by Marie Joseph
When she saw Tom Silver’s notebook lying on her dressing table where she had left it before going down to dinner she picked it up, held it for a moment while running her fingers over the binding, then almost without volition pushed it deep into her school purse. Margaret Bottomley would take it to him at the infirmary tomorrow, report on his progress, and that would be that.
Tom Silver, tall and dark with his teasing eyes and strong arms . . . he had thought her beliefs shallow. He had openly laughed at her, and made a kissing movement at her with his lips. She felt her cheeks grow pink at the memory. And if he had copied out bits of poetry, bits that reached out for rainbows and soothing comfort, then it didn’t make him anything out of the ordinary. He probably only did it for effect anyway, like a lot of working-class men who fancied themselves as amateur botanists, going on hikes into the country on Sundays with shabby haversacks on their backs.
Libby opened a drawer and, taking out a strip of brightly coloured material, slipped it over her head so that it covered the fringe and showed her eyes in the mirror, bleak with surprising despair.
Snatching it off she threw it from her, then stared down at the purse with its bulge showing where the notebook lay.
He was rude and mocking and arrogant, and she would never see him again. And she didn’t care. . . . Well, of course she didn’t care. For heaven’s sake, why should she?
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS VERY hot in the summer house in the late afternoon. Mungo had taken off his tie, and was feverishly trying to unbutton the front of Carrie’s cotton dress even as she pushed at his hands, begging him to stop.
She wanted him to; at least part of her wanted him to, but he was, as usual, in too much of a hurry. She needed, first of all, to be reassured that what they were doing was right, wanted to hear him saying once again that as neither of them was hurting anyone, where was the harm?
‘She isn’t getting suspicious about you having to stay late at school? Surely she must be?’ Carrie always referred to Mungo’s wife, Beatrice, as ‘she’, finding herself unable to say the name. Her eyes clouded over with worry.
Mungo’s mouth fastened hungrily on her own, forcing her lips apart. Then when he surfaced he said bitterly, ‘She wouldn’t give a damn if I never went home again.’ His hand slid inside Carrie’s dress as he pulled down the strap of her underskirt. ‘Oh, God, how I love you, sweetheart!’
With a frantic determination Carrie tried to stop thinking about the wife whose existence she had never really admitted to the reasoning part of her mind. There was an ache deep inside her, a quivering, burning sensation, but when Mungo’s hand crept lower she pushed him away and sat up, hot and distressed. She pulled the ribbon strap over her shoulder.
Groaning, he pulled her close again. ‘I have to, darling. You can’t keep tormenting me like this. Nothing will go wrong. I promise. I give you my word.’ He closed his eyes so that she saw the long eyelashes fan out on his cheek above what looked like a recent scar.
‘She did that?’ Carrie’s fingers were gentle as she traced the tiny half-moon shape.
‘Yes. And this.’ He turned his head so that she saw a scratch running down from beneath his left ear. ‘She wasn’t quite drunk enough last night. Properly drunk she has no fight in her, but halfway gone she can fight like a hell-cat.’
‘Have you ever tried hitting her back?’
‘The boy,’ he said softly. ‘I have to endure in silence because of the boy.’
‘But he’s deaf!’
Mungo shook his head sadly. ‘I did retaliate once, and she ran into the boy’s room and showed him the marks on her wrist, faint marks which faded while he was staring at them in horror.’ His head drooped, and when he raised his eyes Carrie was dismayed to see that they swam with tears. ‘She pointed at her wrist, then at me, then she clung to the boy as if he were the only thing standing between her and a. further attack. And Edwin suddenly rolled on his back making terrible noises. It was dreadful. I sometimes catch him watching me warily as if he were just waiting for me to turn violent again.’
Carrie put her arms tight round him then and rocked him as she would a child, pity welling inside her. ‘Oh, my love . . . oh, my love,’ she whispered.
Mungo relaxed against her with a sigh. ‘So you see, for Edwin’s sake, I have to endure. Because he can’t hear or speak it’s impossible to know what he’s thinking, but he watches me. I feel his eyes watching me.’
