The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  I made no reply to this. I didn’t know what to say. For what Mrs Wilde said was true: I hadn’t been used to this kind of neighbourhood until my marriage; but I’d become accustomed by now to at least one small part of it – the house Tom and I called home. The first home we had ever had.

  ‘You certainly made t’best on it, though,’ Mrs Wilde was saying. ‘I wouldn’t ha’ recognised t’place if I hadn’t lived right next-door. A proper little palace you made on it – a proper little palace. That’s just what I said ‘to my husband when I first saw inside. Such a shame an’ all ’at you’ve to leave it in one way: after all t’work you put into it. All them lovely decorations. Must break your heart to leave it all to some’dy else.’ She paused and cocked an inquisitive eye at me. ‘Course, anybody fair like ’ud be only too willin’ to make it right with you I mean, it’s only proper an’ decent, in’t it?’

  I did not respond to her probing, but merely remarked, ‘Yes, you can usually come to some agreement.’ I did not feel inclined to summon up her rather dubious sympathy by telling her that the new tenants, a cold-faced elderly couple, had refused even to consider the question of compensation. And of course there was nothing to be done about it: we had no legal claim for improvements done to someone else’s property. It had made Tom very angry and he had almost quarrelled with the elderly man.

  ‘Perhaps they aren’t very well off,’ I’d said afterwards. ‘Or why should they want a poky little place like this at their age?’

  ‘Oh, you’re too soft by half, Janie,’ Tom had said. ‘You’d let anybody put on you... No, it’s meanness, that’s what it is. I could see it in the way their faces sort o’ closed up the minute I mentioned the valuation. You can bet your life they’re not short o’ brass. They’re not sort to spend any ‘’less they’re forced to.’ He had stopped speaking then to consider the situation. ‘Well, we can take the cupboards an’ shelves I put up, I suppose. A bit o’ timber allus comes in handy. But we can’t take the wallpaper an’ paint. They’ll have the benefit of that, damn their stingy souls!’

  ‘Yes, it’s only right an’ proper,’ Mrs Wilde said.

  We had arranged that I should go with the van and direct the unloading of the furniture, then come back for Tom, who had one or two last jobs to do, when we would go on for lunch with his family. When the loading was finished, then, I gave the driver the address of our new house and climbed up into the cab, where they made room for me between them. It was only a ten-minute drive across town, but it was to me like a journey into another world: my own world of neat houses along tree-lined backwaters and the Sunday-afternoon quiet of sheltered gardens. It was the sort of district that people in books and plays scoffed at as dull and suburban. But people like that, I thought, had never lived in a place like Bridge Street. But though it was my own world, and the thought of living there again was very pleasant, there was yet no place in it I could call home: not as I regarded the Little Palace (as we called the house, after Mrs Wilde) as home. I thought as the men begin to unload at the end of the short drive, of how that once strange and dirty place had become almost like a part of me, so that ever since waking that morning, and before, there had been in me a vague melancholy at the prospect of leaving it. I had chided myself for my foolish fancies, but it was almost as though I felt that the house was a part of our luck, and that in leaving it we might also leave something of our happiness within its walls.

  For we had been happy there – gloriously happy. And not much more than a year ago I had not even seen the house. A little over two years ago there had been nothing – not even Tom. And what was there in life now without him? Tom, who had appeared and shattered the cocoon which my parents’ genteel, middle-class way of life had spun about me and taught me to live as I never had before. It seemed to me that I had hardly been alive at all until that strange, disturbing afternoon when I first noticed him from the office window as, tired and dirty, he crossed the yard from the pit-hill at the end of the shift...

  I tipped the two men when they had finished, and then walked through the house from room to room, seeing how lost our furniture looked in it, and noting with my woman’s eye all the things that needed to be done. And then I left the house and walked to the bus stop at the end of the avenue. It was well past noon now, and the sky, overcast all morning, had cleared and showed great patches of blue behind the big pillows of cloud. As we ran into town by a stream which flowed into the river I looked out of the bus at the black water and saw the breeze-ruffled surface shimmer, as though someone had thrown handfuls of sunlight onto it from behind the willows which, just there, seemed to me to crouch like big green shaggy dogs by the water’s edge. But despite the sunlight and the blue sky there was a sneaking chill in the air and I felt in its touch the end of the glorious but all-too-short summer.

  The sun was shining, the sky blue, the day I had met Tom. Two days after my first noticing him he came into the big new building, with its many area control offices, to see the manager and blundered into the wrong office, and so into my life. It was like nothing I had ever known before, that feeling which possessed me from then on; it flushed my cheeks at the thought of him, brought tremors to my hands and knees, and filled me with a breathless, delightful excitement. And from that first brief contact, when I came into the corridor to show him the door he wanted, grew Tom’s awareness of me. His eyes began to seek me out as he crossed the yard at the end of the day shift, and soon we were openly exchanging smiles. Even though we did not speak to each other again for some time a kind of intimacy seemed to grow between us through the medium of those daily smiles; so that one day when I had occasion to leave the office early, not long after the change of shifts, it seemed very natural when he came roaring up the yard behind me on his motor cycle that he should offer me a lift into town, and that I should at once accept. That was the day he asked me, with almost painful diffidence, to go out with him one evening, and the day I became hopelessly lost. Three months later, to his open astonishment, I accepted his halting proposal of marriage.

