He feels the whack as the ground shakes and that’s followed by a dull reverberating boom. It’s an explosion further up the creek, Dan Williams up to his tricks again, blasting for fish. He steals the dynamite from the mine; never mind that other miners have to pay for it, then he’s at their wives trying to sell the fish while the men are away from the house. He’s a bad one, Dan Williams, everyone says it, there’s plenty of men who’ve been his partner down the mine won’t have a thing now to do with him, unreliable he is and lazy with it. Fast enough with his fists, though, when he’s facing down to someone smaller and younger.
If he’s riled enough with Pansy to beat her, what would he do to Clem? What if he came to the house with his rifle? You wouldn’t know what Dan Williams would do if he had enough drink in him. Clem’s dad doesn’t trust him, he’s said often enough he pities Lester Wilkes having Dan Williams as his mate down the mine, you have to be able to trust your mate with your life down there and Dan Williams wasn’t balanced right, everyone knew it, and Lester Wilkes was a mug to put up with it. And here Clem is marrying Dan Williams’ girl and making him part of the family.
She meets him, as they’d worked out, in Greymouth. She’s waiting for him outside the Town Hall, a bag on the pavement beside her. She has the papers and when they ask about her birth certificate she says her ma died only a few weeks back and it was her that put those things away and she hasn’t been able to find it. But there, on the form, she’s written where she was born and her age and everything and there, at the bottom, her daddy’s signed it, Daniel Thomas Williams. The man behind the desk looks at Pansy who’s taken her handkerchief up against her eye, then he stamps the paper and hands it back. Then there’s the moment when they look at each other and say they don’t have a witness but one of the girls out of the office is called in, there are a few words said, they sign a paper and it’s done. They’re in then out of the room almost before they know it.
There’s nothing festive about it; not Pansy’s hat nor the grey coat she huddles into when they come back down the steps of the Town Hall. Perhaps he should have brought her flowers but there was no time and he had no idea of where he could have got them. They stand on the street with the wind whipping against them and the grey drizzle of rain. Clem takes her bag in his hand but he doesn’t know which way to go, whether to set off back towards the station or the other way up the street. He’s a bridegroom now, a husband, but he has no idea of what he should do. All of it has been to get themselves married and now they are, what comes next?
Well, they’ll have to go back and tell Mother and Dad what they’ve done and they’ll have to stay there, for now at least; he hasn’t the money to get a place of their own. What if they won’t have them? He can see, already, the look that’ll be on their faces and he’s dreading that. As for his sisters, more than likely they’ll be excited enough by the initial fuss but they’ll be miffed they weren’t told and bitter there was no proper wedding with new dresses and the fun of it. In Blackball weddings are the best chance of a proper shindig, the ladies doing the flowers and the food, everyone out in their best and the band in fine form.
The drizzle is coming harder and the wind’s fair ripping against him and he realises with a start he’s hardly even aware of Pansy there beside him. He supposes a man should take his new wife’s arm and kiss her. But there should be others there as well, calling out and laughing and throwing rice. He glances at Pansy, beside him, staring out at the street. Her face looks pale and rigid and she’s shivering; she’s cold and she shouldn’t be, not in her condition. Probably she’s hungry as well. He has to look after her, he has to make the best of it and treat her well. She’s his wife.
‘We’ll get a cup of tea.’ He says it outright because he’s the husband now, and it’s up to him to make the decisions. He looks at her to see how she taking to the idea. She doesn’t say anything, just nods.
He leads the way to the tea rooms he’s seen up the road and it’s good to be out of the rain and into the warm inside with the fire blazing up. He takes off his coat and hat, Pansy takes off her coat and when the waitress comes he orders tea and scones. There’s a pot of tea and four scones and a good-sized square of butter and a dish of jam on the tray brought over and he feels more cheerful. Pansy sits there as if she’s still frozen.
