‘No, no, don’t do that. I wouldn’t want him…Mr Birch to think I had to sell anything of mine to…to…Well, you know what I mean.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, Emily. But where shall I contact you?’
‘Well, the only place is me Aunt Mary’s. Her name is Southern, Mrs Southern; and she lives at number forty-seven Billow Street, Gateshead.’ Mr Tooton now took from his pocket a notebook and wrote down the address; then said, ‘I’ll write to you there as soon as I’ve concluded the business.’
‘Thanks, Mr Tooton. Thanks very much. You’ve been very kind. All along, you’ve been very kind. I used to think clerks and people like you were too uppish to speak to…well, ordinary folk, but I’ve found me mistake out.’
‘Oh, Emily, Emily.’ He was smiling sadly at her now. ‘How little you know of life or people. I’m afraid you are the kind of girl, Emily, who’ll get hurt. Time and again you’ll get hurt; and I’m sorry that this is so.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me, Mr Tooton; I have me head screwed on the right way, and I never see any harm in trusting people. Speak as you find, do to others as you’d have them do to you, that’s what Sep…Mr McGillby used to say.’
Why did she keep mentioning Sep at this time? It was the watch, she supposed.
Mr Tooton now took hold of her hand, and he shook it warmly as he said, ‘I wish you the best of luck, Emily, in…in your future life.’
‘Thanks. Thanks, Mr Tooton. An’ don’t you worry about me, or him. We’ll get by somehow…Never say die.’
Eeh! There she went again, talking brave talk…never say die, when at this very moment her heart was in her boots; and it wasn’t only because of the hard life that was stretching ahead of her, and she had no illusions about that, but tonight would be her wedding night, today was a kind of wedding day, and she was all worked up inside, not exactly frightened, but not exactly looking forward to it either.
Well, she had burnt her boats. He had given her the chance to take up her bag and go her own way, but she had chosen to go his road; so she’d have to face tonight, wouldn’t she, like many another afore her. Tomorrow she’d know all about it.
It was almost dark when Larry and George carried the last trunk between them up the slope towards the cottage, with Emily following some way behind leading the horse.
The horse wasn’t young, but Larry had chosen him because he was used to the plough. This, Emily thought, was a bit short-sighted because if they ever managed to get a small cart, Bonny would be too cumbersome to pull it; he was more suited to a beer dray.
After settling the horse in the stable, she heaved a great sigh and now slowly, because she felt so tired, she walked the few steps towards the cottage.
Standing in the doorway, she viewed the room. It was cluttered with pieces of furniture, some looking as out of place as it was possible to imagine. And she herself had picked it all, including the pretty French table, and the clock, and the bureau from the drawing room…And all to grace these two small rooms and a scullery!
She smiled weakly at George, who was standing in the middle of the pile shaking his head, and she said, ‘What won’t go round the walls we’ll furnish the shippon with,’ and at this he laughed and said, ‘Aye. Aye. You could.’ Then he added, ‘Well, I’ll…I’ll leave you now to get settled in.’
As he turned towards the door, Larry, edging his way out of the bedroom, said, ‘Thanks, George,’ and Emily put in, ‘I’ll…I’ll never forget your kindness, George. We…we couldn’t have done it without you. I’ll always remember that…an’ the big dray!’
‘Aw, you’d have thought of somethin’. Being you, Emily, you’d have thought of somethin’.’ He jerked his head towards her; then on an embarrassed laugh he went out, and Larry followed him, closing the door behind him.
With a soft plop now she sat down on the top of a trunk and looked towards the lamp that was set on the stone mantelpiece and was spreading its soft light over the odd assortment of furniture and kitchen utensils. Well, she had arrived…They had arrived. From now on this was to be her home; in these two rooms she’d likely spend the remainder of her life. She was seventeen years and four months old and at this moment her life ahead seemed to cover a long, long time…never-ending…eternity.
