Forgiven

by Ruth Sutton

  ‘Who’s the common foe?’

  ‘Anyone with a big house, or a big job, or who wasn’t in the forces, apparently.’

  Matthew nodded. Jessie felt he understood.

  ‘Have you ever thought of giving up, doing something else?’ he asked.

  ‘I have, actually, but in a vague way, nothing specific. I’ll be fifty later this year, Matthew. I could stay at the school another ten years, fifteen even, but then what? Sometimes I find myself wondering if that’s all there is. I’ve even thought of emigrating … but that’s too drastic.’

  ‘There are other things here a woman of your talents could do, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘What are you interested in?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I don’t know. I know there’s more to life than teaching. I read a lot, but I’ve never really travelled. Even talking to the vicar and Alan Crompton has made me realise what they’ve seen over the past few years. I know much of it was awful, but they’ve seen places I could only dream of. I’ve just been to London a few times with Agnes. And I know more about music now than I did, but it’s just bits and pieces, nothing substantial. In some ways my life has been on hold, for years, and I want to start learning again.’

  She waited, remembering, aware of his close attention. ‘Would you believe I worked in a factory, making shells, in the first war? The other girls thought I was the brainy one, because I’d been to college. But I’m not using my brain enough now.’

  ‘There’s time,’ he said.

  ‘And the new vicar may be just the push I need,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to see his arrival in Newton as an opportunity.’ She laughed. ‘That’s quite a challenge, in itself.’

  A flock of finches fluttered round the sheltered garden, settling in the hedge like random jewels before skittering away. Jessie realised that she was telling Matthew things she hadn’t shared with anyone else, not even Agnes. She turned towards him.

  ‘How are you settling, in the new house?’ she asked. He was such easy company; she wished he lived a little closer.

  ‘It’s quite a change, on my own for the first time in years,’ he said. ‘But after Joan died, the link with Newcastle was broken, really. And when Ann went off to college in London, it just seemed right to come back here. They’ll need family doctors in this area when the new health scheme starts – if it starts.’

  Jessie nodded. ‘Cumberland’s too quiet for you, maybe, after the city.’

  Matthew turned to look at her. ‘Perhaps it is. But I can see attractions here … You haven’t changed at all, Jessie. The same warmth, your hair, and that smile, just as it was.’

  She felt herself blush and turned away.

  ‘We’d better go in,’ she said, noticing faces in the window turned towards them. He followed her glance.

  ‘Caroline’s funny, isn’t she? She seems determined to find me a “companion”, as she calls it. I want to explain that I’m quite content as I am, but that would be too direct. Everything is hinted at, nothing explicit. Quite hard to deal with sometimes.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ said Jessie. ‘I’ve been aware of it ever since I moved here. People don’t say things directly, and I’ve always found it difficult. So it’s not just me, you feel it, too.’

  “All the time,’ he said. ‘We should start a club, you and I. We could call it, Plain Speakers United’

  They both laughed. Jessie waved cheerfully at Caroline who was watching them through the window.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve teased her for long enough.’

  * * *

  Much later, lying still sleepless in her bedroom as the first birdsong heralded a new day, Jessie went over the conversation with Matthew in the garden. Agnes had been hinting that the two of them seemed made for each other, and maybe she was right. But further back in her mind, buried deep but not deep enough, Jessie could not forget Andrew Leadbetter, the only man who had ever known this room, this bed. For a short while, ten years before, he had been her lover, and still she could not forget the risks and excitement of their affair. Two young men haunted her past and threatened her future, John the son, and Andrew the lover. She could not give in to them now.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘WHEN’S THE BIG WALK, MISS?’ asked George Tyson in the schoolyard one morning. He was nearly as tall as his teacher.

  ‘Is it your turn already, George?’ said Jessie. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Twelve, miss, nearly thirteen. Me and the others’ll go first time this year, then again next year, before we leave. So when are we going?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask Mr Southward about the weather,’ she said. ‘He’s usually right about it. If he says we’ve got a fine few days coming up, we’ll do it then. Have you got some strong shoes to wear?’

  ‘I can borrow some, miss.’

  ‘You get that organised and I’ll talk to Mr Southward.’

  George ran off, excited, to tell the others.

  It was several years since Jessie had first taken the older children on the Big Walk, when she realised that some of them had never been up to the high ridges that they could see from the school, never seen Morecambe Bay on the other side of the hill. For some of the children Newton and the flat coastal strip on which it lay was their whole world. They needed to look down at it all from a high place, and Newton Fell was the easiest place to get them to. They looked at maps, but that wasn’t enough. The Big Walk was part of her effort to get all the children to see a little of the wider world. Every year for the past decade or so her friend Agnes had donated some money to the school, just enough to take the older children on a couple of trips. On one occasion they went north to Whitehaven on the train, to look round the busy town, up to St James Church and down to the harbour. She taught the children about the slave trade that made Whitehaven rich: it was a dismal story, and not part of what she was supposed to teach, but the children never forgot it. On another day they took the train to Barrow, round the edge of Morecambe Bay, across the viaducts, and then across the bridge to Walney Island and the furthest point of the Furness peninsular. They needed a long summer day, with time to walk along the wide shore from Biggar Bank to the southern tip of Walney, looking out into the shipping channel and across to Piel Castle. Blackpool Tower peeked above the horizon, and Jessie told the children how as a girl she had been on the paddle steamer that plied across from Barrow to Blackpool. Shore, sky and sea merged into each other out there and they would spot geese, ducks and seabirds, noting everything in their little books. The children had no idea that this was where their teacher had walked as a young woman with her first love, Clive Whelan, lying with him in the dunes under the sky.

