by Marie Joseph
Immediately he dropped it into the pocket of the camelhair coat swathed round him like a dressing gown.
‘Don’t be unreasonable, now,’ he said, turning to go up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
‘I’ll have the locks changed!’ she shouted after him, then gnawed at a fist as she heard a drawer jerked open followed by the creak of the wardrobe door.
She didn’t know what to do. The sight of him, when he had been the last person on earth she had expected to see, had shocked her into all the wrong reactions. One minute she had been sitting there regretting her cowardice in not going to the morning service, telling herself that she would have to meet people some day, when there he was, come in from the cold, tall and broad-shouldered, with his handsome face, the features bold and well-defined, a face you could trust to the ends of the earth.
Another drawer banged upstairs, snapping her out of her trancelike state.
She didn’t remember climbing the stairs, but there she was snatching a shirt out of his hand, screwing it up into a ball, hurling it to the far corner of the bedroom.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are?’ Was that alien raucous voice her own? ‘Coming here as though nothing had happened. Sure I wouldn’t be in. What would you have done? Left another flamin’ letter?’ Her eyes blazed. ‘Bringing your suitcase back to fill it again?’ She clapped a hand to her forehead. ‘Oh, I saw it all right. I saw you leave it at the bottom of the stairs.’ Before he could stop her she grabbed the case from the bed, swirled it round, scattering its contents across the carpet. ‘Do you think . . .’ she shouted, ‘do you think you can do this to me? Do you . . . ?’
He caught her wrists as she drummed her fists against his chest, held her so tightly she could only pant and struggle till pain held her still. His face was so close she could see the green flecks in his brown eyes, the faint bags beneath them, the bags he’d anguished over in the mirror, till she’d told him they made him look more handsome than ever, swearing that no one would ever guess he was forty-one.
‘Pull yourself together, love,’ he said softly. When she opened her mouth and screamed, he let go of one of her wrists to slap her so hard her head rocked back on her shoulders. Her eyes flew wide and when she began to cry with hard shuddering sobs he led her over to the bed and sat down beside her.
‘I’m not enjoying this,’ he told her in his caress of a voice. ‘Seeing you upset like this distresses me too, Amy.’ He turned his profile towards her. ‘I am ready to admit that I should have discussed the situation with you a long time ago, but every time I tried you did or said something so sweet, so caring I just couldn’t find the words. Any other woman but you would have guessed I was going through hell. Wounding people I am fond of doesn’t come easy to me, you know.’ He put out a hand to touch her hair, but she jerked away as if his touch would burn her.
‘Keep your hands off me,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘If you touch me I’ll be sick.’
He stood up looking honestly bewildered. ‘I thought you had more respect for yourself than to behave like this, Amy.’ He sounded deeply wounded, badly done to. ‘Can’t you see that in the end there was only one way to leave and that was quickly with no harsh words between us, no quarrelling, no explaining.’
‘Respect?’ She picked on the only word she’d managed to take in. ‘I lost that when I married you. Or rather when you were good enough to marry me! You’ve held it over me ever since. Especially when it turned out not to have been necessary after all.’ The words had been stored up inside her for a long time. ‘You were forced to marry me, because your father convinced you it was the only honourable thing to do.’
‘I married you because I loved you.’
‘But you don’t love me now.’
‘Of course I love you. There’ll always be a corner of my heart just kept for you, but not in the way I love . . . Oh God, Amy, I can’t help myself.’ Apparently overcome, he buried his face in his hands and sat down beside her again.
All at once she was reminded of Charlie Marsden sitting in exactly the same attitude, the tears trickling down between his fingers. But there were no tears this time. She knew that for sure.
‘The way you love her,’ she finished for him.
He nodded into his hands.
She had always loved his thick dark hair, the way it sprang from the parting in deep waves. There were tiny threads of silver in it; it smelled of bay rum and cigarettes, a manly Wesley kind of smell. She moved closer to him and, all the control ebbing away again, put her arms around him, forced his head up and began to kiss his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth, and yes, she had been right, there were no tears.
