Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  Oh yes, she knew the score all right. But long, long ago, in the days of their loving, Wesley had told her that it had been her natural beauty which had drawn him to her.

  ‘I don’t want to go to bed with a wife with curlers in her hair and goo on her face,’ he’d said. ‘Your skin smells and tastes of honey,’ he’d said. A long, long time ago.

  The memory was a knife twisting beneath her ribs, a grinding ache low down in her stomach; it was an anger so suddenly all-consuming she saw the piano through a mist. The dog-eared copy of ‘One Alone’ was on the music stand. ‘To be my own . . .’ he had sung, thinking of that other one, the one who made his life complete.

  Amy snatched the copy off the stand, tore it in two, then again, glorying in the sound of the paper tearing. Beside herself now, she lifted the lid of the stool, took out sheet after sheet of music, ripped them apart, scattered them over the blue and red carpet like pieces of overgrown confetti.

  ‘She is my life. Without her I am nothing . . .’

  Wesley with Clara Marsden, lying in bed with her, covering her body with his own.

  There was a noise going on in the room, a harsh sobbing, a dreadful uncontrolled sound which surely wasn’t her? Why hadn’t she guessed? How had she and Wesley lived together, slept together, without her knowing?

  ‘I hate you, Clara Marsden, hate you, hate you! I spit on you!’ she shouted, kneeling down to get the better of a hardbacked edition of Songs from the Shows.

  When it was all done and there was nothing left in the stool but fluff and an old and forgotten buttonhook, she started to cry, and once she began couldn’t stop.

  So that in her abject misery she failed to hear the almost apologetic rap of the iron knocker on the front door, or the sound of footsteps walking slowly away.

  Lying in bed next door, Dora Ellis heard and wondered what was going on. First the Battersby car had jerked her awake with the slamming of its doors sounding like pistol shots, then half dozing she’d heard someone knocking on Amy’s door. She half raised herself on an elbow, then lay down again. All sorts of peculiar things happened on New Year’s Eve, especially after a few beers.

  ‘You’re not serving ginger wine again this year?’ she’d asked Amy earlier. ‘You don’t really believe Wesley’s mother thinks that never a drop passes her son’s lips?’

  ‘Wesley likes it that way. He likes people to see him not as he is, but as they would like him to be.’

  Dora laughed. ‘Remember I never won a scholarship to the High School like you. That’s a bit too clever for me. Surely old Ma Battersby knows her husband lifts his elbow more often than now and again? And she’s quite fond of a drop of sherry.’

  ‘Mr Battersby drinks whisky for medicinal reasons. For his digestion,’ Amy said. ‘Wesley told me.’

  Dora turned on her side and pulled the blankets over her face. ‘Wesley told me. Wesley said. Wesley thinks . . .’ Did Amy not realize that having walked in her husband’s shadow for so long she’d become his echo? There were times when Dora wanted to shake her, to ask her what she thought, what her feelings were.

  Dora grunted into her pillow. If she wrote down on a piece of silk what she thought about Wesley Battersby, there wouldn’t be enough to make a butterfly a pair of knickers! With his Robert Taylor looks and come-to-bed eyes, Wesley Battersby was the answer to a maiden’s prayer.

  Thumping the flocks in her pillow into a more comfortable shape, Dora made a sound like a Victorian pshaw. She wouldn’t have him if he came gift wrapped. She wouldn’t have him if he came with a ribbon tied on his whatsit.

  Edgar Battersby didn’t believe his son had gone away to search for his soul. He’d seen the way women looked at Wesley, and the way he would give them a sly wink in return. He hoped all this funny business wasn’t tied up with the Preston shop and its disappointing profits. It had a splendid frontage with double windows and couldn’t be better situated, near to both station and the expanding shopping parade.

  Could it be that some of the exotic cigars Wesley had brought into an already heavy stock had tipped the scales? In the Blackburn shop the Santago cigar, small but composed entirely of Havana leaf, had practically walked off the shelves. There was nothing more hidebound than a man’s taste in cigars, though round about Christmas time it was the heavyweight Mexicans that were the most popular.