‘And you would never leave her?’
It was a question to which Carrie knew the answer. This lonely man could never bring himself to desert a handicapped child. And his wife would never leave her home and give up the husband who was no more to her than a meal ticket.
Carrie pressed her lips close together in an attempt to hold back her own tears. Being in love, she had always believed, was meant to be a joyous thing; a meeting of eyes, a sharing of private jokes, laughter on a summer’s day.
She remembered Libby coming into the house wearing her engagement ring for the first time. Holding out her hand, turning it so that the light caught the three diamonds, whirling round the room, skirts flying, hugging her twin, shouting ‘You next Carrie! You next!’
But this love, this powerful overwhelming obsession, weighed on her like a spreading net, enmeshing her in strands of despair. Mungo was there in her thoughts from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning. She would sit with her mother in the evenings and imagine he was there sitting in a chair, smiling at her, telling her of his love in his beautiful voice.
Sometimes she would try to tell herself it was hopeless. She would steel herself to tell him the same. Then the next day, at school, she would see him, brown hair waving back from his high forehead, shoulders stooped, and she would be engulfed in a wave of tenderness so great that she would have to hold herself back from running to him.
We can’t go on meeting like this without something happening,’ he was saying now, making no attempt to touch her again. ‘I tell you, Carrie, the way I want you is killing me. And being alone like this, in our own little hideaway, I – I haven’t got that much control, sweetheart.’ He ran a finger round his unbuttoned stiff collar as if he were choking. ‘A more ruthless man would insist, but I’m not like that. I love you so much I’m prepared to wait for you to come to me.’ His smile was tinged with sadness. ‘I’m a very patient man, Carrie. A deeply frustrated man, but a patient one.’
Carrie felt as if she were choking too, but her emotion stemmed not from frustration, but because she knew Mungo was waiting for her to make up her mind. The heat inside the tiny building was sticky; she could feel the perspiration sliding down her sides. And they had been there for longer than usual – the light had shifted as it seeped through the cardboard shutters. She sighed. Ironically it was Mungo’s very restraint that made her hesitate. If he had taken her forcibly, made her give in by bruising her mouth with kisses, she would have . . . oh, God, at least she thought she might have . . .
Slowly she began to button up her dress. It could never happen like this – with Mungo waiting patiently for her to decide. She didn’t want to decide; she wanted the decision to be taken from her, and now he was going to be angry again. She could see his face working as though he had a tic.
‘But I will,’ she whispered as he buried his face against her. ‘It’s just that, just that . . .’ Her voice tailed away as she remembered.
She could still recall the look on Sarah Batt’s face on the day she had admitted she was going to have a baby. A shy schoolgirl of fourteen. Carrie had come into the kitchen at Westerley to see Sarah sobbing uncontrollably, trying to hide her rounded stomach by holding her clasped hands over it, then running upstairs to pack her bag and leave Westerley. True, Sarah came back, but her child was being brought up by his grandmother and only visited by his mother once a month. And Sarah was so ashamed of her past that she flatly refused to talk about her son. It was as though what she had done in a moment of passion eight, nine years ago had filled her wit
h a shame that would linger for the rest of her life. Carrie shivered.
‘What are you thinking about, darling?’ Mungo’s voice was gentle, and though normally Carrie would tell him exactly what she was thinking, this time she shook her head.
Just how did you tell a man as unworldly, as sensitive as Mungo that every time he wanted to make love to her properly she became a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl again? A girl in a pudding-basin hat gazing in horror, pity and fascination at a housemaid with tears running down her cheeks and her arms wrapped round her swollen stomach.
‘I think we must go soon,’ she whispered. ‘It must be very late.’
‘To hell with time,’ Mungo muttered, taking her into his arms again.
They were eating earlier than usual that evening at Westerley because Oliver had to go down to the mill again.
‘They should rechristen Bridge Mill,’ he thundered, striding into the house around six o’clock. ‘Moscow Mill it should be called.’ Then he shouted through the swinging door leading to the kitchen, ‘Look sharp with it, you two lasses. I want to be away in half an hour at the most.’