This time he held her gently but firmly away from him, searched her face with sad reproachful eyes. ‘Oh, Amy. Dear, sweet Amy, what are we doing to each other?’
‘What did I do wrong?’ she wanted to know. ‘You can see how low you’ve brought me when I can ask a thing like that.’
‘You did nothing wrong, nothing at all.’
Thinking she was calmer, he put her aside and began to sort out a clutch of ties, wrapping the chosen ones round a hand, tucking them neatly into the sides of the case retrieved from the floor.
‘In fact, I don’t think there is a better, more generous person in the length and breadth of England. I can’t fault you in any way.’
‘That’s nice.’
Busily rolling up a Chilprufe vest, he missed the sarcasm entirely, reached across her for a pair of underpants.
‘Clara is no home-breaker, you know. She and Charlie had been drifting apart for a long time, and she knew that we lived together as brother and sister – more or less.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Amy uttered the blasphemy without even noticing. ‘So you must have committed incest at least once a month?’
‘That’s no word for a woman to use.’ He betrayed his agitation by the way he grabbed a heap of socks from a drawer, shoving them into the case any old how.
‘I know worse ones than that!’ Amy was on her feet again. ‘Like whore,’ she shouted. ‘Clara Marsden’s middle name.’
‘Jealousy doesn’t become you either.’
‘Bugger jealousy,’ said Amy, advancing on him, trying to snatch at the handle of the case.
‘I’ve never heard you swear before.’ He sounded genuinely aggrieved. ‘And I don’t like it at all. I think I’d better go,’ he said, sidestepping round her. ‘I came full of good intentions, to try and sort a few things out.’
‘So I see,’ Amy said, glaring at the case.
‘To arrange some kind of weekly payment.’
‘Stuff your weekly payments!’
He was going and she couldn’t bear it. This time he might not come back. She had said all the wrong things, showed herself up, let herself down, in a rage that trembled her into a terrible uncontrollable fury.
‘I wish you’d listen to me,’ he said from the door.
‘Shut your gob!’
He was killing her. Couldn’t he see? He was all that she had and he was walking away. It wasn’t her swearing and saying all those mean and petty vulgar things, it was someone she didn’t know. It was a woman she glimpsed now in the dressing-table mirror, wild of eye, flushed of face.
‘I hate you!’ she called after him, watching him go down the narrow staircase with the case banging against the wall.
The face he turned up to her was full of hurt disbelief. ‘I’ll come back when you’re more in control of yourself. I don’t know you today.’
‘Don’t you patronize me! As if I’m the one in the wrong!’ Without conscious volition she rushed back into the bedroom, threw up the sash window and flung down a fair-isle pullover left on the bed. ‘You forgot this!’ she bellowed at the top of her voice, hurling it as far as she could.
Drawing back in shame as it landed on the head of Mr Dale, innocently coming back from the newsagent’s with the Sunday Times tucked underneath his arm.
At once the fire went out
of her. She closed the window and went slowly back down the stairs, the bile of shame sour in her throat.
4
THE FAIR-ISLE PULLOVER came back that afternoon.
Amy heard the doorbell ping just once and found a brown paper parcel lying on the mat.
‘I believe you dropped this,’ the note pinned to the V-neck of the pullover said in neat clerical writing, with the initials B.D. underneath.
‘I heard you yelling your head off at Wesley,’ Dora said, letting herself in without knocking, ‘so I thought I’d give you a chance to cool down before I came in. What’s all this about?’ She picked up the pullover and read the note.
‘I threw it through the window after Wesley, but it landed on Mr Dale’s head,’ Amy explained. ‘What he thinks about me I daren’t imagine.’
‘He wouldn’t think anything. He just lets people be. Never condemns. He’s a nice man.’
