The way those words had of taking you along with them: for one instant you’d be nestled in them, comforted, the next they’d be spiking up, alarming you. He’d be holding his breath back in case he missed something and, my word, couldn’t he just see those hills right before him? The hills and the gorse all golden against the silvery water shivering in the blackness of that well.
Pansy in her blue checked dress and eyes that he always fancied were like the pansies that sprouted up in Mother’s garden among the bricks around the back, the white encircling the middle so that the blueness stood out so deep and dark. She’d lower her voice right down as she came near to the end, right down, soft and slow and Clem would hear himself breathe out hard as she said the last words, though Joe Marsh who shared the desk with him would give him a look.
‘Son, don’t you go thinking about courting Pansy Williams.’
‘Now, Mother, what makes you think I’d be courting Pansy?’
Though it’s past eleven Mother is still up, pushing bread and apples and parsley and onions through the mincer for stuffing the goose tomorrow. Well, he’s had a fair bit more than his usual couple with the lads outside the hall and he feels the grin he can’t hold back spreading across his face.
‘You’ve been soft on her since you were a boy. It’s time something was said.’
He sits down at the table, takes one of the mince pies she’s got cooling on the wire rack and watches as she mixes the stuffing with her hands, kneading it through her fingers. She covers the bowl with a cloth, unscrews the clamp and pulls the mangle out of the mincer.
‘What’s wrong with Pansy?’
‘You leave those mince pies alone else there’ll be none left for tomorrow. For a start, Pansy and her ma are left-footers.’
The pies were hot and good, the pastry crisp and sweet and filled with nuts and spiced dried fruit and he took another one. ‘Her dad’s not.’
‘You don’t have to look very hard to see how that’s worked out and all.’
‘That’s them, though.’
‘You think it’d be different with you? Clem, I’m telling you now, I won’t have any grandchild of mine off to St Brendan’s bowing and scraping to plaster statues. Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘I won’t have Dan Williams joining up with our family neither.’
‘No, Mother.’ He says it meekly, grinning at her.
‘Don’t you yes mother no mother me, my lad. Pansy Williams is not for you. She’s a pretty girl and all but she’d never make you happy. There’s girls that’d suit you better.’
But he wants Pansy.
Son, don’t you go thinking about courting Pansy Williams.
Well, it’s a bit late for that, he thinks, as he settles himself into his bed. It’s always been Pansy for him. He remembers how, when they were little ones together, he’d be jealous of Otto if Pansy took his side, or favoured him in any way. He remembers how they led her, him and Otto together, to the hiding place they found in the flaxes.
She dances with him more than any other of the lads and it makes him hope she likes him best. Still, he can’t be sure of her. He sees how the other lads look at her; well, she’s a beauty is Pansy. He knows he must say something to her, give her an idea of what he feels and what he wants for the two of them. Up until now, he’s been too shy, but she gave him a kiss after the Miners’ Ball and she held his hand on the way home from the dance tonight so perhaps now’s the time for it.
After Christmas. After Christmas. I’ll do it after Christmas.
But then she’s not at the dances any more. He worries over why she’s not coming. He’s always known she was too clever for Smithsons, for Blackball as well, if he’s honest, and he wonders if she’s going someplace else. Then he hears her ma’s been poorly again.
So that must be it. He can wait. There’s time enough. Sometimes it’s the thinking about something to come, the dreaming about it, that’s to be appreciated while you’re waiting for it to happen.
18
She’s standing across the street as he walks towards home and he hesitates before he crosses over. He’s on the way back from the mine, still with the muck of it on his face. Why is she out here in the cold? Though she’s got her coat on and there’s a scarf covering her head, the wind’s that harsh he sees she’s shivering.
‘What are you doing out here?’ His voice sounds gruff. He doesn’t mean it to be like that but the coal’s in his throat. He clears his throat, swallows hard. He likes to be dressed in a clean shirt and his good pants and jacket, his face washed and his hair combed, when he sees Pansy but here he is in his work clothes with his crib-tin under his arm. He’s looked for her every Saturday night at the dances and he’s gone home on his own, thinking about how only a while ago she’d be walking with him, her arm tucked into his and the string of beads she always wore with her dancing dress sparking under the lamps. It’s a while since he saw her. His voice softens as he looks down at her. ‘It’s too cold for you to be standing about.’
She tilts her head back and looks directly up at him. She’s still little, is Pansy, and that way she has of looking up at a man, well it makes him feel big and powerful.
‘I’m waiting for you.’
‘Are you now?’ Well, and that’s one for the books. Pansy Williams waiting for him? He feels the daft grin that’s spreading across his face.
‘I’m in trouble.’
She’s looking him straight in the eye but her voice falters just a bit and he doesn’t, for a minute or two, take in what she’s said, he’s so caught up with the thought she’s waiting for him. Then he grasps the other part, that she’s in trouble and that makes him feel better still, since she’s come to him for help. He knows her ma has not long gone and Pansy will be grieving for her. It’s said around town they were close at the end, the two of them. ‘Is it your daddy?’
‘I’m in the family way.’
