The Tide of Life

by Catherine Cookson

  Do not attempt to return this to me because if you do, I, being of a persistent nature, will only deliver it back again to your aunt.’

  She bit tightly on her lip as she read the last lines:

  ‘Please remain yourself, Emily; do not let anything change you. May I end by calling myself your friend, Nicholas Stuart.’

  She had never received many letters in her life, an odd illiterate scrawl from her father, and something along the same lines from Lucy, yet she knew that this was an unusual letter. Somehow it reminded her of his face, the foreign look on his face. It wasn’t, she imagined, an ordinary Englishman’s type of letter. She didn’t know how she was aware of this for she had no other letter with which to make a comparison, yet she was deeply aware of it.

  ‘What did he say, lass?’

  She didn’t want her Aunt Mary to know what was in the letter, yet under the circumstances she couldn’t but read it to her.

  When she had finished she gently folded the letter up, and Mary, her head bobbing now, smiled and said, ‘Begod! That fellow could write books. Now to my mind, lass, just going on what he said there’—she tapped the letter in Emily’s hand—‘and if I’d never clapped eyes on him, I’d says there’s a man for you. Smallish he was, he had no bulk about him, as thin as a lath you’d say, but it was a good thinness, a strong thinness, and it comes over in what he says.’ She again indicated the letter, then asked, ‘What you goin’ to do with it…the watch?’

  ‘I don’t know, Aunt Mary. I can’t keep it on me. Eeh!’—she moved her head very slowly—‘I’m flabbergasted. I wouldn’t have believed anybody could be so kind, ever. But anyway, as I said, I can’t keep it on me. Would…would you keep it for me here, Aunt Mary?’

  ‘Aw, lass’—Mary now spread her arms wide—‘I’d never know a minute’s peace with a thing like that in the house. Those are jewels on that strap. An’ he’s had to pay a small fortune for it. Eeh, lass, no, I’d be on tenterhooks every minute of the twenty-four hours. And if our Kathy clapped her eyes on it she’d have it pinned on those twin pontoons of hers an’ out that door afore I could nail her. No, lass, you’ll have to think of somewhere to put it other than here.’

  She had thought up somewhere to put the eighteen sovereigns but he had found them. Yet there were a thousand and one places in the crannies on the hill in which she could hide it. She could dig a deepish hole, and it would have to be deep enough so that nobody, unless they were starting quarrying, would come across it. She said to Mary, ‘I’ll bury it on the hill somewhere.’

  ‘Well, if you can think of nowhere better, then bury it there, lass. But mark it well in your memory so you can pick it up when you want it, ’cos to my mind there lies your future. Why, if I were you, hinny, you wouldn’t see me for dust. I’d be over that bridge an’ into Newcastle to that jeweller’s an’ sell the damn thing an’ be off an’ start up a new life…So why don’t you?’

  ‘And what would happen to Mr Stuart, because Larry’ll carry out his threat once I don’t show up. It would be like biting the hand that fed you.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose you’re right; there’s always two sides to everything. But it’s a damn shame that such a load of responsibility has been put on your shoulders, especially at this time when you’ve enough weight to carry with what’s inside you. Still’—she grinned at Emily now—‘let’s have a cup of tea to drink to your future, eh? Come on, lass, cheer up, never say die. And who’d need to with a windfall like that? As the gypsies say, you have a lucky face. An’ that’s what one said to me once. She said I’d marry a rich man and travel across water on a ship. An’ what other way would you travel across water? I ask you. She said I’d have three children, an’ I’d been born with a lucky streak; in fact, she said, if I fell on me backside down the midden I’d come up smelling of honeysuckle, an’ I believed her. Eeh, my God, how gullible you are when you’re young!’

  Yes, how gullible you were when you were young.

  Emily didn’t join in her Aunt Mary’s laughter.

  PART SIX

  THE BONFIRE

  One

  She was in her eighth month of pregnancy. She was carrying the child high; her breasts, especially when she was lying down, seemed to be resting on her stomach. After the first three months, physically she had felt remarkably well and had continued to work, and was still doing so.

  But when she looked over the past months she wondered how she had endured them. She had learned that the silence of the open spaces was companionable but that the silence of an aggrieved person was hell to bear. Yet over the last few weeks his manner had softened slightly. She could pinpoint the day and even the hour when it began to change. It was a Sunday in late April. Spring was tempering the wind; the sun that came out between showers was warm. She’d had a longing to walk, to see somewhere different from the cottage and the hills about her. She realised, this particular Sunday, that apart from the path down to the main road in one direction and to the river in another direction, she hadn’t been further afield than half a mile from the land that surrounded her cottage.

  So on this bright day she put on her coat and a scarf over her head and went for a walk. Larry had been gone more than two hours and she purposely didn’t take the road that would eventually come out at Chester-le-Street and which led to Durham, but she went, as she thought, further inland, and after walking through field paths, over stiles, and panting for breath climbing two hills, she came out on top of a flattish piece of ground. There she sat looking before her.

  The hill wasn’t very high but it showed a good view of the surrounding countryside. There weren’t many houses, she noted, and most of the land was tilled. In the far distance she picked out a black building standing solitary in a field, which told her it was a barn and that there would likely be a farm somewhere tucked away in one of the valleys beyond.

