It was the agent saying that the previous owner had been about to turn the two places into a boarding house that had given her the idea: why shouldn’t she run a boarding house for respectable gentlemen? Well, she wouldn’t get many gentlemen around here, she knew that, not as one thought of gentlemen, but she decided firmly she would take only respectable men, not riff-raff. But she could see herself working for the next two months papering and painting these eight rooms; then there would be the business of going round the second-hand shops seeking furniture to fill them. The furniture would have to be second-hand because new stuff would make too big an inroad into what money she had left.
She reckoned that after furnishing the place she could live for a year without worrying even if she didn’t get a boarder; but then, she was bound to get someone in that time. The best thing to do was to put an advert in the Shields Gazette …
She had been working on the house by herself now for ten days. Up till yesterday she’d had to go out for her meals, but only this morning the pipes had been replaced in the scullery and the water turned on, and so she was sitting now on an upturned box and drinking the tea she had brewed and eating the sandwiches her Aunt Mary had put up for her.
She had almost finished her meal and was about to rise and start work again when there came a knock on the front door.
That, she thought, would be the painter because she had sent him a note asking if he would come and give her a hand with the inside, because at the rate she was going she couldn’t see herself finishing in three months, let alone two.
When she opened the door she was about to say, ‘Hello there; you’ve been quick,’ but her mouth remained open and it was the man on the step who spoke, ‘Hello, Emily,’ he said.
‘Hello…hello, Mr Stuart.’
‘Well, aren’t you going to ask me in?’
‘Oh, of course, of course.’ She stepped back, and he walked past her and into the front room. And then she was bustling forward, saying, ‘Come this way; it’s all in a bit of a muddle.’
In the kitchen, she stood near the box and looked down at the remains of her meal before removing it hastily, while she gabbled, ‘This is all I can offer you.’
‘I don’t need to sit, I’m used to standing.’
‘How…how did you find…? O…oh! Aunt Mary.’
‘Yes.’ He nodded back at her as he smiled, and repeated, ‘Aunt Mary.’ He looked about him now, ‘You’ve been very busy.’
‘Yes; but…but there’s a lot to do yet. Can…can I offer you a cup of tea?’
‘Yes. Yes, please.’
She hurried into the scullery, and rinsed her cup out under the tap, but before making a move back to the kitchen she held tightly on to the side of the sink and looked down into it and bit hard on her lip for a moment. She felt embarrassed, slightly afraid, all at sixes and sevens.
In the kitchen again, she poured him out a cup of tea; then asked, ‘Do you take sugar?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’ That was a silly thing to say.
‘No, not at all.’ He took the cup from her, sipped at the hot tea; then looking at her again, he said, ‘How are you, Emily?’
‘Oh, I’m all right, Mr Stuart, and I’ll soon be settled in. And…and I must say it’—her voice sank to a soft note—‘it’s thanks to you.’
‘No! No!’ he shook his head slowly. ‘I’m not going to take any credit for this; what you’ve done, you’ve done yourself.’
She looked into his face. It was no use contradicting him, but she too shook her head. He now pointed to one of the boxes, saying, ‘Won’t you sit down?’ and when she was seated he sat opposite her on the box she had used as a table.
Her hands were joined on her lap, but not palm on palm, her fingers, linked together, were gripping each other.
She wetted her lips before she asked, ‘Did you enjoy your holiday?’
‘Not very much. Paris is for the very young and the not so young, and the not so old. I didn’t seem to fit in.’ He smiled, a self-deprecating smile. ‘You are working very hard,’ he said now.
‘Yes’—she nodded—‘it was very dirty. I…I’m in a bit of a mess.’ She moved her joined hands up and down indicating as it were the fact that this was why she was wearing a coarse hessian apron.
‘You look pale, you’ve lost your roses.’ His words brought the roses back into her cheeks for a moment as she said, ‘I’ll soon get me colour back; the wind along the river front is noted for making you either red or blue.’ She gave a small embarrassed laugh.
They became silent while looking at each other; then as if with effort, she unlaced her fingers and, putting her hands behind her back, she undid the strings of the apron, rose slightly from the box and pulled it from beneath her, then sat rolling it up waiting for him to speak again, for at the moment, although she was choked full with feeling she was empty of words.
Her hands became still when he said quietly, ‘I was sorry I was away when it happened; George told me everything, at least as much as he knew. You must have been very hurt indeed to do what you did.’
Her chin was deep on her chest now, and her voice was scarcely above a whisper as she said, ‘I shouldn’t have done it, I know now I shouldn’t have done it.’
‘Can you bear to tell me what happened?’
It was a full minute before she spoke. ‘He went off without a word. He was gone before I got up. He took the cow, the horse, and the sheep. He left me a letter with…with not a line of regret in it, and five pounds. I…I think it was the meanness that sort of unbalanced me. He said I could have the furniture ex…except three pieces, a French table, a clock, and a bureau. They were the only pieces of any value. He implied that he couldn’t go to her empty-handed. That somehow…well, it did something to me.’ She now raised her head and looked at him as she ended, ‘If I could have cried then I might have washed the madness away but I was past crying, an’ all that day I went about dragging the stuff out and piling it up. I didn’t light it until it was near dark. An’ then they all came up the hill, the villagers, and the people from the pit rows, and…and then he came. I knew I was waiting for him comin’ because he would think I’d burned his cottage down.’