‘Where’s Carrie?’ He came into the lounge with a glass of whisky in his hand, then he narrowed his eyes at Libby. ‘I can’t make out why she’s always stopping on late. You can get home in good time, it seems.’ He jerked his chin upwards. ‘Is your mother coming down for her dinner tonight?’
‘Why don’t you go up and ask her yourself?’ was what Libby wanted to say, but the most important thing was to stop him going on about Carrie. So she took a deep breath and let it out again with a sigh. If her father found out that Carrie was meeting a married man after school, a man who had stayed at home during the war instead of going out to France and being killed like Willie, then murder would be done. Libby was sure of it.
‘Why have you to go back to the mill, Father?’ She assumed a bright expression. ‘Is the strike affecting you badly?’
Oliver swilled the whisky round and round in his glass, then took a deep swallow. His ill-humour was such that Libby guessed he was prepared to release his frustration, even to the extent of discussing the situation with her.
‘If I have to fill the mill with tramp weavers I’ll keep those looms running,’ he almost growled. ‘And if I have to run the place without tacklers, than I’ll do just that.’ He went to refill his glass. ‘They reckon there’ll be well over a thousand looms stopped as a result of the strike whichever way it goes. But what can you expect when the union representative’s a damn Bolshie? This strike is right up his street, isn’t it? He hasn’t got enough up top to remember that his bloody union has fought and lost two strikes in the last year against necessary wage cuts. Don’t the stupid fools realize we’re in a period of economic chaos, and that cotton exports are one of the hardest hit? Haven’t they the sense to see that the cotton which used to go to India is either produced there, or got from Japan?’
He went to stand with his back to the fire. ‘It’s like what it was at the beginning of the war. Then everybody got excited and jumped about, desperate to do something. It’s a sort of hysteria. Why, one of my tacklers told me his wife has started her own soup kitchen already, making broth and getting cheap offal from the butcher. All her neighbours are collecting coppers for her, and they’ve got enough to take round to the co-op bank.’ He snorted. ‘And they have the nerve to say they are starving!’
Oliver patted his stomach. ‘Where the devil has Carrie got to? We’ll have to start without her if I’m to get back. I’ll have a word with Joe Postlethwaite next time I see him.’
‘Joe Postlethwaite?’ Libby was still stalling for time. ‘I’ve never heard you mention that name before, Father.’
‘On the board of governors at Carrie’s school. I’ll have it out with him about the extra hours his teachers have to work. Teachers’ hours are supposed to be civilized, they’re not miners or factory workers. Go into the kitchen, Libby, and tell them we want to start. I can’t hang about like this another minute.’
‘They’re not miners or factory workers! Oh, dear God . . .’ Libby was muttering to herself as she walked down the long passage to the door leading to the kitchen. ‘Oh, Carrie, why do you have to be so stupid? Why? And where are you?’
‘Miss Carrie’s just wheeled her bike round the back. She says she had a puncture and had to walk all the way home with it.’
Mrs Edwards was putting the finishing touches to a pink blancmange, and Libby was sure the look she gave her was knowing. ‘I’ll go upstairs and tell Mother,’ she said, and left the kitchen before any more could be said.
‘Carrie’s just come in,’ she told Ettie, and saw the relief on her mother’s face as she got up from her dressing table.
‘I’m much better today, dear,’ Ettie said wistfully. ‘I am so glad we will all be sitting down to a meal together. Your father is so busy, and Carrie has so much extra work to do at school these days, then you are often out with Harry . . .’ She pulled at the strands of faded hair covering her forehead. ‘I sometimes feel that you have all made separate lives for yourselves, and just come home to eat and sleep.’ She smiled at Sarah hovering in the doorway. ‘I can manage the stairs myself, Sarah. I mustn’t let people think I am an invalid.’ She left the room.
Libby sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands for once still in her lap. Then suddenly her mood changed as she watched Sarah pick the hairs from Ettie’s tortoiseshell brush and stow them away in the hair-tidy on the dressing table. With her head on one side, her restless mind ticking over, she studied the matronly solid figure through narrowed eyes.
