The Unbaited Trap

by Catherine Cookson

  His fingers remained slack and still within her hold, and then his hand was free and he was hitching his case up again under his arm, and his voice had a businesslike, brisk sound now. It was a tone she hadn’t heard him use before. ‘When you see him, tell him I’ll take a run over one of these days. Now I must go.’ He hunched his shoulders up under his coat. ‘Goodbye, and…and I hope you find the place all right.’

  She moved her head in the characteristic way he had come to know so well and enjoyed watching, and not as a father might a quaint mannerism of a favourite daughter, but that is how he must think of her from now on, as a daughter. Yes, a daughter. But how did one take to oneself a daughter when he didn’t want a daughter? Well, the years ahead would tell; he’d have plenty of time for practice…All his life he had been practising law, restraint, to live without bodily expression, without love, to smile—that had almost been the hardest, and would certainly be so in the future. To smile for Ann, who, of a sudden, needed his smiles to prove to her that he was happy, that she was making him happy, for now he was not only at long last her husband, but also her son, her lost child. A stronger man would have run from this new burden of affection, but he wasn’t a strong man, he was a vacillating man, a weak, kindly man. He wondered at times how he got by in court. Perhaps because in court he was dealing with other people’s emotions, emotions which he knew couldn’t impinge on himself. In court he stepped out of the weak man and acted a part. He was fortunate, he supposed, in having this form of outlet; other weak men had to be content with dreams…Dreams! Now he, too, would have to resort to dreams; for the rest of his life he could only be with Cissie in dreams. He had been a fool, an utter fool. He could have made her happy; even as he was he could have given her more than Laurie could ever dream of. For the young only took, but he would have given, and she had wanted what he had to give. She wanted more than mere sex; but even there he would have satisfied her, there were ways and means. During all the long twenty-six years with Ann he had never thought along such lines. There had been no incentive. You don’t look for ways of loving an ice-coated wall. But with Cissie…Oh, Cissie.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes.’

  He had been staring at her so long, sort of holding his breath, she thought he was going to have another attack. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Of course. Now I really must go. Goodbye.’

  His abruptness now disturbed her. She tried to smile at him but couldn’t. ‘Goodbye, Mr Emmerson,’ she said. ‘And thank you. Thank you so much.’

  When he passed her and walked away she should have walked in the opposite direction, but she turned and watched him until he stepped off the pavement and went towards the market stalls and disappeared into the gloom. She had the unnerving desire now to run after him and catch him by the arm and say, ‘Come on home, John.’ She wanted to lift that look from his face. That lonely look. That lost, empty, hungry look that had first caught at her sympathy. And it had all been there again as he stood staring at her…But in the hospital he had said…what had he said? Only, ‘I’ve nothing to offer you, Cissie, and you’re young.’ But it wouldn’t have mattered about what he hadn’t got to offer, she’d had all the sex she wanted in her lifetime. This being the case, then why had she been breaking her neck to find Laurie?

  ‘You can’t have them both.’ She came to herself with a shuddering shock, not only from the context of her words but the fact that she had spoken them aloud in the street.

  Three: The Farm

  She set off early from Fellburn the next morning for Newcastle, from where she took the train to Alnwick, and it was just on twelve o’clock when she reached there. On enquiring, she found there was no bus passing Slagbottle Farm but that she could be set down near a road which led to it.

  Out of Alnwick the change in the aspect of the country both surprised and awed her, and this wasn’t helped by a low rain sky. There were few houses to be seen, only great stretches of fell land rising to bare-looking hills. Eventually they came to a little hamlet, followed by a long stretch of deep, black-looking woodland, then open country again, and it was while passing through this that the conductor said, ‘There’s your stop, missus. Go along the road there.’ He pointed to a track. ‘Fork to the left over the hill an’ you can’t miss it.’

  ‘What time do you come back?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, around half past three, a minute here or there.’

  ‘Is that the last one?’

  ‘No, there’s another around six.’

  She thanked him, and he rang the bell, leaving her standing, seemingly alone in a vast wilderness, for wherever she turned she could see nothing but rolling fells.

  She set off on the rough cart track, which went uphill for some way. Then over the brow she came to the fork in the road that the conductor had spoken of, and now she found herself going gently down hill and looking across a wide valley. She could see in the far distance the wood she had passed in the bus and, nearer, were small copses. The land here looked less gaunt; altogether it had a gentler aspect.

  Then she saw the farmhouse. It lay in a hollow on the hillside. It was as if a giant hand had scooped out the earth to make a place flat enough to build a house. After staring at it a moment or so she went on down the hill and came to a five-barred gate. After passing through and closing it she walked along a footpath that skirted a deep rutted field. And again she was going uphill. At the edge of the field some of the earth had been dug and made ready for planting. She walked now between stacks of seed boxes, then past a greenhouse that was in the process of being erected, and all the time she looked around her. But she saw no-one, not even an animal.

  Then she was walking up a flagged path, bordered on each side by a tangle of weed and bramble that had once been a garden. And so she came to the back door of the grey stone house. She noticed that the weather boarding on the bottom of the door was rotten and that the door had not been painted for years. She shivered, not only from the cold, which had become intensified in the last few minutes with a thin drizzle of rain, but with a foreboding of fear as to what she would find when the door opened.

