Our Time Is Gone

by James Hanley

  And Mrs. Fury still hoped. Not for Desmond or Maureen. They were out of it. But she hoped for Denny, for her son Peter, for Anthony. She would never let those things go. And she could not but think of them now, as she pottered about this one room, refuelling the fire, tidying up the hearth, dusting the mantelpiece and brushing the floor. Rearranging the artificial flowers on the altar, which she had now made on a wooden box covered with green baize. There it stood, as it had stood in all her life. She would never feel lonely, never. Not whilst that altar stood there. Soon she would be able to go out and get some proper flowers for it.

  She rarely went out. Most evenings she spent with her black bag before her, its contents littering the small table, letters, cards, envelopes, old view-cards, holy pictures, rolls of cuttings of Peter’s trial. This was the only Peter she now knew. She wondered when, where. Would it be soon or late? Would it be before—no—yes. She hoped to God, soon. The hope burned brightly, she would hold on to it. But at the moment the world was upside down, her world—a series of pieces, the ends of things. Nothing she could hold on to properly. Not yet.

  She said aloud: ‘I must write Denny to-morrow.’

  About half-past nine to ten she went to bed. This stood in a corner of the room under the window that looked out on to the yard where the lorries of the forwarding agents were stabled. Sometimes she would wake in the night to the stamping or crying of the horses, and at half-six her day began—had to begin. Such noise nobody could sleep through. The unstabling of horses, the driving out of horses, the cries of the drivers, their jokes and laughter and occasional swearing. But she would soon get used to that. She would lie awake thinking of Anthony coming home. It seemed ages since she had last seen him. And it made her think of making preparations. Getting the place tidy. What would he say, think about this?

  When she thought of it properly, wisely, she saw the difficulties. No place to sleep. Where would Anthony go? He’d hate it. Suddenly other plans were in her head, buzzing about like bees. Something would be done. She had Denny’s money, not much, but still she had it, and Anthony’s twelve shillings. She would fix everything up all right. This was only temporary. Just wait. In a few months she’d be all right. Just now she just wanted to be alone. Life for the moment was made up of doing little things, trivial things like eating and sleeping. Life was built up of this, and lying awake in bed remembering things. She wouldn’t worry. God was good. Everything would come right in the end. She knew. She always said so. Always believed in it. It kept her alive. That was the main thing. Believing. Her sleep was child’s sleep, untroubled. She was alone, far away, deep down, and she was unknown. She was at last secure.

  Mrs. Gumbs, however, did not think so. She came in one evening from work, and as she always did as she passed Mrs. Fury’s room, knocked to bid the time of day. Finding the door half open she looked in. Mrs. Fury was seated at the table and it was littered with her things, for there was the empty black bag on the floor.

  ‘Evening,’ said Mrs. Gumbs, walking into the room.

  But Mrs. Fury was so absorbed in the game of looking and picking up and putting down that she never noticed the woman at all.

  ‘Really,’ said Mrs. Gumbs, ‘I don’t really know what you get out of those puzzle games of yours, Mrs., but I always feel people are not happy when they keep turning their past out of old handbags. It worries me to see you doing it,’ she went on.

  They had reached the stage in friendship when it wasn’t necessary to ask Mrs. Gumbs to sit down. She was already seated on the chair. She watched Mrs. Fury.

  How could anyone who had reared a family suddenly sink to that sort of thing? All right for monks and scholars and people like that. But a woman who all her life had been on the go, suddenly descending to this pottering about in her room all day and looking at the family relics. It didn’t seem quite right. She said so.

  ‘You’ll go to pieces, Mrs., that’s what’ll happen to you, see! Playing with those things. Now I’ll give you some advice. What you want, Mrs., is work. See? Work. Something to do. Something to keep your mind on. Now don’t you think I’m right?’

  ‘But I am going to work, Mrs. Gumbs,’ replied Mrs. Fury. ‘Have some tea, will you?’

  ‘Oh, you are going to work. It is a surprise. Where, may I ask?’

  ‘Where you work, Mrs. Gumbs. Aboard the ships. I’m going down to-morrow night.’

  ‘Oh! Now that is the right thing to do. That’s sensible. No, I don’t want any tea, thank you. Mine’s just made upstairs. Always is. Nellie’s a decent girl,’ and without another word Mrs. Gumbs got up and seemed to swing rather than walk out of the room. Mrs. Fury heard her slow tread up the next flight of stairs.