He waits for her to pour the tea, but when she doesn’t he pours milk into the teacups from the little jug and does it himself. He slathers a scone with butter and jam and passes it to her on a plate along with the cup and saucer. But does she like milk in her tea? He doesn’t know but she takes it up to her lips without a word.
He looks around the room which is nice enough with the pictures on the walls and the china ornaments along the sills. There’s a gentleman in his suit and wearing a watch-chain on his own, a newspaper spread in front of him, but in the main it’s ladies here, with shopping baskets spread around them, some of them with children. He looks again at Pansy who looks back at him then lowers her eyes. He sees she’s drunk most of her tea but hasn’t touched the scone.
‘Do you not like scones, Pansy?’ It occurs to him that he knows little enough about Pansy any more. He knows she’s pretty and light and agile on her feet when they’ve danced together, but anything else, whether she has milk in her tea or not or what she likes to eat, well, he knows nothing of that. It occurs to him, as well, that neither of them has mentioned what they’ve done, that the only words between them have been of tea and scones.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.
He knows Pansy only as the clever, pretty child she was, then the girl who made his heart beat at the dances, but now he’s married to this white-faced, unsmiling woman and the realisation of what he’s done and what it means rushes in on him like the wind’s rip and chill.
‘I feel sick, sometimes,’ she says.
He feels his face turn hot. He should have thought of that. He knows from his mother when she was expecting his sisters and from his aunts that women in the family way feel sick.
‘You have it,’ she says, pushing the plate towards him.
‘We need to go. The train . . .’
She nods and as she takes up her coat and pulls it over her dress he sees her breasts are fuller than before and her belly curves outwards and he feels a jolt of repulsion mixed with the sort of panic he has never felt before, the kind that makes him want to lurch out of the chair, out of the tea rooms and run as fast and as far as he can. Because he can see in front of him, that belly burgeoning out as she waddles around his parents’ home in that way that women do when they’re near their time, their backs arched and their legs planted apart. Everyone counting months and nodding and tutting.
How will he bear it? He’s trapped by this body which will grow huge and produce milk out of breasts all bloated up and run with veins. He sees that the Pansy he has loved all of his life was only that little girl with her bright eyes and neat, dainty body and that the house they were to live in wasn’t that of a grown-up man and his wife but the hidey-hole beneath the trees he and Otto led Pansy into, only a play-house of flowers and games and stolen cakes.
Down by a shining water well/ I found a very little dell/ No higher than my head.
He pays for the ticket for the train and they sit together while it carries them along.
20
He has wrapped himself in the extra blanket from the chest in the corner of his room and lies on the mat beside his bed. She’s asleep, now, breathing softly, up there in his bed. For a while he’d felt her awake beside him, staring as he was into the darkness. He could have spoken to her. He could have taken her hand and said it would be all right, Mother and Dad would come around in the end and anyway he’d take care of her.
But it’s as if the kindness he’s always felt for anyone little or hurt has gone out of him, leaving nothing but sourness and bitterness.
They came in at the door, Mother was at the stove and Dad
sitting at the table, his cup of tea in front of him. Dad looked up, just a little curious, but Mother turned around and faced them and Clem saw that she knew.
‘What have you done?’ It was Mother that said it, her voice raised up and shaky and there was nothing for it but to tell them out straight. ‘Pansy and me’ve got wed.’
Mother’s hands were up to her mouth.
‘You’ve done what?’ Dad was standing now.
‘Pansy and m-me are wed. We’ve b-been to Greymouth t-t-today for it.’
Him a married man and here he was stuttering like a kiddie. ‘W-we’ll have to st-stop here with you for now if you’ll h—. If you’ll have us.’
Mother went to the table and sat down. She held her head in her hands. Dad’s face was reddening up, his mouth opening ready to shout, then he looked into Pansy’s face and stood there, gripping the edge of the table.
Jeanie came in at the door. ‘Mother? When’s our dinner?’ She looked at Pansy then at Clem. ‘What’s going on?’
