by Dai Smith
But a week later, without note or word, they learned that Bobby had gone to sea, signed on before the mast as deck boy. One of the Trencherman girls called when the bakery had closed and dropped the news almost casually after they had spent a night thinking he had gone to Cardiff and missed the last train to the valleys.
‘Gone?’ Leonard said. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘They’re sailing for Liverpool.’
‘Bobby wouldn’t do that,’ she said.
‘Of course not. It’s not true. There are papers and things to sign. He’s only just seventeen,’ Leonard said. ‘I’ve signed nothing.’
‘Oh, Len, what if he has?’ Lydia caught her throat.
The girl was taken aback at their distress. In the Trencherman household, men went out into the night to jail or across the world without fuss. They had the industrial peasant’s acceptance of leave-takings without ceremony. The Skuses were of Welsh stock and although the language had gone, they remembered ancestors who had worked the land and did not have the anarchic indifference to catastrophe which the coal mines bred.
The girl wanted to get out of the room as quickly as possible.
‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right. Hector’ll look after him. He’s been all over.’
‘All over?’ Lydia said.
‘The world.’
Their throats were dry with apprehension. As soon as the girl left, Leonard began to rush around seeing people. He got a cousin to come in and look after the bakery and left for Liverpool the next morning. They had no information, nothing to go on, not even a postcard. The local grammar school headmaster rang the shipping offices, finally contacted the Seamen’s Pool and found that Leonard’s signature had been forged on the consent forms. Later, they found that some unknown person had impersonated Leonard in the shipping office and that if Leonard had not missed a train at Crewe, they might even have stopped the ship. But it was all too late. The ship had sailed in convoy and Bobby was at sea.
Leonard told her he’d wandered around the hinterland of the docks like a lost sheep. It was a prohibited area and they shunted him from office to office, and to make matters worse, there was an air raid in the middle of the afternoon and he had no chance. Lydia pictured him shouting at the officials, his rage giving way to guilt and finally despair. She remembered his homecoming, the peak of his trilby almost worn through with the marks of his fingernails and fidgeting. She could see his face all through the journey. He was red-eyed and exhausted when he returned and stepped into the tiny kitchen.
‘It’s no good. He’s gone, sailed.’
‘Oh, Len…’
‘They couldn’t tell me where, but I’ve got a forwarding address.’
And that was all. But then came the weeks of waiting until a pathetic allotment note arrived and then more silent, dogged weeks. Nothing more until the telegram came, and that was like some savage blow sent up with a snarl of fate into the middle of the anguish they were already suffering. She could not speak the words aloud, but the précis of them stayed as if carved in her skull for years. MISSING, PRESUMED…
‘Oh, Bobby… Bobby…’
It was too much for the human soul to bear. Not a postcard, a letter, a kind word, an expression of regret, or hope, or remorse, or forgiveness. Nothing. A dead void whose circumference was infinity lay before them and an abyss arose between them, an aching and immediate gulf of sorrow that welled in her body like some unnatural destructive sea of feeling itself. Not another word.
They sat in the kitchen helplessly. A cross word, a tiff, and death. Leonard moaned.
‘Oh, no… no… no.’
It was Lydia who felt that there was no hope immediately. With the telegram in her hands, she knew it was final.
But Leonard was already building up his hopes.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘where the convoy was going. If it was the Mediterranean, there’s a chance.’
‘Why?’ she asked flatly.
‘There are more ships to pick them up. The water’s not so cold.’
But the convoy, it turned out, was going to Russia.
Two days later there was a letter from the shipping company with details, but no hope. Yet Leonard stuck out his jaw and willed hope.
‘Hector was a good swimmer. He’d look after Bobby. Say what you like about him, he’s from the same street. They’re local boys together. I mean, they’re both Welsh.’
But she looked away from him. She had already accepted it. It had happened and it was past. She was too old to have more children. She was a woman who had had a son. She stated it simply. After all, she had previously said, ‘I am an unwanted child who was deserted before I was five.’ All these things were facts. She went about her daily tasks automatically and dared not share her feelings because Leonard could not have stood them. But she knew, and for the following weeks, she was like a wounded animal limping about her lair in silence. There was nothing she could say that made any difference. Bobby was gone. She was already preparing for the future without him.
But there was a night that week in which she seemed to feel her heart stop, experiencing a physical pain that made her gasp.
Without bothering to knock, flushed with drink and hoarse with shouted jubilation, Ben Trencherman came booted and black with pit-dirt into the kitchen, bearing a second telegram. His eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced and they could smell his sweat and the clammy dankness of the pit.
‘The Ruskies have got him. Archangel. The bloody water couldn’t stop him.’
‘Who?’ Lydia gasped.
‘Hector,’ he said blandly, flourishing the second telegram. ‘Haven’t you got yours?’
No, they had not. There was not one for them.
Lydia saw Ben Trencherman’s white teeth glisten behind the coal dust as his jaw fell open. The immensity of his blunder dawned upon him.
‘Oh, Christ, sorry,’ he said. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
He backed out helplessly, leaving a stain against the wall where he had stood.
