by Marie Joseph
‘It was nothing like that, Father.’
Libby held her breath as she calculated that Carrie was close to breaking down. And if she did, if she were foolish enough to burst out crying and rush from the room, then God help her. Even Oliver’s preoccupation with the strike and his worries about the mill wouldn’t stop him from rushing after her and shaking the truth out of her.
Quickly she came to one of her swift decisions. Drawing Oliver’s fire to herself, she said, ‘Maybe if you hadn’t put your weavers working on piece rates at a lower return last year, they would have been content to stay at their looms. They are bound to make comparisons when the rates vary from mill to mill. Now they could be grasping their chance to show their disapproval, wouldn’t you say, Father?’
When Oliver dropped the lid of the vegetable tureen on to the table with a clatter, widening his eyes before letting fly with a spate of angry words, Libby knew her ploy had worked.
‘It’s all right now,’ her eyes signalled Carrie. ‘He’ll be on his way out down to the mill soon, then you can give way.’
‘But not before,’ she prayed silently. ‘Dear God, not before!’
Tom Silver, sitting up in his high bed in the long ward of the town’s infirmary, saw Margaret Bottomley the minute she came through the doors, but couldn’t quite place her. Her face, with its eager, thrusting jaw, was familiar; but he couldn’t for the life of him put a name to it, so he leaned his head back against the piled pillows and closed his eyes.
‘Mr Silver?’
He opened them again to see her standing by his bed, pale eyes shining, her upper lip with its shadowy moustache quivering with enthusiasm.
‘Yes?’ He sighed. Now he had placed her. She was one of the band of supposedly liberated women who tried to talk like men. And this one even looked like a man. Peevishly, because his head was aching and he had been told that morning that his immediate discharge was out of the question, he sucked in his bottom lip and tried to look even more ill than he felt.
But Margaret pulled up a little hard chair and sat down, pulling her skirt over her knees. As if he wanted to stare at her legs, Tom thought with distaste, then widened his eyes as she opened her purse and took out the little brown leather book. Forgetting his act of invalidism, he sat bolt upright.
‘How the . . .? Where on earth . . .?’ He held out his hand, only to have his wrist tapped playfully.
‘Don’t say you hadn’t missed it, Mr Silver?’
Women with faces like that shouldn’t try to look coy, he thought uncharitably, shrinking away from her unwelcome touch.
Margaret wrinkled her nose. ‘Your little scribblings are safe with me, Mr Silver. I guessed the book meant a lot to you, so at the first opportunity I have returned it to you.’ She tapped the book with a gloved finger. ‘It was handed to me, so I thought it was the least I could do.’ She smiled. ‘I must say you look in better shape than I expected you to. My . . . my informant told me that the last sight she had of you was when you were stretcher-bound, being handed into an ambulance.’
Tom put a hand up to his bandaged head. ‘Oh, yes. The market square. It must have dropped out of my pocket.’ He winced with the effort of sitting upright, and sagged down against the pillows again. ‘The crowd got a bit out of hand and decided to use me for target practice, and the next thing I knew was when I woke up in this bed. The damnable thing is I can’t find out what’s going on.’ A sudden stab of pain drained the colour from his already pale cheeks. ‘I have been trying to get hold of the reports from union headquarters, but from what I hear even the reports contradict each other.’ He frowned, then winced as the frown pulled at the stitches in his forehead. ‘My lads will be counting on me. They’ll be at sixes and sevens without me there. And there’s nothing I can do, lying here like a wet lettuce.’
He suddenly looked much older than his years, as if the whole responsibility of running the strike had been his alone. ‘Those men throwing stones, they weren’t helping. If we succeed, and we have to succeed, it has to be done through patience, not by force. Violence never gets anyone anywhere.’
‘Oh, I do agree.’ Margaret was too insensitive to realize that the grey-faced man was talking more to himself than to her. She beamed. ‘They say Ellen Wilkinson could be paying us a visit up here. Imagine! She’s a real fiery speaker, and she knows what she’s on about when she talks about the injustices done to the workers. There’ll certainly be a full house if she does come. I know I’ll be there, that’s for sure.’
Tom was very tired. He did not feel like talking politics with this woman. He reminded himself that she had brought the book back out of kindness, so, speaking slowly as if every word pained him, he thanked her, closed his eyes and waited for her to go.
‘It wasn’t exactly me who rescued your book, Mr Silver.’
Margaret did not want such an interesting encounter to end like this. It was a long time since she had talked so intimately with a good-looking man like Tom Silver. He was a real charmer, in a masculine way of course. There was a touch of the Byron in the way his hair fell forward over his forehead like that, and his eyes were the most unusual shade of grey. Not flint grey, or steel grey, but a soft gentle grey, like rain clouds.
With difficulty, because her plump knees were already touching the bed, she moved forward. It was growing dark outside, and because the trams were so unreliable she would have a long walk home. She sighed. The very minute she turned her key in the door her mother would call out, ‘Margaret? Is that you?’
