by Melvyn Bragg
Martha opened the door of the terraced house. ‘I’ve told you not to knock,’ she said. ‘Family and friends don’t knock, they just walk in.’
She turned and Grace followed her, already sensing the rise of the dread. But when the girls waved and called her name across the small room, she was glad to be there. Only her father’s daughters were there: Martha’s own girls were out in the world, both married now.
‘They’ll be looking for their treats,’ said Martha.
‘Hello, lass.’ Her father beckoned her to come to his chair by the fire. She bent down and he kissed her. Martha saw them twinned. Both had thick black hair, the strong blue eyes of the Irish who had come across to this west coast for work. Martha felt again a return of that anger at this girl who looked so like James’s first wife – so he told her too often – and came here and queened it with her treats and her always clean clothes and her singing to the girls at the slightest opportunity.
‘You’ll want some tea?’
‘I’ll make it.’
‘I’ll make it. And they can have one sweet each and keep the rest for another time. We’re not made of money in this house.’
James found Grace’s eyes and soothed her. Just go with it, his look counselled her. Hold to what matters. And Grace always knew he had determinedly followed that through. James had sworn away his Roman Catholic faith, and he and her mother, Ruth, had married in the chapel at Oulton. They said it was a miserable affair. His Roman Catholic family did not come. Many of the Primitive Methodists did not want to be there. But Wilson said he knew a good man when he saw one and his was the final word. He warranted the marriage.
So James had learned to chain his anger and kept the peace in his second home and tried to understand the anger of his second wife, who behaved like this only on the days when Grace visited them.
‘Can I take the girls out for a walk?’ Grace asked Martha.
‘As long as you bring them back.’
‘Why . . . I . . . I will.’
‘Martha,’ said James. And again. ‘Martha.’ Soothing her as he soothed Grace. ‘Let her be.’
Martha turned her face away from him. ‘You always take her side.’
‘That’s not true. And you know it’s not true. But let them go out. Here. I’ll stroll along a bit with them.’
‘So it’s a family outing. Am I not invited?’
‘Yes. Come. Let’s all go.’
‘I’ve work to do,’ said Martha. ‘Somebody’s got to get them their tea ready.’
‘I could help,’ said Grace, hopelessly.
‘I don’t need help. You just go and enjoy yourselves.’
On the street, Grace’s heart soared when her father took her arm. ‘You’re a young woman now,’ he said. ‘They’ll think I’ve clicked.’
The children scuttled around them and they walked down to the harbour. James nipped into a bakery and bought a loaf of old bread and split it into two parts, one each for the girls. They pinched pieces off it and threw it up for the seagulls to catch in mid-air or pick up off the sea. The fishermen were cleaning out their boats. The harbour was crowded with the Friday fleet. Grace felt that she was at a carnival.
An hour or so went by. The screaming calls of the gulls, the pride of the children filled with energy in the presence of their big sister.
James had the gift of easy talk and soon Grace felt she had been with him for hours on end. Had her mother felt like this with him? A woman in the village had once told Grace that Ruth and James ‘couldn’t take their eyes off one another. In one way you couldn’t have two people more different – Ruth on the farm, James the rolling stone who gathered no moss. And the religion, of course. But he turned up one hay-making when hands were needed and it seemed in no time at all they were talking wedding bells. Oh! What a commotion that was! A Roman Catholic!’ she said. ‘It was a revolution round here – but your mother wouldn’t give in and neither would he. They were just made for each other. It was something to see.’
Grace carried that around with her like a locket. ‘Made for each other’. She opened it only when she felt unaccountably lonely and breathed it in. Now, with her father, as the boats rolled gently on the water and the lights were lit against the darkness, she felt that she could understand it.
‘Better go back,’ said James.
They went back, the four of them, in what for Grace was like a dream, walking through the gloaming of the streets. The rows and rows of terraced houses were lit up now and it was a warm house that met them when they walked in.
Martha came across to James directly and stood toe to toe with him. ‘What time do you call this?’
‘We were feeding the gulls.’
‘Well, you can feed yourselves now. It’s wasted.’
‘Martha. It’ll be all right.’
‘Not when she’s around,’ the older woman said spitefully. ‘It always ends like this when she comes – we always have an argument.’
‘I’m not arguing.’
‘I’ll go now,’ said Grace. ‘There’s a train soon.’
‘I’ll set you to the station,’ he said.
‘You’ve just come back with her!’
‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Well, you might not find me here.’
The children were cowed but Grace was not going to go without giving them a kiss. From Martha’s expression it was as if she were planting a stigma on their faces.
‘She’s been badly,’ said James, as they stood on the platform. ‘Her nerves seem to have gone. She can’t help herself. I think she’s got something and she’s scared. She should go to the doctor but she won’t. She wasn’t herself, Grace.’
Grace nodded, unwilling to waste a minute on her, unable to forgive. The train pulled in. James opened the carriage door for her and gave a little bow. ‘My turn to come over to see you, next time,’ he said. ‘You’ll see that I will.’