When the door opened she went to rise from the trunk, but when Larry said quietly, ‘Sit where you are, I’ll make a drink,’ she obeyed him without murmur. And when presently he handed her a mug of tea she reminded herself the last time he had handed her anything to drink had been on New Year’s Eve when they’d had that bit of jollification…Would she ever know a bit of jollification again? She doubted it.
‘You’re tired.’
‘What?…Oh aye. Yes.’ She smiled up at him where he was now standing over her, looking down into her face.
‘You must get to bed; we won’t do any more moving or lifting tonight.’
‘No. No, I don’t think I could.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’
‘No, no, thanks. I’m not hungry. But…but I’d like a wash.’
‘A wash?’
‘Aye, I feel filthy.’ She held out her hands. ‘An’ me face, it feels full of grime.’ She now moved her fingers around her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I look like.’
‘You look beautiful, Emily; you always look beautiful.’
She bowed her head and told herself she mustn’t cry. All he had said was she looked beautiful, but he had said it in the same way as he had said you’re tired, in a kindly fashion. But at this moment she couldn’t even stand kindness.
She slid off the lid of the trunk, saying, ‘There’s no water in; I’ll have to get it from the rain butt.’
‘I’ll get it,’ he said.
She lit a candle, which she took into the bedroom; and when he returned with the bucket of water, she emptied most of it into the black kale pot, and as she swung it up onto the fire, she muttered, ‘I just want the chill off it.’
She now searched among a high heap of utensils piled in the corner until she found the small tin bath and, emptying its contents onto the floor, she took it to the fireplace. After a few minutes she tested the water in the kale pot. It had barely got the chill off it, but she poured it into the bath. Then, having pulled a towel from a bundle, she lifted the bath and went into the other room, and with her buttocks she pushed the door closed behind her, aware all the time that he was sitting on the other trunk watching her.
She placed the bath on a small clear space at the side of the wooden bed, then with a shiver she began to undress. Stripped to her waist, her shift hanging over her outer clothes, she washed the top half of herself; then put on her blouse again, took off her skirt, petticoats and drawers, and her shift, and, standing in the little bath, finished the rest of her toilet. By the time she pulled her shift and clothes on again her teeth were chattering in her head.
She now told herself she should have got into her nightgown, but she had left it in one of the bundles back in the room. Anyway, she felt a bit fresher now and she didn’t want to go to bed yet; it was too early, she’d make a meal.
As she buttoned up her blouse a wave of panic assailed her, and from shivering with the cold she now began to sweat. She didn’t want to go to bed at all; it seemed funny, but she didn’t.
She lay staring upwards into the deep, thick blackness. It was over. It had been over for some two hours now but she was still in it, terrified, repulsed, sickened, exhilarated. Up to a short while ago she had known three sides of him, now she knew four, and the fourth she liked least of all. For the past hour or so Alice Broughton’s sayings had punctuated her thinking: Some men eat you alive…Some men are never satisfied; breakfast, dinner and tea wouldn’t satisfy some of them…She had to go to the priest about him, and a lot of damn good that did her…Do your duty; keep at it; if you don’t somebody else will. That’s what they told her.
Then there was the faint memory, but distinct now, of her mother crying out, making strange sounds as if she we
re being tortured, but in the morning looking happy and smiling and cooking her da a big breakfast, especially if it was a Sunday morning.
She was cold, although there were four blankets and a hap on the bed. The air in the room was like nothing she had ever breathed before, not even when the snow was lying feet deep in Shields, and the noise of the freezing spray lashing the pier walls was like thunder over their part of the town. This was a different cold, a damp, penetrating, deadening cold. She wanted to turn to him and snuggle against his body, as she would have against Lucy’s for comfort, but she daren’t move in case she roused him. So she lay still and stiff; her body couldn’t stand another attack, she told herself; for that is what it had been like. And yet, she had to admit if she remembered rightly, there were moments when she had responded to him …
Would she always feel like this about it? Would it be like this every night? She hadn’t bargained for this. No, she hadn’t bargained for anything like this. She had thought, in a way, she had known what it was all about, but she hadn’t.
