Forgiven

by Ruth Sutton

  John looked away, towards the grey square of light and the brown ground outside. They could hear the rush of the beck at the bottom of the garden. Hannah started to speak, but Fred held up his hand, to stop her. They could see that John was thinking. When he spoke, he didn’t look at them.

  ‘I told Maggie about Jessie,’ he said. ‘About her being my mother, and how we’d lied about it.’

  There was no response. They waited for more.

  John sat down on an old chair that stood beside the front door.

  ‘She was angry with me, about the lies. She said I’d not stood up for meself, and that she couldn’t respect me for that … Then she went to see Jessie, at the school, without telling me.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Hannah asked, imagining how the two women might have dealt with each other.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, she didn’t tell me. But I know she was angry with Jessie too, and she said so.’

  ‘Good for ’er,’ said Fred.

  John turned around to face them. ‘But she didn’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I had to find about it from Jessie herself, in a café. I felt such a fool.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Hannah. ‘She made you look a fool.’

  John hung his head. He knew how feeble it sounded, spoken out loud.

  ‘And that’s why you’ve fallen out?’ asked Fred.

  ‘Aye,’ said John. ‘We ’ad a row, and I’ve not seen ’er since then, two weeks or so. I don’t want to forgive ’er but I don’t want to lose ’er either.’

  ‘Forgive?’ said Hannah, ‘What do you ’ave to forgive ’er for?’

  ‘For not telling me. For getting involved without telling me.’

  Hannah and Fred looked at each other.

  ‘Shall I tell ’im, or you?’ said Fred.

  ‘You save your breath, love,’ said Hannah. She walked slowly across the room and stood in front of John. He looked up at her.

  ‘Now listen to me, our John,’ she said. ‘You’re like a son to us, and we love you. You’ve helped your mam all these years by keeping it all quiet about you and ’er, but it were bound to come out sometime. And now it ’as. And the person you told cares enough about you to say summat. You were just a lad when you found your mam. Just a lad. Now you’re a man wi’ a life of your own, and that girl could be part of it. She’s got spirit, that’s why we like ’er. She said some things to your mam that might’ve needed saying, who knows? And she didn’t tell you, and now you feel shown up. Is that it?’

  John nodded.

  ‘Get your ’ead straight, our John,’ Fred joined in. ‘Don’t dribble on about forgiving ’er. What’s to forgive? She’s done nowt but stand up for you, in ’er own way.’

  John stared at them both. They’d never spoken to him like this.

  ‘What should I do?’ he asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Go and see ’er, for a start,’ said Hannah. ‘Forget about forgiveness. Do you love ’er?’

  John nodded.

  ‘Tell ’er that. That’s enough. The rest’ll sort itself.’

  ‘But she lied to me!’

  ‘Did you ask her, straight out?’

  ‘Not until Jessie told me what happened.’

  ‘So she didn’t lie,’ said Hannah, sitting down on the arm of Fred’s chair. ‘She just didn’t tell you. We all keep quiet about things, all the time,’ she went on. ‘I ’ad to lie to me dad all the time about Fred. Didn’t like it, but I’d no choice.’

  Hannah leaned forward and put her hand over John’s.

  ‘Life’s not that simple. Lies, truth, they’re not so different sometimes, tha’ knows. If we all told truth, all the time, it’d be a mess. Fred calls me beautiful, I call ’im a stupid bugger. Both lies. Don’t mean any of it. It’s what you do. Makes t’world go round. Reet, Fred?’

  ‘She’s reet, lad,’ said Fred. He smiled. ‘She’s allus reet.’

  ‘Lying again,’ said his wife, smiling back at her sick husband in the chair.

  ‘Don’t let ’er slip away,’ said Fred. ‘Tha’s waited for a lass a long time, and that’s a fine lass. You’d be a fool to let that ’un go.’

  John said nothing.

