He was smiling at her now, a half amused, half pitying smile; then he said, ‘I am not going to eat you.’
Now she did speak; she didn’t like to be treated as if she were a frightened lass. ‘I don’t imagine you are,’ she said.
‘Then why be so afraid?’
She stared straight into his face now and her head lifted and her voice sounded harsh as she replied, ‘You know right well, you know who I am and I know who you are, an’ I’m surprised to see you this side of the road…Don’t you think there’s been enough trouble?’
His face was unsmiling now as he replied, ‘I had walked round the quarry; I took a side path, I didn’t know where it led but I suppose if I’d stopped to think it would have told me. Anyway, I’m glad now that I didn’t because I’ve wanted to speak to you for a long time.’
She drew her chin in, her eyebrows moved upwards and she went as if to step further back from the stile as he rested one arm along the top bar of it and said, ‘I don’t see why this situation should continue. I apparently have inadvertently done Mr Birch out of his livelihood and his home, to my mind his rightful home, and I feel that it is time that we got together with regard to me making some reparation.’
She wanted to protest immediately at the madness of his suggestion; she wanted to say there’ll be another murder if you ever come face to face with him; whether he’s drunk or sober he’ll go for you. And she believed firmly that he would. But she said nothing, she just stared at him as she thought in amazement, He talks like the gentry do. She had never heard Larry talk this way; he wouldn’t know how. It was sad when she thought of it that Larry’s one aim had been to appear like a gentleman, whereas this man who had stepped into his shoes, the man who had been in prison all these years, talked like a natural one, which belied his looks, for she had half expected him to speak in broken English.
‘Do you think you could arrange that we should meet?’
‘No! No!’ She was shaking her head wildly now. ‘Oh no, please, don’t you ever go up there.’
‘But why not?’
‘Well—’ She now dropped her two bags by the side of her feet and, still moving her head, she said, ‘I shouldn’t have to explain to you, you know yourself you walked into his shoes; everything he had went to you. You came out of the blue as it were. It was like him sort of handing everything to a ghost who he wasn’t able to fight.’
‘He should have fought, he should have taken the case to court. Even if he hadn’t won completely he would have had some decent reparation, much more than she left him.’
She looked at him now through narrowed gaze. The way he had said she, it could have been Larry speaking of her.
‘Do you really want to be of help?’ she asked.
‘Yes, sincerely I do.’
‘Then please do as I ask, leave him alone. He would sooner die than take a penny off you, and he’d likely try to do you in if you suggested it to him.’ And she knew this to be true; she knew that in many ways Larry was a weak man, but that on this one point, namely the hate of the man who had usurped his position, he was strong, and his hate, she felt, would keep him strong until he died.
They stared at each other for a long moment before he stood aside; and now when she lifted up the bags from the ground and put them on the top bar of the stile and he lifted them down, she made no protest, but when he offered her his hand she ignored it.
She did not give him any farewell but went on along the path, her back slightly stooped under the weight of the knapsack and she didn’t stop until she was through the copse and had reached the broken-down bridge. There she leant against the wall and closed her eyes, and said to herself, ‘If it isn’t one thing it’s another. I might have guessed things were running too smoothly.’
Two
During the next two weeks or so she was afraid to go down to the road in case she bumped into ‘him’. As she told herself, she mustn’t have any truck with him, for she had only to be seen talking to him and the village would be alight again. Yet she thought about him often. He seemed a nice man, quiet. She couldn’t imagine him murdering anybody, but he had done, and served his time for it; yet somehow he didn’t look any the worse for his long years in prison. There was a sort of…She searched in her mind for a word, and the only one she could think of was calmness. Yes, there was a sort of calmness about him which she considered odd after what he must have been through, and again and again she told herself how surprised she had been to hear him speak so well. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to listen to him, but now she didn’t wish for that pleasure, and if he ever tried to speak to her again she’d squash it in the bud quick and fast. She would that. She’d tell him straight.
