by Marie Joseph
‘What do you think we look like, Father?’ Calmly Libby passed the dish of chopped carrots to her sister, ignoring Carrie’s eye signals. ‘At least it won’t take hours to dry now. When we went up to Mother’s room she said she thought it looked rather nice.’
‘Then your mother’s a fool!’ Oliver tucked a white linen napkin into the front of his waistcoat, threading it between two buttonholes, then picked up his knife and fork. ‘Right then, Libby Peel. Since you ask me I will tell you what you look like.’ He pointed his knife at each twin in turn. ‘You look like a couple of street women! A pair of whores. All you need is a feather boa apiece, stuff on your faces and your skirts even shorter than what they are. And I’ll tell you something else. You wouldn’t get past the Town Hall without being picked up by two men who have nowt else to do at the moment but roam the town looking for trouble!’
‘Father!’ Carrie blushed bright red, but Libby waited until Martha had walked out of the dining room. Turning her head to make sure the door was safely closed, she leaned forward and said softly, ‘Martha Cardwell has her hair cut short, Father. Even shorter than ours. Do you think of her like that? Does Martha look like a whore, Father? Is that why the word came to your mind?’
Carrie gave a little gasp, but Libby kept her gaze steady on her father’s face. For a moment their eyes locked, then Oliver was the first to turn away. His high colour deepened to purple and his left eyelid began to twitch. For a startled moment Libby was sure he was going to hurl the contents of the gravy boat straight at her.
‘Get on with your dinner.’ He was blustering and she knew it. ‘There’s been enough bother down at the mill today without you riling me. You’d be smirking the other side of your face if you knew how many contracts I stand to lose. Aye, and it would be jam butties for your dinner, not roast lamb. You’d soon lose them Bolshie ideas if you had to get your snouts in the trough along with the rest of them. I’ve had enough, more than enough, for one day.’
As the meal continued in uneasy silence, Libby knew she had guessed right. It was to Martha’s bed her father crept at night when the house was shrouded in darkness and his family slept.
Triumphantly she speared a sliver of lamb on the prongs of her fork, telling herself that never again would she walk in terror of this man, this shouting bully of a man who just happened to be her father. She watched him carefully as he gulped his food without chewing, controlling his emotions with difficulty. Refusing the Lancashire cheese which followed the pudding, he threw down his napkin with an obvious gesture of relief and walked quickly to the door, slamming it behind him. The slam was echoed by the banging of the door of the billiard room.
Libby smiled at her sister. ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ She pulled a dark wing of hair forward, laughed as it barely reached her nose, then squinted down at it. ‘The only way to defend oneself against a bully is to attack. I’m always telling you that, Carrie.’
‘All the same, I wish you hadn’t said that.’ Carrie rolled up her napkin and slid it tidily into the silver ring marked with her initial. ‘Father will never forgive you. He’s not stupid, you know.’
‘Aren’t you going to have any cheese?’ Libby helped herself to a crumbly wedge, then stretched out a hand to the bowl of fruit. ‘It shut him up, anyway.’
‘It wasn’t just an innocent remark, though, was it?’
Libby froze with a grape halfway to her mouth. Oliver’s reaction to her words had in no way spoilt her enjoyment of her meal, but what Carrie had just said, and the way she had said it, made her push her plate aside, her appetite gone.
‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’
‘Oh, yes, you do.’ Carrie’s eyes were downcast. ‘I saw the way you watched Martha when she was serving Father, and I guessed what was going on in your mind.’ She twisted the rolled napkin round and round in her fingers. ‘I’ve known for a long time what was going on. My bedroom is directly underneath Martha’s and Father’s voice and laugh aren’t exactly on the quiet side.’ She breathed on the silver ring and rubbed at it with her fist. ‘So you see,’ she added softly.
‘But you never said!’ Libby stared at her twin in disbelief. ‘You kept it all to yourself!’ She twisted round in her high-backed chair. ‘Why? I thought we always told each other things. Especially anything as important as that.’
Carrie shook her head. ‘Not always we don’t, Libby. And besides . . .’ She glanced over her shoulder towards the door. ‘I don’t think it is all that important, if you must know.’