‘How can you stand it, Sarah? I mean having to be with Mother all day long? It would kill me. Do you never feel you want to break away to go and do something quite different?’
‘Oh, no, Miss Libby. I’m right fond of your mother and I like looking after her. We have a nice understanding, me and your mother,’ Sarah bustled forward to strip the green satin cover from the bed, twitching at it in a pointed way so that Libby was forced to stand up.
It was an unspoken rule that Sarah’s ‘trouble’ of eight years ago was never referred to, but now the worry of Carrie’s behaviour filled her twin with an anxiety that bordered on a terrible half-acknowledged fear. Surely Carrie wasn’t going to make the same mistake that Sarah had made all those years ago?
‘How is your little boy, Sarah?’ Libby asked the question, not quite admitting the association of ideas, even as she told herself that Carrie would never . . . not with a married man. Not out in the fields . . . she shuddered. ‘We never hear anything about your son. How old is he now, Sarah?’
‘Eight, Miss, coming up.’ Sarah had her back turned as she shook out her mistress’s nightgown and laid its crêpe-de-Chine folds over the top sheet.
Libby persisted. ‘What does he look like? Is he dark? Red-haired like you? Small for his age? Big for his age?’ She smiled. ‘I know. Why don’t I get the doctor to drive me over to your parents’ cottage on one of your weekends off, so you can introduce him? It seems so silly that none of us have seen him. There’s no shame, Sarah, not to my mind anyway. You mustn’t feel there is.’
‘No!’
Libby blinked as Sarah turned round, her face contorted with what seemed to be fear. ‘He’s to be let be. He’s happy as he is with his grandma and grandpa. and me going home regularly. I won’t have him shown! I won’t!’ She gripped a corner of her apron in both hands and twisted it round. ‘An’ if you insist I will give up me job, and then where will your poor mother be without me?’ The blue eyes filled with tears. ‘There’s only me what cares about her, really. He doesn’t . . .’ – this with a jerk of her head towards the door – ‘an’ you and Miss Carrie, you’re so full of each other you don’t need nobody else.’
She started to back out of the room. ‘In all this time your mother has never once asked me a thing like that. She knows when to let be. She cares about folks’ feelings, while you . . .’ Overcome, Sarah rushed out of the door, leaving it wid
e open behind her.
‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’ Libby opened her eyes wide at her reflections in the tripled mirror over Ettie’s dressing table, then, shrugging her shoulders, she went out on to the landing.
There she bumped into Carrie, warm and pink, with hastily brushed hair, and verging on hysteria in her twin’s opinion.
For a second they stared at each other; in another second they would have had their arms round each other as Carrie’s obvious distress communicated itself to her sister. But Oliver’s loud voice boomed up the stairs.
‘Will somebody tell me what you two are doing up there? The soup is on the table, though why anybody wants soup on a warm evening like this I don’t know!’
‘And I heard you come in, Carrie,’ he added, as soon as they were all seated round the big dining table. ‘Teachers are supposed to finish at four o’clock, aren’t they?’
Silently, with head bowed, Carrie spooned her soup. Silently Libby watched her, noticing the way her twin swallowed with difficulty, left hand trembling as she lifted the spoon to her mouth.
‘I’m sorry, Father.’ Carrie dabbed at her mouth with the large damask napkin. ‘We had a meeting and I couldn’t get away.’
‘Meeting?’ Oliver hacked away at the joint of beef placed in front of him by the young maid, Martha Cardwell. ‘Don’t tell me the teachers are going to be the next to come out on strike?’ He passed a plate over to his wife, then went on carving. ‘There’s bound to be Labourites amongst your lot. You know what will happen if you come out, don’t you? If I know Joe Postlethwaite and his committee, he’ll have the bloody school closed, and there won’t be a job to go back to when this lot’s finished. Joe won’t have any truck with sympathy strikes. The miners might have a grievance, a slight one at that, but nothing that can’t be settled with negotiation. God damn it, you don’t know when you’re born!’