She waited until the train was well clear of the town and then, in the empty carriage, the girl wept her heart out and felt the terrible pain of a jealousy she did not understand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next morning, after chapel, Grace, as usual took Belle around to their mother’s grave. It was a cold morning, a north wind whipping across the plain, and Belle, who felt the cold, decided to stay for no more than a few moments. Grace was relieved when she left. To want to be alone was selfish, she knew that, but her yearning for solitude was sometimes strong and occasionally, as on this Sunday morning, desperate.
She looked at the neatly trimmed mound and the plain granite headstone and tried to summon up thoughts that would do justice to the turbulence of her feelings. In the novels she read thoughts seemed so well ordered. In her mind there was a constellation of perplexities that would not settle down into anything resembling the coherent sentences in the books she liked so much. So she stood, quite still, letting the wind blow about her, a lone figure in the small graveyard. Mr Walker saw her as he left the chapel: the minister hesitated and then he sensed that such spellbound stillness wanted no interruption and went his Sabbath way.
Sunday was the Lord’s Day and his day too, and Mr Walker felt it keenly as he strolled around the village pacing out the boundaries of his parish. He loved the difference of the Sabbath. Every shop was closed. When people emerged from their homes they would be dressed at least respectably and most often in their solely once-a-week-worn black Sunday Best. There was neither sowing nor ploughing on a Sunday, neither harvest nor haymaking. Now and then a pony trap would take people to visit relatives or a family walking party would go down the lane past the village hall to the little tarn beyond which the gypsies used to camp in the winter. With a west wind you could sometimes hear the bells from the churches in Wigton. The Bible would still be read in some of the cottages he walked past. It was called the day of rest. Only a few failed to mark it. Across most of the land it was a day when another way of the world was observed and villages, towns, hamlets and cities were
linked to keep it as they thought it had been immemorially observed.
Grace had walked from the grave to her favourite viewpoint on a small rise of land from which she could look down to the Solway Firth and across to Scotland and, in the right light, catch the sheen from the sliver of sea. She wanted to break out of this Sunday and all Sundays. Her agitation had become a mind and body torment through a restless night. She wanted to race, to hurl herself into some great adventure, to leap off this little mound of earth and soar over the plain, over the sea. She remembered the ballad ‘Over the Sea to Skye’.
How could she miss so achingly someone she had never known? How could that happen? Her mother was in her grave, nearly fourteen years dead now, never seen, never heard and yet staked inside Grace. She felt tears inside her and flushed at the thought that somebody might have come into that compartment of the train and seen her in tears the previous evening. Grace never cried, they said, but there she had been weeping, and in a public place.
She tried to understand. In his sermon Mr Walker had spoken about how you could change yourself and how you must change yourself. He had spoken of the rich man who had given up all his wealth and the poor men who had given up their work as fishermen and Saul who had given up his life at Damascus to become St Paul; Grace was near blushing. She had thought this was somehow directed at her. How could she be so vain? And yet it had seemed so clearly meant for her. In little more than a week the pupil-teacher proposition had seeped into the whisperings of the village and Grace felt cut off by it. She sensed envy. She sensed an unusual tension between her grandmother and her grandfather. She had become a little distant from Miss Errington.
She wanted to fly away and yet, looking down on the ample lap of the plain land, the first mountains of Scotland beyond, the last of England behind, she felt a security stemming from the earth itself. Here she was planted. So where did it come from, this opposite power, this almost panic, to get away, to uproot herself?
Only when she felt thoroughly cold did she wrench herself away and hurry back home.
Grace was in the front schoolroom when it happened. Miss Errington was clearing up the senior room at the back.
The shouting had been nothing out of the ordinary but a shriller element and then the unmistakable voice of Belle sent Grace to the window and from there, blind with anger, gorged with it from that first sight, to the school gate.
Three of them were baiting, tormenting Belle: one boy, Daniel Turnbull, a swarthy man of a boy, son of one of the grander farmers, and the two sisters who came from that clump of poor cottages near the tarn settlement, forever desolate and home of toxic rumours. They circled Belle like wolves around a deer, they dashed forward to prod her or slap her or tug at her hair. The girls spat at her; the swarthy boy made a jeering farting sound and put his thumbs to his ears and wriggled his fingers and gaped a smile of pleasure as Belle’s distress became more and more visible. As Grace flew across the playground she saw the feeble flailing of Belle’s unwilling arms. And as she came nearer, she caught full sight of the terror in her sister’s eyes. ‘Leave off my sister! Leave off my sister!’
Grace grabbed the hair of both girls and pulled them to the ground and attempted to drag them away. The boy came near and she hit out at him and screamed at him and when he stood struck dumb, she let the girls go for a moment and leaped at him to scratch his face, claw down it, draw blood, and when he kicked out she caught the lumpen boot and yanked it high so that he fell back and smacked his head on the ground. The two sisters had got up and stood side by side, warily. This time Grace whirled her arms and ran at them, all the time shouting abuse at them, swearing and howling, and did not mind the blows she received and would not have cared if they had felled her to the ground as long as she could hurt these people, as long as she could harm them and take revenge for her sister, who had now stood aside, making a strange noise as she sobbed and tried not to sob. The two girls got Grace on the ground and were kicking her, and Daniel stood above her, waiting to join in.