She paused now and dropped her gaze from him as she said, ‘It wouldn’t have hurt him to give me the cottage, would it, although I’d never have stayed there on me own? But it was, as I said, the meanness that got me. Yet if I’d left it at that, I mean just burned the stuff, I would have had nothin’ to regret, but…but when I saw him face to face I spat out my bitterness in front of them all. That’s what I’m sorry for now, because they’ll take it out of him, not because they thought anything about me being thrown off, but because I’ve given them another stick to bray his back with. What I said aroused all the old bad feeling against him, and I think it had almost died away over the years…’
He held up his hand now to check her going on, and his tone was harsh as he said, ‘No, it hadn’t, Emily. No, it hadn’t. I know that much, and what I didn’t find out for myself George filled in for me. He tells me there’s been talk in the village for the past year or more to the effect that someone should put you wise to the situation. I think they were only deterred by the thought that you couldn’t be blind to it, that you must have known what was going on. Anyway, if nothing else would have aroused the old feeling, the fact that Farmer Rowan had scarcely settled in his box before he went and took over, that alone would have done it. His hurry was indecent. So you have no need to let him bother your conscience for one moment; in fact, as George says, you have the sympathy of the whole village.
She got abruptly to her feet now. ‘I don’t want the sympathy of the whole village. Except for Mr Waite, the baker, they would have had me in the stocks at one time, if that were possible. And I’ll never forget it was them who killed Con…I suppose you know about Con?’
‘Yes, I heard about him.’
She walked to the kitchen window and looked out before turning to him aga
in and saying, ‘There’s one thing in his favour. He liked Con, he was good to him. He looked after him, and he nearly went mad when he died…and about the way he died.’
‘There’s some good in every man, Emily; there’s nobody really black or really white, but some have more black in them than others. And as I see it, Birch’s blackness was merely weakness, and his strength greed, which in his own mind he would have termed ambition.’ He paused and shook his head before he said thoughtfully, ‘He must have coveted that farm a great deal to get Rona to do what she did because even from the short time she and I were together I realised I’d taken on a mettlesome horse; he couldn’t have got her into the church, and to commit bigamy into the bargain, without some hard work on his part. But with regard to the bigamy, she would doubtless have felt safe here for she would know I’d never want to see her again.’
She was sitting on the box again and she looked straight at him as she said, ‘He also sent my sister to this home in St Leonards to be cured of consumption.’
‘Yes, I heard that also, but I wouldn’t give him too much credit for his motives there. He wanted the child out of the house, I think; she was standing in his path towards you…Emily—’ With a quick movement that was characteristic of him he had caught hold of her hands and he shook them gently as he said, ‘Don’t try to find excuses for him in your mind, excuses that will make you feel guilty about telling him the truth, for as I see it, it was time that somebody told him exactly what he really is, a nowt, as they say around these quarters.’ His hands stopped their movement; he looked deep into her eyes and asked now, ‘Do you still love him?’
Her fingers jerked within his grasp but he did not release them, only held them more firmly and waited. She did not bow her head, but she looked first to one side of the room and then to the other before she answered, and enigmatically now, ‘What does anybody mean by love?’
‘You’re not answering my question, Emily.’ He gave her hands a little shake. ‘Do you still love him?’
Now she was looking back at him and she answered plainly, ‘If you mean, have I got the feeling for him that I had two years ago, no; but looking back, I don’t know now if that feeling was love or not. I was sorry for him, I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to give, I wanted to make him happy. It’s a failing of mine, a sort of conceit I suppose you would call it that I want to make people happy, at least I used to. I’ve learned more sense now; you can’t make people happy unless they want to be happy.’
‘You’re very wise you know, Emily. And there’s some failings I think one should hold on to, even indulge in; so don’t give up wanting to make people happy. There’s one emotion I noticed that you didn’t say you had for him, and that was liking.’
When she raised her eyebrows slightly he nodded and went on, ‘To my mind it’s the most important emotion of all because without it love never lasts. You know you can love somebody and hate them at the same time, but you can’t like somebody and hate them at the same time. I’d rather be liked, well liked, than loved…Do you like me, Emily?’
She made a movement with her lips as if they were gummed together and were having difficulty in separating them, but when she did she said, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I like you. It would be impossible not to like somebody who had been so kind to me. If you hadn’t given me the watch…’
‘Now, now!’ He rose abruptly to his feet. ‘We’ll speak about the watch for the last time. Let me put it like this. If Birch had taken a different attitude towards me I would have shared everything in that place with him, because this much I’ve got in his favour, he put a lot of work into the farm, so I look upon the money spent in retrieving your watch as some form of recompense which, had it been given to him, he should in kindness have passed it on to you for all you did for him. But as things have turned out, I know now he would never have given you the watch, or its equivalent in money. So let’s say the farm paid its debt in a small way, not me…Now’—he bent down to her—‘I want a straight answer to my question, do you like me for myself?’
