The Would-Be Wife

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘You don’t know the half. He went to Austria for a week, and he never even brought us a present back, either me or Simon,’ Lynn said, following Janet into the dining room.

  They put their coffee down on the coasters on the polished top, and sat facing each other.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Janet asked. ‘The fact he’s probably got another woman on the go, I mean.’

  ‘What can I do? I’ve no way of finding out for sure, and I couldn’t do much about it if I knew. I’m trapped, Janet. I’ve no home or money of my own. He can come and go as he pleases, and if he wants other women I reckon he’ll have ’em, the only difference being he’ll be a bit cautious about letting me find out about it for fear of my dad. He’s not brave, our Graham.’

  ‘You could live at your mother’s – I mean, your dad’s. You’d have the place to yourself the best part of the time.’

  ‘It would mean dragging Simon out of school again, away from his friends and another nice house with a garden with a swing and trees to climb . . . not to mention separating him from his dad again. It wouldn’t be fair, and what would I live on? If I can’t prove adultery I can’t get maintenance, and I can’t get a decent job. With my mother gone, I’ve nobody to look after Simon.’

  ‘You could try and find a childminder.’

  ‘I’ve looked, and there’s no one near enough to pick him up from school.’

  ‘You could maybe go for a job on nights.’

  ‘Graham wouldn’t look after him if I had to work weekends; he’d be shuffled off to his mother’s, and she won’t want him. She’s got to hold herself ready to go out with Gordon, or so she tells me.’

  ‘It would be too much to ask Margaret to have him, I suppose.’

  ‘I think so, at this stage, and in any case, it’s too far away. My dad’s helping her out with money, now Jim’s gone. The owners paid her his wages up to the minute the ship sank, and that was the end of that. She’s keeping the job on at Birds Eye, which she says pays peanuts, and she gets a bit from the National Assistance. He makes up the rest. It would make more sense for her to give her house up and take the lads to live at Boulevard – it would save her the rent, but she doesn’t want to do that. I think she’s nursing secret hopes of Jim walking through the door one day.’

  ‘Not much chance of that,’ Janet said.

  ‘None at all, I’d say, but I wouldn’t want to try to convince her. I went to the Memorial Service with her two eldest, because she wouldn’t go herself.’

  ‘That must have been a lot of fun.’

  ‘It was really, really sad. All the flags were flying at half mast on the way there, and the church was absolutely full of flowers – bouquets, wreaths, crosses, and anchors, with my beloved father; my darling husband; my dearest son, and messages on them fit to break your heart. Young Jim put our wreath beside them. God Bless Our Jim, they’d written on it. I couldn’t sing any of the hymns, I was that choked. When they started reading the names of all those poor lads you could have heard a pin drop – and the sheer size of places like that seems to magnify the silence, somehow. You could hear people snuffling, and choking sobs back; it was awful. I was glad I’d remembered to bring handkerchiefs because we really needed ’em. I thought: that’s it, now. We’ll never see any of them again.’

  ‘I saw the flags. I don’t think I saw one cheerful face in town that day,’ Janet said.

  ‘I think that’s why I can’t get too worked up about Graham, you know. I’m fed up with the way he’s carrying on, but I’m not devastated – or obsessed by it, not like I was the first time round. I think it’s just panning down to being a way of life, him being out all the time, probably messing about with other women – like his mother putting up with his father.’

  ‘You can’t!’ Janet protested. ‘You can’t let that happen.’

  ‘I can’t do much to stop it. Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but that Memorial Service seemed to put everything into perspective,’ Lynn said. ‘After that, Graham’s carry-on didn’t seem to matter all that much.’

  Chapter 50

  Brenda stood by the cooker passing plates to her Easter dinner guests without having to move more than a step in her tiny kitchen. It might have been easier to eat at Boulevard; at least they’d all have been able to get round the table, Lynn thought – but her mother’s absence would have been felt even more there than it was here.

  Brenda must have read her mind. ‘We’ll have to get a bigger house. You get more than two people in this kitchen, and it’s crowded.’