  The land, even on the slopes, looked well tilled; the whole scene below her was one of farm order. But she hadn’t seen a soul for more than half an hour: no families out for a Sunday walk, no pit lads strolling in twos and threes; no courting couples; this part of the world seemed as isolated as the hilltop on which the cottage stood. Then of a sudden two people appeared. She saw them walking from the direction of the barn. The farmer and his wife, she thought, taking a Sunday stroll round their domain. Farmers did that kind of thing. When Larry was master of the house, he used to put on fresh-polished leggings and his best tweeds and walk round the whole place on a Sunday afternoon. At one time the thought would have aroused deep pity in her for what he had lost, but not any more. The man she was living with now was more like a gaoler who had been given power, and through it had turned into a petty tyrant.

  To be treated as if she weren’t there, never to be spoken to, she just didn’t know how she was standing it. Sometimes she thought she would go down and tell Mr Stuart the whole business and let him deal with it. But then the thought would come that if he did deal with it, he might, in order to prevent himself from being killed, kill again. What would happen then? She wouldn’t be able to bear that; she would do something desperate to herself. Oh yes, she wouldn’t be able to bear that. Why was it, she asked, as she watched the two minute figures crossing the field, that one never came to know one’s own mind until it was too late. Youth was a time of false values. You laid stock on all the wrong things because something inside of you urges you to believe they were right. And later, when you had your eyes opened, the urge was just as strong telling you that you had been wrong about that particular feeling, but the new feeling you were experiencing was right. This business of youth was very complicated. She had tried to sort it out in her mind but had come to the conclusion you couldn’t really give yourself the answers, you just had to live to get the answers. Life itself gave you the answers by making you go through things, experience them. You had to suffer in all kinds of ways before you got the answers.

  When the child inside her began to kick she put her hand gently on the place. There should have been
joy in the action; the gladness that was once hers should be flooding her now; but all she felt was pity for the life inside her and what lay before it.

  It was some time later when she rose to her feet and went from the hilltop. The shadows were stretched out now; she hadn’t realised how long she had been sitting there.

  Some little distance further on she had reached a stile and was cautiously lifting her leg over the top bar when she looked along the path to her right and saw Larry approaching in the distance. She saw him stop; and he continued to stand still even after she had got down on the other side of the stile.

  When he did come up he spoke to her for the first time in months. ‘What you doin’ here?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘I was just takin’ a walk.’ Her reply was quiet and ordinary; and after staring into her face she saw his body relax, and he spoke his first kind words to her since she had told him she was going to have the child. ‘You shouldn’t have come this far,’ he said; ‘it won’t do you any good.’

  ‘I’m all right.’ It was silly but she felt grateful to him in this moment for speaking to her. If he spoke a word now and then life would be liveable; it was the silences that were killing.

  They had covered some distance before he asked, ‘Do you often get this far?’

  ‘No; I’ve never been this way before. It’s nice; I didn’t realise that there was so much flat land about. I thought every place must be like ours, all hills.’ She smiled weakly; then she asked, ‘Have…have you been to Chester-le-Street?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head quickly. ‘No, I didn’t get that far.’

  ‘It’s a nice day for walkin’.’ Even as she spoke she was despising herself for being so easy, making herself cheap as she thought, just because he was civil to her.

  And from this time he had continued to be civil to her, not talkative, but civil, giving her such words as ‘Those three old hens are eating their heads off; you’d better put them down for the pot.’ And once he had actually said to her, ‘When is it due?’ Moreover, he had become quite concerned about her walking. ‘You could slip on the scree banks,’ he said, ‘and you could lie there for hours, or, if a mist were to come up for days, and no-one would find you.’

  Dumb concern made her life tolerable.

  During the past months she had seen Nicholas Stuart only twice, once recently, when she was sitting in the carrier cart and he in the dog cart, when he had raised his hat to her and the other passengers had stared at her. The first time had been in Fellburn, while she was waiting for the carrier cart. It was three weeks after she had received his gift and she was still full of fear at the consequences of what might happen should he and Larry meet, and so her thanks had been hasty and stammered, yet at the same time she had managed to convey to him the deep gratitude that she felt for his kindness. And she had further said to him, haltingly, ‘After what you told me, Mr…Mr Stuart, about the profits an’ that from the farm, are…are you sure you did the right thing, because it’s a small fortune you spent?’

  And he had answered, ‘I spend as I go, because if I decided to leave, to get married say, which I just might, I could take very little with me. Do you follow me?’

  She followed him. In a way he was getting his own back on his wife. And who was to blame him? People like her would make a fiddler of any honest man. She said to him, ‘I was going to write to you when I got the chance, but…but…’ And he had finished for her, ‘I understand,’ and to her embarrassment he had stayed with her until she had mounted the cart; then he had raised his hat to her and walked away.

  She had only come across George once since his marriage; and the meeting had been little more than a greeting and a goodbye, for he seemed embarrassed. All she learned was that he had married Jenny, the new maid, and that she was a ‘canny lass’, and she had said that if he liked her she was bound to be a canny lass.