‘Not important?’ Libby forgot to keep her voice down. ‘Not important’ Our father making love to the housemaid? A girl young enough to be his daughter, his granddaughter, even! You must be mad!’
Carrie put a finger to her lips as the door opened to reveal Martha Cardwell, cap awry, tripping over what could only have been the pattern in the carpet as she came forward with a tray to clear away.
‘Mind if I side the pots now?’ She hovered uncertainly. ‘I’ve been a bit run off me feet all day with Mrs Peel having all her meals in her room along with Sarah, and Mrs Edwards getting off early to the second house pictures. She’s gone to see Zazu Pitts at the Olympia.’
‘That’s all right, Martha.’
It was Carrie who smiled at the tall clumsy girl, Carrie who led the way down the hall and into the big front lounge, there to carry on the conversation as if they had never been interrupted.
‘Listen, Libby. Our mother has been an invalid since we were born. That is over twenty years ago, and in all that time – for as long as we can remember, anyway – Father has seen to it she’s been taken care of. He even let Sarah come back after she’d had her baby because he knew how fond of her Mother was.’ She patted the cushions on the chesterfield for a bemused Libby to sit down beside her. Think, Libby. Father used to be a keen Rotarian and a Mason, but he seemed to lose interest in them after Willie got killed in France. Do you ever stop to think what it’s like for him down at the mill? Father isn’t a man who can easily trust, so he takes on far too much, and it’s sometimes as hard being a boss as a worker, you know.’
‘Hah! Talk about middle-class righteousness!’ Libby’s voice rang with scorn. ‘I suppose you’ll be saying next that Father’s workers have a struggle to keep fed because of their own inadequacy? Bosses have been saying that for hundreds of years. Anyway, what has all that got to do with . . .?’
‘Everything. You know as well as I do that the boom in cotton didn’t last long after the war. Father was a broken man because of Willie, and Mother being the way she was, and it was only natural that his weavers turned against him when he had to reduce their wages by forty per cent four years ago. Of course they were bitter, so they set against him.’ She patted Libby’s hand. ‘Father is an anti-union boss, so they are only loyal to him for fear of losing their jobs. It’s clear to me. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, so why can’t you make allowances for him?’
‘Allowances for that?’ Libby jerked her head upwards. ‘And why tell me what I know already? Father tells us often enough, but a lot of it is his own fault. Father treats his workers as if they were the scum of the earth. No wonder they hate and loathe him. He treats you and me and Mother as if we were the scum of the earth, too, just because we’re women. His sun rose and set with Willie, and just because he hasn’t a son to follow him into the mill he takes it out on us.’
Carrie agreed. ‘But have you ever stopped to think how lonely he is? He needs comfort. All men do, even the toughest of them. Can he turn to Mother? To you and me?’ Her cheeks grew pink. ‘He is a man, Libby. A strong normal man, and he has to get it – affection, love, softness – from somewhere.’
‘You mean lust.’ Libby hardly knew how to contain herself. Carrie was so serious, so intense, pointing out the reason for things as if she were ten years older and not ten minutes younger. She got up to stand in front of the fireplace. ‘You’ll be saying next that they are in love! Our father and that – that unfinished girl who s
tarted as one of his weavers. He brought her here, Carrie, I distinctly remember him bringing her here himself and telling Mother she was half-starved and having to sleep four to a bed at home. The great philanthropist! Him! Our father treats his weavers as if they were mere extensions of their machines. They’re not even human beings to him! And now he’s using Martha, that’s all. Using her, Carrie. So how can you defend him? What’s got into you, for heaven’s sake? And, oh God, don’t cry, please don’t do that.’
Libby went to sit beside her sister, her own throat tightening. It had always been the same. If one twin cried then the other followed suit. She placed an arm round Carrie’s shaking shoulders and drew her close.
‘You’re not upset just because of Father, are you?’ She whispered as she had whispered through the closed dividing door between their rooms the night before. ‘What is it, Carrie? Is there someone – some man you are trying to tell me about? Someone at the tennis club? The church?’ Her darting mind considered one acquaintance after another, dismissing every one as impossible. So many of the boys they had known had gone straight to France from university, never to return. And those who had come back seemed remote and strangely indifferent, as if what they had seen had marked them for ever. Libby frowned. There was more here than met even her penetrating eye. She had seen nothing, suspected nothing – she had dismissed Carrie’s strange behaviour of the night before as trivial.