  Of course she was going to work. Why not? What had she come here for. Just to sit in the room doing nothing? Ridiculous! Worked all her life. Did Mrs. Gumbs think she was an outright fool? Certainly she was going to do something. One had to. And must. Living was work. But now it could be more. It could be peace for Denny and herself. She’d work—and as Mrs. Gumbs had said—she’d keep her mouth shut. Wouldn’t breathe a word. Thank God. She had her health back again. Never depend on anybody ever again. She was off to-morrow night. She’d give Denny a nice surprise one of these days. One that he wouldn’t get over in a hurry. Why not write him to-morrow? Poor Denny. She hoped he was all right. He did look sad that morning. He was getting on now. He was getting too tired to shovel any more. Hadn’t she seen it? Still, that was his affair. She had tried to keep him off the sea—who wouldn’t after one’s husband has been on it for forty years or more? But he had gone off to it again, after only a short stay ashore, and had then told her that she had driven him to it by her cantankerous ways.

  Cantankerous! He was the cantankerous one. She gathered her past together and put it back into the bag, which she put at the back of the cupboard. She could hear Mrs. Gumbs pottering about upstairs. That was the trouble. There was nothing to do. She was happy now. She had made up her mind.

  Mrs. Gumbs knocked again.

  ‘That’s funny,’ Mrs. Fury said. ‘I was just going out for a walk myself.’

  ‘Splendid! Where’ll we go? I like to sit on the benches at the end of the court and watch the ships going up and down the river.’

  They went off together. Down three flights of stairs, and at the bottom sat two stout women, one of whom was entertaining the other with the most sensational news from the Gelton Times.

  ‘Mary Gumbs’s new friend,’ said the reader, as Mrs. Fury and Mrs. Gumbs walked off towards the river, then she went on reading about the Gelton robberies.

  ‘I think you were wise, Mrs.,’ Mrs. Gumbs remarked. ‘Very wise. I know.’

  Of course she did. She knew everything. Another occupant of the bench looked at Mrs. Gumbs, got up and walked away. The two women looked at the river.

  ‘I’ve worked at the same job for years,’ continued Mrs. Gumbs, ‘on the ships. And it’s interesting work, Mrs., though it is scrubbing and polishing, it is interesting. You see interesting people too. Captains and engineers, divers, people like that. And I don’t mind talking to them either, once in a while. They are broad minded. Mr. Leatherer, he’s our boss, you’ll like him. He’s been in the same job years. Just bossing us women—and of course there’s money in it, too, that is if you like money. A tip here and there. I once got a whole bucket of dripping and two large jars of jam off a German cook. You’ll soon find out that pottering about in your room is only good for the undertakers. You have to keep moving along, Mrs. Working—I always said it, always will—never killed anybody. There’s a lot of people in this world, Mrs., who ought to be made to work hard. I’ve seen some of them. Cures everything. Nonsense, pains and aches, softness in the head! If I hadn’t worked hard all my life I’d be dead long ago,’ and she went on talking, asking questions, answering them, airing opinions, making suggestions, though she stopped short of outright prophecy, until Mrs. Fury began to wonder whether Mrs. Gumbs’s ideas about keeping the mouth shut weren�
��t fast receding. She had never heard anybody talk quite so much, nor indeed strike so many variations from a single thought. Yet she took a great liking to the woman.

  She couldn’t be called young, yet somehow she couldn’t be called old. There was a fixity about Mrs. Gumbs. She balanced perfectly between the extremes. She looked old, but walked as sharply as any youngster of twenty. She wore clothes that suited her age and a hat that covered grey hair. Beneath it lay a mind that had not lost its nimbleness, and a heart that beat with real interest in the job of living. It must be this secret of work. Mrs. Gumbs’s law and Bible. She appeared to have no friends. Fanny Fury had never seen her with any. Once or twice on Friday evenings the woman had shown an interest in Mrs. Fury’s dressing up and making herself look extra nice and then going off as quietly as a mouse. She wondered where. Until one such evening she offered to accompany Mrs. Fury to ‘wherever you go.’

  Mrs. Fury felt no embarrassment in saying ‘no ‘gracefully and with dignity. These Friday evening journeys were lone journeys, secret pilgrimages to church, and there she prayed to God. To have taken Mrs. Gumbs would have been wrong.