  ‘You’ve treated yourself to a bit of a holiday, then, Anthony,’ Lynn said, slipping into the chair beside him at the tiny formica-topped table.

  ‘I’ll be having another one in a couple of months, if I can wangle it,’ Anthony said, with a glance at Brenda’s very obvious bump.

  ‘Let’s hope the owners decide to have the ship in for an overhaul when the baby’s due, and you might get nearly three weeks – like you dropped on with your wedding,’ Lynn said.

  ‘That would be good,’ he nodded.

  Their father took a plate piled high with roast lamb and all the trimmings from Brenda. ‘Thanks, love, that looks gorgeous. She’s not a bad daughter-in-law, is she?’

  ‘Or a bad cook, either,’ Anthony said.

  ‘She’s not a bad Auntie, either,’ Simon piped up.

  ‘Or a bad sister-in-law,’ Lynn laughed, ‘Thanks for inviting us, Brenda.’

  Brenda smiled, and blushed. ‘You’re welcome. ‘Did you have a good trip, Tom?’

  ‘We landed a decent enough catch; enough to keep all the coastal towns in fish and chips over the bank holiday. Talking about good catches, you remember Alec McCauley?

  ‘We were friends for months, ’course we remember him,’ Anthony said. ‘I’ve talked to him on the VHF radio a couple of times.’

  Did he ask about me? Lynn wondered. ‘Pass the salt, will you, Brenda?’ she said.

  ‘Did you hear?’ their father went on. ‘He landed about a hundred and twenty-five tons of fish and a dead skipper, a couple of weeks after the Miranda sank. One of the biggest catches Grimsby’s ever seen. Caught the market tide, as well. He must have made a packet.’

  ‘And a dead skipper?’ Lynn repeated.

  ‘Yeah,’ Anthony laughed. ‘He was on the radio when they were coming back to port, said they’d had about eighty hauls and got the boat full of prime quality fish. He reckons the skipper got so excited watching the last one coming aboard that he had a heart attack.’

  ‘Turned out all right for Alec, anyway,’ Brenda said, glancing at Lynn.

  ‘Not as well as it should have done, though,’ Anthony said. ‘Umpteen kits disappeared, he said. Off on the ghost train.’

  Shuffled off before the market, sold for cash, and all in the owner’s pockets, Lynn thought. No tax, no records, and nothing to pay the fishermen at the settling for any of that fish that had been ‘disappeared’.

  ‘It makes my blood boil, that,’ said Brenda. ‘Couldn’t he have reported them, to the Board of Trade, or somebody?’

  Anthony laughed. ‘He could. Trouble is, he’d never have got another ship, then.’

  ‘It’s not right,’ Brenda fumed.

  ‘Get used to it,’ their father said. ‘The whole fishing industry runs on nods and winks and backhanders – and outright thieving. It’s all fiddles and shams and twists from top to bottom.’

  ‘Do you fancy going to the park later, if it’s fine?’ Lynn said, looking towards Simon.

  ‘No, I want to go now! I want my cousins to come, as well.’

  ‘We’ll get a taxi later, and we’ll all go,’ their father said.

  ‘Not us,’ said Anthony. ‘Brenda’s going to have a rest, and I’ll be doing the washing up.’

  Later, when they were sitting in the front room with a cup of tea and their father had gone out for a moment, Anthony turned to Lynn. ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he said.

  She awoke from her reverie, and
gave a self-conscious little laugh. ‘I was thinking about the one that got away,’ she said, ‘like many a fisherman.’

  ‘You’re talking about Alec.’

  She nodded, with a warning glance towards Simon, who was sitting on the carpet, apparently engrossed in a jigsaw.

  ‘Aye, he thinks about you as well.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘We’ve had him on the VHF a few times lately, and he’s never failed to mention you. Have you heard anything from my mam?’

  ‘Not a peep. I really miss her, though, and not just for getting Simon looked after, either. She was funny. She was witty. I miss her like hell. She was so . . . alive! The house is like a morgue without her,’ Lynn said, with a sudden and vivid memory her mother handing her that bottle of perfume and telling her, ‘Spray at your own risk!’ That was almost eleven months ago, now.