As if it would or could be anyone else! She would have to take her mother’s nightly cup of cocoa upstairs, then help her out of bed and on to the commode, averting her eyes from the yellowed toenails and the stick-thin legs. And oh, how she hated the lack of modesty that seemed to have afflicted her mother in her old age. Sometimes Margaret saw in the little body slumped on the commode a picture of how it would be with her one day, except that she, Margaret Bottomley, would had never known a man’s touch, would be all alone.
‘It was Miss Peel – Libby Peel, who asked me to bring your book back,’ she said, not quite truthfully, and was rewarded by a sudden flash of interest in the grey eyes, and the semblance of a smile.
‘Ah, yes, the teacher who wanted to see how the other half lived, all fierce and unenlightened. She got home safe then? I’ve wondered about her.’ He kept his eyes tight shut, but this time he was not escaping. Instead he was recalling the small girl with the silly straw hat. He was remembering the earnest way she listened to the speakers, and the softness of her, small-boned and somehow fragile, as he held her tight against him when the crowd swayed and the stones began to fly.
‘She teaches at the same school as me. Her father owns Bridge Mill.’ Margaret gave the information reluctantly, sensing that her captive audience had somehow dismssed her more surely than if she had got up and walked away down the ward. It was always happening. A pretty face, a shapely leg, and she, Margaret Bottomley, might as well not exist.
She hurried on with a bit more information. ‘Libby, Miss Peel, is getting married at Christmas to a doctor. Dr Harry Brandwood, in practice with his father up Park Road.’ She laughed a trill laugh at variance with her bulk. ‘I know exactly what you mean about Miss Peel being unenlightened, Mr Silver. It would be impossible for the likes of her to understand the present conflict, or the needs of the workers. The Peels of this town won’t go short of a bob or two, no matter how long this struggle lasts. Her family have never known what it is to want. It’s still Them and Us, Mr Silver, and always will be. When the likes of you and me say we are hard up we mean we are hungry. When Libby Peel thinks she is hard up she means she has spent her monthly dress allowance in the first two weeks. She’s never had to turn a skirt, nor steam a hat to stop the brim from curling, and she’s never had to be the sole support of her mother from the day she left college.’
It was with a deep sigh of relief that. Tom heard the bell clang out heralding the end of visiting time. He knew he should have
been feeling pity for the sallow-faced woman now gathering gloves and bag together, because a lot of what she had just said was right. It was still Them and Us, and as far as identifying with hardship and poverty went, well, he had no difficulty there, God knew. But he hoped, oh, he hoped most fervently that he would never spit out his grievances with his lips twisted into a bitter line. His mission, if mission was the right word, was to improve the lot of his men, to help lift the lower-paid workers from despair, not sink them down into a sea of envy and spite against those who had more.
And now the ache in his head was worse. There was a sour taste in his mouth as the depression closed down on him again. The pudding-faced lass, she was looking for justice, and he could have told her that justice was merely a word. Because if things were just and fair and the scales of fortune balanced out the bad with the good, how was it that he had come back from France unscathed? And why had his young wife, the girl he had married on his last leave, been blown to pieces in an explosion at the grey spread of munition factory buildings where she worked?
No, there hadn’t been much justice there, by all that was holy.
And yet, at that very moment, what wouldn’t he have given to be sitting at the wheel of a car, the kind of car Libby’s fiancé was sure to own, with her by his side, the wind loosening that brown hair of hers, blowing it across her eyes as she laughed and pleaded with him not to drive so fast? If that was envy, then he was guilty of it all right.
Reaching for the little brown book, he opened it at random and read:
‘How pleasant as the yellowing sun declines, and with long rays shades the landscape to mark the birches’ stems all golden light, that lit the dark slant woods with silvery white. . . .’
And was comforted.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘FORGET THE PAST; look to the future,’ the King said when the strike was called off on 12 May 1926.
‘GREAT WORKERS’ VICTORY’ the Daily Herald declared with banner headlines, but Libby was not too sure about that.
‘So much for your revolution,’ Harry had teased. ‘Now, if there really had been a revolution, a real Lenin-flavoured uprising, then the government would have completely lost control. And far from doing that, the government were in control all the time, from start to finish. He smiled. ‘The bluff failed dismally, Libby. You must agree there.’
‘The miners haven’t given in. They never will give in,’ Libby had retorted, but some of the fire had gone from her in the past few days. Carrie’s refusal to go to the tennis party and her subsequent moping about the house with a white face and haunted expression had, of course, affected her twin. Harry knew this, but was determined not to probe. His beloved would tell him all about it, whatever it was, in her own good time.
He was, above all, a patient man.
Far more patient than Mungo McDermot, who at every opportunity tried to catch a few minutes alone with Carrie at school.
‘Why won’t you meet me in the summer house?’ His face was lean with suffering. ‘I can’t go on like this.’