  The children called the excursion to the top of Newton Fell the Big Walk, as it was further and higher than many of them had ever walked before. For one or two, it was a more familiar experience. The older boys sometimes followed the hounds on foot, as was the custom in this part of Cumberland, wherever the fox would lead them. For them the Big Walk was relatively tame and predictable, and Jessie would put them in charge of the younger children as they picked their way up to the ancient rocks on the summit. If the day was well chosen and the air was clear, they could look right round, at the peaks of central Lakeland to the north, then out to the west across the Solway Firth to Scotland. Below them lay the Irish Sea, and between it and them the flat green coastal plain dotted with grazing sheep and cattle, where they lived. Newton lay on the southern side of the estuary; the road that followed the river led first to Ganthwaite and then on to Boot, along the green flat floor of the Esk valley, chequered by stone walls.

  After the Big Walk every year Jessie gathered the children around the map of Lakeland that hung on the wall of her classroom. They marked out the route they had taken and what they had seen, connecting the reality of their experience with the two dimensions of the map. Did it make a difference, she wondered. Did it make any of them wonder what lay beyond, in the rest of England? She wanted to make them curious, to make their feet itch wit
h the possibilities of a larger world, beyond the confines of their village where they knew every tree, every chimney stack, every gatepost.

  Jessie heard young voices and looked out. Children from Mr Crompton’s class were running into the yard, dressed in vests and shorts, despite a brisk wind and drizzle blowing in from the sea. Mr Crompton was with them and Jessie saw to her surprise that he too was in vest and shorts, with a whistle in his mouth that he blew insistently when he wasn’t shouting. The children jostled into rows facing the teacher and jumping with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm. Alan Crompton pulled one of the larger boys out of the line and made him stand at the front, facing the others. The boy began to jump awkwardly, raising his arms above his head while his teacher stood behind him, poking at his legs with a long stick. Some of the children stopped and began to laugh, until another of them was pulled out to the front and the laughing stopped.

  Why was he doing this, she wondered, right outside her room? Was he trying to make a point? She had asked him not to take his children out for exercise in all weathers, but here they were again. This was the same man who’d found the mildest of children hard to manage when he first started at the school ten years before; the same man who had blushed and stammered whenever Lionel Leadbetter had spoken to him.

  He had always struggled to control the children, she remembered, and seemed to have decided that fear and humiliation was the answer. Maybe that was what the navy had taught him. He even looked different now: wiry rather than thin, his face harder than before, brown and lined. He’d been in Atlantic convoys they said, for five dangerous years, and his compassion seemed to have been lost at sea. For some of the parents and the older boys, this new, regenerated Mr Crompton was a hero; to Jessie, he was a bully.

  At the end of the day Jessie spoke her mind. It did not go well. She hadn’t expected his obvious disdain for her.

  ‘Maybe you’ve been here too long, Miss Whelan,’ he said. ‘The school is too soft, I believe, and so are the children. We learned a lot from being away these past years. These children need discipline, and that’s what they’ll get, from me at least. The last war may be over, but the next isn’t far away, you mark my words. Those Russians …’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Mr Crompton?’ she said, wondering who he’d been talking to.

  ‘I’m suggesting, Miss Whelan, that times have changed and we need to change, too. All of us. The old, soft ways got us into the last war, and who knows how long the peace will last? We need to stay tough, and that’s what I’m doing to these children. If I had the chance I’d have the whole school out there.’

  ‘Remember how the last war ended,’ said Jessie quietly. ‘It didn’t matter whether those poor Japanese children were tough or not.’

  Alan Crompton said nothing, but looked at her with the same defiance.

  ‘Have you talked to the vicar about this?’ she asked.

  ‘Mr Barker and I talk about a lot of things. I’m sure he would agree with me about the need for our children to toughen up.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Jessie. ‘Maybe I need to talk to the vicar myself. Of course, you may take your children out for exercise, but not in the pouring rain, and I don’t expect you to single out any children for public punishment. Is that clear?’

  ‘I fought for my country,’ he countered, his neck flushing. ‘You have no idea …’ He looked away from her, out towards the sea. ‘We all need a fresh start, or –’

  ‘That may well be,’ she interrupted, raising her voice. ‘But bullying children will not be part of it.’

  He stared at her, then down at his feet, moving slightly.

  ‘You’ve been here for many years,’ he said, without looking up.

  Jessie waited.

  ‘That’s an important job in this community,’ he went on.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

  ‘People expect the headmistress to be, well, above reproach, don’t they?’