She was coming out of the byre when she saw Larry going towards the gate in the stone-walled compound that they had erected to house the sheep in the roughest of weather, and she called to him, ‘Where you off to?’
He turned sharply and, pointing to the trolley, called back, ‘Where does it look like?’
‘But I didn’t know there was any wood over that way.’
‘There’s a rotten branch came down beyond the rise, I noticed it yesterday.’
‘Oh, good.’ She nodded at him.
Wood was becoming a problem and although they might have been able to afford a hundredweight or so of cheap slack coal each week it was the getting of it up here that posed the problem.
Last year when they had searched for wood they had done it together, but of late he had taken to going off on his own; and she was glad of this for it left her free to sit down for a time. Not that she couldn’t sit when he was present, but she was never able to think quietly, or even to sit and read without a sense of unease. She had taken to reading in the evenings; sometimes it was the stories in Ladies’ Weekly or Red Letter which she purchased on her weekly visit to the town and her Aunt Mary’s, and sometimes, and more often of late, she looked through the little black book.
There were fifty-eight pages in the book, and on each was a piece of prose or poetry, some pieces consisting of only two lines. But it was with secret pride that she had memorised more than half of them, and often she quoted them to herself word for word whenever their meaning seemed applicable, as at the present moment when she was unpicking, of all things, the coat she had bought in the second-hand shop in Fellburn, the coat that had caused such a stir. It was good material and she had decided she could get a skirt from it besides a sleeved waistcoat. The line that came into her head now was one of the short ones, and it went: ‘Language is the dress of thought’. It was said by somebody called Johnson. She mightn’t be using it in the same way as the man meant it when he wrote it, but she always found that when she took a needle into her hand her thoughts became clearer, more wise like, and she considered it was a pity that she couldn’t turn all her thoughts into language, but once she let them flow down from her head into her mouth, there they stuck, or if they did come out they were expressed in a very ordinary fashion, and not in the fine garments she had made for them in her mind.
There was another reason why she enjoyed her time alone, because then she could talk to the cat. She called him Tiddles. He was still a kitten but very affectionate and very often when she addressed him he mewed back at her and she swore that he understood every word she said.
She stooped down now and lifted the kitten from the hearth and onto the settle at her side, saying, ‘There now, what will we talk about this afternoon, eh? There’s a nice story started in Red Letter but I only hope it doesn’t ramble on forever and a day like the last one. Oh, the things that happened to that poor girl. And I never knew how she did end up because that was the week I missed. Remember, when I had that shocking toothache?’ But besides her reasons for liking to have some time to herself she wanted at the moment time to dwell on the consequences of what might happen should the suspicion that kept nagging in her mind be correct. She stopped stroking the kitten as a slight sweat broke out on her.
The ki
tten mewed for more attention, then curled into a ball and purred. The wood on the fire spluttered and crackled. A crow called from the chimney top and as if Daisy were answering it there came a loud moo from the shippon, and Emily, now picking up the scissors, went snip, snip down the gores of the coat.
When the knock came on the door her scissors froze in her hand. No-one had knocked at that door during all the time they had been here. It couldn’t…No, no! It mustn’t be him. Eeh! It would be murder. Thank God Larry was out. She took the coat from her knee and slowly laid it aside; then taking a deep breath, she went to the door and pulled it open, and on a great gasp and a loud cry she actually yelled, ‘Da! Oh Da! Da!’ The next minute she had her arms round the tubby red-faced man standing on the step, and he was holding her tight, not saying a word, just holding her tight.
Now she was pulling him into the room and closing the door behind him; they held each other at arm’s length, then again they were enfolded; and now she was crying and laughing and spluttering all at the same time. ‘Oh Da! Da! Where have you sprung from? Oh, am I glad to see you. Oh Da!’ She rubbed both sides of his stubbly cheeks with her hands and, her face awash with tears, she gulped as she muttered, ‘Oh, you’re a sight for sore eyes. I…I wouldn’t change this moment for a thousand pounds. No, no, I wouldn’t.’
