Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  Wesley slammed on his brakes to avoid running into the back of a taxi, almost catapulting Clara through the windscreen.

  That night his lovemaking was filled with a frantic urgency, an aggression that Clara found exciting, awakening a response that surprised even herself.

  ‘You’ll have to go and see Amy more often,’ she told him, when it was over and they lay exhausted in each other’s arms. ‘If this is what seeing her does for you.’

  But he was asleep, seemingly from one breath to the next.

  Amy’s mother called round early the next morning on her way to the Co-op. ‘You look shocking,’ she said, ‘but I thought you looked very nice at the funeral yesterday. You suited that hat. I’ve not seen it before.’

  ‘It was nice of you to go to the church, Mam, especially as Mrs Battersby hadn’t thought to ask you back to the house.’

  ‘She thought all right, thought I wasn’t good enough for her la-di-da relations. What does she think I’d do? Talk about passing wind, or spit in the fire? I can be as refined as she thinks she is when I want to be.’

  Gladys’s nostrils twitched with suspicion. Something was up with Amy, something on top of all her other worries. She had that shut-in look about her, that air of obstinacy, of keeping things to herself. Gladys wished her husband was alive. He could have wheedled out of Amy what was wrong with her.

  Standing there in her daughter’s living room, with her basket over her arm and her shopping coat and hat on, she had a clear recollection of her husband’s Jesus sort of face, his large kind eyes and his skin that looked tanned even when he hadn’t been on his holidays. She wondered if Amy missed him as much as she did? Wished she could find the words to ask her.

  ‘You want to get some Acdo on that mark on the carpet,’ she said instead, looking down. ‘Did you drop your tea on it last night? I would have thought there’d be plenty to eat at the funeral.’

  ‘Do you remember what was said about this house when Wesley and me got married?’ Amy didn’t even bother to look at the mark. ‘Can you remember exactly?’

  ‘Mr Battersby bought it outright for you.’

  ‘For Wesley?’

  Gladys cottoned on quickly that something was very much up.

  ‘For both of you. For you to live in to give you a good start. So you didn’t have to move in with me.’

  Amy was flabbergasted. ‘Would you have had us living with you?’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t. That was made clear from the beginning. She wouldn’t have had her house messed up with a baby’s things. Not Lady Muck.’

  ‘But there was no baby, was there?’

  ‘Wasn’t meant to be,’ said Gladys stoutly. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’

  Amy sat down suddenly. ‘He could have been coming up to twenty now.’

  Gladys wasn’t standing for this sort of talk. ‘Yes, he would. And he’d be just the right age for the next war. Though if there is one we’ll all be dead anyway. They haven’t opened that gas-mask factory not all that far from here – though it’s meant to be ’ush-’ush – for nothing.’

  ‘Mam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s nobody can cheer me up like you.’

  ‘It’s my disposition.’ Gladys almost literally warmed herself at Amy’s smile. ‘How about me fetching you a small tin of Heinz soup? Cream of tomato would be nice. It’s reduced to fourpence this week. If you do a couple of slices of toast to it you won’t come to any harm.’

  She walked down the hill to the Co-op with her mind in a turmoil. What Amy had said about the house wasn’t just idle chatter. Amy was nearly out of her mind with anxiety, and what about that big stain on the carpet? It wasn’t like her to go throwing her food around. Look at what a neat and tidy baby she’d been. Screamed the house down if she got as much as a spot of food on her towelling bibs, and if you dropped her dummy on the floor she wouldn’t have it back till it had been well rinsed under the tap.

  It was all to do with Mr Battersby dying. Gladys waited for a coal cart to pass before she crossed the road. While he was alive Amy was safe in that house. But with him dead and gone? Everything was going wrong since Wesley went away.

  The shop door pinged as she opened it. Everything looked nice and normal, with the manager patting half a pound of best margarine into a decent shape, and Mrs Beal from Ribble Street sitting on the stool at the counter watching her weekly order being made up.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Renshawe.’

  Gladys nodded. ‘How’s your husband, Mrs Beal?’

  ‘Fair to middlin’, I’m glad to say.’