Mother’s voice was fierce. ‘Never you mind, it’s naught to do with you. Off you go back into your room. I’ll call you for your dinner when I’m ready.’
Jeanie stared and closed the door. He heard the whispering in the next room, her and Alice, and then they were quiet. He knew they’d be listening and he wished he was with them, pressed up against the wall trying to make out what the grown-ups were on about rather than here and part of it.
‘We’ll have an explanation for this, by God we will!’ Dad said.
Pansy was silent. Was it only up to him to do the talking?
‘It’s like I said. Pansy and me got married. That’s all there is to it.’
‘That’s not all of it,’ Dad said. ‘Not by a long chalk it isn’t. Why hasn’t anything been said? To us, boy, to your own mother and me? We deserve better than this. What about you, Pansy? Did you tell your daddy or is it all of us been left in the dark?’
‘I didn’t tell him,’ she said flatly.
‘What’s there to hide? If there’s anything else to say you’d better come out with it now.’
Clem speaks quickly, ‘You know what Dan Williams is like. He wouldn’t have said yes. Pansy’s had a hell of a life there with him, especially since her ma died. I had to get her out of there. It had to be a s-secret.’
He’d thought it out on the train and it’s the best explanation he could come up with. He has to stand up for Pansy and he can’t have Mother and Dad knowing the full truth of it. Not yet. He wants them used to the idea of them married first.
‘That’s the reason you’ve married her?’ His mother was looking squarely at him.
‘I c-c-care for Pansy. You said it yourself, Mother.’
‘And I said why I didn’t want it.’
But now Dad is speaking sharply, ‘Pansy’s our daughter-in-law now, Meg, so you’ll keep those thoughts to yourself. It’s Clem the fault lies with. He’s the man and he had the lead in this. He should have come to us like a man and spoken out.’
‘It’s not Clem’s fault.’ It was Pansy speaking out.
‘P-Pansy,’ he tried to warn her off saying it.
‘I’m in the family way, Mr Bright.’ She said it flatly and Dad’s face blushed up bright. It’s what they were thinking, surely it was what they were suspecting, but to have it spoken out like that, right there in the house. Clem heard the intake of breath on the other side of the wall.
‘Well, now.’ Clem saw his father, floored, unable to think of what to say in return. ‘Well now, Pansy. But. It is Clem’s fault. By God it is and to think that a boy of mine—’
His mother’s cheeks stood out red against the whiteness of her face as she stood up briskly. ‘What’s done is done,’ she said. ‘And we’ll have no more about it.’ She wiped the tears standing out in her eyes with her hand, turned her back and lifted the pot of stew from the stove top. ‘Alice, Jeanie,’ she called. ‘We’ll be having our dinner now.’
They came immediately, pop-eyed, into the kitchen.
‘Set another place, Alice,’ Mother said. ‘You’ve heard it all through the wall. Clem and Pansy are married and she’ll be stopping with us and there’ll be no more talk about it, in this house or out of it. Are you girls listening to me?’
They nodded. Mother said grace. Pansy crossed herself and his sisters stared. There was stew and mashed spud and cabbage then apple cobbler and custard to get through. The knives and forks and spoons scraped across the plates. Clem caught Pansy’s eye and she looked away.
Mother said they should sit in the parlour. She was in the kitchen, Dad off to the union meeting and his sisters closeted in their room, though he could hear the rush and quiver of their whispering. He offered Pansy a book his sisters had, The Golden Road by L. M. Montgomery, but she shook her head and sat staring into the fire he’d laid. He went outside for a smoke, then came back in to her.
All the talk they’d once had, bubbling up between them, one thought leading to another, the talk and the laughing as well, all of that was gone. He had nothing to say to her nor her to him. As he sat there in the chair beside the fire he tried out in his mind ideas she might have an interest in. The mine? The war? There was nothing he could think of to tell her. He supposed he should have talked of the future but what was there to say about that? What did other men talk of with their wives? The baby? He knew nothing of babies.