  Mrs. Gumbs had some queer ideas about God, and that settled the matter. To Mrs. Fury there could be no queer ideas about God. If Mrs. Gumbs doubted, she believed. It brought a temporary coolness between them, though Mrs. Gumbs, who had such a large ‘experience of the world and life,’ had begun to see something entirely new in Fanny Fury. Something new to admire and even to be amazed about. She developed a curiosity, which, however, remained a curiosity. Her mind refused to let it go beyond the seeding stage. She wanted to enquire, but she didn’t. She wanted some idea of Mrs. Fury’s feelings about God—but she never questioned. She would sit in her window and look down into the yard and watch Mrs. Fury go off. To Mrs. Gumbs there was something beautiful and steadfast about this belief, and these pilgrimages, and once she almost went after Fanny Fury just in order to say: ‘Mrs., there must be something wonderful about your God.’

  But she never went.

  They were very quiet evenings. Like her new friend she liked her room, and the door shut of an evening. Beyond it the world brayed and yelled or got itself excited. But what did the world matter, anyhow? More than once Mrs. Gumbs felt that that immunity from the world, coupled with the beauty of Mrs. Fury’s Friday evening pilgrimages, might make towards a perfection; and surely her goings and comings revealed it. She came back looking rested. There was a serenity about the woman. This new friend was something she had never met before. It astounded Mrs. Gumbs herself that this woman could make her think like this. In her world people did not go pilgrimages on Friday evenings. Now she felt she wanted to know this woman more.

  Here she was on the bench beside her, and without a doubt she was thinking of her children and of her husband, of how through one weakness—or perhaps the wrong kind of strength even—she had suddenly lost hold on them. Mrs. Gumbs had been able to piece a picture from odd words, an occasional hint. She knew two were at sea, one a captain in the army, and two others lost to sight, so to speak. But then the world was full of such struggles, thought Mrs. Gumbs suddenly. She found herself saying:

  ‘What, most of all, above all things, would you like to have happen to you?’ and her intimacy stretched a point and she put a hand on the other’s arm. What would Mrs. like most to happen?

  Instead Mrs. Fury said: ‘What about you, Mrs. Gumbs?’

  ‘Me!’ laughed Mrs. Gumbs. ‘To tell you the truth—nothing. You see, you reach an age when nothing matters. Now what do they call it?—well, you rest on your oars, as the sailors say, and you don’t want anything more to happen—because it doesn’t matter. You’re younger than me, Mrs., and things could still happen to you yet. Never fear that. Tell me, would you like to see all your family rise in the world, or would you like them to be all around you and knowing everyone had failed, not you, but themselves, which is worse? You see, Mrs., I’ve had an education and it wasn’t the slightest use to me, just because I had no ambition of any kind. It’s easier to watch the world moving round you, than it is to make it do the moving. Just wait till you get to know the people down there, Mrs., the sailors, the captains, the engineers. You’ll see what I mean. I like being ordered about. That’s funny, isn’t it? But I do,’ and here she became emphatic, suddenly bringing the flat of her hand down on Mrs. Fury’s knee.

  ‘No responsibilities. That’s the thing. That’s why at sixty-eight I’m as strong as you and even more contented, Mrs. My mother thought she was doing me a good turn by sending me to college when I was young—but, like you saw, I did her a bad turn back. That’s how it is. You’ll go the way you have to go. No other! Look at the people I work with—and it is work, Mrs. Look at them. Some of them live in this very Court. Some of them can’t write their names, some have children every five minutes. But they’re happy. Because they don’t worry about things. They just do their work.’

  Twice Mrs. Fury smiled. This woman was clever. What on earth was she doing here in this place?—and that kind of work too. Well, perhaps she had run away from something worse, in spite of her talk. And as though the other woman had already divined her thoughts, she went on and at the same time drew nearer to Mrs. Fury.

  ‘You may smile, Mrs., but I’m right. I know I’m right. Just look at you. A whole lifetime in one street, doing one thing, hoping one thing. You’ve slaved for them till they grew up. Well, you get nothing from it, Mrs. Nothing, not even a cold stone, and you can’t sit there and tell me so.’

  ‘I was happy, Mrs. Gumbs,’ said Mrs. Fury, turning and looking into the other’s eyes.

  ‘Nonsense, Mrs.! You can’t tell me. I don’t look at the back of people’s hands. I know.’