‘It’s not a married man, is it, Carrie? You wouldn’t be such a fool as that?’
Carrie raised a face stiff with pain. ‘Being a fool doesn’t come into it. Not when you love someone as I love him.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks as she groped in her pocket for a handkerchief. ‘His wife has no feeling for him. None at all. She is unbalanced, Libby. Insane.’ Her voice broke on a sob. ‘Sometimes he has bruises on his face, and once his eye was closed right up. She attacks him, Libby, and he is so gentle, so sensitive, he just has to take it. He didn’t go to the war because he . . . because his beliefs wouldn’t let him fight back. He just lets her scream at him. Oh, Libby, it’s so awful.’
‘You mean he was a conchie?’
Carrie bit her lip and nodded. ‘Yes, he was, but what he had to face took as much courage as if he had rushed out of the trenches with a fixed bayonet. For what he believed to be right he went to prison, Libby. And now that dreadful so-called wife of his keeps reminding him of it, taunting him. The war has been over for eight years but she will never let him forget that he stayed at home. They were newly married and she wanted him to go. Imagine.’
‘And he stands there and lets her hit him? Oh, my sainted aunt!’ Libby opened her eyes wide in disbelief. ‘What kind of a man is he, for heaven’s sake?’
‘He’s good. That’s what he is.’ Carrie jumped up from where she sat, twisting the handkerchief round and round in her fingers as she had twisted the napkin ring not ten minutes before. Now there was a desperate pleading in her voice. ‘Try to understand, Libby. At least try to understand. He has no one, not one person in the world to turn to.’
‘Only you.’
‘Only me. She has even tried to turn his son against him, a boy who was born at the end of the war, deaf and dumb, as if fate hadn’t been cruel enough.’
‘I thought you said he was in prison?’
Carrie flapped a hand from side to side impatiently. ‘He was sent home because of his health. His lungs. He had a mild form of consumption, and he’s so thin and so pale. Oh, Libby, you don’t know. You just don’t know. His wife sleeps in a separate room, and he told me once that if only he could wake up one morning and see the face of a woman who loved him on the pillow beside him, he would think he had died and was in heaven.’
‘Your face?’ Libby found she was holding her breath. ‘You’re not . . .’ She hardly knew how to go on. ‘You wouldn’t be such a fool as to . . . oh, Carrie, you wouldn’t?’
‘I don’t know!’ Carrie’s voice rose to a wail. ‘He needs me so much!’
‘And like Father, he’s only human?’
Libby was so angry she wanted to grab her sister by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. ‘Oh, Carrie, you silly, stupid – I don’t know what!’ For once words failed her. ‘Do you want to end up like Sarah, with an illegitimate child? Do you? Because that’s what will happen if you let him, whoever he is, have his way with you. If he can’t control his own wife, then he’ll hardly be able to control himself any other way.’ She fought the blush rising to her cheeks. ‘Oh, Carrie. I’m engaged to be married. Harry . . . we’re getting married at Christmas, and he . . . we want it to be the first time for, well for me.’ Harry was in the army and, well, it’s different for a man. Biologically different.’ She gave up, and threw up both hands in a wild gesture of exasperation. ‘Besides, where would you go? Not to his house, I’m sure. In the back of a car?’
‘Stop it!’ Carrie backed away as if physically trying to ward off anything else her sister might say. ‘You’re so — so clinical. You don’t know what loving means, to talk like that. You might be going to get married, but you don’t know! Oh, I wish I’d never told you.’
As the door bell rang she was running upstairs to shut herself in her bedroom, and when Harry Brandwood was let in by a dishevelled Martha with a dish towel over her arm, Libby was waiting for him in the lounge with hands outstretched in a dramatic greeting.
‘Oh, Harry. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.’ She turned her face into the comforting smell of his tweed jacket. ‘Father slapped my face last night, and now I’ve quarrelled with Carrie. She looked at me just now as if she hated me, and I can’t tell you anything about it because it’s a secret, a terrible, terrible secret.’