  The manager took out his long black book of divi stamps with its flimsy pages and slipping carbons, pencil poised.

  ‘I’ll not be a minute, Mrs Renshawe. Your Amy all right?’

  ‘Champion. I’ve just left her.’ Gladys nodded. ‘Aye. She’s champion.’

  Was Mrs Beal looking at her funny? Was it getting about that Wesley had done a bunk? Could it be on the cards that he would turf Amy out of that house and move in with his fancy piece? Gladys went stone cold. She could just imagine what would be said, especially after she’d been so openly proud of Amy marrying into money, almost into the gentry.

  ‘I’ll have two ounces of tea and three rashers of bacon,’ she said, when the door had pinged behind Mrs Beal. She hardly knew what she was saying or doing. If what she was afraid of came to pass, it would be worse than dreadful. The gossips would have a field day. What had been said about the pinched-faced Prince of Wales and that American woman, Mrs Simpson, would have been no more than tittle-tattle compared. Amy’s name would be mud, or worse, folks would pity her. For no reason at all a line of a song shouted in the streets by children at the time of the Abdication popped into her mind:

  Hark the herald angels sing,

  Mrs Simpson stole our King.

  Coming out of the Co-op, Gladys saw two women she knew talking together on the corner. It seemed to her they darted funny glances at her as she passed.

  ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to come here today, Dora.’

  Phyllis Battersby had been at the bottle. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that. She was wearing a dusty pink dress with a cardigan buttoned wrongly so that there was a left-over piece dangling down. She looked sticky and sherry-sodden, and Dora knew that the wonderful Wesley had already been and done his worst. Ethel, it seemed, had gone into town to do some shopping.

  Dora knew there was no point in explaining that she had taken the food because she couldn’t bear to see it go to waste. No point in explaining that Amy hadn’t expected either Charlie Marsden or Mr Dale to drop in. Useless to point out that laughter on the day of a funeral was a natural relief from the awfulness of it all. Wesley would have put the worst interpretation on it, for reasons of his own.

  ‘I’m starting that other job on Monday, Mrs Battersby,’ Dora said quickly, getting it in before Phyllis had the chance to give her the sack. ‘You won’t have any trouble finding someone else, I know at least three women who would jump at the chance.’

  Phyllis merely shrugged her shoulders before reaching down to the side of her chair and coming up with a three-quarter full glass of sherry.

  She had put it there not knowing who was at the door, Dora realized. She was a grief-stricken widow, with a cousin from St Helens staying with her – but for how long? She needed help, friendship, company, an outstretched hand. Dora half stretched her own out, then drew it back. She sat down suddenly without having been given permission to do so.

  It was no good. Dora had known and accepted a long time ago that she would never get to heaven when she died. She’d done some awful things in her time, but this was surely one of the lowest and meanest. Old Ma Battersby might have treated her less than the dust, paid her peanuts, worked her till she was fit to drop, but this wasn’t the time to desert her. Charlie Marsden would understand, Dora knew that instinctively. He’d be disappointed, but he’d understand.

  ‘I’ve be
en thinking about what I just said, Mrs Battersby.’ Dora’s small face shone with pious zeal as she made her supreme sacrifice. ‘And I’ve changed me mind. I’ll stop on here. In fact, I’ll go through in the kitchen right this minute and make you a cup of tea. You look done in.’

  ‘No thank you, Dora!’

  In an instant the old Phyllis was there. ‘I was going to tell you not to come any more if you had given me the chance to speak.’ Phyllis’s thin mouth with the lipstick blurred round the edges set hard. ‘I will be leaving this house as soon as possible.’ She waved a hand round the vast expanse of carpet. ‘My son is arranging for me to move into something smaller. Eventually. When Ethel’s gone back. He has everything in hand. He’s got a good business head on his shoulders. Not that his father would ever admit that.’ Her eyes were suddenly bleak with despair. ‘They never got on, you know, Dora. My husband never let my son in on any of his business transactions.’

  She had great difficulty forming her mouth round the last word, and Dora knew then that old Ma Battersby had had more than a skinful, because never in a million years would she have dropped her guard like this.

