by Sue Gee
Deepest condolences, the card had read on the wreath. Miss Aickman would have ordered it; Mr Straughan had written the words: black ink, his strong distinctive hand.
They drove out of the town, as light on the ring of hills faded.
The house smelled of ash and cold air. He dropped his bag and stood in the unlit kitchen, putting his hands to his face. Each day it was such a relief to do this: after the greetings, the smiling, the ‘Come along, lads,’ the ‘Get out your books,’ the ‘Silence!’ Though he didn’t have to say that often. They were quiet and respectful, on the whole.
He shut his eyes, drew the deepest breath. That, too, felt an immeasurable relief.
‘Margaret.’ Each day he said it. He said it when he woke, and when he shaved at the washstand—
How long had she lain there, before he came home?
He said it as soon as he came in from school.
‘Margaret. My Margaret.’
You can’t stay in that house, said his parents, her parents. You mustn’t be up there all on your own. And, He’s stubborn, they said, when he’d shaken his head and left them. Like her. Neither of them would be told, and if only they’d listened—
He took his hands from his face, lit the paraffin lamp on the table. He refilled the range and sank into the chair beside it, where she used to sit and sew, or read. They used to read together, when he’d done his marking; reading together was one of their deepest connections.
‘Margaret?’
She’d look up at her name, put her hand out. They never tired of looking at one another. And they talked, they talked all the time. Until they learned the great beauty of silence.
‘My love.’ A murmur. And then—
They lay in the deepest quietude, the window open on to the cropping of the sheep, the calling of curlew and chough, and then the starlight.
Now – there were so many places where she was not. She was not in that chair by the fire, her head bent over her book, her sewing. She was not in her place at the table, passing his plate, listening as he told her about his boys. She should have been telling him about her girls, as she’d done when they were getting to know one another. Teaching was in her blood.
‘Good morning, girls!’
‘Good morning, Miss Ridley!’
The Ridleys had been teachers for as long as anyone could remember. Her grandfather had taught maths at the Board School in Hexham. Her father was Head of the Cawbeck village school. But then she became Mrs Coulter, and a married woman was not allowed to teach.
‘What shall I do all day?’
‘We’ll have children, won’t we?’
‘Margaret,’ he said to the empty kitchen, where the clock ticked on the wall. Where had she gone?
She was not sewing a quilt for the baby who never came, not humming as she took down her coat from the peg, pulling her gloves from the pocket as they set out at weekends to walk.
Sometimes they went down to the river, tumbling out of the forested hills, a great plantation dating back a hundred years or more, and picnicked on the bank. In summer, kingfishers flashed. ‘Look! Look at that!’ Sometimes they struck out across the moor, hand in gloved hand swinging as she sang: folk songs, border ballads.
‘You shall have a fishie, on a little dishie,
You shall have a fishie, when the boat comes in . . .’
She sang songs from her girlhood, too, heard on the wireless in her parents’ house in Cawbeck: ‘Tea for Two’; ‘Happy Days are Here Again’. Sometimes he joined in, though he didn’t think he had much of a voice, beside hers. She was the musical one.
‘We shall have a family, a girl for you, a boy for me . . . ’
Her sweet clear voice rang out. Sheep bolted into the bracken. Five miles across were the remains of a Roman fort: they ate their sandwiches leaning against the broken stone wall, the wind in their faces, hearing the high sad pipe of lapwing.
The schoolchildren knew all about the Romans, as if they were part of their own families, their ancestors.
Margaret had been in her first term at Kirkhoughton Girls when she walked Class One in pairs along Milk Lane and up into the Square. A fine day in early October, 1933, sun shining on the weathered sandstone of the Museum. Many of the great buildings in the Square – the Assembly Rooms, the Museum, the Judge’s Lodging – were sandstone, designed in the early eighteenth century, she had told her class, by a pupil of William Newton. In they went, through the big oak doors.
‘Ssh, now, girls. Take a sheet, each of you, that’s it.’