A month later, Hector came home, frostbitten again, his features indelibly coarsened and his clothes hanging on him. Lydia saw his back in the street first, but eventually he came to see them, bolstered with rum. He could not keep his eyes on her and Leonard went sobbing with rage and anguish out of the room.
‘He passed on very comfortable,’ Hector said laconically. ‘In his sleep, in the night, like. He was very brave. They was all very fond of him. Game, he was. I give him my blanket, tack an’ all, but it was hopeless in that weather.’
‘Yes,’ she said. Although it was obvious that Hector had passed a point of no return in his own life, she did not believe a word he had said. But what was the point of accusing him now? ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. And that was all.
Leonard did not speak that night, but months later he wanted all the details. Hector had one story for them and another for the girls on the street corner. Bobby had died screaming in his arms while the lifeboat was being dashed against the ship’s side and they’d had to cut away the fall. He was dying when Hector got him into the boat, both his hands mangled to pulp. And when she heard this, she believed. It would be like Hector to carry a dying Bobby into the boat, anxious to do the right thing at last, as if by some dumb gesture, he could bring the body home to her to atone in some way. No matter how much Hector had suffered, the war was to him a schoolboy escapade. It sounded like the truth and she believed it and then put it out of her mind.
But not Leonard. The night of torment became the central point of his life. What she had come to think of as the death word, was on his lips.
‘If… if… if…’
She knew there could be no if. There never were any second chances.
‘It’s happened,’ she said simply. She never wasted words. ‘But we’ve still got each other.’
‘Yes,’ he said, but she could see then that he did not really believe it, or that if he did, she was not enough. That was really the great tragedy of
their life, not that Bobby had been taken from them, but that without him, there was nothing else they could create together. Leonard could never communicate any sense of the present afterwards. When the brief period of praying passed, he retracted from life altogether and aged prematurely because from then on, he functioned like an automaton, all his responses conditioned. She could not waken anything in him. She tried, in the initial stages, to join him in prayer. But it was an idle practice. She had faith in herself but not in God. She had not the experience of life to prepare her for that luxury and following her own intuitive stands, she felt there was something not quite right about the Church. There was so much faith consciously aired that it smacked of disbelief. She was too much a realist to depend that much on others or on a supreme being. Not her, she said to herself. They allowed you freedom of action but not of thought, and all her life, while her actions were curtailed, her mind remained her own and the use of it was the only blessing she had left.
But Leonard tried everything else, religion, bowls, a working men’s organisation dedicated to good works, only to find that there always came a point when he suddenly saw Bobby’s face and there were always lonely hours when his mind returned to that night. He thought about the killing so intensely that it was as if he drowned himself a thousand times, and try as he might, his ear seemed never to be far from the sounds of the sea. She heard him mutter in his sleep as if he had heard Bobby cry out and one night when she woke him, he protested about the curses of the sailors – a child in the midst of all that.
She watched him pass through that stage until he hardened his heart to life, and slowly, all the arteries of feeling in him contracted in the face of the pressures of an existence that could allow such barbarous strokes of fate. It was not right. Life was not right. It was more than the human heart could bear and the imagined scenes too awful for the eyes to comprehend. He was their only son, could nobody understand that? From then on, any life outside the ordered treads of the familiar baker’s round seemed to be leading him into that unknown where such things happened. Any life outside the known was a blasphemy and he feared it as a prim man might fear an obscenity. Hear it, and it contaminated you; touch it and examine the fingertips afterwards with terror. So Leonard turned his back upon the living.
He had died, she thought now, sitting peacefully in the armchair, with the blinds of the little room still drawn to his memory, twenty years ago. She had been a widow all that time. But how fruitless to think your life ended in a lifeboat even if it bore the dead body of your son. Poor Leonard, he could never realise it. But she had done her duty by him and now she was free. Freedom was the courage of facing things as they are.
Presently Ada entered with tea.
‘I made another pot. I know you didn’t want it, but I’m sure it’ll do you good. I’ve put a few aspirins in the saucer.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Lydia smiled.
‘Of course,’ Ada said, ‘you’ll want a few days to think things out, but you know you’re always welcome to come to us.’
‘Welcome?’
‘To come and live with us,’ Ada said, raising her voice as if she was speaking to one afflicted. ‘Leonard would have wanted it.’
‘Yes, he would,’ Lydia took the tea and stirred it. It was true. He didn’t like people to be alone, perhaps because his own aloneness was so complete.
‘Of course, it would be a big step to give up everything here. You know how you like to be independent. I mean, we’re all getting on and we’re not the company we used to be. We’re all getting tetchy. And our place does get a bit crowded. But you are welcome. Leonard would have wanted us to ask.’
‘Yes,’ Lydia said. But she could have hooted with laughter. Other people’s lies only confirmed her own strength. One cryptic sentence and she could have sent Ada packing, exposed as a person to whom nothing had happened, one of those unfortunates hardly touched by living.
‘Well,’ Ada hesitated. ‘I expect you’d like a few days to think about it?’
‘No, I’ve made up my mind now.’
‘Oh,’ Ada flushed nervously. She would ever after be ashamed of her next thought. It would be typical of the workhouse brat to say she’d come. But thank God she never uttered it. What would she have to answer for in the hereafter!