  ‘Was it my fault, Dora?’ Great glycerine tears welled in her eyes. ‘Was it true that I thought more of my son than of my husband?’ Her voice rose to a wail. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before – if someone had given me a gun and ordered me to shoot the one or the other, I’d have shot my husband without pausing to think.’ She drained her glass and looked at it in bewilderment. ‘I feel guilty, Dora. So very, very guilty.’

  ‘I put my husband away,’ Dora said, ‘an’ I’ll never stop feeling guilty till the day I die.’ At a sign from Phyllis she went to the sideboard for the sherry decanter. ‘How do I know my Greg wasn’t forever calling out for me during the night?’ She refilled the wine glass that Mrs Battersby now used for sherry. ‘How do I know whether they ignored him night after night, when he lay there not able to go to sleep? I used to get up and sit on his bed, Mrs Battersby, and let him talk to me about the war. Yes, thank you Mrs Battersby, I will have a drop. Yes, I know where the sherry glasses are. Thank you.’

  Holding a glass roughly half the size of her employer’s, Dora sat down again to keep Phyllis company. Poor old sausage.

  ‘Greg never got to be more than a lance corporal,’ she confided. ‘He would have ended up a sergeant, I know, if he hadn’t got wounded early on. He was in hospital on and off for nearly two years.’

  ‘Wesley still has a piece of shrapnel in his thumb,’ Phyllis said. ‘He can move it round and round with his finger.’

  ‘It was the second battle of Ypres where Greg was wounded. He said the firing was like all hell let loose. Bloody Germans.’

  ‘Down with the Kaiser,’ Phyllis agreed, sipping her drink in a very refined way.

  Dora did the same. ‘It rained for twelve days out in Belgium and that was June. They never got dry in all that time, then in early July they were in the thick of it. High explosives, shrapnel and gas-shells. Greg said the gas smelled like coconut oil. He said they were wading up to their knees in mud, and that when their water supply came on the cart it was purple. But when the tea was made it was green.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever tasted Earl Grey, have you, Dora?’ Phyllis said, attempting a hostess smile. ‘It’s not usually given to domestics but I think we’ll have a cup. Sherry gives me a dry tongue.’

  ‘And a shredded liver,’ Dora said, going into the kitchen to make a pot of the tea she had tasted once on the quiet and decided that if someone gave her a cup of hot water with Ashes of Roses scent sprinkled in it she’d have a job to tell the difference.

  ‘I said I would give backword to Charlie Marsden and stop on with her,’ Dora told Amy. ‘But though I felt heart-sorry for her, she’s never going to change. She told me that Wesley is looking around for something smaller for her, more manageable, and that for the time being Ethel will do the housework, so she doesn’t really need me any more.’

  ‘You mean Wesley’s looking around for a smaller house? Like this one?’

  Dora shook her head. ‘Well, yes, I suppose. More like this one, but in a better district, I suppose.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly a slum.’

  ‘I should think not, but can you see old Ma Battersby living here? Next door to me, and across the street from Mrs Rakestraw? No garden, and a lavatory down the backyard. That would be a bit of a come-down, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘He’s going to try to get me out,’ Amy said. ‘I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘But it’s your house!’ Dora was outraged. ‘Mr Battersby gave it to you on your wedding day.’

  ‘To both of us? Or to Wesley? I’ve never seen the deeds, Dora.’

  ‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’ Dora sat down with a thump on the piano stool. ‘That’s what he’s looking for in his father’s desk. He’d been at it again this morning. Hadn’t even bothered to roll the top back again. Papers everywhere. He wouldn’t tell you to get out. Surely?’

  They stared at each other for a long time without speaking.

  And knew he would.

  Twice during that long, endless night Amy had read the pamphlets Bernard had left on the sideboard.

  She leaned against the draining board in the kitchen, drinking tea and worrying herself to death. If Wesley was to repossess the house, or whatever they chose to call it, there would be no point in her training for anything. She would have to find money now, this minute, and fast.