They gazed at coins, pots, fragments of pots, little figures, beaten bronze necklaces. The morning sun came in at tall windows. They pressed their faces to the glass-fronted diorama: women cooking, men marching over the hills. Then the rooms were suddenly noisy and crowded, as a class from Kirkhoughton Boys arrived.
‘Quiet, lads!’
She looked across, saw their teacher, tall and nice-looking, shepherding in a straggler. He caught her eye.
They knew, almost at once, though neither had ever thought it could happen like that.
Back at the school, the girls began a frieze. She painted an enormous backdrop in sections: long straight roads cutting across moorland and valley. She wrote in the names of real places and features – places the children would already know about, or could go to, on a trip: the Cheviot Hills to the north-west, Hadrian’s Wall, to the south; a long wavy blue line for Fallowleys Burn, which ran down from the hills and through Kirkhoughton, with its fine stone bridge. Their brothers fished there in the summer holidays. She marked pikes and crags. Hencote Moor had been just a name to her then.
One afternoon, coming out of the school gates, she found the young teacher from the Boys’ school waiting for her.
Her first years spent history classes drawing, painting with powder paint, cutting out: great grey stones to build the Wall, the barracks and milecastles set along it, the sally ports, the turrets and forts and settlements. They painted the helmeted figures of centurions, added foot soldiers, patrolling garrisons, to march along the wall, and along those great roads, rising and falling over the land.
The afternoons darkened, the gas lights went on. They cut out women in togas, huge amphorae, heaps of coins. There was a village, a bathhouse. Stables. Everything was glued on with flour paste, and by the end a whole Roman world ran round three walls of the classroom. Miss Brierley came in to admire.
All this, she had to give up.
‘But you still want to marry me?’
‘Kiss me again.’
Walking up the track to Hencote Moor one Saturday, the fifth they spent together, they’d come upon the empty little house. They peered in through dirty windows, tried the door. Someone must own it, surely, they said, sitting down on the grass. They looked out towards the distant town. They could ask at the agent in the Square.
You don’t want to live all the way up there, said her parents, out in Cawbeck, a thirty-minute bus ride from Kirkhoughton. That’s not very sensible. She and her brother had always been sensible, competent and clever. They were proud of them. She said it was what she and her fiancé both wanted, and since until then she had done almost everything she was asked, they said, Well, if that’s how it is.
When she fell ill, all sense deserted her.
Her coat still hung on the kitchen peg, and would always hang there, next to his. It smelt of wood smoke and paraffin, like everything else. Reddish-brown hairs still clung to the collar. One day, she might come back, and need it.
‘Margaret.’
Sometimes, saying her name aloud like this, like an incantation, he half expected to see her, singing as she ironed their clothes with the flat iron, or put the heavy kettle on the range. ‘Tea for two and two for tea . . .’ He saw her lighting the lamp, climbing the stairs to their bedroom, washing at the stand, there in her nightgown, splashing her face, b
rushing her teeth, turning to smile at him, saying his name as she climbed into bed beside him.
‘Steven.’
They say you know you love someone when you hear them speak your name. As if it had been waiting to be spoken, by just that voice. That was what it had been like, for both of them, when they went out together for the first time: Mr Coulter and Miss Ridley. Finding out each other’s first names, hidden behind those titles, was almost like undressing.
She was kneeling up before him while he slipped the gown over her head; looking into his eyes, smiling, murmuring, ‘Here I am,’ as he enfolded her.
There was no one to say his name now, no one to call it. He made tea, put the pie his mother had made in the oven. He got out his books and sat at the table, trying to do his marking. End of term essays.
‘The Battle of Alnwick took place in 1174, when William I of Scotland invaded Northumbria. He was met by Ranulf de Glanvill, leading four hundred knights . . .’
Snow blew against the window. The clock ticked into the silence. When she was here, he had hardly noticed it.