It was at this stage that Miss Errington appeared.
‘Grace was like a banshee,’ she said to Wilson and Sarah. They had been shocked at the state of Belle and Grace when they came home, but unable to get anything out of either of them. Miss Errington, to her credit, they thought, had come to the house to explain everything even though it was well into the evening. She, too, was distressed.
‘I could not believe it of her,’ she said. ‘She was like a wild creature.’
‘There must have been a reason,’ said Wilson.
‘Nothing could excuse that.’
‘We should know the reason,’ he said.
‘It seems that the Turnbull boy and the McQuinn girls were teasing Belle.’ She paused. ‘And hitting her.’
‘The McQuinns can be difficult,’ said Sarah, ‘but Belle often turns up to meet Grace after school. What happened today?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Errington, although she had her suspicions.
The favouring of Grace had not gone down well with all the pupils. Talk of Grace’s possible further education might have stirred the pot. Belle, as a defenceless one, had through the years been well protected at school, first of all by Miss Errington herself and then by Grace. But Miss Errington knew that there were devils out there in the world. She had seen gargoyles on churches to fight off the devils that tried to destroy those churches and she had understood them. She had seen boys and some girls do unforgivable things to each other. And at times there would be a spiralling down, a devil’s whirlpool, an unleashing of nastiness that sucked out all goodness and reason and would not be satisfied until it spent the dark force that drove it. Miss Errington had seen that a few times in her teaching life and it frightened her. It came out of a part of humanity she did not want to acknowledge. It sought only to torture and destroy and once it had identified a victim, there was joy as well as energy in the hunt to kill.
‘Belle and Grace are very upset,’ said Sarah. ‘They’re in their room.’
‘We must clear it up,’ said the schoolteacher. ‘I’ve been to see the other two families and the children will apologise to Belle tomorrow. I will make them do that after morning prayers in front of the whole school. The parents agree. In fact Mr McQuinn started to slap his daughters in front of me and I had to ask him to stop.’ She paused. ‘And I think it would be good if Grace were to apologise too.’
Wilson held his tongue.
Sarah said, ‘Should I bring them down?’
While she went to fetch them, Wilson added coal to the fire but maintained his silence.
The girls edged into the room and Miss Errington was shocked by the change that had come over Grace. Something . . . violent about her, still. Belle sat down and lowered her head as if awaiting a sentence. Grace, beside her, looked at Miss Errington full in the face.
It was explained that the others had agreed to apologise to Belle. Belle was asked if she would come to the school in the morning and, after looking to Sarah, to Wilson and to Grace, she nodded. Grace held out her hand to her sister, who clasped it desperately.
‘And,’ said Miss Errington, ‘I think that if you were to say you were sorry, Grace, then we could put all this behind us.’
‘Who to? Who do I say I’m sorry to?’
‘Those you attacked.’
‘They were getting Belle.’
‘Your behaviour was too violent, Grace. It was far more violent than it need have been.’
‘I won’t apologise. I’m not sorry.’
‘When you think about it, overnight, I believe you will find it the better way. To turn the other cheek. To forgive your enemies. To bless them that curse you.’
Grace did not respond.
Is this the same girl? Miss Errington wondered. Is this the girl I have seen grow so finely ‘through sun and shower’? How can people change so? Yet look at the others, Turnbull and the McQuinns. They were generally obedient enough, uninterested but not disruptive, nothing that could not be
quelled. And then this wickedness.
She worried about Wilson. There had been a difference in him during the discussion. It was as if he had absented himself from the person Miss Errington had known before this incident and left only a trace of himself in the room. She felt tired and rather dizzy.
‘It would mean a lot to all of us, Grace,’ the schoolteacher said, with difficulty, meaning ‘It would mean a lot to me’, ‘if you did feel you could apologise. Say that you were sorry you had . . . behaved . . . like that . . . like . . .’ To her horror she almost said ‘an animal’. ‘Not like you, Grace.’
But Grace stayed silent. The girl felt that she had gone into a deep vault and locked herself in there where no one could enter and she would not hear what anyone said. She was very hungry. Belle’s head had sunk even lower as the tension inside her sister streamed into her, as Grace’s strong feelings always did.
‘We’ll have to let her sleep on it,’ said Wilson. ‘She’ll be at the school in the morning.’
Refusing the cup of tea she desperately wanted, Miss Errington took her leave, pausing in front of Grace for a sign, getting nothing save for a politely chiselled ‘Goodnight, Miss.’
Even though Mr Walker got involved, Grace would not apologise and Wilson, who alone might have forced her into it, would not intervene.
Her refusal became her fate. The enthusiasm and affection that had gone into the pupil-teacher notion drained away. There were those who admired Grace for what she had done; a few who saw her as a cross between a local heroine and a martyr, but they did not hold sway. Her school days ended with the prize for best pupil, a special mention from Miss Errington in her round-up of the year, but they ended. Her formal education was done and she was now out in the world.
