Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  Dora vented her feelings on an ornate silver tray, rubbing it up till she could see her face in it. Determined to speak her mind to Amy that evening, to tell her that if something wasn’t done about her father-in-law, and soon, he’d be dropping off his perch. Edgar crouched over the steering wheel to peer more closely through the windscreen. Twice since leaving the house he’d had to wipe the sweat from his forehead, which was ridiculous on a day like this. He’d never have thought that being confined to the house for such a comparatively short time could weaken him like this. He doubted if he’d have the strength to blow the skin off a plate of rice pudding.

  The pain was there, underneath his ribs today, but he could ignore it if it didn’t get any worse. The liver salts the doctor had advised him to take every day seemed to be helping a little. Old-fashioned remedies were often the best. Look how his mother had sworn by arrowroot for every ailment. He reckoned she’d have spread it on a plaster, or put it in his tea given the chance.

  Amy should be back from work by now, and with any luck he would be back home before Phyllis came in. He blinked as the sweat and the heat coming from him steamed up his glasses, missed a woman crossing the road by jamming his foot down hard on the brake pedal. Why was she shaking her fist and mouthing something at him? Was he going too fast? He couldn’t see the speedometer but it didn’t feel like he was going very quickly. He drew up outside Amy’s house with a screech of brakes.

  The pain came on him as he lifted a hand to the iron knocker set high in Amy’s front door, ignoring the bell. He knew she wasn’t in; she’d told him herself she only closed the big door when she went up to bed at night. The disappointment was like a clout to his head, and he clutched the door post for support, unable to move for the stab of agony piercing his side. He gasped, tried to straighten up, and the effort almost killed him. He groped his way across the pavement to his car and forced himself to slide slowly into the driving seat.

  ‘Aw God,’ he prayed, laying his head on the steering wheel, ‘if I’m going to die let it be now. Just take this pain away, it’s crucifying me.’

  The bright promise of the day had drifted into a damp clinging drizzle. Weavers climbed the narrow streets to their homes, shop-girls hurried along, wanting to get round the fires in their cosy back living rooms, to the teas their mothers would have all ready to go on the table. Because it was Wednesday and a market day, there would more than likely be something extra tasty, such as tripe and onions stewed in milk, polony sliced thin, or black puddings with their distinctive spicy taste.

  Lottie Marsden walked slowly, going home the long way round because she liked the feel of the feather-soft drizzle on her face and the way it beaded her navy-blue coat. She had walked through the park where the dripping trees, the dark rocks looming up on either side of the paths and the sound of running water had frightened her halfway to death. She had been kept in by the Scripture Mistress for not handing in last week’s homework and for talking her way through the lesson.

  ‘I was only telling Mildred Howarth that my mother’s consumption is bad at the moment,’ she had explained. ‘And that I had been up all night praying for her. She’s in a sanatorium in Switzerland.’

  The Scripture Mistress, who also taught needlework, had been warned to take everything Lottie Marsden said with a pinch of salt – but suppose it were true?

  ‘You poor child,’ she said. ‘You poor child. You may go, dear. Just try and remember to do your homework next time,’ the mistress said, looking at Lottie’s oval face and silk-smooth hair, thinking what a beautiful Virgin Mary she would make at next year’s nativity concert, which was to be on a lavish scale.

  Coming out of the park gate Lottie could see the town stretched out before her. The houses up at this side of the town were hidden by tall privet hedges. Husbands drove home from their offices, turning their cars into gravelled drives. Some of the fee-paying girls lived up here. They had piano lessons as optional extras and went to private elocution classes, even though they knew quite well how and where to sound their aitches. They wore gymslips with pleats that kept in on account of the superior material, and white linings to their navy-blue knickers for the sake of hygiene. Lottie avoided them as much as she could, much preferring the company of the scholarship girls who wore their coats all the year round because their parents couldn’t afford blazers, and who never had linings in their knickers.

  The rain was coming down heavier now, bouncing off the flagstones, wetting her through. She hoped she got pneumonia and died before her mother could come to pay her last respects. She hoped her mother would be forced to live the rest of her life in terrible remorse. She hoped her mother got ringworm so that they had to shave her head, or that her teeth dropped out. So that staring at herself in a mirror all day would drive her crazy.