  Edgar rinsed his empty whisky glass and put it back in the cupboard before going to bed. It was no good voicing his worries to his wife. Phyllis wasn’t interested in the shops at all. He hoped that she was asleep, but no such luck. She lay on her back in her single bed, hands clad in white cotton gloves, her hair neatly netted in peach to match her nightdress and the bed jacket she slept in to stave off the chill in the big room with its tall windows and high ceilings. Her already sharp nose looked peaky with anxiety, and Edgar wanted to go to her and kiss her cheek, but she’d smell the whisky on his breath again and know he’d been having more than a last smoke of his pipe downstairs.

  ‘That girl’s driven Wesley away,’ she said, averting her eyes as usual as he undressed. ‘I’ve seen this coming.’

  ‘In what way has Amy driven him away?’ The exertion of climbing the stairs had set his heart beating so fast he could swear it was making his pyjama jacket move up and down as he fastened the buttons, and the pain beneath his ribs was starting again.

  ‘From the beginning,’ Phyllis said, ‘she failed him.’

  Edgar grunted. If he got into bed, lay down and tried to breathe deeply, then the thudding might slow down.

  ‘She’s had no ambition. I mean, what is she doing now? I ask you? Working afternoons as a fitter of corsets. Down on her knees with a tape measure. Granted her customers wear their long vests, so it’s all done decently, but how could she possibly meet them socially when she knows their most intimate secrets? How do you think I felt when the Enrolling Member of the Mothers’ Union told me that my daughter-in-law had told her that an all-in-one corselette would disguise her spare tyre better than a bust bodice and a corset finishing at the waist? Granted she laughed, but then Madeleine Cronshaw has always had a warped sense of humour. I don’t think she graces her position at all.’

  Edgar closed the bathroom door and sat down on a cork-topped stool. He wasn’t in a fit state to argue with his wife, but he had wanted to remind her of so many things . . . so many things . . .

  Phyllis knew as well as he did just why Amy hadn’t qualified for a better job. How could she when Wesley had seduced her in her gym slip? How could she when over the years of their marriage she had lost two babies stillborn and miscarried at least three others? Until he had put Wesley in his Preston shop, what stability had the lass had with a husband losing or giving up one job after another? Good God in heaven, couldn’t Phyllis see the truth about her precious son?

  But he was Edgar’s son too. He rocked himself backwards and forwards, in a disappointment he thought had ceased to plague him years ago – a slightly drunk, overweight elderly man in striped pyjamas, knowing he would have to get back to bed before his wife came looking for him.

  2

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, as a filter of grey light seeped through the curtains, Amy turned on her side, pulled the blankets over her head and for the next two hours slept the sleep of the dead.

  At seven o’clock she put a coat over her nightdress and went downstairs. The living room was as cold as a tomb, the all-night-burning fire a heap of grey ashes, choked to extinction by Wesley’s sheet music. Amy wished she hadn’t done it now. Suppose he came back today, changing his mind when he found out that Clara Marsden didn’t get up with him to make his breakfast, that all she wanted a man for was a meal ticket? Amy used her mother’s turn of speech without even noticing.

  As she opened the back door on her way to empty the ashes in the dustbin at the bottom of the sloping yard, the powdery ash blew into her face, clinging to her lips, stinging her eyes.

  Too miserable even to glance in the sideboard mirror – what did it matter how she
looked? – Amy knelt down on the rug and relaid the fire, criss-crossing the sticks of firewood, cheating by using half a firelighter, arranging the coal in a pyramid. Wesley had liked to come down to the sight of leaping flames and the smell of bacon sizzling in the frying pan, half a tomato, a couple of sausages and an egg with the white nice and lacy. He was full of chat, even first thing in the morning. Sometimes, when the temperature was below freezing, she would warm his shoes before he put them on, and the inside of his woollen gloves.

  ‘You do spoil me,’ he would say, and grin. ‘But I’m worth it.’