She gulped in her throat and blinked before saying, ‘That’s a difficult question.’
‘Why difficult? You must know inside yourself whether you like me or not.’
‘Well—’ As she went to turn her head to the side her neck jerked upwards, for he had taken her by the shoulders and, sitting down on the box, his knees touching hers, he commanded, ‘Look at me, Emily!’ And when she looked at him he went on, ‘I’m not asking, do you love me, because that would indeed be a very difficult question to answer, what I’m asking you is, do you like me…like me sufficiently to marry me?’
She swung herself away from his hands and to her feet, and she backed a step towards the fireplace now while crying. ‘Don’t be silly! Don’t be silly, Mr Stuart! You know what you told me yourself, if you marry you lose the farm.’
He hadn’t risen from the box and he looked up at her as he answered, ‘I know what I said, and yes, I’d have to leave the farm; but let me tell you now, Emily, that would be no loss to me. What do you think my life has been like during the past eighteen months or more? Do you know the only company I’ve had is George and Jenny and Mrs Riley? And they all have their own lives to lead. Where does that leave me? Night after night sitting in that frenchified drawing room, or walking from room to room, or going round the farm pretending to inspect my domain, and not caring a tinker’s cuss for any part of it, because let’s face it, Emily, I’m no farmer. I don’t run that place, it’s George who’s the farmer, George who runs it. Like you I wouldn’t trust any one of those villagers as far as I could toss them, but there was a time when I’d have been glad of a kind word from them. As for the farmers around, and those higher up, well, the men look through me and the women lower their glances, only the children stare because I’m the parents’ picture of a bad man, a murderer, a man who served a long term in prison. Emily’—he now rose to his feet and came towards her—‘I could walk out of there tomorrow and sing if I had any place to walk to, anyone to walk to.’
‘No!’ Again she swung away from him; and now she put the distance of the whole room between them and her voice sounded harsh in her ears as she cried, ‘No! No! I’m not going to have that on me conscience an’ all. And anyway, it couldn’t be right living with two men who have owned the place.’
‘I’m not asking you to live with me, Emily, I’m asking you to marry me.’
‘And I say no! No, Mr Stuart! What you must do’—she nodded at him now—‘is take someone there to live with you; there are plenty of nice girls, women, lonely women…’
‘Shut up, please!’
Her eyes widened. She stared at him. He hadn’t shouted at her, but his words carried more weight than if he had. His face had lost its smooth pallor, he looked angry and he sounded angry as he said, ‘The only woman I would take to live with me would be you; and I wouldn’t ask that of you. You’re the only one I want to live with. I’ve known it from our first meeting. You are the kind of woman I dreamt of at night when I lay awake and sweated and tried to get the smell of human bodies out of my nostrils, tried to forget the sound of steel doors clanging, and worse still, the jingle of manacles. When I saw you first sitting on the back of the carrier cart, I didn’t know who you were but your face was as familiar to me as my own, more so because for years I hadn’t seen myself very often…’
In the silence that fell between them they stared at each other, and she only just stopped herself in time from thrusting her hands out to him and saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
She walked back to the fireplace. Her head was down, her hands joined at her waist, and he came and stood beside her and, looking at her bent head, he said, ‘I’ve rushed at it like a bull at a gap. I didn’t mean to. I should have given you time.’
She now turned to him and shook her head, and her voice had a deep note of sadness in it as she said, ‘I…I could never marry you because I would never know a moment’s peace thinkin’ about how I deprived you of
what was rightly yours.’
‘Rightly mine!’ He laughed softly and repeated, ‘Rightly mine! Do you know something, Emily? If she hadn’t wanted to get her own back on Birch she would just as soon have given that place to the devil. And what is more, should she have been alive, and on her own, and I had turned up after my release, she would have shown me the door, likely with a gun at my head from what I can gather now. No, I have no more right to that place than you have. I say than you have, for you earned some part of it by nursing her as you did, whereas I came into it as a means of spiting the man she had come to hate…One last question, Emily.’ He paused and smiled gently at her now, ‘Had we met each other under different circumstances would you have liked me enough to marry me then?’
She had no need to consider her answer. In deep confusion she looked away from him and put her hand up and pressed it on the thick coils of her hair circling the back of her head, and standing like that she muttered, ‘I…I don’t know.’
It was almost a full minute before he said, ‘I don’t believe you, Emily. But enough, enough for the time being…Can we be friends?’
Now she turned and smiled quietly at him as she answered, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘And my name is Nick, remember?’
Her smile widened as she said, ‘I’ll…I’ll try an’ remember.’
‘Now, now!’ As if he had settled an important issue he swung round from her and, spreading his arms wide, said, ‘And what do you intend to do here?’
‘Didn’t Aunt Mary give you all the news?’
‘Yes, she did.’ He laughed at her over his shoulder. ‘But I didn’t believe her. You couldn’t possibly run a boarding house.’
‘Why not?’ There was an indignant note in her voice now.
‘Because you’d be eaten alive.’
‘Eaten alive?’ She screwed up her eyes at him.
The Tide of Life Page 45