  ‘There’s lies and lies,’ said Hannah. ‘You and Jessie’ve lied all these years because she ’ad to and you went along wi’ it ’cos she’s your mam. No shame in that. Maggie’ll know that too, deep down.’ She squeezed John’s hand.

  ‘Does she want you?’

  He thought about that.

  ‘I think she does,’ he said.

  ‘Well don’t ’ang around. Life’s too short.’

  ‘That’s reet,’ said Fred.

  For the next hour or two John was busy outside, keeping the bitter cold at bay by chopping logs and carrying water into the house. As he worked, he went through what they had both said to him. Were they right about Maggie? He hoped so.

  By the time the jobs were done and he was warming his hands round a mug of tea, he reckoned there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, long enough to get back ahead of the snow that he was sure would come.

  ‘Think on, our John,’ said Hannah as she watched him bundle himself up in as many layers as he could manage. ‘Don’t let that lass get away.’

  He hugged them both, ducked through the low doorway and stood for a moment, looking at the sky, feeling the wind, thinking about driving back down the valley. Wind’s behind me, he thought, and the road’s dry. As he pulled the bike from its stand by the bridge tiny pinheads of ice blew past him.

  Almost as soon as John turned the bike into the main road down the valley, the tiny flakes had begun to grow and thicken and he increased his speed, driving ahead of the wind, ahead of the curtain of snow racing down from the mountains behind him, inexorable, unseen. When the blizzard overtook and engulfed him, John soon realised he could not go much further. Seeing nothing but the walls on either side of him he had no idea where he was or how far he had come. White flakes swirled out of the dark sky, and soon the bike began to slide on the road. Horizontal wind screamed through his thin leather helmet and blew the snow into drifts.

  John’s stomach had begun to churn with anxiety when he recognised the driveway down to Applegarth on his right and he knew that he was within reach of Newton. Relieved and exhausted, he pushed the bike off the road, as far under the bushy hedge as he could get it and set off to walk the last hundred yards down the slippery hill towards the schoolhouse.

  All he wanted was shelter until the snow blew out. He hadn’t seen Jessie since their miserable conversation in Whitehaven, when she seemed to taunt him with Maggie’s behaviour, and had no wish to talk about it again, but there was nowhere else to go.

  CHAPTER 16

  JOHN SAW THE LIGHT in the front room change, growing fainter as the lamp was carried away from the window. Then he heard his mother’s voice through the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called.

  ‘It’s John,’ he called back, raising his voice above the whining of the wind. ‘I’m stuck.’

  The door was pulled open immediately and he stepped into the house in a whirl of snow. Jessie closed the door quickly behinds him and pushed him into the front room where a fire was burning brightly. John pulled off his sodden gloves and held painful fingers towards the heat.

  ‘What is it?’ said Jessie. ‘What on earth made you go out on a night like this?’

  ‘I went up to Boot earlier on, to see Hannah and Fred, and thought I could get back before the snow came. I got as far as Agnes’s drive but I couldn’t go any further, so I left the bike and walked down.’

  ‘Get those boots off,’ she said. ‘And that wet coat. I’ve plenty of warm things if you’re not fussy.’

  Both of them were grateful for the distraction of necessary activity, getting warm, changing clothes, making and drinking tea. It was only when all that was done that awkwardness began to seep through the veneer. Talking about Hannah and Fred was safe, and they did so with enthusiasm for a while, before ther
e was nothing else to say.

  ‘I’ll check what it’s like outside,’ said Jessie, ‘see if I can get to the outhouse.’ When she returned a few minutes later the embarrassment deepened with the news that the outhouse was inaccessible with drifting snow half way up the door.

  ‘There’s a commode in the back bedroom,’ said Jessie.

  John nodded, wishing he had set off earlier and was back in the privacy of his own little house, not stuck here with someone he really did not want to see.

  He made himself useful bringing in more logs from the yard while Jessie made them some food. When the meal was over, both of them thought about the night ahead and tried to speak at once. ‘You’ll be staying over, of course,’ said Jessie. ‘I can light the fire in the back bedroom if you like.’