  Yes, she knew. Always did. Everything, and Mrs. Fury’s smile broadened. But not at what her companion said, or thought. She smiled at greater knowledge. She was actually growing less lonely, her mind had ceased spinning, her spirit felt quietened, less lonely, her face cool. It was this woman. This curious, almost comical-looking Mrs. Gumbs. Even the name amused. An educated old woman without a doubt. But a curious idea about God. Yes, she did not forget that. A very curious idea of God.

  Mrs. Gumbs continued: ‘Happy! Rot! I don’t believe it. You’re only a poor woman like myself. I like that. There’s advantages in being poor. But when were you ever happy? Rot! How are you? It’s all a long struggle. I know! I haven’t experienced it, but I’ve seen it, and why shouldn’t I know as much as you? Every day a struggle, every day a hope, Mrs., every day a plan, a wait, a wondering. Will this be right? Is this wrong? What will happen to him? Is she doing right? What will he think? What’s the happiness? Years ago, Mrs., I knew a young girl who got married to a very nice young man. Her father didn’t approve. The girl married in spite of that. She said she loved the young man. From that day the girl went to pieces. Believe it or don’t—when you love things, happiness is over. Is that silly? Course not. It’s not something like cake. If you had thought more of yourself than your children you wouldn’t be sitting on that bench, listening to me. You don’t know what being content is, Mrs., that’s the truth.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of my children. What makes you think that? I’m just feeling quiet and rested. And, Mrs. Gumbs, I don’t believe you. I mean—but then you are not what I am. I mean—but you know, I have my religion, I always had. It held me up. It still holds me up.’ She took Mrs. Gumbs’s arm and holding it tightly, as though she must hold the woman there, continued: ‘You’re not happy yourself. I know. You don’t believe in anything. But I do.’

  She got up from the bench. It was getting cold, darkness seemed to have swallowed up Edcott Court. A strong wind from the west was blowing in over the river. Mrs. Gumbs got up too. Slowly they walked back to their rooms. Horns sounded on the river-front. Suddenly Mrs. Fury stopped dead.

  ‘Those horns sounding like that. It makes me think of my husband and my son far away on the sea, Mrs. Gumbs. And if I were a contented woman I would walk on, never hearing th
em blow. But I do hear them, because when those belonging to you are away, you have to think of them, and go on loving them. You would have made a fine wife, I’m sure,’ and she started to laugh.

  ‘You know, Mrs., the first night you came here with your handcart of furniture, and the cart came into the yard, I was standing in my window watching you, and d’you know what I said. I’ll tell you. I said: “I like that woman’s face, there’s something good in it.” And I said, “That woman looks ill.” I said, “There she is with her few sticks arriving from some other part of Gelton.” And the next day I heard what your name was and I remembered reading all about that case of your son. I knew then you had come here because you wanted to hide away, because you were disappointed, because things didn’t happen as you hoped they would, and I watched you come to the stairs. I heard you climb up. Twice I saw you. I said I’d like to know that woman, because I like her face. That, Mrs., is the God’s truth. Before you came I never spoke much to people. I used to go off on my own of an evening. I have no relations living now. They are all gone. I came here to live nearly a quarter of a century ago. Here I am still, and still going. But where you are different from me, Mrs., is this. You go to church. You believe. That makes you good. But in my family they had different ideas. And if I have funny ideas about God, what matter. Now I’m going in,’ she concluded.

  They had been on the bench a whole hour. Slowly they climbed the stairs. At Mrs. Fury’s room they stopped. Would Mrs. Gumbs like—but the woman shook her head, said: ‘Good night,’ and went on up to her room.

  Mrs. Fury bolted her door. She made the bed, put the kettle on to make some tea. She felt cheered by the woman. She had never before talked to anybody like that. The only unacceptable part of Mrs. Gumbs was that which held those curious ideas about God.

  After having some tea, she said her night prayers at the altar, named aloud every member of her family, named Mrs. Gumbs, and then, making a sign of the cross, she got up, undressed, and climbed into the bed. She had made up her mind. She would go to work with Mrs. Gumbs. She would write Denny in the morning. She would start all over again. It was worth it. Mrs. Gumbs was a woman who had had education. Something that she had never had. Nevertheless Mrs. Gumbs was wrong. God was good. She believed in God, and to-morrow would be different.