  Anyway, the pamphlets were about secretarial courses not due to start until September, though Bernard had kindly included a leaflet advertising private typing lessons, at half a crown a lesson, which she could start straight away. Half a crown a lesson. Dirt cheap at the price.

  Amy looked up at the ceiling and sighed. Soon every last penny of her nest egg would be gone. Soon there would be nothing worth while and portable left to sell to the little man with the second-hand stall on the market. The gilt carriage clock and the pair of matching vases had fetched a reasonable price. The stallholder had whipped the vases out of sight before counting three grubby pound notes into her hand. Amy, who had never liked them, thought there was no accounting for taste, and put the money away in her purse.

  She opened the back door to take in a sniff of the damp night air. Her father had died owing no man a penny, and her mother had a set of little boxes in a kitchen drawer marked gas, rent, doctor’s man, clothing club, Christmas club and, optimistically, holidays, though that one was always empty when the July Wakes week came round.

  ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ Amy could remember her father saying, and once, when a mistake had been made down at the Town Hall and the gas bill came in grossly overcharged, Gladys had come round with tears streaming down her cheeks, sure she was headed for a debtor’s prison with all the neighbours reading about her in the newspaper.

  Amy put the leaflets on further education away at the back of a drawer in the sideboard. As she trailed upstairs she whispered a sad farewell to her fantasy of herself as a secretary with a clean white collar tacked to the neck of her navy-blue dress, and her hair screwed up into a little bun on top of her head. In films Joan Crawford never seemed to have the slightest difficulty in finding herself a job in an office. She would pause outside the door just long enough to pin a white gardenia on the lapel of her dark suit, put on the white gloves kept in her handbag, check that her stocking seams were straight, lick a finger and smooth her eyebrows in the right shape, dip a scoop-shaped hat over one eye, square her already squared shoulders and march in, coming out half an hour later with the job hers and the boss already crazy about her.

  Amy walked over to the window and drew back the curtains. It was raining hard, pouring in a torrent from a gap in the guttering, dropping like a frenzied waterfall to splash noisily and rhythmically in a pulsating beat. She got back into bed, turned her pillow over and pulled the heavy blankets over her head. But they failed to muffle the sound of the rain.

&nb
sp; ‘You fool, fool, fool,’ it was saying. ‘How could you be such a fool as to think the vases and the clock were yours to sell? How could you be such a fool as to think you could go on living in this house? Did you really believe it had ever been yours? You fool, fool, fool . . .’

  By nine o’clock the next morning the rain had gone and she was in the queue at the Labour Exchange, willing to go down on her knees for the chance to scrub the Town Hall steps at five o’clock every morning if needs be.

  Wesley drove into town not long after that. He was finding it easier and easier to leave the Preston shop now that Clara had stopped grumbling so much at having to take a turn behind the counter. That she wouldn’t have felt the same about a shop patronized mainly by women never occurred to him. It was men buying the cigarettes, cigars and tins of tobacco, and the majority could always spare a few minutes to exchange banter with the tall blonde who had more than a passing resemblance to Jean Harlow. When she climbed the flimsy ladder to reach a box of cigars from the top shelf their eyes stood out like chapel hat-pegs as her tight skirts rode up to show her stocking tops.

  The commercial travellers were equally taken with her, though young Arnold Porrit considered the whole performance to be pathetic. This one wasn’t a patch on the real Mrs Battersby. This one looked like death warmed up when she didn’t have all that stuff on her face. It must be awful kissing her through all that purple lipstick, like sucking damson jam off a spoon.

  Wesley found the outer door of the office in Richmond Terrace on the latch. Taking off his hat he stood there for a moment in the narrow hall, staring up, far up through the well of the house, which not all that long ago had been a gentleman’s residence with gas lamps flickering on the walls, and thick carpets instead of well-trodden linoleum the colour of beef tea.

  The banister rail was smooth to his touch. The door to the solicitor’s office was open a fraction, so he went in.

  No, the girl with water-waved ginger hair told him, Mr Thomson wasn’t in but if he cared to sit down he wouldn’t have long to wait. Mr Thomson never came into the office before ten o’clock these days.