  And all this was what the Little Palace had come to mean to me. More, much more, than cleanliness and shining paint had emerged from the squalor of flaking plaster and peeling wallpaper that had been the house when first we took it. A marriage had been made there, had come through its first vital year; a marriage that had received little but discouragement because of the differences between Tom and me. I was too good for him, they had said. I was throwing myself away on a boy from the back streets whose rough-shod nature and way of living would sooner or later break my heart. But they had been wrong; only the walls of the Little Palace knew how wrong. Those walls had held our year of hope and happiness, our little failures, and, above all, our success. It was because of this that I knew I should remember it for the rest of my life.

  I alighted from the bus in the station into a swarm of shoppers and home-going workers and decided it would be quicker to walk the rest of the way. I was soon out of the teeming shopping centre and plunging deep into the back streets on the old side of town: the district in which Tom had lived all his life, and which I had not been in more than twice before meeting him. I walked along the cobbled river of Gilderdale Road, with its noisome tributaries, each with its twin banks of terraced houses, ceasing abruptly by the blackened upright sleepers of the railway fence, and, turning the corner by the little newsagent’s, came into Bridge Street. A year of it had not changed my sense of being alien and conspicuous and now, walking along its uneven pavement for what, for all I knew, might be one of the last times in my life, I felt even more acutely self-conscious than usual – as though in every house along the way the occupants had put aside what they were doing to watch me pass – and I was glad when I reached the cover of the entry which broke the terrace and gave onto the communal backyard behind the houses. As I came through, my heels echoing on the brick paving, I could hear Tom whistling inside the house. He was happy today. He had never reconciled
himself to my living here. It had been I who insisted on our taking the house when Tom’s mother heard of it, rather than wait in the hope of something better turning up. We could not afford to buy at that time. My father’s offer of help would have solved the problem, but only at the expense of Tom’s pride; and I had seen the Little Palace as a challenge to me, to be faced boldly, without fear. We had won through, and now it made Tom happy to be able, after only a year, to take me out of it and across the town.

  Absorbed in these thoughts, I had walked right into the living-room before I saw what awaited me there. And then I stood and gaped in staggered disbelief. The room was as though emblazoned with warnings of a terrible plague; for on each of the walls, stretching diagonally from ceiling to floor across the pale blue wallpaper, and on each of the doors, Tom had painted a huge scarlet cross. And now, brush in hand, he spoke to me over his shoulder as he heard me come in.

  ‘Janie? Little surprise for you. An’ a damn big ’un for them two stingy old codgers when they turn up again.’

  I turned without answering and ran out of the room and up the uncarpeted stairs into the bedroom. He had done that room first. I came slowly down again. My heart hurt as though a great hand was kneading it brutally, and I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Thought of it yesterday,’ Tom said. He was putting on his jacket now and he wore a grin which slowly faded as he saw the expression on my face. ‘Well, I mean, damn it, we couldn’t let ’em get away with it altogether, could we?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, Tom.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Tom said again, ‘it serves ’em right for bein’ so flamin’ mean!’

  He wrapped the paint-brush in a piece of rag and put it in his pocket. ‘They can have the paint.’ He looked at me. ‘C’mon, then, let’s be off. Take your last look at this place. You won’t be seein’ it any more.’

  We went out, he closing and locking the door behind us, and walked away together. It was about half-way down the street, that, to Tom’s confusion and distress, I began to cry.

  ‘What’s up, Janie?’ He stopped and peered down at me. ‘What’s wrong, love?’

  But I could only shake my head in reply. It was going to be all right. I just knew it was. But I couldn’t help but cry.

  The Years Between

  At fifty-three, when nostalgia could be borne no longer, Morgan Lightly turned his back on the sheep-farming land of his adoption and returned to Cressley, sick for the sight of his native county, which he had not seen for thirty years, and of the woman who had jilted him all that long time ago. With no more announcement than a brief letter to his brother Thomas, his only surviving relative, with whom he had corresponded spasmodically over the years, he came back.

  He came in winter and for several days he curbed the impatience that would have hid him rush off it once to find her whom he hid loved and lost, and wandered the dark town and the countryside, drinking in the sight and sound and smell of all that which, though changed, still held the savour of his youth. And then, when nearly a week had passed, he decided that if he were not to allow the prosaic reporting of the weekly Argus to rob his reappearance of its drama it was time for him to appease his other yearning.

  Driving up out of the town he felt as nervous as a boy on his first date and on the crest of the hill he stopped the hired Ford and relit his dead pipe. He sat there for a little while, with the window down, enjoying the tobacco in the keen air. Before him the road fell into the narrow valley of the stream, then twisted upwards to the village which, not much more than a double row of stone-built cottages in his youth, now carried a pale fringe of new corporation houses and several architect-designed bungalows and villas sited in such a way that, through a deep cleft in the hillside, they commanded a view of the town. Above the village was the winter-brown sweep of the moors and beyond, in the west, pale sunlight touched the thin snow on the Pennine tops.