  ‘I know. That’s why I asked your dad to come here for his dinner,’ Brenda said. ‘I knew he wouldn’t go to you because of Graham, and I wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be there on his own, although I suppose Margaret would have asked him if I hadn’t.’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Lynn said.

  Anthony looked uneasy. ‘It’s bad, what she’s done, really bad. But she’s still our mam, and I’d like to know where she’s got to,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no way I know of that we can find out,’ Lynn said, and looking towards the door said: ‘Anyway, change the subject, he’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘All right. What do you think to our Margaret?’

  ‘She seems to be doing all right.’

  ‘It’s six weeks since she got to know about Jim and she hasn’t shed a tear,’ Anthony said. ‘I’ve been to see her a few times, and she never says a word about him. It makes you wonder if she ever really loved him.’

  ‘She told me she doesn’t want to grieve,’ their father said, walking back into the room. ‘She reckons if you grieve, it means you’re letting them go, and she doesn’t want to let him go. She loved him all right. I wish your mother had loved me half as much.’

  Nothing is ever finished until people are dead, Lynn thought, and not even then, sometimes. She looked at her father, wondering if he’d really intended to let her mother go, or expected that she would, in that moment of anger.

  ‘I’m sure she loved you, Dad,’ she said, and found herself hoping that he would forgive and forget, and travel over land and sea to find his wife, and bring her home – weaving the same impossible fantasies of impossible reconciliations that most children weave, when the parents they love are divided.

  Chapter 51

  On the Saturday before the Spring Bank Holiday Lynn had a letter from her mother. Piers was managing a hotel in Scarborough and if they wanted to go there after the bank holiday they could have a very good room, free of charge. She’d also written to Margaret, to ask her and the lads as well. Lynn put the card in her handbag, intending to go down to Margaret’s and see what she thought about it.

  She was out in the front garden mowing the lawn that afternoon, when Graham’s car screeched to a halt outside the house. He jumped out and slammed the door, and Lynn saw that his upper lip was swollen. Her heart missed a beat. Her father must have done it – nobody else had ever threatened Graham.

  Overjoyed to see him, Lassie leaped up and went rushing forward to greet him, jumping up at him, yapping with excitement and furiously wagging her tail. Graham pushed her away, then deliberately swung back his leg and with his full weight behind it he gave her a kick her in the belly that sent her yards up the drive. Lynn felt a sharp, sympathetic twinge in her own stomach.

  Lassie lay where she’d landed, completely silent and motionless, too shocked even to whimper.

  ‘Lassie! Lassie!’ Simon dropped the scooter he’d been riding up and down the drive and ran towards her.

  That one deed defined Graham for Lynn. He’d deliberately made that little creature love him, and just as deliberately he had kicked the guts out of her. In spite of his philandering, his conceit and his utter selfishness she’d still had a lingering love for him that he might have revived had he wanted to, but with that one vicious kick, he killed it. Graham had the soul of a torturer, and everything she had ever felt for him was stone, cold, dead.

  ‘What was that for?’ she yelled.

  ‘For getting in the way, stupid bitch!’ he snarled, his speech slightly distorted by the swelling on lip. He marched into the house and slammed the door.

  Lynn went and knelt beside the dog, stroking and soothing her.

  ‘Is she dead, Mum?’ Simon asked. There was a catch in his voice, and tears brimming on his lower lashes. Lassie turned a pair of big, wounded brown eyes up at him, as if grateful for his sympathy but still completely still, not moving even to whimper.

  ‘No, but he’s done her some serious damage, by the look of it. You stay with her, for a minute.’

  She found Graham in the bathroom, bathing his swollen lip.

  ‘You’ve probably killed that dog.’

  ‘Your luck’s in, then. You never wanted her in the first place.’

  ‘I’d never have done that to her. What’s wrong with you?’

  He turned towards her and she saw that his lip was cut, as well as very swollen, but after that first panic Lynn realised it couldn’t be her father’s doing. He wasn’t due back for another four or five days.