‘I need my clothes and things,’ she said, finally.
‘Now, you mean?’
‘I’ve got enough for tonight and the next day or two in my bag. I couldn’t carry everything, though.’
That would mean facing Dan Williams. He’d have to go with her and have it out with him. He should have come to us like a man.
‘We can get them while Daddy’s at work.’
‘He’ll have to be told,’ he said.
‘He’ll hear it soon enough.’
He saw by her face she was tired, but how was he to manage it? Just say we should go to bed? But what would she think he meant by it and there was only the one narrow bed he’d had his whole life there in his room. Mother had said they’d get in a double bed for them and another duchess for Pansy’s things but for now it was all there was.
In the end she said it herself, ‘I’m tired, Clem, I need to go to bed,’ and she went out the back first, then he did and had another smoke.
Her hair was in a plait and she had the coverlet pulled up but he could see the top of her nightdress, plain and white. She was more the girl he remembered with her hair like that and the light dim and the pale cotton at her neck. She moved over in the bed. ‘There’s room,’ she said.
He took the blanket from the chest and pulled the mat away from the bed. ‘I’ll be all right down here.’
‘If you want to. You know. Well, you can.’
He turned down the lamp and took off his shirt and his pants. You can. You know. If you want to. You can. You know. If you want to. Well, he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to at all and he couldn’t see any time ahead of him when he would want to. And he couldn’t see any way ahead for himself and Pansy whom he’d thought of as a treasure he’d want to look after and cherish all his life if she’d have him. Well, he had her now and it was a great mouldering mess with Mother crying in the kitchen and Dad disgusted with him and the girls blithering in their room. He lies down, feels the floorboards hard beneath the mat on his back as he pulls the blanket up around him. ‘I don’t want another man’s leavings.’
He regretted it soon as he started saying what he did; he’d muttered it under his breath, so she might not have heard it. He listens hard in case she’s crying, though he doesn’t know what he’d do about that. Everything is quiet. Any road, he should be sleeping by now: he has to be out and on the way to the mine by six. He needs his sleep.
He’ll be eating his breakfast with Dad, walking with him to the mine a
nd perhaps then he’ll let fly with the words he kept back tonight. He hopes he will. Better than silence.
Will the others know of it by now? Will Dad have let it out at the meeting? It can’t be kept a secret. But if the word’s out, it’ll be all around the town by the morning. Pansy Williams is stopping over at Brights’. Well, Pansy Bright she is now. Her and young Clem took themselves off and got married. Well, my word. My word, you don’t say.
Will Dan Williams know? That might be something else he has to face up to in the morning, Dan Williams coming at him shouting with his fists up. He’s younger and quicker by far than Dan Williams and he’s muscled up since he’s been in the mine. He’d most likely beat him if it came to a fight.
But he doesn’t want the indignity and shame of it. Got my girl in the family way. You bloody mongrel. He doesn’t want a fight, nor does he want the knowing grins and claps on the shoulder from the lads. And he doesn’t want his room crowded up with a double bed and a duchess and a crib with a squawling babby in it in the corner.
He doesn’t want the mine either. If he’s honest, he hasn’t ever wanted the mine but miners are followed into it by their sons and it’s the way it is for people like them. And while he could beat Dan Williams in a fair fight there’s ways of making sure a man gets hurt down a mine and Dan will know them and wouldn’t think twice about it. He could be down there with his back turned and never know what hit him.
What’s a man to do when he can’t sleep and he’s at odds with everyone and everything around him? What’s left to him? Well, he could get rid of himself in the Grey or shoot off his head. He grins a bit at the idea of it: he’s stuck but he’d rather be stuck than dead. Pansy’s snoring now, only softly, but he grins at that as well. Poor Pansy. Poor girl. Does she want the baby? He’s never even asked her that. He knows it’s not him she wants. She needed his name and he’s given it her. Made her respectable.
She’s got what she wanted but it’s not what he wants.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 16