2
1937
The New Year began with the setting of her stone. On a freezing January afternoon they all stood round her grave in the Cawbeck churchyard.
Of course this was where she must lie, with all the old Ridleys around her, but although this was where they had married, her father walking with her through the village and along the grassy lane, so that today made it all of a piece, in a terrible way; it felt as lonely and pitiful as on the day of her funeral, to have her so far from him. Left to himself, he would have buried her up on Hencote, marked with a stone from the moor.
In life she had been his. In death she belonged to everyone: her white-faced mother; her father, biting his lip; her brother Andrew, silent all through lunch, who’d been the top student at Kirkhoughton Boys and now was studying law in Edinburgh.
Rooks cawed from the elms. Steven stood between his parents and they all looked at the fresh new stone, and its carving.
Margaret Coulter, née Ridley, beloved wife of Steven
19th June 1912–3rd December 1936
A June baby, born in the loveliest month of the year, sun and shadow dancing over the churchyard grass on the day of her christening, birds flitting into the yew. He thought that was how it would have been.
‘He’s made a good job of it,’ said his father, clearing his throat.
Her father nodded. Her mother began to cry. Andrew stood stiff and apart.
The pale winter sun was sinking. They walked back along the path to the lych gate, the grass stiff with frost, great big icicles hanging from the guttering on the church.
‘What will you do now, Steven?’ her father asked him, back at the house, by the fire. The cat was stretched out like a dead thing. Teacups chinked. He couldn’t answer. He stood looking out at the darkening garden; birds beat their way to the trees.
He went home, climbed the track up the moor, climbed the stairs, flung himself down on the bed.
A young man sobbing in an empty house.
This is it, this is it, this is it.
3
Spring crept over the moor. It came in the faintest green on the thorn tree by the shed, where one half-term morning, fetching in fresh wood for the range, he disturbed a hedgehog.
‘Hello.’ It lay in a corner beyond the log pile, uncurling with the sudden flood of light from the open door. At once, with his shadow, the sound of his voice, it curled up again, and he stepped quietly away. Next morning, it had gone. He felt painfully disappointed.
He stood looking round: at the saw on its hook, the work bench and planer, and remembered the carpentry he’d done in the first year of their marriage: the new kitchen door, the window frames. He thought of Margaret on summer days, sewing and watching him work, as his father had worked all his life, the finest cabinet maker for miles. He wanted to tell her about the hedgehog, felt a new wave of loneliness as he carried the logs out. It had rained in the night, and the branches of the thorn tree were dusted with fresh green, the tightest buds. Pools of peaty water lay in the grass.
Spring came with the sheep trotting up the track again, the farmer touching his cap and saying how sorry he’d been to hear the news, lambs racing and butting and crying as the flock spread out in the sun. The thorn tree was thick with white blossom, the tough moorland grass and the bracken greened up, the heather was a purple haze. Then came the call of the curlew.
He took down his coat and went walking. He was looking a bit less peaky, his mother told him, when he went home to Birley Bank at Easter. Ducks were nesting on the riverside, daffodils blew in the garden. ‘Got a bit of fresh air on your face again.’ She put lunch on the table. ‘Still too thin, though.’ ‘Leave him alone,’ said his father, carving spring lamb. ‘He’s too much alone as it is,’ she said. ‘How can you stay up there, Steven, love?’
Back at school the talk in the staffroom was suddenly of the bombing of Guernica, a little Spanish market town no one had ever heard of. ‘Have you seen this?’ Frank Embleton flung The Times on the table. ‘The boys must be made aware of this,’ he said. Then the bell rang, and the day’s routine began.
Routine was saving Steven. He had started the first years on border raids, fortifications, castles and peel towers. Things they had learned in infant school, but it did them good to come to it all again. They traced the outline of the county, marking in castles: Haydon Bridge; Alnwick and Bamburgh on the coast, Lindisfarne on Holy Island; Featherstone at Haltwhistle; Kirknewton, Newcastle. There were more castles to the mile in their county than anywhere else in the British Isles, he reminded them. More battle sites.