‘I won’t move,’ Lydia said. ‘But I’d like to stay a little longer with you in the summer when the children are on holidays.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Ada said hastily.
‘In furnished rooms,’ Lydia said.
‘There’s no need for that.’
Lydia smiled. ‘I’d prefer it if it’s to be more than a fortnight. But I shall always be very grateful to you for asking me. Leonard would be too. He always said how kind you were really.’
Ada flushed. She felt herself humiliated and could not understand why or how it had happened. After all, she thought, how many people in their sixties would welcome an in-law like Lydia? And she had offered. Moreover, she’d brought up children and lived her own life free from the tarnish of the major sins, and she still looked more worn than Lydia. To cap it all, the March wind had given Lydia a high colour, whereas Ada was sure she herself looked positively sallow from contact with the open air. And she felt chesty, fit to crumple. But Lydia sat there stiff-backed, her chin tilted, her small pointed features and smooth grey hair, a picture of health, and still – she had to say it – definitely a charity figure. Completely without style. Perhaps it was the unmarked, tight skin? She did not know. What was she thinking?
Lydia smiled. ‘Poor Ada,’ she said quietly. ‘D’you think I can’t manage?’
‘Oh, no,’ Ada said hastily. ‘No, of course not.’ She could find nothing more to say, nodded solicitously at the aspirins in the saucer, and left the room uncomfortably.
Watching the door close behind her, Lydia summed it all up. As the workhouse master had told her all those years ago, life was very unkind to those who did not help themselves. A human being had an allotted span. You did what you could, that was all. What was the point of complaining? Why sulk? What was the value of pretence? You could grieve a life away by wishing. And of course, he was right. Everything that had happened to her was beyond her wildest expectations. If she had learnt anything, it was to take people as they are. And hadn’t her skill in this direction won her a husband, a son, a house with six rooms, the luxury of in-laws even!
She smiled as she thought of them, lifting her ear to the wall. She knew there’d be silence in the next room and she had the teeniest pleasure in knowing it would be an uncomfortable silence. Whoever would have thought that a little mouse like her could have reduced such a notability as Ada to silence? No; more than that, she’d positively dismissed her!
Gulping, Lydia reached again for the cup of tea and dutifully took the two aspirins from the saucer. Of all the ideas which had been impressed upon her, the most important was that she should never get above her station.
‘I really am grateful to you for offering,’ she said later. ‘And Leonard would have liked it.’
And then she smiled one of her secret smiles and went quietly upstairs to bed, Lydia Skuse, widow, Dan y Graig Street. From now on, this was how she would be described. It was yet another experience.
AFTER FOREVER
THE RETURN
Brenda Chamberlain
It isn’t as if the Captain took reasonable care of himself, said the postmaster.
No, she answered. She was on guard against anything he might say.
A man needs to be careful with a lung like that, said the postmaster.
Yes, she said. She waited for sentences to be laid like baited traps. They watched one another for the next move. The man lifted a two-ounce weight from the counter and dropped it with fastidious fingers into the brass scale. As the tray fell, the woman sighed. A chink in her armour. He breathed importantly and spread his hands on the counter. From pressure on the palms, dark veins stood up under the skin on the backs of his hands. He leaned his face to th
e level of her eyes. Watching him, her mouth fell slightly open.
The Captain’s lady is very nice indeed; Mrs Morrison is a charming lady. Have you met his wife, Mrs Ritsin?
No, she answered; she has not been to the Island since I came. She could not prevent a smile flashing across her eyes at her own stupidity. Why must she have said just that, a ready-made sentence that could be handed on without distortion. She has not been to the Island since I came. Should she add: no doubt she will be over soon; then I shall have the pleasure of meeting her? The words would not come. The postmaster lodged the sentence carefully in his brain ready to be retailed to the village.
They watched one another. She, packed with secrets behind that innocent face, damn her, why couldn’t he worm down the secret passages of her mind? Why had she come here in the first place, this Mrs Ritsin? Like a doll, so small and delicate, she made you want to hit or pet her, according to your nature. She walked with small strides, as if she owned the place, as if she was on equal terms with man and the sea. Her eyes disturbed something in his nature that could not bear the light. They were large, they looked further than any other eyes he had seen. They shone with a happiness that he thought indecent in the circumstances.
Everyone knew, the whole village gloated and hummed over the fact that Ceridwen had refused to live on the Island and that she herself was a close friend of Alec Morrison. But why, she asked herself, why did she let herself fall into their cheap traps? The sentence would be repeated almost without a word being altered but the emphasis, O my God, the stressing of the I, to imply a malicious woman’s triumph. But all this doesn’t really matter, she told herself, at least it won’t once I am back there. The Island. She saw it float in front of the postmaster’s face. The rocks were clear and the hovering, wind-swung birds; she saw them clearly in front of the wrinkles and clefts on his brow and chin. He coughed discreetly and shrugged with small deprecatory movements of the shoulders. He wished she would not stare at him as if he was a wall or invisible. If she was trying to get at his secrets she could till crack of doom. All the same. As a precautionary measure he slid aside and faced the window.