He moved, snorted slightly, heaved himself round in the bed, and his arms sought her again, but they did not clutch at her; instead his head snuggled into her breasts, his lips touched her flesh lightly, and he sighed and breathed her name, ‘Emily,’ he said. ‘Oh, Emily.’ His breathing fell into rhythmic flow. He was asleep.
Slowly, slowly, her body relaxed against his. Then her hand moved up under the bedclothes and lay on the back of his head. She felt warm now. She was warm, drowsy. As she drifted into sleep she thought she heard her Aunt Mary laughing and shouting at her: ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, lass. You’ve got a lot to learn. An’ you’ve only started. But you’ll come through, never fear…never say die.’
PART FOUR
THE HILL
THE FIRST YEAR
One
For three full weeks, except to gather wood, they did not move from the precincts of the land attached to the cottage. They worked from dawn till dusk through wind, rain and early sleet showers. Larry had made all the outhouses dry; he had cleared the back and front yards of grass and weeds and young hawthorn, and laid a path of broken slabs across the backyard. He had repaired, here and there, the rough wall that bordered his three acres of ground. But after the evening meal he would sit before the fire, his hands idle; and not once did his face lose its stiff, sombre, bitter expression.
As for Emily, she had first of all arranged the furniture inside the cottage. What couldn’t stand around the walls she placed on top of other pieces, such as the glass-fronted cupboard which she put on top of the chest of drawers, and the whatnot she placed on the lid of one of the trunks. Why, she asked herself, she had brought a whatnot when there were no bits and pieces to put on it, she didn’t know. The bureau she set in the corner near the fireplace, and the French clock she placed on the mantelpiece in between the two brass jugs, and also the tea caddy. The little French table she put at the side of the bed. Her pans she hung on the iron hooks in the wall down the side of the fireplace. At one side of the hearth she placed the settle, at the other the big leather chair she had taken from the study. One step from the chair was the narrow kitchen table, which had acted as a side table down in the house, and two straight-backed wooden chairs. On the floor was a carpet and she had known this to be a mistake from the beginning for within the doorway it was already caked with mud. Yet, in spite of its cluttered look, the kitchen had taken on a homely air.
But she did not waste much time inside the cottage. She cleared the front garden, and side by side with Larry she dug it up, not to be arranged into flower beds but for vegetables that would have to be their mainstay in the time to come. The carrying of the water from the burn was a task in itself, as was the gathering of wood. And as the days went on she found that she had to go further and further from the cottage in her search for wood in order to keep the fire going, because, as she had remarked to Larry, it ate the blooming stuff, the chimney had too much draught.
Her hands had been rough before, but now the backs of them were marked with keens; and her nails were worn down to the quick. She had worked hard down there in the house, long, tedious hours, but she realised now that that work had been light compared with her present tasks. This was navvy’s work.
And now at the end of three weeks they were faced with a problem. The horse needed fodder, the chickens needed mash and corn. Nearly all that George had stacked on the cart had gone.
No-one had been near them. She hadn’t seen a soul since she came up here, not even George. But in a way she could understand George not coming up: it was sort of delicate, courtesy like. So she explained it to herself. But she would have been so pleased to see him…to see anybody for that matter.
The longing had come on her last night to see the town again, to mix with people, just for a short while, an hour or so. If she could look forward to that every week it would get her by, so she told herself.
And so strong was the urge still on her that it helped her to speak out on this Tuesday morning when the sun was shining and the wind for once was light but still biting, and the sky was high, and the light all about them a silvery white. ‘We’ll have to go down,’ she said.