  Lottie was disappointed to see that Mrs Battersby’s house looked just like all the others in the long terrace. The front door was closed and there was no sign of a light anywhere, but there was a car outside with the dim figure of a man crouched over the steering wheel. His hat had fallen off and the bald part of his head gleamed white like a bar of shiny soap. Lottie averted her eyes and quickened her step.

  ‘I saw a dead man on my way back from school,’ she was to tell her father in a conversational tone much later that evening.

  Charlie looked at her over the top of his newspaper. There were times, and this was one of them, when he wondered if she was quite right in the head. ‘Oh, yes?’ He turned to the sports page. ‘That must have given you quite a turn.’

  ‘It was right outside Mrs Battersby’s house.’

  Charlie felt his stomach lurch. ‘Lottie,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘are you quite, quite sure this man was dead?’

  Lottie’s dark eyes narrowed into calculating slits. ‘Of course,’ she said loftily.

  ‘Because if he was, you had no right to come home without telling someone.’

  ‘Oh, I told the police,’ she said airily, blotting a line in her exercise book with exaggerated care.

  ‘How did you tell the police?’ Charlie knew he would have to shake her. ‘Did you go all the way down to the police station? Did you? I want the truth! And if I don’t get it, I’ll find out for myself.’ He got up from his chair. ‘I’ll phone them now.’

  The telephone was in the hall, on a half-moon table with a chair by the side. There was an oval mirror hanging on the wall from a gold link chain. Clara used to sit for hours talking and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. Charlie lifted the receiver.

  ‘He might have been drunk.’ Lottie appeared in the doorway. ‘It was hard to tell.’

  ‘You saw nothing!’ Charlie slammed the receiver back hard on the cradle, followed his daughter back into the living room. How small she was, how unkempt, untidy, pale, with dark shadows beneath her eyes. Suddenly the urge to shake her was gone. ‘Why do you do it, Lottie? Nobody likes a liar, and that’s what you are. A liar! A terrible thing to be. They’re not fairy stories you’re always telling – they’re lies. Cruel untruths. Would you like to put your pen down and we’ll talk about it? Perhaps you can explain to me why you do it and we can work something out together.’ The sigh came from deep inside him. ‘Put your pen down, lovey.’

  ‘I have three more subjects to do,’ Lottie lied. ‘English, geography and algebra, and I’ve got the main part in the Easter play so I’ve two pages of that to learn.’

  ‘And you didn’t see a man crouched over a wheel in a car outside Mrs Battersby’s house? You made it all up?’

  ‘Yes, I made it up,’ Lottie said, genuinely wanting to please him. Her father looked so bothered, so badly done to. ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t come home that way at all.’

  Charlie went back to his chair, tried to read the report of the Rovers’ current form, found he couldn’t concentrate so went to stand at the back door, staring out at the rain-sodden garden, thinking how awful and depressing everything was.

  6

  PHYLLIS WA
S NOT in the habit of talking to her domestics about anything other than tins of polish or which vegetables to prepare for their evening meal, but when she arrived back from town an hour later than she had intended, saw the garage doors open and the car gone, she went straight to the kitchen.

  ‘Has Mr Battersby taken the car out again, Dora?’ She looked agitated, the schooner-sized sherry she’d drunk at her friend’s house flushing her cheeks.

  Dora looked up from the carrot she was scraping. ‘He wouldn’t listen, Mrs Battersby. I told him he wasn’t fit, but would he listen? Might just as well have been talking to myself. He pleases himself, as well you know.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  It took Phyllis all her time to ask that. The question put her on the same footing as Dora, so to speak, but Edgar had been far from well that morning, certainly in no fit state to drive the car.

  Dora slid the chopped carrrots into a casserole dish. ‘My guess is he’s gone to see Amy. I can’t tell you how I come to think that, but I have this feeling somehow. He must have forgotten she doesn’t get home from work till gone six o’clock. His memory’s not what it was.’ Both pairs of eyes swivelled towards the clock on the wall. ‘He’ll be back any minute, I expect,’ Dora said.