  John shook his head: he did not want to be treated like a guest, to be beholden. ‘I’ll sleep down here,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was going to say, before. No need to heat another room, and I’ll pull the cushions onto the floor. That’ll do fine. It’ll have blown over by the morning, and then I can sort out what to do.’ He looked at his mother. She doesn’t want me here either, he said to himself. She’s as uncomfortable as I am.

  He was right. Jessie did not like surprises, and always needed time to prepare herself to see John, ever since their first encounter. In all those years, she had never spent more than a few hours with him, and now they could be marooned here together for much longer than that. What could they talk about? Their last conversation, only three weeks before, had been painful. Jessie had said more than she had intended, and John had been angry. Now, Jessie could not ask about Maggie and John would not discuss it. The only acceptable conversation would be about other things, things that didn’t really matter. Lying in her bed, Jessie went over a list of safe subjects in her mind: it was a short list. The best thing would be to avoid conversation as far as possible by keeping busy, and it was while making a mental list of necessary jobs around the house that Jessie finally fell asleep.

  When she peered out of the window around eight o’clock the next morning she knew at once that there would be no early release from their confinement in the house. All night the wind and snow had continued and the landscape around the schoolhouse was as bleak as the surface of the moon, save for the white outlines of trees. Drifts had reached the top of the wall around the school yard, but in the field opposite there were patches where the snow had been blown aside, leaving the frozen ground almost bare. Looking down the road towards the Farriers, Jessie could see no tracks, hoof or footprints. Nothing was stirring.

  In the front room, John was picking up the blankets and cushions from the floor. As he turned towards her, Jessie noticed with a shock the white scarf he was wearing round his neck.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked, remembering the last man she’d seen wearing it.

  ‘I found it last night, under a cushion on the sofa,’ John said. ‘I think it’s silk, like pilots used to wear in the war.’ He stroked it with his hand. ‘Where did you get it?’

  Jessie hesitated. John had never known about Andrew, and he must never know. She had to think quickly, finding another plausible lie.

  ‘It was a gift,’ she said lightly. ‘Caroline Leadbetter gave it to me, and she got it from her son.’

  ‘Andy?’ said John. ‘I thought he was in Canada.’

  ‘He is, now,’ she went on, juggling truth and untruth in her mind. ‘He was with the Canadian air force during the war, and when it was over he sent the scarf to his mother, as a keepsake.’

  ‘And she gave it to you?’

  ‘She was grateful,’ Jessie lied on. ‘I tried to help when Lionel was ill, when he had his stroke.’

  ‘Well it’s a splendid gift,’ he said, raising the scarf to his face and sniffing it. ‘Smells of something, soap maybe.’

  ‘Yes,’ said his mother, holding out her hand. ‘I can find you another scarf …’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said, handing it back to her. ‘Sorry.’

  Jessie left the room. In the hall she buried her face in the silk scarf for a moment before putting it away, out of sight in the cupboard. She pulled another, longer scarf from a hook and took it back into the room with her.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said brightly, ‘this should be better. Now, let’s get the range fire going and warm ourselves up. Still snowing. You’d have trouble finding the bike, never mind riding it anywhere.’

  ‘What about the trains?’ he asked, wondering how long his unexpected stay would have to be.

  ‘Hard to tell. Sometimes the coast gets less snow than here. Drifting will be the problem. If the snow eases a bit, we’ll venture out, shall we, and see what’s happening?’

  Venturing out proved to be a problem. When they pulled the back door open, a wall of snow fell into the room and it took both of them several minutes to shovel it out again before the door could be shut. On one side of the house the snow had almost reached the window, while on the other there was much less. Together they planned the best way of getting out. First they wound some old cloth round John’s trouser legs and boots to keep out the snow, and then Jessie held a chair while John stepped out of an open window on the side where the snow had largely blown away. He sank in almost up to his knees but managed to pull out one foot at a time and began to dig out a narrow path between the front door and the lane that ran down to the shop. One side of the lane was almost passable, while on the other side the snow was piled up against walls and doors.