  She put her hand out and tapped on the door, two small knocks. She imagined she heard a movement inside, but when no-one appeared she tapped again, louder this time, and the next minute the door was opened and there he stood, at the top of the three steps, his face at first expressionless until the colour suddenly flooded over it.

  Her whole stomach jerked as it hadn’t done since Pat first kicked at her from within the womb. ‘Hello,’ she said softly.

  Still with the door in his hand he didn’t move. She was shocked at the change in him. He was older, much older, and although his face was flushed to a dark red, his skin indicated pallor. There was an oddness too about his looks. Both his eyelids moved but only one side of his face seemed alive.

  Her voice trembling, she said gently, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in? I’ve—I’ve come a long way.’

  As he half glanced over his shoulder she was reminded of the last time she had seen him, when she had half glanced over her shoulder. He had thought then she had someone with her. Now the same fear attacked her making her feel faint and sick, and it sent flying the doubts she had had about the reason for her visit here. When with a jerk he stepped aside and pulled the door wide she walked past him and entered the house.

  She had taken no more than three steps into the room before she was brought to a halt with shock. The place was stark and bare, reminiscent of most of the land outside. The floor was made of great uneven slabs of stone. There was a big open fireplace with the remnants of a dead wood fire on the hearth, and in the middle of the room an old wooden table and one chair. On the table was a board on which stood a loaf, some butter, still in the paper, and a piece of cheese, it, too, lying in its wrapper, and towards the edge of the table lay a knife and plate, and beside it a half-empty bottle of beer and a glass.

  She turned her eyes from the table and looked at him. He w
as standing with his back to the door, his hands hanging by his sides. She didn’t know what to say. She had thought she would have known, once she saw him, but she didn’t. She hadn’t expected it to be like this. She hadn’t expected him to look like this. He had always looked cocksure, but now he looked ill, yet aggressive. She made herself smile as she said, ‘It’s…it’s grand country; I’ve never seen such scenery.’

  He seemed surprised at her choice of words and she watched him clutch at them as if with relief as he spoke to her for the first time. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s wonderful.’ He cleared his throat then moved stiffly towards the table. ‘It makes you wonder why you ever stayed in town.’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He pointed to the chair; then his hand, continuing the movement, covered the table, and he gave a hick of a laugh. ‘I’m living rough; I’m not settled in yet, there’s so much to do.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘There’s always a lot to do on a new place.’

  He scraped his foot, which was encased in a thick, heavy boot, over the stone floor, and then he looked down at it, and she looked at it too. He had changed, all of him. He was wearing dirty corduroy trousers and an old leather jacket on top of a pullover, and his hands were rough, his nails broken. She remembered having admired his hands and the way he dressed. As yet she couldn’t understand the reason for the complete change in him. Would losing the sight of his eye do this?

  His voice startled her, bringing her eyes up to him. ‘Why have you come?’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  ‘What for? We have nothing to say to each other; you pointed that out very forcibly the last time we met and you were quite right. I know now you were quite right. Oh yes.’

  She leant over the corner of the table towards him. ‘Please! Listen. I…I hadn’t had time to think.’

  The seconds piled up before he answered, ‘You…you wouldn’t have needed time if it had been my father, would you?’ Now she saw it all, the reason for this self-imposed isolation, the way he was living, the whole disintegrating of him, it was almost tangible. This thing that was eating him was not the loss of his eye, this thing that might take her a lifetime to conquer, this thing that would well up at times and make them blaze at each other, this thing that would be secreted in some corner of his mind for as long as she was alive, was jealousy of his father.

  Still leaning towards him she almost convinced herself she was speaking the truth, so emphatic did she sound when she said, ‘It had nothing to do with your father. He didn’t come into the picture at all, not in that way. I was mad at you, that’s why I said what I did…and, and I didn’t believe you would want to marry me.’

  Again some time elapsed before he spoke. ‘If my father was free and you had to choose between us you would have him now, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No! No! I wouldn’t.’ She shook her head wildly. ‘He’s nearly twenty years older than me, another generation. He…he could be my father.’ Somewhere inside her she was apologising to John, begging him to understand.

  ‘You’ve changed your tune.’

  ‘Look, be reasonable. Just think for a minute…I didn’t know you when I met your father. If I’d met you first, well …’

  ‘He still wants you.’

  ‘He doesn’t. He doesn’t.’ She was shouting now as if he were at the other end of the house. ‘He sent me…Aw, please.’ She rose to her feet and pressed her hands over her face and begged, ‘Don’t let’s start again, don’t let’s row…Please.’

  ‘He sent you?’ His lips scarcely moved as he spoke. ‘You’ve been seeing him?’