Dora was so tired that even her eyeballs ached. As an extra favour to Mrs Green and because she had been offered double pay, she had cleaned through the empty house waiting for Mrs Green’s daughter to settle down in after her marriage. The previous owners hadn’t wiped the paintwork down for years, and when they’d taken the carpets up had left the tacks in the floorboards. Dora had nearly knocked an eye out struggling to remove them with a pair of pliers.
‘I saw Wesley coming in as I turned the corner,’ she said. ‘He didn’t stop long, did he?’
Dora wasn’t being inquisitive, just friendly and nosey. Amy accepted that, but all at once she felt hemmed in, suffocated, as though the walls were closing in on her.
‘I’ll have to get out,’ she said.
‘What, right this minute?’
‘Or I won’t be responsible, Dora.’
‘I’ll go and get me coat on . . .’
Dora wanted nothing more than to have a nice lie-down on the bed, but Amy didn’t look fit to be let out alone. Screaming and yelling like that must have taken a lot out of her.
Amy wanted nothing more than to be left on her own, to walk as fast and as far as she could. To forget the terrible things she had said to Wesley, the way she had sworn at him, his disgust of her. Every single nerve in her body was still alive and jangling; if anyone had touched her she was sure she would have twanged like a ukulele.
‘Why do you say Mr Dale’s a nice man?’ she wanted to know, before they had turned up the hill towards the park. ‘Wesley always said he was a jessie.’
Dora was at the stage of exhaustion akin to intoxication. She had left the brown halo hat at home and tied a woollen scarf round her head, fastening it beneath her chin with a bow. With her prematurely wrinkled face and her habit of walking leaning forward as if battling against a force-ten gale, she looked at least ten years older than Amy.
‘He’s not a jessie.’ Dora looked smug all of a sudden. ‘The town looks quite nice when you see it from up here on a fine day like this, when there’s no smoke from the mill chimneys and the hills are covered in snow.’ Dora stopped and narrowed her eyes as if she intended drawing what she could see. She turned to Amy. ‘I know that he’s not a jessie because once, years ago, we were lovers,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time.’
Not another word would she say, though they skirted the duck pond in the park and started off at a brisk pace down the Broad Walk. Amy was so flabbergasted that she saw nothing of the people going for their Sunday walks, husbands and wives, arms linked, grumbling children trailing on behind, two stray dogs fighting, a tramp rooting in a wire bin, a couple out of Hodder Street who had a stall on the market on a Wednesday and Saturday, walking along having a good old row.
Dora must be having her on – she could say the most outrageous things when she wanted to. Deep, too. Amy glanced at her now, swinging her arms, walking like a soldier, as if her revelation had put fresh heart into her. The park was beautiful with the trees etched boldly against an ochre-pale sky heavy with the promise of snow, but Amy was oblivious to it all. Until Dora enlarged on the preposterous statement she had just made Amy could think of nothing else. Not even at that moment of Wesley.
Amy hadn’t been to chapel that morning and she wasn’t at the afternoon Sunday school, either. Gladys sat at the back of the big room with the Ladies’ Class, and after Miss Barton at the piano had played the opening chords of the first hymn, gave up watching the door.
‘Stand up! Stand up for Jesus,’ she sang. One thing was certain. Wesley would never dare to show his face in here again; wouldn’t have the cheek. Not that he’d attended Sunday school regularly. Gladys stared at the Men’s Class on her left, singing away at the tops of their voices. Like a miners’ choir without the tin hats and lamps. Wesley would have been a credit to them, but his parents were church, not chapel, and church-goers didn’t seem to sing as loud as Methodists somehow.
‘From victory unto victory. His army He shall lead.’ More than half the men singing their heads off had been in the last war. Gladys had always thought old soldiers had a stamp about them. Those terrible trenches, that terrible mud. Three of the women in the Ladies’ Class had been widowed, left to struggle on a pittance, to bring children up without fathers, deny them scholarships, because their wages were needed. Now they were talking about another war.
‘Forth to the mighty conflict,’ Gladys sang. She’d pop round to see Amy on her way home and take her a barm cake spread with a bit of rum butter left over from Christmas.