  Today was the last Thursday in June. She had been into Gateshead for her weekly visit. For months past, she had changed the days on which she visited her Aunt Mary so that there’d be less chance of running into Mr Stuart.

  On the second of the month she’d had her nineteenth birthday, and within herself she was surprised that she was only nineteen, because she felt old, thirty, at least; and her distended body helped to emphasise this impression. Over the past three days she had been feeling odd; she couldn’t explain to herself just why she felt this way. She wasn’t sick, she had no pain, she just felt—odd. There was no reason at all why she should feel like this because she had another month to go before her time came to her.

  Alf Morgan drew up his cart near the stile, and after she had descended from it, he admonished her gently as he handed her the four bulky bags from under the seat. ‘Go careful now,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be carryin’ all that lumber. And mind yer feet, it’s still slippery from the downpour we had.’

  ‘I’ll go careful. Thanks, Mr Morgan. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, lass. Hoy-up there!’ He whipped up the horses, and the cart rumbled on, leaving her standing on the grass verge with the four bags of groceries at her feet.

  Since her stomach had risen she hadn’t been into the village. There was a standing order for hay, flour, boxings and corn with Mr Waite, which he dumped by the stile on a Thursday; but the rest of the household necessities she carried in from Fellburn.

  Most weeks their needs filled only two bags, but during today’s shopping she had bought some soft lawn, enough to make a robe and a gown for the child. She had also bought some yards of cheap holland, which she intended to bleach and cut into napkins and binders. She had also treated herself to a box of Fuller’s Earth powder. She had Fuller’s Earth back in the cottage, but it was the rock kind which you made into a paste and which, when applied to the tender parts of your body, was very soothing. Two penn’orth would last you for weeks; but this small box had cost her fourpence ha’penny.

  She was pleased with her purchases, and the bags, although bulky, had seemed light in Fellburn, but now when she lifted them, two in each hand, it was as if their contents had suddenly been turned to coal, for she found them so heavy that in the short distance she had to walk to the stile, they dragged her body sideways.

  When she reached the stile she set them on the ground again; then leaning on the top bar she looked to where Mr Waite had stacked the weekly delivery, and she gave an impatient jerk of her head as she thought, He hasn’t come down for them yet. What’s he been up to all day?

  Lifting one bag in her hand, she now swung it over the top bar and dropped it on the other side; the second one followed. It was as she was stooping down to lift the third one that the pain gripped her and her mouth stretched wide in a sort of surprised scream; but she made no sound, for the scream, like the pain, seemed trapped inside her.

  As quickly as it had begun it passed, and she leant over the top bar gasping while the sweat dripped from her chin.

  Had she strained herself while lifting the bags over? No, no; she had been lifting things for weeks. Only this morning, before it was really light, she had forked the muck from the shippon.

  Slowly now, she bent and picked up the bag that had dropped back against her feet and, gently, put it on the far side of the stile.

  She had picked up the fourth bag and was lifting her foot onto the first step of the stile when the terrible pain gripped her again; and now she was bent over the step, clutching the bars of the stile and moaning aloud. The pain seemed to be tearing her bowels from their casing. What was the matter with her? Was she in labour? Had she started? But it wasn’t due. And according to her Aunt Mary you started with a griping pain, and it might be hours before you had another. You always got plenty of warning, so her Aunt Mary said.

  Oh God, she couldn’t bear this! Somebody…somebody come. She was going to have the child here on the edge of the road. But it couldn’t be; no child came as quick as this. She remembered the women in Creador Street, Mrs Oliver, Mrs Smith, Mrs Garrick and so many more; their bairns had take
n a long time to be born, some two days in fact. She couldn’t stand this for two days. Oh no! No! She would die.

  The pain eased a little, until she attempted to straighten her body, and then it started again, even worse, if this were possible.

  She was lying on the grass now, her knees up to her stomach. She was crying aloud, ‘Larry! Oh Larry! Please…please. Oh! Somebody, help me.’

  A blackness swamped her and the pain was lost in it, but when she opened her eyes to the light again there it was, somebody was cutting her open all the way down her right side. She pressed herself into the ground, and again she was crying aloud. She was crying so loudly that she didn’t hear the sound of the horse or of the wheels of the trap on the road; nor was she actually aware when the arms went around her and attempted to straighten her; but she heard a familiar voice saying, ‘She’s going to have the bairn, sir.’

  She recognised the voice. It was George’s voice. Had she married George? No, no; don’t be silly. Oh my God! Please…please, God, ease it. Ease it.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  She opened her eyes and looked up into the foreign face…Mr Stuart. She didn’t want to see Mr Stuart because Larry would be down in a minute, he would be down for the fodder. ‘Go away!’ she said. ‘Go away!’ And when she tried to push him away he held her all the tighter, saying, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  What were they doing? They were taking her to the trap. Oh no! She knew where the trap would go, back to the house. Oh my God! No! No! They mustn’t take her to the house. She actually fought them now. Then grasping George’s arm, she looked up at him pleadingly and groaned, ‘George! George! Get me…get me up the hill. Please…please get me up the hill.’