"Very well then, come home."
When I got to my feet, my body seemed dragged down, as if I was carrying a bucket of coal in each hand, and my legs would not obey me and walk. I felt myself swaying and I muttered, "I - I feel faint.
Father. " As I felt myself falling, I sunk down to the ground but willed myself not to faint, and in a few minutes I got to my feet again.
I kept my eyes turned from the priest and made to walk on when his voice stopped me.
"Go home," he said, "I won't tell your mother anything yet. I dont believe you dont know where this man lives, but I'll find him quite easily, I have ways and means, and he must marry you right away."
At this I turned wide, startled eyes on to his face, but found I couldn't say anything, not a word, for to my amazement I saw through the fading light that Father Ellis was crying, and at the sight a sorrow pierced me very like the day I had seen the rabbit nailed to the tree. Flinging myself about I ran stumbling and sobbing along the bank, and when I crossed the stones it was to meet our Ronnie. He pulled me to a stop and stared at me before exclaiming angrily, "Where d'you think you've been to at this time of night? Mam's worried stiff." Then looking me up and down he added, "Good Lord! what's happened to you?"
My sorrow broke loose and burying my face in my hands, I cried and spluttered, "I - I fell in the river and waited until until my clothes dried."
"Aw, never mind." His voice was soft, softer than it had been for a long time.
"Come on," he said. The instant I felt his arms going round me, I tore myself away from him like a mad thing, and, running as if my very life depended on it, I made for home.
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CHAPTER FOUR
my mother said, "You're ill, girl, you must see the doctor. That tumble into the river frightened you, and this is the aftereffects.
You look like a ghost. "
"I'm all right," I said.
"But you're not, lass. You look like death, and you're not yourself in any way, and you're not going to go walking by that river by yourself at night again."
"Oh, Mam!" I exclaimed hurriedly, "I like walking by the river."
"Well, then, you'll let Ronnie go with you."
"No!" The tone even startled myself, and, coming to me, she looked into my face and said, "What is it, lass? I've never known you to be like this. You're not frightened of all this war talk, are you?"
War talk. What did the war talk matter to me, with my own war raging inside me?
"War talk?" I said.
"No, of course not."
I mustn't have sounded very convincing, for she added, comfortingly,
"There won't be any gas in this war, that's if it comes, and God knows it looks very much like it. They saw what gas did in the last one.
They've learnt something, they won't act like mad animals again.
Although that Hitler seems like a maniac. "
War, war, digging trenches and air-raid shelters and getting fitted for gas masks in their silly little boxes, and people storing in food, buying up everything they could, and men in different trades being stood off because they couldn't get the material with which to carry on their jobs. Everybody waiting for the war to start. Our Ronnie saying he was going to join up and looking at me as he said it. Don Dowling saying they wouldn't get him. Anyway, pit men were exempt if in they worked at the coal face. Then yesterday my mother sending me with her wedding-ring down to the pawnshop in Bog's End to get a little extra money to buy tin stuff to store away . just in case, as she said.
Then going to WoolworAs and buying her a ring there. This all unknown to Dad, for she said he wouldn't have stood for it. Her little duplicity pleased her, I saw, yet I could take no part in it. I could take no part in anything that went on in the house or outside, for I was dead.
I had gone down to the river bank on the Sunday night and walked and walked its length between the stepping stones and the big bend several times, but he hadn't come. There had been another couple lying in the green hollow, surrounded by the bushes, and our Ronnie had come looking for me again and demanded roughly, "What you doing prowling the bank?
You after a lad?"
He had gripped my arm and I had wrenched it angrily away from him, crying, "And if I was it's none of your business!" And he, like Father Ellis, had looked amazed for a moment, before saying, "Well, I thought you could have got one with out going on the prowl." As I have said the river bank was given over to the courting couples on a Sunday night and to groups of lads and lasses out for the sole purpose of clicking.
But as we neared the house his tone had become solicitous and he inquired softly, "What is it, Christine? There is something up with you. Can't you talk to me about it?" It was the only time during the past week that I was tempted to laugh.
Every night I went to the river, and if I had to go into the town during the day I made my way round to the better- class shopping centre at the foot of Brampton Hill, my eyes searching all the while.
The following Saturday night I stood in a warm drizzling rain looking up at the gardens on the hill across from the big bend and praying,
"Oh, Martin, Martin, please come. I'll die if I dont see you. I will, I will. Oh, Martin, Martin! Please God make him come. Oh, Holy Mother, answer my prayer." Yet as I prayed I knew he wouldn't come.
But even with this knowledge deep inside me, I kept asking, "Why?
Why?" He surely must come if only because of the fact that I needed him and wanted to see him, to hear him, to be pressed close' ll2 to him and feel his eyes moving over my face, feel his look burying itself in me.
And then there was this frightening urge of my body that I had to fight each night. Oh, Martin! Martin!
As I turned homewards I saw through the drizzle a figure coming along the river bank, but there was no leaping of my heart and I didn't think, "That's Martin', I knew who it was. The black felt hat, the black mackintosh, the black trousers and the black boots. When Father Ellis stood in front of me I did not lower my head this time, I kept it level, but I turned my gaze away and looked over the river.