  To help the fire draw, Amy put the blower up and held a sheet of newspaper across it; in her mind’s eye was a picture of the flat over the Preston shop, with its tiny iron-canopied fireplace, its card table over by the window, and a carpet so thin the nicks of the floorboards were clearly visible through it. And a picture of Clara Marsden lying in Wesley’s arms in the rickety bed, her black-rooted hair spread on the pillow.

  The newspaper flared up and Amy pushed it quickly into the fire, burning a finger. It wasn’t much, hardly enough to redden the tip, but enough to rush the tears to her eyes and make her moan in an exaggerated way.

  If she could she would have rung the Preston shop, told Wesley that if he didn’t come home she would put her head in the gas oven. She saw herself opening the door, taking out the roasting tin and the shelves, laying a settee cushion inside, turning on the gas, and making herself as comfortable as she could. She saw Wesley by her graveside in the cemetery on a windswept rainy afternoon, watching as they lowered her coffin into the earth, a broken man destined to live the rest of his life in the shadow of inconsolable regret.

  She was dying for a cup of tea. The thought popped into her head even as she was imagining Wesley being led away, tears streaming down his face. Killing herself wouldn’t do anybody any good. Telephoning Wesley would only humiliate her even more. But making herself a cup of tea made sense.

  Moving like a sleepwalker, she swayed her way down the lobby to take the milk in, bent down to the step, straightened herself up to stare into the face of Mr Dale, smart as a funeral director in his dark overcoat, on his way to work in the Education Office down town.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Battersby.’

  He was for stopping, but she was too quick for him. Before he could take one breath she had the door closed, leaving him standing there blinking.

  Amy was so ashamed she went straight to the sideboard mirror to verify the worst, and what she saw made her step back in horror. Now Mr Dale would know why her husband had left her. Right this minute he’d be walking along the street wondering why it had taken Wesley so long!

  Black soot striped one cheek. Her hair looked as if it had been combed with a rake and powered with blown ash. Mr Dale would think that she didn’t possess a dressing gown, not knowing that she had spilled tea down it and put it in the wash.

  ‘You look like something the cat’s brought in and spit out,’ her mother said, turning up before Amy had a chance to get dressed. ‘I’m going down to the fish market. I’ll bring you a herring if you like.’

  ‘One, not two,’ Amy said, wild-eyed with misery. ‘From now on it’s one chop, one rasher, one sausage.’

  ‘One alone,’ Gladys said, straight off. ‘Who would have thought that all the time he was singing last night he was planning to run off?’ She waited, but her daughter still wasn’t for telling, so she placed a paper bag on the table. ‘I’ve brought two pieces of fatty cake to have with our cups of tea. I don’t suppose you’ve fancied any breakfast?’

  ‘He hasn’t run off with his nerves,’ Amy said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘He’s run off with Charlie Marsden’s wife. You know Charlie Marsden. One of Wesley’s friends.’

  ‘Amos Marsden’s lad? Master Plumbers, Ember Street? I remember Amos starting off with a handcart, zigzagging to get it up Shear Brow, and when he died, leaving a nice little business. Took the lad next door on as an apprentice last back end.’

  Amy waited impatiently, knowing that until her mother had sorted out the Marsdens there was no point in continuing.

  ‘Clara Marsden? Father unknown, and a mother who ended up in Queen’s Park Hospital believing she was a brazil nut. Or was it an acorn? Something in that line. A rough lot if I remember rightly.’

  ‘You’ve seen Clara Marsden at the Dramatics, Mam.’ Amy sat down at the table and began to cry. ‘She’s smart. She has a new outfit every Easter, then another for winter. Coats and toning hats. And hair like Jean Harlow’s.’

  ‘Fur coat and no knickers, I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Gladys said.

  There was a grey hair or two sprouting from her daughter’s parting, and Amy not yet forty. Clara Marsden! Gladys’s expression was murderous. She wasn’t even pretty. Nowhere near as pretty as Amy, but there was no getting away from the fact that she could look like a mannequin when she tried. Gladys had heard it said many a time that half of Charlie Marsden’s money went on his wife’s back.