  ‘How did you get that? Some irate husband?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘The only irate husband’s in Leeds. If he is irate. If he even realises that somebody else has had a few slices off his cut loaf.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to ring a taxi now, and take Lassie to the vet, and you’re going to pay for her to be put right, Graham.’

  ‘You ring any vets, and you’ll be paying for them yourself.’

  ‘Then I’ll get the RSPCA to come for her, and they’ll have you up in court. Let your cognoscenti chew on that. Let your dog-breeding friend Mrs Orme chew on it. Wait till she finds out how you treated the little bitch she gave you.’

  She went downstairs, lifted the receiver on the telephone, and started to dial directory enquiries. A moment later Graham was beside her, his fingers pressing down on the buttons, cutting her off.

  ‘All right. Ring the vet,’ he said. ‘I’ll take her myself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she nodded. ‘They’ll be asking some questions I reckon, so better get your lies straight before you get there.’

  ‘I want to come with her,’ said Simon, when Graham lifted a whimpering Lassie into the car.

  ‘You’re staying at home, with your mother,’ Graham snapped. He took Simon by the shoulders, thrusting his face aggressively towards his son’s, staring at him, eyeball to eyeball. ‘And you don’t say a word about any of this, to anybody,’ he threatened. ‘Not to your friends at school, or anybody else. Do you understand?’

  Simon shrank away and nodded, white-faced.

  ‘Answer me, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘And don’t you forget it.’

  After Graham had lifted Lassie into the car Lynn had sudden misgivings. She issued her own threat.

  ‘Graham! Don’t you dare just have her put down. I want her back here when the vet’s seen her, or there’ll be hell to pay.’

  She watched him drive away, and then carried on mowing the lawn, adrenaline giving her energy to spare.

  Simon came to stand beside her. ‘Will she be all right, Mum?’ he asked, his face streaked with tears.

  She stopped mowing and looked him in the face. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

  ‘I hate my dad,’ he said. ‘George says he’s a rotten bugger, and he is.’

  ‘George shouldn’t be saying words like that, and don’t you say it either. Anyway, you don’t really mean it.’

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  Janet rang about an hour after Simon was in bed. ‘Is Graham in?’ she demanded.

  ‘No, he’s out – putting his boyish charm to go
od use somewhere, I expect. Except he doesn’t look quite so charming now. Somebody’s given him a smack in the mouth.’

  ‘Has he said anything?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘You?’ Lynn repeated in astonishment. ‘No.’

  ‘I haven’t got time to talk now, but I’m off the day after the bank holiday. Come down, and I’ll make us a bit of lunch,’ Janet said, and hung up before Lynn could get another word out. She replaced the receiver, absolutely mystified. Janet had never been one to waste words, but that conversation had been abrupt, even for her.

  She was finally dropping off to sleep when Graham switched the bedroom light on. She opened her eyes and glanced at the alarm on the bedside table – past three o’clock.

  ‘Where’ve you been till this time?’ she enquired.

  ‘At my mother’s,’ he said, peeling off his socks and throwing them in the corner of the bedroom. ‘Where else would I go, looking like this?

  ‘You never told me who gave you that smack in the mouth, by the way.’

  ‘What’s that rhyme they say round Hessle Road? Mind your own business, eat your own fish, don’t poke your nose in my little dish.’

  ‘So what were you doing at your mother’s, till three o’clock in the morning?’

  Graham’s underpants went the way of the socks. ‘We got talking, that’s all.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Stuff you wouldn’t be interested in,’ he said, pulling his shirt over his head and tossing it after the rest.

  ‘Where’s Lassie?’

  ‘Still at the vet’s. He’s keeping her for a day or two, to observe her, he says.’

  Lynn sat up, wide awake. ‘What for?’

  Graham hung his jacket and trousers in the wardrobe. ‘To make a nice fee for himself, what else?’ He grimaced. ‘There’ll be nothing wrong with her, except a couple of bruises. She’d have been perfectly all right at home.’

  ‘Which vet’s she gone to? The one on New Village Road? I’ll ring him tomorrow, and find out. In fact, I’ll go and find out.’