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped him?’ Phyllis felt worry settle like a poultice round her heart. ‘No. I don’t suppose you could.’

  ‘There’s no shifting him when his mind’s made up, Mrs Battersby. Sets like concrete, his mind does. He had that stubborn face on him.’

  Enough was enough. Phyllis shrank back into herself. Any minute now and Dora would be inviting her to sit down at her own kitchen table and share a pot of tea while they discussed Edgar’s funny ways.

  ‘You can go now, Dora,’ she said.

  Her face was smooth again, her head up as though there was a bad smell underneath her nose. Dora watched her march straight-backed across the hall and into the drawing room, heard the door click and knew she’d be on the phone to the wonderful Wesley before she took off her hat and coat.

  She half considered bending her ear to the door and having a listen, but all she wanted was to get home, put the kettle on and make a sandwich from the slice of corned beef she’d filched from the casserole. She opened the oven door and slid the brown dish inside. Why, she wondered, was the same recipe called a beef casserole in the houses up by the park, when round where she lived it was called tater-ash?

  Dora saw herself as more of a female Robin Hood than a thief. She knew she earned every brass farthing of the sixpence an hour Mrs Battersby paid her. With a bit of extra Bisto added to the casserole, who was going to miss a paltry slice of corned beef? She eyed the fruit dish and wondered if the old bat had counted the oranges, decided it wasn’t worth the risk and took her coat and scarf from the cubbyhole by the back door.

  Phyllis didn’t hear the back door slam. She was listening to the sound of the telephone ringing in the Preston shop. They had never had an extension put in upstairs, so it would take a minute or so for Wesley to come down. She could actually ‘see’ him running down the uncarpeted stairs, picking up the receiver, modulating his voice to the one he kept specially for the telephone.

  ‘Hallo? Who is it, please?’

  This was a voice she had only heard once or twice, but recognized straight away. Arnold Porrit, the school-leaver Wesley had taken on for the Christmas rush, was still there, though Edgar had complained that he couldn’t see why Wesley had got rid of old Mr Lewis who knew to keep the popular brands of cigarettes all together by the till, the cigars in boxes, even though he was quite prepared to sell them singly. Mr Lewis might be coming up to sixty-five, but he knew the tobacco business inside out. Shags, cut-cake, cut Cavendish – Mr Lewis could calculate a customer’s order to the thousandth of an inch, hardly needing to use the weigh-scales to check, confident he would be accurate to the last flake.

  ‘Arnold?’ This wasn’t the time to tell the boy he should always answer the telephone properly, giving the name. Wesley always did it so beautifully: ‘Battersby’s Tobacconist. Mr Battersby Junior speaking,’ he would say. Phyllis sighed. ‘Arnold, I would like to speak to Mr Battersby. Will you ask him to come to the telephone, please? This is his mother speaking.’

  ‘Mrs Battersby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Old Mrs Battersby?’

  ‘Yes.’ Phyllis gritted his teeth.

  ‘Only Mr Battersby doesn’t wish to speak to the young Mrs Battersby, I have to say he’s not in.’

  ‘Well, he will certainly wish to speak to me!’ Phyllis gripped the telephone hard. God grant me patience, her expression said.

  ‘He’s not in, Mrs Battersby.’

  Phyllis felt she could weep with frustration. Edgar had been right. Taking on this untrained, stupid boy in the place of the ever courteous and knowledgeable Mr Lewis had been a bad mistake, even accounting for the saving in wages. She closed her eyes.

  ‘This is an urgent message, Arnold. I wish to speak to Mr . . . to my son. Now. Without delay.’

  ‘They’ve gone to Blackpool, Mrs Battersby. To the pictures. I was just going to lock up when the telephone rang. I’d best be going, or I’ll miss me train. They don’t all stop at Bamber Bridge, tha knows.’

  Phyllis put the receiver down and stared at it in disbelief. Then she took her coat and hat upstairs, put them away, smoothed down an already smooth counterpane, shivered at the cold feel to the large high-ceilinged room, went back downstairs. And poured herself a drop of comforting sherry.

