with a rosewood bedroom suite, to his mind at that moment it was the two young men that seemed to fill it, especially Martin.
With the pain in Joe’s chest growing deeper and deeper, Martin seemed to swell before his eyes; then the hand came on his shoulder and Martin’s voice, jovial now and very like his father’s, said, ‘Come on, nipper. Cheer up. You won’t be all that far away. And…and you’ll be coming back on Christmas Day.’
‘I won’t.’
‘What makes you say that?’ It was Harry asking the question, and Joe answered, ‘Just, I know I won’t; once we’re gone we’ll be gone.’
‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’ Martin’s voice was loud and he turned away as he spoke and rubbed his hands together as if they were cold, which they were, as the bedroom had no heat whatever.
‘I’m…I’m not a little kid any longer, Martin.’
‘What!’ Martin turned abruptly and faced him; then he looked down on him for a moment before he said, ‘I’m sorry, Joe, you’re quite right; you’re not a little kid any longer. We should have realised that, both of us.’ He glanced at his brother. ‘You’ve never been a little kid, really. Anyway, we know where we stand now, don’t we? And as you’ve just said, I doubt if you’ll be here for Christmas, and that being the case we’ve brought your presents.’ He nodded towards the table. ‘Those are to take with you.’
Joe moved his head to the side and gave a short sharp cough, then said, ‘I’ve…I’ve got something for you both. I…I gave them to Mary to put on the tree.’
There followed a long pause: they stood in awkward silence, Martin and Harry looking down on the dark bent head that was hiding the pale, drawn face of the boy. Presently Harry spoke, saying, ‘Time soon passes; it won’t be long before you’ll be able to go your own way…What I mean is—’ he hesitated, glanced at Martin, then finished, ‘to decide things for himself, won’t he, Martin?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
Joe’s next words, however, seemed both to belie his previous manly statement and to deny the truth of Martin’s words. ‘I’m nearly eleven,’ he said, ‘and sixteen, seventeen or eighteen appears to me like next Christmas; it’ll never come.’
Martin bit on his lip before saying, in a voice that was almost a gabble, ‘I know how you feel. I was like that myself; in fact, I still am. At times I feel I can’t wait until I’m twenty-one, when I’ll come into my grandmother’s money, and the things I want to do with it is nobody’s business. Not that father keeps me short, but it isn’t like having cash of your own, and I can’t see me earning any for some time.’ He grinned now at Joe and, realising that he had succeeded in taking his attention away from himself, he went on, ‘I want to breed horses. I’m going to breed horses. As you know I’m quite daft about horses, like he is’—he nudged his brother now—‘about motorbikes. You, too, will go daft about something that’ll take your mind off everything else. What do you think you’ll go daft about, Joe?’
Joe replied quietly, ‘Writing, or painting.’
‘Oh.’ The word was said simultaneously by Martin and Harry and they turned and looked at each other, Harry saying, ‘Well, he’s good at both, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘And what about cricket and football?’ Martin had his head on one side and a grin on his face as
he asked the question, and Joe replied, ‘No; they don’t really appeal to me.’
‘You’re a funny fellow,’ Martin now put out his hand and ruffled Joe’s hair, then he added, ‘It’s a wonder you don’t take an interest in cars. Now that would be exciting. I’m surprised they don’t attract you ’cos your mother can drive as good as a man. She can change a tyre, too, and that always surprises me, for she doesn’t look mechanical. Now does she?’
‘No.’ As Joe stared back at his cousins he was asking himself when they were going to stop being kind, because if they didn’t stop soon he knew he would cry. They were talking about things that didn’t matter, to them or to him. He wished he could get out of the room. He wished he was leaving today instead of tomorrow morning. He wished his heart would stop aching for Carrie. He wished he could die, yes, he wished he could die because, from now on, he would have to live with his mother. There would be no-one else but himself and her; she would have no-one to love but him because, he reasoned, she couldn’t love his uncle now he was going to be married, and he didn’t know how he was going to bear her love.
He couldn’t really explain the effect her love had on him. It was like when he had a nightmare and got tangled up in the bedclothes and couldn’t breathe. And yet he knew he loved her and wanted to comfort her because she was very unhappy. She’d be sitting alone now. He ought to go to her. His uncle and Miss Southall had gone walking through the estate. They had gone out after lunch. His mother hadn’t gone in to lunch and she had told him not to either. He hadn’t minded because he wasn’t hungry.
It was four o’clock now and it was getting dark; he must go and find her. His legs suddenly moved. His head down, he made a rush for the door, mumbling, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ He ran the length of the corridor to his mother’s room. After tapping on the door and hearing no answer, he pushed it gently open, then peered into the room. It was empty. He walked slowly now to his room and there, standing at the window, he looked down onto the back of the stables and the little barn that was used as a garage on this side of the yard. He could just make out the main yard. There was no movement there. They had been short-handed in the yard all week: Mr Smith was off with a bad cold and today it was Bernard Paxstone’s half-day. Rob Burnip had been working on his own, but from the light in one of the windows above the harness room at yon side of the yard, he guessed that Rob would be working up there. He liked Rob. He was another one he’d miss and it wasn’t because he always had a bag of black bullets in his pocket and was never mean with them.
My Beloved Son Page 6