"Well, Christine?" His voice was one that I recognized. There was the old kindliness in it. I did not say, "Hallo, Father," I made no remark whatever, yet I was glad to see him and I longed for him to speak, for when he did he would give me some news of Martin. Perhaps he would say he had refused to marry me. And would it be any wonder? All beauty, all magic stripped from our lives by a compulsory order to marry.
I walked on and the priest turned and walked by my side. We had gone a considerable distance before he spoke, and then it seemed it was with an effort that he asked, "Have you seen that man again, Christine?"
No, Father. "
"Were you speaking the truth when you said you didn't know where he lived?"
"Yes, Father."
"I made a boast last Saturday night that I'd find him. Well, I haven't been able to. Apparently there is no one of that name living on Brampton Hill, even visiting there."
The leaping of my heart, the turning of my stomach, brought me round and I gazed on him and protested, "But he does live there, in one of the houses that have the gardens backing on to the river."
"You mean Fell Close or The Rise, and round about there? I have access into most of those houses, he doesn't live there. What is more I would recognize him again in a moment." He was standing looking down on me now, compassion in his face, and he asked, "Oh, what have you done, Christine? Let's hope God is merciful to you."
I pressed my hand over my mouth and cried, oh, dont start on me.
Father, not again. "
"All right, all right. But I want you to promise me something, Christine."
I stumbled on, taking no heed until he said, "I want you to promise to come to mass every morning for the next three months."
My eyes looked vacantly ahead as I muttered, "I can't get every morning, Father; there's too much to see to in the house."
"Well, when you can."
He crossed the sto
nes with me, and as we reached the bottom of the river bank, below our houses, Ronnie came down the hill and Sam with him. Before they reached us the priest had left me without even a word of good-bye. But he waved his hand to them and they waved back.
When they came up to me, Ronnie remarked, "He's in a hurry the night."
Then taking my arm, he said, "You come on up home and get to bed, you look as if you are in for something. You're mad, out in this drizzle."
I said nothing but let him lead me up the hill. Sam, on my other side, said, "I've made you another plaque with your surname on it, Christine," and before we reached our door and I fainted, I remember thinking, "Kind Sam, nice Sam."
"But I assure you, Mrs. Winter, she is pregnant."
"But... but, doctor, she can't be!"
"I understand it must be very difficult for you to take it in, but I assure you that that is her condition."
I stood in the little room off the surgery getting into my clothes. My hands were shaking so that I couldn't fasten them up. Then for almost the sixth time since the doctor had joined my mother, I heard her explain, in high amazement, "But, doctor!" Then, her voice in a terrible whisper, she exclaimed, "But how can she, she never goes out with anyone, she's never been with anyone?"
The buttons were slipping away from my fingers as if possessed of a life of their own, and there was a pause before the doctor spoke again.
"She has had intercourse, Mrs. Winter." Every organ in my body was shaking with terror, and as automatically I smoothed the front of my dress over my'll4 stomach, my fingers drew sharply away from contact with it. Inside there was something vile and awful, a thing that was bringing horror into my mother's voice. I pushed myself towards the door, and when I entered the surgery, my mother stared at me as if she had never seen me before, and I noticed her reactions were similar to those of Father Ellis. She kept her distance, she even stepped back from me. When the doctor opened the door and we had passed out she still did not come near me, and we walked all the way home separated by an arm's length.
And she uttered not a word until she got into the kitchen. Then sitting down in a chair by the table, she dropped her head on to her hands and burst into passionate weeping. Helplessly, I stood watching her, the tears raining down my face. And as I stood like this the back door opened and my dad came in from the allotment, accompanied by Ronnie, who was on back shift. The sound of their entry aroused me from my stupor, and I made to go upstairs when my mother, without looking at me, put out her hand and said, "You stay here."
Immediately on entering the kitchen Dad exclaimed, "What's up?" Then going to my mother he asked anxiously, "What is it, Annie? What's happened?" He looked from one to the other, and my mother, drawing herself up by the aid of the table, said, "You'd better know sooner or later. There's a reason for her sickness these weeks, she's going to have a baim." , "Baim?" The look on Dad's face could have been comic.
His lips were drawn back from his teeth and his eyes were lost behind the pushed up flesh on his cheeks. But Ronnie's look was not comic.
The colour had fled from his fresh-coloured face and his eyes looked terrible, fearsome and full of loathing, and he yelled right out loud as if he was on the open hillside, "No! God, no!" Dad came slowly to me and, taking my hand gently, said, "Look at me, lass."
And when I could not look at him he dropped my hand exclaiming, "Christ Almighty!" And my mother repeated, "Aye, Christ Almighty."
Then Dad, turning to me again, said sternly, "Who's the fella?" But before waiting for my answer he swung round to my mother, crying as if I wasn't there, "But I've never known her to go out with a lad."
"No," said my mother, in dead sounding tones, 'she's had
"5
no need. You haven't far to seek. It's been coming for years. I've seen it coming for years and dreaded this moment. "
These words brought my head up and a wave of protest through my body and I cried, "It wasn't him, not Don Dowling."