She looks away and she doesn’t say anything more, just stands there, her gaze fixed on the other side of the street. There’s a coldness inside him, filling him up so it feels as if all his innards are frozen. He looks at her, waits for her to look back up at him and laugh and tease him, say she’s just pulling his leg. But not even Pansy would joke about something like that.
He can’t think what to say so he stands there like a fool clutching on to his crib-tin. ‘I d-d-don’t understand.’ Now he’s stuttering; he hasn’t since he was a little lad and the words wouldn’t keep up with what he was thinking to say.
She looks back at him, then she shrugs. ‘I’ll be off.’
‘I’d b-best marry you, then.’
The words blurt out without him thinking whether they’re right or fair or even how it’s to be done. He hears her breathe in sharply.
‘Will you?’
Jesus and now what’s he done? ‘I said I would.’
‘Are you sure, now?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Well—’ Without thinking his eyes go to her belly but there’s nothing he can see, bundled up as she is in her coat. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to th-think.’
‘It’ll have to be soon,’ she says, ‘and listen now, I don’t want no one else knowing. Don’t you go telling anyone, Clem Bright. I’ll see you here tomorrow night.’
And there she is, walking up the street away from him, not even explaining or saying she’s sorry, only telling him what he must do. He goes inside, into the kitchen, sits down at the table and Mother sets his dinner down in front of him. He’s late back so the rest of them have eaten, Dad already off to the union meeting and he can hear the girls at the back of the house. He eats slowly, filling his fork, pausing between each mouthful before lifting it to his mouth. He barely knows what he’s eating. I’m in the family way.
Pansy. Pansy. Jesus.
‘H
as the stew dried up?’ He looks up, sees Mother watching him. His plate’s been sitting on the rack above the range, a plate covering it and, yes, there’s enough gravy around the steak though the kidney’s gone grey and shrivelled.
‘It’s good enough.’
‘There’s apple jelly in the larder.’
‘It’s all right without.’
He feels her eyes on him as he finishes up what’s on his plate. He knows she’s sensing in the way she always does that something’s not right and that any minute the question will be out there in the warm, steamy kitchen between them demanding an answer. She’ll say it the way she always does, gentle and kind, What is it, son? and he’ll want to tell her, won’t want to see disappointment in her face as he says there’s nothing and she knows he’s keeping something to himself.
They’re too close for him to put away what he’s feeling from her and just now that closeness they’ve always had is what’s keeping his mouth closed and his head down. Most times he’s able to explain to her what’s gone wrong while she makes a pot of tea and then they talk it out and put it right together. Most times they’re in agreement. This is the one thing they’ve had their differences about, though.
Don’t you go thinking about courting Pansy Williams.
Mother would’ve come around to it in the end. All it needed was time; she’s never denied him anything he really wanted before. Once he’d talked her around she’d persuade Dad. That was the way it worked.
He’d counted on time for Mother and Dad. Time for him and Pansy as well. Time for him to make her see she wanted to dance with him more than any of the other lads and that it was him she wanted with her at supper time, handing her a plate and a cup of tea, and him taking her home afterwards and all. He’d been prepared to wait for her to grasp how it should be between them, grasp how he felt about her and how he’d look after her the way she should be.
Time for him, too, to see her smile up at him and feel her hand on his shoulder, to put his hand on her waist and move together around the hall. Time to see the other girls and lads looking and knowing something special and sound was between them and not just Pansy messing about, laughing and flirting like she did. He’d thought how, once she loved him, he’d go to Greymouth and buy a ring and do it romantic-like, down on his knees, holding up the ring to her like in the books and she’d say yes.
Not until she was ready, though, not until she loved him and he knew it. She’s a beauty is Pansy with her eyes and hair and dainty looks and other lads see that well enough. He wanted to be sure of her before he said anything.
But now, without any time for the fun and trust and soundness, there she is needing him to marry her and he’s said he will. So that’s that: a man has to keep his word. I’m in the family way. It’ll have to be soon.
He doesn’t know the first thing about how to go about getting them married for a start-off. All he does know is if he sits here much longer with Mother looking at him the way she is she’ll be asking her questions and she won’t take no for an answer. He gets up from the table.
‘I’m making a pot of tea and there’s a bit of shortbread in the tin,’ she says.
‘I’m tired.’
She looks hard at him. It’s not even eight o’clock. But it’s not that unusual for him to turn in early. He’s a reader. He lights a lamp and he’ll read some nights till all hours, she knows that. He sees Alice and Jeanie in the room as he passes, Alice standing on a chair and Jeanie with her mouth full of pins turning up the hem of a dress.
What would the girls think if they knew? Well, they will know, they’ll have to, all of them, Pansy’s daddy and his own folk, then everyone in town. They’ll have to live here with Mother and Dad until he can get them on their feet. He sits on his bed. He feels jumpy, he can’t put on his nightshirt and settle in his bed, not with all this churning around, but he can’t go back out to the kitchen either, not with Mother there already thinking there’s something up.
I’m in the family way. I’d b-best marry you, then.