  Amy came away from her mother’s house carrying a covered basin filled with good marrow-bone stock gone to jelly. For nourishing broth, Gladys had said, noticing her daughter’s pinched face and shadowed eyes.

  ‘There’s not a man alive worth making yourself ill over,’ she’d said. ‘The more I see of life the more I believe that the only good men are the dead ones. It’s a man’s world – always has been and always will be.’

  Amy saw Edgar trying to walk from his car to her front door, and ran straight to him, spilling most of the marrow-bone jelly down her best coat.

  When she got him in the warm she saw that he’d been sweating so much his high stiff collar was all stringy and crumpled. His eyes were glazed and expressionless, his skin a dingy grey colour, and for those first frightening moments she thought he was going to die.

  ‘I’m all right, love.’ He was trying to smile, which upset her so much she knelt down by his chair and gently stroked his face. ‘Stop fretting,’ he whispered. ‘Just let me sit here for a while then I’ll be getting back. Mother will be wondering where I’ve got to. It was the pain,’ he went on, catching his breath at the memory of it. ‘That stuff the doctor’s giving me isn’t doing any good. I’ll have to get a bottle of something that hits the spot more.’ He tried the wavery smile again. ‘It’s nice here,’ he said, when Amy had poked the fire into life. ‘This house and you go together. I’ve always liked coming here.’

  ‘You have?’ Amy was astonished. ‘Shall I tell you something? I’ve always liked you coming here too!’ They smiled at each other in a new warm way.

  ‘But I’d better be getting back. I’ll talk to you another time.’

  He pushed himself up to a standing position, his eyes widening with the effort. Amy saw the jaundiced look about them, their slight protuberance. She spoke quickly.

  ‘Sit down again. Please, Mr Battersby. You can’t possibly drive the car.’

  She stood before him, uncertain what to do, wishing that Wesley wouild walk in and take over. The single-decker bus was trundling past, rattling the ruby-red panes of glass in the vestibule door the way it always did. If only Wesley could be getting off it, walking quickly into the house.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  Amy spun round and saw Dora, so thin and slight she could have been blown in on the wind. Gawping at the man huddled in the chair.

  ‘Mr Battersby! You’ll get what for when you go home. I thought I was seeing things when I spotted
your car outside.’ She went up to Edgar and laid a hand on his forehead. ‘Your temperature’s up again. Your forehead’s that hot I could fry an egg on it – and just look at your coat! You’ve been sick again, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s marrow-bone jelly,’ Amy whispered. ‘I spilled it when I helped him inside.’

  She motioned Dora through into the kitchen, though Edgar seemed to have dropped off to sleep with his mouth open, making a bubbly noise in his throat. They looked at each other.

  ‘I found him staggering about outside the house.’ Amy frowned. ‘Why hadn’t you told me how ill he was? Dyspepsia, you said it was. Dyspepsia! He’s got more than that. He looks like my dad did when he was on his last.’

  ‘It’s only today he’s had a fever on him,’ Dora hissed. ‘Don’t you go thinking the worst. If the old bat had brought a decent doctor to him weeks ago things would never have got this far. The one she swears by is about as much good as a chocolate fireguard.’ She peered round the door at Edgar. ‘You stop with him and I’ll go and telephone Mrs Battersby. The infirmary’s the best place for him. I’ll go and ask Mr Dale if I can use his phone. He’ll be home by now.

  ‘C’mon, c’mon,’ she muttered two minutes later, standing on the pavement outside the house four doors down. ‘Don’t say you’re at a meeting or sat in the pictures, or round at a friend’s house having your tea. Just answer the door!’

  When Bernard saw who it was he looked surprised, but stood back at once for her to go in.

  Phyllis answered the telephone at the second ring, her voice a bit slurred because she was on her third sherry, not counting the schooner she’d had at her friend’s house. Not knowing where Edgar was or what to do for the best had made her feel quite ill. She would have rung the police if she could have been sure it wouldn’t have got their name in the papers. She would have walked up the next-door drive and told them, if she hadn’t imagined the look on their faces when she said she didn’t know where her husband was. Besides, they would be having their meal. It was quite the wrong time to call. She had rung Wesley’s number again, but the wretched Arnold must have told her the truth. There was no one there.