  The wind was merciless, pushing snow back as fast as John shovelled it away, and by the end of the morning he had given up, defeated by the force of the storm just as he had been the night before. Jessie had baked some bread while John was busy outside and the air smelled delicious. For lunch she made meagre sandwiches with the old bread and the last of the ham. They ate in apparently companionable silence, and Jessie was beginning to hope that the day might pass without incident when John leaned back in his chair and said, ‘He always spoke very highly of you, you know.’

  She looked up. ‘Who did?’

  ‘Andy Leadbetter. He’d had a bit too much to drink one night and started talking about what a fine woman you were. I was surprised, you know, with him being so much younger. He’s only a few years older than me.’

  Jessie got up from the table. Surely John didn’t know about Andrew. He couldn’t.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked, keeping her voice as light as she could.

  ‘Nothing much. I’d forgotten all about it until you mentioned about the scarf.’

  ‘He drank too much, that young man,’ said Jessie. ‘I hope they sobered him up properly when he joined the air force.’

  ‘He came home, didn’t he?’ said John, ‘when Lionel had his stroke. Agnes mentioned it.’

  Damn, thought Jessie. ‘I think he did.’ She lied so easily now. ‘That must have been when he gave his mother the scarf.’

  She glanced at the clock. ‘Two o’clock already,’ she said. ‘And still the snow’s coming down. It must stop soon, surely.’

  ‘I could try and clear a path to the outhouse,’ he suggested. ‘If the wind drops, the snow might not blow back. It’ll take a while. I’ll go out of the window, same as before, and attack the drift from the other side.’

  They both knew that this task was both unnecessary and probably fruitless, but they both agreed that it should be done. By the time the daylight was fading, John had cut a narrow path across the yard to the outhouse. He arms ached with the effort of shovelling, but when darkness finally forced him back into the house he was relieved to find that the atmosphere indoors seemed to reflect what was happening outside; it was less frigid and brittle than before.

  While Jessie washed their evening meal plates in the sink, John fell asleep in the chair by the fire in the front room. For the first time in years she was able to look at him closely as he slept, unobserved by anyone else. How like Clive he looked, with his dark hair hanging over his face. Clive would have been pro
ud of him, she felt sure. As it was, Jessie’s feelings towards her son were always complicated, contaminated by fear and regret. Would that change, she wondered, once the secret was finally out? Could they start again perhaps, or was it too late? And what was there to keep them together, besides the blood link? He was a likeable enough young man, but nothing remarkable, she thought. Dependable, quite a catch for that young woman from Kells. It occurred to Jessie that John, her only child, was a disappointment to her.

  John’s eyes were closed, but he knew that Jessie was watching him. What does she see, he wondered. She doesn’t know much about me, except that I threaten her respectability. He lay still, remembering how he had put together the puzzle of her identity and tracked her down. Would he do the same again, knowing what he knew now? Part of him wished he had never found her, or having done so, had just tiptoed away, out of her life. Now they had to deal with each other, and it felt like treading on eggshells. He opened his eyes just enough to see that she had turned away to tend the fire, and he feigned sudden wakefulness, stretching his long legs out in front of him.

  ‘Feeling better?’ she said. ‘It was hard work for you today.’

  ‘More tomorrow, if the weather improves.’

  ‘It sounds as if the wind has dropped. And the snow seems to have eased off. The path to the outhouse is still clear.’

  ‘If there’s any chance of getting home,’ he said, ‘I really want to do that, even if it means leaving the bike where it is for now.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to get back to work … and to your friend.’

  ‘No,’ said John, suddenly confused. He sat up straight in the chair. ‘I mean, yes, but … I don’t want to talk about that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jessie.

  He looked at her. Why did she say that, mention his ‘friend’ again in that same patronising way?

  Jessie saw his expression change. ‘Has something happened?’