  Morgan got out of the car and walked across the road to look back the way he had come, at the town. His town. How often had memory conjured it up thus when he was thousands of miles away! There were changes visible – the twin cooling towers of the power station by the river were strange to him – but the hard core of it was the same. And it satisfied him to note that most of the changes were for the better. ‘Muck and brass’, they had said in his youth; ‘they go together’. But not everyone accepted that now. Light and space and clean untrammelled lines were what they went in for nowadays. The new estates, covering the playing fields of his youth on the fringes of the town, with their wide streets and well-spaced houses; and the lawns and gardens in the public squares and streets that had known no colours but grey and soot-black. The smoke was still there, fuming from a thousand chimneys, but when you planted grass it came up fresh and green every spring. He liked that. It was good. It was good too to see well-dressed people thronging the streets, and the market and to notice the profusion of goods behind the plate-glass windows of the new shops: for he had left the town at a time when men hung about on street corners, their self-respect as worn and shabby as their clothing, idle, eating their hearts out for want of work to keep them occupied and feed and clothe their families decently.

  He returned to the car, the feeling of nervousness and apprehension returning to him as he reached the floor of the valley and changed gear for the climb into the village. He turned the green Consul into the steep main street where the windows of the parallel terraces of cottages winked and glinted at other across the narrow cobbles, and he noticed lace curtains flutter in some of them as the car moved along, taking up almost the entire width of the roadway and darkening the downstairs room of each house in turn. An elderly woman, standing in a doorway with a shawl over her shoulders, stooped and stared with frank curiosity into the car. He stopped and lowered the window.

  ‘I wonder if you can tell me where Mrs Taplow lives – Mrs Sarah Taplow.’

  The woman directed him farther up the hill, still gazing intently at him as he thanked her and moved on. He had a feeling of knowing the woman and he wondered if she had recognised him. Down in Cressley he could walk about largely unknown but here in the village some of the older people were sure to recall him – and the details of long ago. And standing on the pavement outside Sarah Taplow’s house he hoped that no one had stolen his thunder and deprived him of the pleasure of surprising her as he had looked forward to doing. But when she opened the door to his knock and faced him, gaping at him with all the astonishment he could have wished for in her blue eyes, he could only shuffle his feet like a bashful boy and say sheepishly, ‘Well, Sarah?’

  Without speaking she ran her eyes over him and he felt them take note of every detail of his appearance: his tanned cheeks, his hair – greying fast now and cropped shorter than when he was young – and the good thick tweeds on his heavy, solid frame. And when at last it seemed there could be no doubt left in her mind, her eyes returned to and rested on his face and she said, ‘It is you, then, Morgan Lightly?’

  Morgan chuckled, but a little uneasily, ‘It is indeed, Sarah. I didn’t think I’d startle you quite as much as that; but you’d not be expecting me to pop up at your door after all this time, eh?’

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ she said. She took a deep breath as if to take control of her startled self, and turned to go into the house. ‘You’d better come on inside,’ she said. ‘No need to fill the neighbours their mouths.’

  ‘You’ve given me a turn,’ she went on as they entered the living-room through the in-door. ‘I never thought to see you again,’ she said once more. She turned and faced him, standing by the square table which was laid for a solitary dinner, and her eyes, still disbelieving, roved ceaselessly over his face.

  ‘You’ve come back, then,’ she said. ‘After all this time.’ The words were spoken half-aloud and seemed more of a statement to herself than a question addressed to him.

  ‘Thirty years, Sarah,’ Morga
n said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  She nodded and echoed him softly. ‘A long time.’

  He noted the changes of that time in her, but saw with approval her smooth, clear complexion, the soft, still-dark hair, the full mature curve of her bosom, and the proud straight line of her back. He knew her: she was Sarah. He felt warmth and hope move in him, as though only now had he reached the end of his journey, and for a moment he forgot his earlier doubt and uncertainty.

  She stirred, seeming to come to, and motioned him to one of the armchairs by the fireside. ‘Well, sit you down, Morgan. I was just getting my dinner onto the table. You’ll join me in a bite, I suppose?’

  In this swift transition from astonishment to what seemed like a calm acceptance of his presence it seemed to Morgan that the years fell away almost as though they had never been, and he was relieved. The reopening of their acquaintanceship had been easier than he had expected.

  ‘Don’t put yourself out for me, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I can get lunch at my hotel.’

  But it was a token protest, for it had been comparison of hotel meals with his memory of Sarah’s cooking that inspired him in his choice of this rather odd hour for visiting her.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ she assured him. ‘It’s all ready.’

  She went off into the kitchen and Morgan looked round the little room: at the well-worn but neatly kept furnishings and the open treadle sewing machine against one wall, with a half-finished frock over a chair beside it. They told their own story. His eyes fell on two photographs in stained wood frames on the sideboard and he left his chair to look more closely at them. One of them, a portrait of a thin-faced balding man, he recognised as being of Sarah’s dead husband. And the other, a young army officer, remarkably like Sarah, could only be her son. He turned to her, the photograph in his hand, as she came back into the room with cutlery for him.