  ‘Best go upstairs and get dressed while I put the kettle on,’ she said briskly. ‘And I’ll give the kitchen floor a wipe over while I’m at it.’

  When Amy came down wearing a black dress with white collar, ready to go to work that afternoon, Gladys said, ‘When his passion’s slaked he’ll come back to you. He’s a Battersby when all’s said and done, with their good name to think about. The Battersbys would never stand for a divorce. It would kill his mother. She’d never lift her head up again.’

  ‘Oh, Mam . . .’ Amy’s voice was raw with the hurt of it all. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Gladys felt a sharp stab through her heart. Amy had never asked her mother what she should do, not even during that awful time when Wesley had come on leave from France and taken her virginity before she was seventeen. The puppy-like pleading on her daughter’s face was more than she could bear.

  ‘Well, sitting crying won’t get you nowhere, will it?’ she said, going through to put the pieces of fatty cake on a plate.

  Gladys had only just gone when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Amy told the square-built man standing outside, gazing at her with stricken eyes. ‘You’d better come in.’

  ‘If it’s not convenient I’ll go away,’ he said, following her down the lobby, taking off a fawn trilby hat with a small green feather growing from the band,

  ‘What are we going to do, Amy?’ he asked, sitting down and bursting into tears, letting them trickle down his cheeks, making no attempt to wipe them away. ‘What is our Lottie going to do? I’ve sent her to stop with her Auntie Maude for a day or two – till she’s back at school anyroad.’

  Amy was stunned. She couldn’t look at him, so she stared down at the orange sunrise pegged into the half-moon rug in front of the fireplace. Charlie Marsden was crying so hard she could see the old forceps marks on his forehead turning purple. Funny she’d never noticed them before. Charlie was the joker in the pack of Wesley’s friends, with a non-stoppable fund of jokes.

  ‘Charlie told us a good one tonight,’ Wesley would say, repeating it with all the accents and the right emphasis on the punch line. ‘Where he gets them from I don’t know.’

  ‘Clara’s not a bad woman,’ Charlie was saying now, after a trumpeting blow into his handkerchief. ‘It’s not the first time she’s strayed from the straight and narrow, but they’ve been no more than passing fancies. She’s never left home before.’ He buried his big face in his hands. ‘She’s wanted for nothing.’ His voice broke with emotion. ‘It seems they can’t live without each other. I fear it’s the real thing this time.’

  ‘But this is the real thing,’ Amy cried, flinging both arms wide. ‘This house, this room. Me! An’ you, Charlie.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  ‘Do twenty years of marriage count as nothing?’

  ‘Seventeen for us.’

  ‘Then how can you sit there and talk about the real thing?’

  ‘Because I’m a
realist. Because I saw them together not long ago without them seeing me, and it took just one glance at their faces to know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Amy thought she might be going to hit him, but worse was to come.

  ‘That they were besotted. Oblivious to the world around them. Gazing into each other’s eyes.’

  ‘Where?’ Amy demanded. ‘Where?’

  ‘On the Boulevard.’

  ‘What day? What time?’

  ‘Holding hands,’ Charlie said, ignoring her. ‘What does it matter what bloody day it was? I was in the van with one of the lads driving, or I’d have got out and thumped their heads together.’ He balled his hands into fists. ‘By heck, but I’d’ve liked to do that. As it was we were on our way to rescue a woman up to her waist in water in her back scullery. Half the bloody town’s frozen solid. I’ll be run off my feet when a thaw sets in.’ He was talking at random, hardly knowing what he was saying, and Amy Battersby was standing there white as a sheet in a dark dress with a white collar that made her look like a Sister on a men’s surgical ward. He groaned. ‘She told me that Wesley wants to marry her,’ he said.

  Amy saw him through a red, hazy mist. Did he know what he’d just said?

  ‘I hope you know a good solicitor.’ He got up to go, then sat down again as Amy clutched at his sleeve.

  ‘How can they get married when Clara’s married to you and Wesley’s married to me? Yesterday, at this time, she was your wife and Wesley was my husband. Is my husband.’