After the hymn, the various classes dispersed to the vestries for their own individual lessons and prayers. Mrs Rakestraw, who lived opposite to Amy, caught Gladys up in the passage.
‘A right old bust-up this morning,’ she whispered. ‘Your Amy was leaning out of the upstairs window chucking all her husband’s clothes down into the street. Has he gone back to his mother? I believe they’re very close.’
In the small vestry the women arranged themselves on the little hard chairs set round the walls.
‘Let us pray,’ the Minister’s wife said, and Gladys buried her face in her hands. ‘For the peace of the world, and that men may learn to love one another. That all violence and thoughts of violence may cease.’
Gladys was certain of one thing. If she’d had a gun on her at that moment, Mrs Rakestraw would be a gonner.
‘If you don’t tell me about you and Mr Dale I shall burst,’ Amy said the minute they got back to the house. They had actually met him on their way home and Amy had thought she would die of embarrassment if he stopped to talk to them, but he had merely raised his hat and walked on.
Dora suggested that they had a cup of tea first and perhaps a couple of biscuits as she hadn’t had time for any dinner, and anyway what was the hurry when it was a secret she had kept for years.
In the kitchen Amy willed the kettle to come to the boil. ‘Why haven’t you told me before?’
‘Because when Wesley was here you would have been shocked.’
‘And I’m not shocked now?’
‘Well, are you?’
Amy handed Dora a cup of tea. ‘Fascinated, but no, not all that shocked.’
‘He saved my life.’ Dora settled back in Wesley’s chair. ‘If he hadn’t made me feel I could go on living, I don’t know what would have happened. But I still put Greg away eventually.’
‘You didn’t put Greg away! You had no choice but let him go into hospital when he became incapable. He needed specialized care.’
‘An institution,’ Dora said, ‘with a lot of broken men from the war, men who were taking too long to die. Men rejected by their families.’
‘You didn’t have any family, Dora. There was only you.’
‘There was a man in the next bed to him with hardly any face.’
Amy put her cup down on the tiled hearth. ‘Don’t tell me about Mr Dale and you today. It’s bringing bad memories back and besides, you must know you’ve nothing to reproach yourself for. Wesley said Mr Dale was a conscientious objector during the war.’
Dora immediately snapped out of he
rself. ‘And so he was. At the very beginning, but they sent him off to the front line in the thick of the fighting and tied him to a post with all the killing and the dying going on around him. You can imagine what that did to a man like him who wouldn’t step on an ant if he could walk round it.’ She drew in her breath. ‘Anyway he joined up right away after that, and they sent him as a stretcher bearer. At the end of the war he had spent over eighteen months in the trenches. He got a medal, too.’ Her voice was fierce. ‘You and Wesley don’t know the first thing about him, do you?’
‘He’s always struck me as wanting to keep himself to himself, and anyway . . . with . . .’
‘With Wesley not liking him you decided not to like him either!’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘It’s the truth.’
Amy suddenly saw that it was. Mr Dale had certainly been very kind to her. If you hadn’t known differently you might have thought he was a real medical man. He had knelt by her side and held her hands in his; he had calmed her down . . .
‘He calmed me down,’ Dora was saying. ‘At that time I was working all day, then running to catch the tram to Queen’s Park Hospital. I was sitting with Greg every evening by his bed, though for the last few months he didn’t know me most of the time. He would tell me I never went to see him, forgetting I’d been just a day before, and worst of all, towards the end he turned against me. His voice went deep and rough and he looked at me as if he hated me.’ She sighed. ‘So because of what had been between us, I was able to tell Mr Dale all that, and he understood. He explained that Greg, the real Greg, had gone away from me a long time ago, leaving this drug-filled weary man who lashed out at the person he instinctively felt he could hurt the most. Me. He said that men who had been in the thick of it, like Greg, still paid a terrible price of suffering. Greg was lying in a water-filled shell hole for two days before they found him. His leg was rotted, Amy, and the rats had got to him . . .’