As the boys went up through the school they had local history under their belt, a solid foundation to anchor them for the rest of their lives: that was what Straughan said he wanted – another historian, and a Northumbrian to the last cell of his body. Then they could look at the world. He spun the great globe in the hall.
Everyone sensed that the world was changing: here, with men out of work and women scraping by; with the great march from Jarrow to London last autumn. Here, and in Europe: civil war in Spain, Hitler and Franco in alliance, women and children blown to pieces in a market square.
‘Listen to this,’ Frank Embleton told his sixth-formers, reading out from The Times.
But the bell rang, homework was given, exams loomed in the summer.
The second year was Steven’s own class. Each morning he took the register. Archbold, Aickman – that was Miss Aickman’s nephew. Here, sir. Bell, Carr and Cowens. Dagg. Here, sir. Herdman and Hindmarsh. All the old names. In medieval times they’d have been feuding in graynes, clans. There were one or two feuds here now.
‘Mather.’ ‘Here, sir.’ ‘McNulty. Moffat. Moffat?’ Moffat’s father had died two years ago, after months in the sanatorium. ‘He’s poorly again, sir.’ He put a cross. Later in the morning a note would come. Potts. Rigby. Stoker. ‘Here, sir.’ Neat ticks in the column all the way down. Wanless. Wigham.
Margaret had wondered if your place on the register affected your sense of yourself. Sometimes, she’d said, she started at the bottom with her girls: she thought it did them good, suddenly to be first and last when you weren’t used to it. And it made them laugh.
‘Wilson.’
‘Here, sir.’
‘Good.’ He closed the register. ‘Get out your books.’
The room smelled of chalk dust and boys. By break-time they could smell pot-pie, wafting from the kitchen along the corridor, where everyone walked to the left.
In the staffroom he took his tea from the trolley. ‘Have a bun,’ said Frank Embleton, fresh from the Lower Sixth, and the Boer War. He passed the plate.
‘Do you good, sir,’ said the girl behind the trolley.
‘That’s right,’ said Embleton, giving her a smile. Molly-on-the-Trolley was what
Armstrong called her, a pretty girl. She brushed crumbs off her flowered pinny and smiled with a blush.
Embleton and Steven sat by the open window, away from all the smoke. Gowens had his pipe in his mouth almost before he was through the door; Armstrong and McLaughlin sat in clouds of Navy Cut. David Dunn stood in a corner, leafing through a heap of papers. One or two dropped to the floor.
Shouts of the boys came distantly from the playground at the front: on this side of the school they looked out over the hills. Frank Embleton’s mind had left Spain and the Boers for now: he talked about Tom Herron, deputy head boy, whom he was preparing for a scholarship. Steven listened. Frank had been to Oxford, he was very bright: Straughan had made him Head of Department as soon as old Ogilvie retired. Dunn hadn’t liked that, but no one had thought he would get it.
The morning sun shone on Embleton’s fine young face and fair hair. He polished off his fruit bun, changed the subject.
‘How were the holidays?’
‘Quiet.’ Steven looked away. ‘I saw my parents. You?’
Frank said there’d been a little concert at home. He had a sister, Diana, a cellist, who played in a trio of friends.
A boy and a girl: that was the family Margaret had said she wanted. At once, it was what Steven had wanted too, though until they met he had scarcely given it a thought. Perhaps only children didn’t. He’d had a dog as a boy.
Frank was still talking. He’d hardly heard a word.
‘Shall we go for a drink one evening?’
‘All right – thanks.’ It was a long time since he’d been out and about.
The bell rang from the playground and they got to their feet. Year Three: the Industrial Revolution. Railways taking coal down from Tyneside to the river, Puffing Billy, colliers taking coal down the Tyne to open sea, and to London. Stephenson’s Rocket. Stephenson’s High Level Bridge at Newcastle, an amazing achievement.