‘What!’ He was scooping up the last spoonful of porridge from the bowl and he hesitated before putting it to his mouth. Then he placed the spoon back in the bowl and pushed them away across the table before saying, slowly and heavily, ‘I’m not going down there.’
‘Well, you can’t expect to stay up here all your life.’
‘Why not?’ He was looking straight at her.
‘Why not?’ She moved her head from side to side. ‘We’ve not tasted meat for a week; the hens want crowdie; there’s not one of them laying now and they never will if they don’t have their hot mash at this time of the year. You know that well enough.’
He got up from the table, swung round and took the one step it needed to reach the mantelpiece. Taking from it a briar pipe, he knocked the noddle against the rough stone, then with a penknife scraped the bowl until her teeth were on edge, forcing her to cry at him, ‘Well, if you won’t go I’ll have to. And George’s likely left stuff down there for us; do you expect me to lump it up?’
She stopped abruptly for he had turned and was staring at her, and the look he was levelling at her was one she had often seen on his face when he was acting the master; and in this moment she knew he was seeing her again as the servant who was stepping out of her place. But he was wrong, wasn’t he? She wasn’t stepping out of her place, not any more she wasn’t. She knew what her place was. But even now, when he had lost his, he didn’t know where he stood, and so she cried at him, ‘Don’t look at me like that. We’re no longer down there, and don’t you forget it.’
When she saw his face twitch and his head move downwards with that slow painful movement as if it were being forced from behind, she ran round the table and put her arms about him, saying contritely, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Larry…Larry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It’s my mouth; I should keep it shut. I know, I know. But look at me. Look at me.’ She pushed her doubled-up fist under his chin bringing his eyes level with hers. ‘This thing has got to be faced, we’ve got to live. An’ the animals have got to live. We all need food. The only thing we’ve got at present is milk. I can make butter of a sort, and a bit of cheese, but we want bread. And for that I need flour and yeast. And we want a bit of meat. You, most of all, want a bit of meat.’
‘I can’t go down there, Emily.’
‘Not just to the bottom of the far hill to carry up the stuff?’
He blinked and seemed to consider; then said, ‘Aye, well, perhaps that; but I’ve sworn inside meself never to go on that road again.’
‘But there are other roads.’ She pointed in the direction of the bedroom, saying, ‘Across that way you could get to Birtley an’ Chester-le-Street.’ She stopped herself from adding, ‘An’ the Rowans’ farm is that way an’ all.’
He never spoke of his friends to her, of either the f
ather, the mother or the daughter. She had pondered on this, thinking that the reason might be he was hurt by their desertion of him. If it wasn’t that, then there was another reason that was too delicate to broach. Her thinking on the subject stopped here.
She swung round from him now and hastily began to gather up the dishes from the table; and he looked at her enquiringly as he asked, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m goin’ into the town, I’m goin’ by the carrier cart an’ I’m goin’ to get on it in the village.’
‘No, no, Emily. No, you’re not!’
‘Yes, yes, I am.’ Her hands became still on the table. ‘But first of all I’m going down into that village this mornin’, because there’ll come a time when we’ll be snowed up here and we’ll be lucky if we can reach even there, for it’ll be impossible to get into Fellburn. So I’m going to put in an appearance, when the goin’s good.’
‘They’ll hound you.’
‘Huh!’ She wagged her head. ‘Just let them try. That’s all, just let them try.’
‘Do you remember what happened to Con?’
She became still and her lip trembled slightly as she replied, ‘Aye, yes. I remember what happened to Con. Only too well I remember what happened to Con. But you can take it it won’t happen to me. There’s a piece in me little book. I was lookin’ at it just last night and I thought how right it is. It says: “Fear is the enemy, fear is the foe, if you run before it down you’ll go. But if you stand and look it in the face, God will pour into you the bravery of grace.”’
He still did not smile as he said, ‘Oh Emily, you and that book.’
‘It’s got a lot of sense in it, that book.’ Her tone was now defensive.
The Tide of Life Page 31