  Jessie suddenly felt a little dizzy.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Mr Crompton?’

  He looked at her. His oiled hair flopped forward over his face and he pushed it back.

  ‘I know about you,’ he said.

  She held his look, steadying herself.

  ‘It was years ago,’ he pushed on, ‘before the war, but I know …’

  ‘Mr Crompton,’ said Jessie, pulling herself up to his height, and holding on to the edge of a table. ‘I have no idea what you’re hinting it, and I’m not sure I want to know. We’re here to talk about your treatment of the children, and it will go into the record –’

  ‘Oh, but it won’t,’ he said, ‘not when you hear me out.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ she asked, wanting him to continue, but dreading what he might say.

  Alan Crompton hesitated, but only for a moment. He took a deep breath and said, ‘I know about you and him.’

  Jessie’s mind raced, trying to find a connection to any of the people who knew about John.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she said, ‘what are you talking about? I have better things to do.’

  ‘I noticed, but I didn’t say anything. Didn’t dare then, but now it’s different. I watched you together, I saw him at your house, at night.’

  ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Who did you see?’

  ‘Leadbetter,’ Alan Crompton’s face was red.

  ‘The vicar?’ said Jessie, with as much incredulity as she could muster.

  ‘No, the son, Andrew. I saw you together, I know about you.’

  ‘What? Where? Andrew Leadbetter went away to Canada years ago.’

  ‘It was just after I started here,’ he said. ‘When the vicar was talking about building the new school. I saw Andrew at your house one night, in the dark.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said, sitting down. Her legs suddenly felt weak. ‘I know you’ve had a dreadful few years, and it must be hard coming home, taking orders from a woman, as you see it, but you cannot go around saying things like this.’ As she talked, the words came more freely. ‘Andrew Leadbetter and I had a meeting or two, at my house, about the new school, but that was all. Since then he has served his country bravely, in the Canadian air force. What are you implying is an insult to us both, and makes you appear weak and spiteful. I suggest you keep this nonsense to yourself.’

  Alan Crompton looked down at his feet. He seemed smaller now, like a boy in trouble not a man in control. Jessie had seized the moral high ground, and pressed home her advantage.

  ‘I have no idea what brought this on, Alan. I’m prepared to believe that it’s just part of what you may be going through. But you know how much damage can be done by loose talk in a village like this, and I am sure you will be more careful in the future. I will not make a note about you going against my expressed wishes regarding the children, for now, but I expect that to be the end of the matter. Is that understood?’

  There was silence, save for the wind whining in the window frame. He opened his mouth, but she put up her hand to stop him.

  ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘You’ve said quite enough already.’

  Without speaking, and without looking at her, he turned smartly on his heels and left the room, shutting the door behind him with more energy than was required. Jessie waited for a minute or two, hardly breathing. He was a weak man, and he was trying to intimidate her like he did the children. She was fearful and furious all at once and felt the tears pricking her eyes.

  * * *

  Later, talking to Agnes, Jessie tried to make light of what had happened.

  ‘He looked so silly, standing there with his little moustache wobbling up and down, and his nasty hair in ridges on his head. He must have combed it specially before he came to see me.’

  ‘You are his superior, after all,’ said Agnes.

  ‘And he hates that, I know. All those years at sea must have left their mark. And I told him so, gave him a way to back down, but I honestly think he’s going to carry on. Did I tell you the phras
e he used, about me as the headmistress? I had to be “beyond reproach”. Sounds like something out of the Bible.’

  ‘Or out of the vicar,’ said Agnes. ‘That’s where it’s coming from. You know how close the two of them are. They may feel it’s them against the world, and a world full of women at that. My mother told me it was the same after the first war, the men wanted to put the clock back, get the women back into the kitchen where they belong.’

  ‘I think Crompton wants my job,’ said Jessie. ‘He wants my job, and the schoolhouse, and thinks he can bully me into moving out.’

  ‘And Barker will back him up,’ said Agnes. ‘One more thing to talk to the Bishop about.’

  They sat for a moment, each thinking her own thoughts.

  Agnes spoke first. ‘He’s right about “beyond reproach”. It’s still true, even now.’

  ‘About me, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, dear, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know about John, or that would have been thrown in my face straight away. It was Andrew he mentioned. And that was, well, nothing really. It happened and was over, and so long ago.’

  Agnes looked across at her friend, watching her carefully.

  ‘I never understood it,’ she said, her voice quite soft. ‘I still don’t. I know you were lonely. We all get lonely at times, but … not that. Not with … someone like him, Jessie.’

  Jessie sat up suddenly. ‘I remember what you said that day. We were in this very room. You said you were disgusted. I’ve never forgotten that.’

  Agnes pulled a small handkerchief from the pocket of her cardigan. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it now, I shouldn’t have …’

  ‘No, Agnes, we need to. We never did at the time, with everything else going on. But that word, it’s stayed with me ever since. Disgusted.’

  ‘It was the shock,’ said Agnes. ‘I guessed something was going on, but I never thought, not for a minute, that you and he …’