‘How are you, lass?’
‘Oh, me? Oh, I’m all right, Da, I’m all right. Eeh! I was just thinking of you last night. I thought, Where’s he got to? It’s a trip and a half. It’s well over two years. But sit down. Give me your coat. Let me get you a drink.’ As she flung his coat and cap across the back of a chair, she turned to him laughing through her tears, the old Emily, as she cried, ‘I said, get you a drink, it’s only tea.’
‘Tea’ll do fine, lass.’
But she didn’t hurry to make the tea, she stood looking at him, and he at her; then once again she was rushing towards him, and now there was no laughter threading her tears and her crying was not that of a girl, or even that of a young lass, but of a woman; and her father recognised this as he held her tenderly.
When he had last seen her she still looked a child, in a way, but a child full of life and jollity; yet here she was, two and a half years later, so changed that he hardly recognised her. She had jumped girlhood, there was no remnant of the fledgling on her any more, and her but eighteen. She was still bonny though. Oh aye, she was bonny all right, more than bonny. He held her from him now and, his voice thick, he said, ‘Give over, hinny, give over,’ and with her head down she muttered, ‘Aye, Da, aye…’
She made him a dinner of cold meat, pickled cabbage, new bread, and an apple pie, and she heard how he had reached home yesterday to find Alice Broughton and her brood gone and the house in a shambles. Alice had made a hasty retreat with another lodger after his boat was reported due in; and she heard how he had dashed round hoping to find her and Lucy at McGillby’s, only to receive a garbled story of what had happened there from Mrs Gantry next door. Late last night he had landed up at her Aunty Mary’s. And now here he was.
She, in turn, told him of Lucy’s good fortune in getting into the hospital in St Leonards, and in making a friend of this lady called Miss Rice, whose people lived in Hastings and who were welcoming Lucy into their home and apparently making much of her. She brought out Lucy’s letters and watched him read them, nodding as he did so, but making no comment until he was reading the last one; then, looking at her, he said, ‘You shouldn’t be separated.’
‘It was for her good, Da; she was bad, real bad. Look’—she picked out a letter—‘she says herself she hardly coughs at all now and she eats like a horse.’
‘Aye, she does; but she also says she misses you and wishes you were there.’ He pushed his empty plate away from him now, but kept his eyes on it as he said, ‘Why don’t you go, lass?’
She went to the fire, put on more wood and moved the kettle along the hob before she replied, ‘What’s done is done, Da. Things happen in life, and you can’t fight them. It all seems worked out for you somehow.’
John Kennedy stared at his daughter’s back. Yes, indeed, the girl was gone forever and it was a woman who was talking.
‘Is he good to you?’
‘Yes. Oh yes.’ She straightened up and came back to the table.
‘How has he taken the change from the big house to here?’
‘Badly.’
‘Aye, well, it’s to be expected. Why aren’t you married?’
‘Well, it’s understandable why I’m not, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Well, if Aunt Mary told you the whole story you would know that he thought he had been married for seven years and then found he wasn’t, so it’s natural he’d have a thing against marrying again, for who’s to tell I wasn’t married before?’
‘Don’t be daft, lass.’
‘I’m not daft, Da. Sep…Mr McGillby, he wanted to marry me.’
‘Sep McGillby? Him! Why, he was nearly as old as me.’
‘Aye, I know he was, Da, but I liked him. I mean that was all, I realise now. I only liked him, I didn’t love him or anything like that. But I didn’t know it at the time. Anyway, I promised to marry him the minute I was seventeen.’
‘Begod, you did!’
‘Aye, I did. Well then, say I had, and say what I know now, I doubt if I could have stayed with him. I might have gone off and come here and…well, I could have married Larry, and he’d have been done in the eye a second time.’
‘Aw, that’s damn nonsense. But to think that Sep McGillby had the gall to expect you to marry him and his wife hardly cold. It’s just as well he did die or I would have knocked his bloody head off when I got in.’