"What!" My mother was staring at me.
"Then who was it?" The deadness had left her voice and now she looked angry, threateningly angry, as she demanded, "Who was it? Where have you been?"
I cast my eyes towards our Ronnie, and Dad fumed to him and said, "Go on out."
Ronnie went out, but he backed from the room and his eyes never left my face until he had passed through the door and into the scullery.
Dad now going to the scullery door pulled it shut, then he joined my mother and, side by side, they stood looking at me.
With my hands gripped tightly together and my eyes fixed on the floor, I said, "It was a boy I got to know." I did not wait for them to ask his name but continued, "They called him Martin Fonyere, he lives on Brampton Hill." I still did not believe what the priest had said that Martin did not live on the Hill.
"Then we must have a talk with him."
I raised my eyes when Dad spoke" and what I saw on his face was too much for me, for there, untouched, was his love still shining but threaded now with pity and compassion. I turned slowly about and leaning against the wall I buried my face in the crook of my arm and sobbed helplessly.... It was a week later and Martin Fonyere had become someone who had never existed, at least to my mother and Dad. My mother was becoming frantic to find him and make him marry me before the scandal became obvious, and at this moment she had just returned from Mrs. Durrant's.
Mrs. Durrant had lived on the Hill for years and she knew nearly everybody of any importance there. My mother had confided the whole business to her and she had suggested that the most likely place to find this elusive fellow was The Grange, for a number of young men were staying there, and not to ask for an appointment but to take me and go boldly up there and ask for Colonel Findlay.
I cried and protested but I could do nothing to deter her, and so, standing in a flame of shame, I found myself on the wide steps of The Grange listening to my mother asking to speak to this Colonel Findlay.
The colonel was tall and thin and never stopped moving about as my mother spoke, and although he scared me with his blustering my mother remained unperturbed, answering him calmly, saying, "I'm not accusing anyone, I'm just asking you if you have anyone staying here by the name of Martin Fonyere and could we please speak to him?"
"There's no Martin Fonyere here," said the colonel.
"I have two nephews staying in the house at present and my two sons.
There they are on the tennis court. Here." He lifted a sharp finger and beckoned me to the window.
"Is the young man you are seeking among those?"
I looked out of the great window on to the tennis court and the four men jumping about. Not one of them was anything like Martin and I shook my head slowly, and without waiting I walked towards the door.
The colonel was speaking again to my mother asking her who had told her to come here.
As I stood just within the door waiting for her I found myself looking at a picture on a side table. It showed a group of children, three boys and two girls; they were about fourteen years of age and were all sitting in a row on a balustrade and the second one from the end was Martin Fonyere. As clearly as one would recognize oneself in a mirror I knew it was he. The long, pale face, the brown hair, that penetrating, dark, intense look already in his eyes. It was Martin, and this was the house where he had stayed. What relation he was to the people here I did not know, but what I did know was that the Colonel had been aware of us even before he had seen us, and in a flash of insight I knew I had Father Ellis to thank for this. His diplomatic investigations had been broadcast to this house as a warning against coming trouble . Catholic priest trouble. Priests had the power to bring about unusual things, even the power to force a man from Brampton Hill to marry a girl from Fenwick Houses, or at least ensure her of support.
My mother's steps were behind me and I moved forward into the hall, and if I wanted any further proof that this was the house where Martin had lived I had it as I came face to
"7
; face with a young woman. She was much older than me, perhaps twenty-two or three. She stared at me as if wanting to remember my face forever, and as I looked back at her I thought, "You were likely his girl before he met me, and hope to be again."
"Eileen!"
It was a sharp voice calling from the stairway and the girl slowly drew her eyes from me and walked away. Then the colonel opened the door and let us out, and my mother said, "Thank you." But he said nothing.
War was declared but it made no impact on our house, I had already dropped the bomb that had blown our peace to smithereens. My mother seemed to have thrown off her illness and become possessed of an energy that enabled her to search and inquire. And I did nothing to stop her, for I was numb inside and not caring what happened to myself or to anyone else. This feeling was dominant in me until the night our Ronnie spoke.
My mother had come in from one of her visits to Mrs. Durrant. I was upstairs at the time, but my door was open and I heard her remark, "The earth couldn't have opened and swallowed him up, he must be somewhere.
If he was in the town somebody must have remembered him."
And then I heard our Ronnie say, "Perhaps he never was."
"What do you mean?" said my mother.
"It's only somebody she's made up."
"Oh, lad, I wish it was, how I wish to God it was. But she couldn't, she hasn't made up the hairn. And if it isn't Don, and she says it isn't, who could it be?"
"Have you ever thought of Father Ellis ?"
My hands went to my mouth and almost stopped my breathing, then I was on the landing, down the stairs and in the kitchen before my mother had repeated for the second time an agonized "No!" It was a high "No!"
like a wail, and as her voice drifted away I almost sprang on our Ronnie, crying, "You! you devil you." Then turning to Mam, I screamed, "You can't believe him. It was Martin Fonyere. There is a Martin Fonyere."
Fenwick Houses Page 13