Harry, an expression of resignation on his round ruddy face, held her close and stroked her hair. ‘Now then, love. You’ve quarrelled with Carrie before, but you know the arguments between the two of you never last. What were you doing? Waving the red flag at her? You know Carrie has no social conscience, and I told you last night the strike will succeed or it will fail, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He smiled into her hair. ‘And if your father slapped you I’m sure it was only a little smack and you must have provoked him.’ Suddenly his voice trailed away as he realized something about his beloved was very different. Gently he pushed her away. ‘Libby! You’ve had your hair cut off!’ His blue eyes twinkled. ‘It’s lovely, darling. Absolutely lovely. Spiffing. You look about seventeen years old.’
Libby put up a hand and touched the swing of her cropped hair. The appeal to her vanity and the admiration in his eyes steadied her as nothing else at that particular moment could have done.
‘Do you really like it?’ She gave him a trembling smile. ‘I wasn’t sure . . .’
‘I love it and I love you, and I wish I could take you out somewhere so that I could show you off, but I’m on my way to see yet another patient with strike fever.’
‘Strike fever?’ Libby widened her eyes, then snuggled close again.
Harry’s voice was teasing. ‘Remember last night when you told me it was only the downtrodden poor who suffered? Well, it seems you were wrong, Libby Peel. I can’t speak for the majority of the rich bossmen in this town, but one coal owner who shall be nameless worked himself up into a mild heart attack this afternoon. One of his miners actually stormed his way into the pit office and declared that the outcome of this strike would be the nationalization of the whole of the coal industry. Result – one poor downtrodden boss practically foaming at the mouth, in need of urgent medical attention.’ He put up a finger. ‘No, not a word. I haven’t finished yet. And I’m off now to minister to Mrs Amos Birtwistle at Gawley Hall, prostrate with a migraine because her dress for the tennis party on Saturday is holed up somewhere in a siding, and likely to remain there till the railways start running again. So you see.’
He was so solid, so reassuring, such a comfort that Libby actually smiled properly before surrendering to one of his pleasantly thorough kisses.
Har
ry relaxed. His Libby wasn’t always as easily calmed down as this, and she had seemed to be genuinely upset. He surfaced for a moment, then bent his head to kiss her again. And Carrie with a terrible secret! Docile, gentle Carrie with a secret too terrible to be told – how Libby liked to dramatize everything! Her twin was as open as a spring-lit day, so passive as to be merely a shaded echo of her sister. He touched the tip of Libby’s nose with his finger.
‘I think Mrs Amos Birtwistle is quite taken with me, especially when I assured her that with her grace and charm she was bound to be the belle of the tennis court with or without the missing dress. If she invites us to the party on Saturday, shall I accept? I’m free after lunch. I hope.’
Libby walked with him to the door. ‘Oh, yes, please Harry. I’ve never been to Gawley Hall, and we haven’t worn our new tennis dresses yet.’ She patted the new fringe. ‘They are an exact copy of Suzanne Lenglen’s, with orange bandeaux to go with them.’
‘We?’ Even as he asked the question Harry knew what the answer would be.
‘Me and Carrie, of course. You’ll wangle an invitation for her as well, won’t you darling? It’s just what she needs.’
Harry ran down the steps to his waiting car, seeing himself for one slightly hysterical moment arriving at Gawley Hall with two Libbys in tow, identical in white dresses with orange bandeaux round their short dark hair.
‘Love me, love my sister,’ he muttered good humouredly, then turned to wave before driving back down the drive and heading the car towards the road leading away from the town.
As soon as Libby went back into the house she remembered her intention of going down to the tram depot at the weekend to volunteer as a driver. She started upstairs, then hesitated for a second with one hand on the banister rail. Ah, well . . . She tossed her head, enjoying the feel of her hair bouncing freely. It had been a crazy notion anyway, especially in view of the fact that she was on the side of the strikers. And she was. Most definitely. She was thinking about them at that very moment, walking with earnest workworn faces to their meetings, tightening their belts in determined preparation for the long weeks and months of struggle to come. Oh yes, there would be lots of ways she could help, she decided vaguely. If the teachers remained uncommitted she could drive a tram during the long summer holiday, in an impartial way of course, not really identifying with either side. And besides, going to Mrs Amos Birtwistle’s party wasn’t going to influence the outcome of the struggle one way or the other. And the orange bandeau might need a tuck in the back now that her hair was short.