She did not say, ‘The man I’m living with now is of the same age,’ but with a deep note of nostalgia in her voice she asked, ‘What’s it like down there, Da, the same?’
‘Aye, I suppose. Well you’ve seen it since I saw it last.’
‘Not number six Pilot Place. Eeh! I liked that house. And to think that Jessie Blackmore’s got it now.’
‘Oh no, she hasn’t, lass. I learned that much an’ all from Mrs Gantry. She never got as much as her foot in the door by what I can gather.’
‘No?’ Her face brightened. ‘Then who did it go to?’
‘The nephew. It so turned out that Mrs McGillby left the house to McGillby for his lifetime, but should he die it was to pass to her nephew. He’s a fellow who lives up in Westoe and I think by all accounts he’s pretty comfortable himself.’
‘Well I never! Who’s in the house then?’
‘Oh, it’s rented to somebody; she didn’t say who.’
‘Aye well, rather anybody but her for I’ve always felt so…well so incensed like about that woman having the place.’ She looked towards the window as she said musingly, ‘I used to keep it lovely; you could eat your meat off the backyard. I used to scrub every flag separately on a Friday and bath-brick the back step. Yet nobody ever saw it, except Sep when he came in that way.’
She continued to stare towards the window but in silence now, until he said, ‘You wish you were back there, lass?’
She turned her head slightly towards him, ‘You mean in Shields, Da?’
‘Aye, in Shields.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, why don’t you go? There’s nothin’ stopping you.’ She swung fully round now, her face straight as she looked at him. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more, Da; I’m here an’ I’m here for good. But I’ll tell you something’—she now made a face at him—‘I’m going to give meself a couple of days off afore the year’s out and I’m going into Shields. I’ve thought about it many a time. But then I thought I could never go and look at Pilot Place, not with that woman in that house, but now I can. I’ll go and I’ll walk past the door, and I’ll go down the pier, then I’ll walk right back up Ocean Road and King Street and through the market, and up the Mill Dam Bank and have a look in the shops in Frederick Street. I always liked
Frederick Street, better than King Street, although they weren’t half as swanky. Yes’—she nodded at him—‘I’ll do that…How long are you in for?’
‘Well, if I go back on this one, three weeks I’d say.’
‘Are you going back on her?’
‘What is there to stay for, on shore I mean? You’re not there: the house is empty.’
‘Are you going to keep the house on?’
‘Oh aye, yes.’ He nodded emphatically. ‘My bits an’ pieces are there, and it’s always somewhere to come back to. I was talkin’ to your Aunt Mary about it and she, as usual, found an answer.’ He smiled widely now. ‘You know young Jimmy’s getting married shortly and he’s working in the yard at Hebburn, well, Shields is nearer to Hebburn than Gateshead, so she said, what about letting him rent the place off me until I needed it, an’ then they’d find a shanty of their own, an’ I said, aye, well, that suited me.’
She now leant across the table towards him, her face bright and eager as she said, ‘I’ll tell you what, Da. I’ll take those couple of days off next week and you and me’ll have a jaunt round, eh?’
‘I’d like that, lass. Aye, I’d like that.’
‘All right, how about next Wednesday, I’ll meet you at me Aunt Mary’s and we’ll go down home…I can think of it as home now, an’ I’ll stay there the night and we’ll do Shields and Jarrow and right up the river to Newcastle.’
He cocked his head at her now, saying, ‘Aye, we will if I haven’t gone through the lot afore then.’
‘Well, don’t you go through the lot afore then. Now I’m tellin’ you’—she wagged her finger at him—‘you keep your hand out of your pocket…Well, that’s a date; next Wednesday at me Aunt Mary’s.’
John Kennedy sat back in his chair and looked about the room and, as if the thought had just struck him, he asked, ‘And where is he then?’
‘He’s out gatherin’ wood. He shouldn’t be long. It’s a business keepin’ the fire goin’. Do you want another cup of tea?’
The Tide of Life Page 35