Why did he say it? Why did he blurt it out without so much as a proper talk and a proper think about it? He stands in his room looking out into the night. Well, it’s done now.
Perhaps he should go around to the minister’s place and talk with him right now and have it over with. But Mr Grant may tell somebody else, how can you keep such a thing as a wedding quiet around here, and how could Clem tell him to keep it quiet with him knowing Mother and Dad the way he does? And if he did agree to keep silent about it someone might see Clem there at the door and start tattling. You can’t trust Mrs Grant, either, and she’s the one always opens the door, shows people in and just the type of busybody who won’t let up till she knows what folk are there for. She’d have it all over town.
Going to Mr Grant with Mrs Grant standing in the doorway isn’t the right way. She’s got a mean mouth has Polly Grant, thin and tight and mean. He sees her on a Sunday in church in her fancy hats, her voice pitching up over everyone else’s during the hymns. And he’s seen her in the street as well, all smiles for the ladies married to the managers and not so much as a look for anybody else. ‘She’s got a high opinion of herself has that one,’ Mother smiles about her but she wouldn’t be smiling if she heard from someone who’d heard it from Mrs Grant that Clem Bright was in to see the minister the other night and there was trouble.
However they do this it’ll have to be done away from folk who’ll want to put their own oar in, maybe try to put a stop to it. Ah, to hell with it all, he doesn’t want this, every part of him is itching to take off and run from it. He’s already fretting over his mother and his dad; he knows how their faces will be when he tells them him and Pansy have gone off in secret and got married behind their backs. Underhand and sly it would be and it’s not how the Brights do things. He thinks of what Mother has said to him since he was a little lad: ‘I can face the truth, son, whatever that may be. It’s lies I can’t take.’ Well, he’s not telling lies, he’s only holding the truth back from her a while and now he’s given his word to Pansy he can’t go back on it.
Would Pansy want it done at St Brendan’s? His stomach turns at the thought of it. He went in once when he was a boy and Otto dared him. He was only in the vestibule, his head through the door looking, and then Otto’d shoved him and he’d been right inside with the funny smell and the statues pale in the darkness and Jesus on the cross with blood all around the nails that were poking out of his hands clenched up tight like claws. There was a lady, with a scarf tied over her head, kneeling beside one of the statues whispering and shifting beads through her hands. Everything about it frightened him: the queer smell and the lady clicking her beads, and he turned and ran. But if it’s St Brendan’s Pansy wants he’ll have to go along with it. But what if she wants him to turn to be a Catholic as well?
I won’t have any grandchild of mine off to St Brendan’s bowing and scraping to plaster statues.
He and Otto’d got hold of Danny Murphy once and sounded him out about why Catholics couldn’t eat meat on a Friday. It turned out Jesus never ate meat on Fridays so they couldn’t either. Danny Murphy told them God had the different rules for Catholics because their religion was the only true one and he had to be stricter about making sure they did things right so they’d get to Heaven.
That seemed an odd way of going about things to Clem when only the Catholics knew how to do things right. ‘How do the rest of us get in?’
‘We’re the only ones going,’ Danny Murphy said.
‘Where’s the rest of us going then?’ Otto had been listening closely.
‘Probably Hell. Limbo if you’re lucky.’
‘What’s Limbo?’
‘It’s just being dead. You don’t feel anything. Not like Hell where you get burnt up over and over for ever.’
Otto pinned him on the ground, then, and hit him in the face. When he let him up his lip was bleeding a
nd he turned and ran. ‘You’re going to Hell, Otto Bader! You’re going to Hell!’
‘It’s all a lot of nonsense. Put it out of your mind, son,’ Clem’s mother said when he’d told her his worries about the unfairness of only Catholics knowing the rules for getting into Heaven with the rest of them going about it the wrong way.
Although he goes along with his family to church every Sunday, as he’s done since he was a child, Clem’s ideas about God are hazy. If he thinks about God at all he seems too much of a problem for his mind to stand up to. He likes the hymns and he tries to concentrate on the rest of it but he still can’t reconcile what’s said in church about a loving God, not with all of what happens in the world, some things so unfair, like little Mrs White who waited so long for a baby only to have him die of the croup.
He liked some of the Bible stories when he was a lad, especially the one about David knocking down Goliath with rocks from his slingshot. He and Otto used to play that one by getting another boy to stand on a stack of wood they’d pile up to make him tall enough, then they’d have goes at trying to hit him from a fair distance using the slingshot they’d made.
Other stories, though, seemed to Clem to confirm what Danny Murphy had said about God having favourites. Whenever Clem thought about God, it’d been old Uncle Charlie sitting by the fire in his worn-out suit with his pipe in his hand and his mouth turned downwards ready to shout at anyone who crossed him that’d come into his mind. God was like Uncle Charlie, an angry old man you had to edge around because of his temper and were supposed to love even though he didn’t love you back or behave as a good man should.
But now that he has to marry Pansy, the idea of God is with him again and the thought of him and Pansy closeted up with that priest among all those statues and the stink of incense at St Brendan’s, it makes his gut churn. Would he have to call the man Father? Well, he won’t do that.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 14