  ‘No. No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘He phoned me yesterday and told me where you were.’ She knew better at this stage than to say she had met John. ‘He had just learned the day before that I had been looking for you, and I have, for months and months, from shortly, shortly after that night. I, I went to the hospital, then to your old home, then to the new place. The woman there wouldn’t tell me where you were. I got in touch with your uncle at Oxford. I…I went back weekend after weekend, and sometimes of an evening, to Bromford, hoping that I might see you, at least see your car, and when I did see it and your father and mother were in it I stopped going. I phoned Mr Ransome and begged him to tell me where you were. He said he didn’t know, and then he must have told your father about me enquiring and’—she spread out her hands to him—‘and here I am.’

  As she finished speaking she felt a faintness coming over her and she turned from him, groping at the back of the chair, and sat down again.

  He looked intently at her but did not go towards her.

  ‘Could I have a drink of water?’

  Without a word he went out of the room, his boots clattering on the stone floor, and in a minute he came back carrying a cup. He did not put it into her hand, but on the table to the side of her, and she took it up and drank it nearly all. Then, wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, she said, ‘It was a long walk.’

  ‘Would…would you like a glass of beer, and some bread and cheese?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I would, please.I…I’ve had nothing since breakfast; perhaps that’s what’s made me feel faint.’

  ‘Help yourself, my hands are not too clean.’ Brusquely, he pushed the board, with the loaf and butter and cheese, towards her; then he went out of the room again and returned with a bottle of beer in one hand and a box in the other. He put the bottle to her hand, saying, his manner unchanged, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to use the cup, I’m short of glasses at the moment.’ Then taking the box to the other end of the table he sat down and poured the remainder of his beer into the glass.

  The food was sticking in her throat; she was cold both inside and out, and the beer wasn’t helping. There was an unreality, she felt, in their sitting together like this, eating together in this awful room, in this awful silence. ‘What kind of farming are you going to do?’ Her voice was small.

  ‘It isn’t farming, nothing so glorified as that; there’s only four acres. I’m going in for flowers, building my own greenhouses.’ He moved his head towards the door but he kept his eyes on his plate. ‘I’d like to try orchids; there’s money in them and this spot is amazingly sheltered.’

  ‘The house looks old,’ she said, her voice still undertoned.

  ‘It is. It’s over three hundred years. They hauled the stones over the hills from the quarry, and there’re timbers in some of the rooms that were once part of the old wooden ships on the Tyne.’ His tone was stiff, his flow quick, but he was talking.

  ‘Would you show me round?’ she asked gently, and when his eyes flicked towards her before returning to look at his plate, she said. ‘My bus doesn’t go until half past three.’

  ‘Half past three?’ He nodded, then added, ‘They don’t run very often.’ Then finishing his beer, he said, ‘It won’t take all that long, there’s not much to see, only the skeleton of the house. I’m concentrating on the outside first, getting the greenhouses up. They’re the most important.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they would be.’

  He rose from the box and walked across the room and she left her unfinished bread and cheese and quietly followed him. At the door he flung his arm back and said, ‘This is really part of the hall. The stairs used to go from here but they shut them off to make another room, but later on I’m going to have the partition down and it’ll make a fine hall.’

  They were standing now in the other part of the room, from which led a shallow black oak stairway. There was another door in the far wall, which she took to be the front door, and to the side of it a window which stretched from floor to ceiling, giving a view across the valley.

  ‘It could be very nice.’ She looked around her, and he nodded and said, ‘Yes, when I get down to it; it’ll look all right.

  ‘This is the kitchen,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit old-fashioned but there’s plenty of time to alter things. At present I cook with calor gas but I’ll get that old range going one day; there’s n
ot a thing wrong with it.’

  She looked at the great black open range taking up almost one wall of the big room, which was also flagged with stone. There was no furniture at all in this room, no table or chairs, nor even a working surface. The cold bareness, that in itself indicated loneliness, made her ache with compassion. His father had been lonely, but that wasn’t his fault. But this kind of loneliness, this self-inflicted loneliness, spoke of a sickness of the mind.

  ‘There’s another room on this floor,’ he said, as she followed him out of the kitchen. ‘But I won’t use it much, as it’ll take too much heating.’ He opened a door and she saw a long, low, beautifully shaped room, it had a wooden floor, the boards, worn with use, were over a foot wide.

  ‘It’ll be a pity if you don’t,’ she said, ‘it’s a lovely room this.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He turned abruptly away and walked back into the hall and up the stairs. On the landing he said, ‘There’s five rooms here. Mind your head.’

  She had to bend down to go into the first room. It had a dormer window and the walls were plastered. The next three rooms were larger but much the same. The fifth door he didn’t open, and as he passed it he said, ‘That’s just the same,’ and she guessed it was where he slept.

  As she followed him down the stairs, her eyes on the back of his head, she thought what a dreadful place to be alone in. There flashed into her mind a picture of her flat, and she almost groaned aloud at the comparison.

  Downstairs again he walked through the room by which she had first entered the house, saying, ‘There’s a big cellar underneath. It’s full of rubbish, but it’ll do for a storage place when I get going.’

  He was still walking, in silence now, and she was still following, and when they reached the other side of the house she saw, to her surprise, a large courtyard with two stables going off and a thatched barn that was used as a garage. The thatch was rotten and there were gaps in the roof, and inside the garage stood a van.