‘I’ve told you why!’ Carrie, with one eye on the door of the staff room, put the width of the table between herself and Mungo’s wandering hands. She blushed and hung her head so that all he could see was the parting in her shiny brown hair. ‘That last time we nearly . . . we almost . . .’
The break in her voice told him that tears were not far off, and his own voice was suddenly hoarse. ‘But we didn’t, did we? We stopped just in time.’
‘What we did was just as bad.’ Carrie felt a hot flush of shame wash over her as she remembered the urgency of his hands, the weight of his body, the searching open-mouthed kisses, and her own frantic struggles. ‘The next time I might give in, and oh, Mungo . . . I must never give in. It’s wrong and besides, I’m scared, so terribly frightened.’
‘I would never hurt you, darling, in any way.’
He was saying that just as the door opened and Carrie, blushing scarlet, made a pretence of collecting books together. She reached for her register with a trembling hand. Then, as Miss Clayton, walking as though her heels were sprung, bounced into the room, Mungo walked out, his thin shoulders drooping in the jacket that always seemed too big for him, a neglected, lonely-looking man, with brown hair straggling over his collar.
‘I wonder if his wife will come to Open day?’ Miss Clayton, cold eyes shrewd beneath the cap of her Eton-cropped hair, flopped down in a chair. She produced a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches from the leg of her knicker elastic and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. ‘Have you ever met her, by the way?’
‘No, I’ve never met her.’ Carrie longed to escape, but knew that if she did so it would only arouse suspicion. No teacher worth her salt ever emerged from the staff room unless she was on mid-morning duty at the drinks table set out in the hall if it was raining and outside if it was fine. So she compromised by walking over to the window and staring out.
Under the long verandah pupils were queueing at a trestle table for mugs of cocoa, hot or cold milk, still lemonade and biscuits. She saw Mungo, head bowed, standing behind the table, supposedly checking that each pupil dropped two pennies into the round tin provided. But it was obvious that his mind was in some faraway place as he stared down, then lifted his head as if he sensed she might be watching him.
‘She’s a lot older than him.’ Miss Clayton addressed Carrie’s unresponsive back. ‘And she wears the trousers, from what I’ve heard. Though I believe she’s good to that poor little lad of theirs.’ Carrie heard the clatter of a tin ashtray falling from the table to the floor. ‘She won’t let him go into an institution anyway, so she can’t have much of a life cooped up with a child like that all day. Not much fun for her.’
‘Nor for him,’ Carrie said, then bit her lip as if she wished the words unsaid.
‘For old McDermot?’
‘He isn’t old.’ Carrie turned round, knowing she was saying too much, but powerless to stop.
‘Our Mr McDermot is nearly forty, if he’s a day.’ Miss Clayton flicked ash in the vague direction of the ashtray. ‘He gives me the creeps, but then maybe he’s your type?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I must say you seem to be pretty thick with him, but he looks to me as if he’d been grown in the dark. Like a mushroom, with a big white head and wobbly legs. How he ever had the nerve to stand up and be counted and declare he was a conchie during the war I just can’t think. I wouldn’t have thought his guts were as strong as my garters.’ The cropped head went to one side. ‘Wasn’t your brother killed in France?’
Carrie nodded.
‘Then how can you be so friendly with a little squirt like that? Maybe you’re sweet on him? Is that it?’
Carrie felt her face flame, and knew that she had gone scarlet. ‘I am not sweet on him! What a thing to say! I just feel pity for him, that’s all.’
‘And pity is akin to love, so they say.’ Miss Clayton stretched out her legs in their black lisle stockings and checked that the seams were straight. ‘Good God, Carrie, there’s no need to look so flummoxed. Your murkey secret is safe with little Angela.’ Smiling, she licked a finger and made the, sign of the cross on her throat. ‘But I’d watch out for that wife of his, if I were you. God, I wouldn’t like to meet her up an alley on a dark night. She’s a fat woman with a face like the back of a fish cart, and shoulders on her like an ox. Get the wrong side of her, and she’d flatten you as soon as look at you.’
She sat up suddenly as Carrie moved blindly towards the door. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry? Our cocoa will be here soon. Steady on! The fire bell hasn’t rung, has it?’
But Carrie, the small heels of her court shoes tapping on the wide polished stair treads, was flying as if pursued by devils. The monitress, on her way up with the tray, had to step quickly to one side to avoid being knocked over. Her face was a study as she watched the quiet Miss Peel hurtle past her.
Carrie hesitated by the door leading out to the playing fields; then she turned left into the corrid
or leading to her form room, her heart beating like a drum.
Angela Clayton knew. That blab-mouth had guessed, so it followed that the rest of the staff knew too, and oh, dear God, if it ever got to the ears of the headmaster then heaven help both her and Mungo.
Sitting down, she stared at the rows of desks and at the far wall with the map of the world with the Empire filled in with red crayons. Soon it would be Empire Day. The Union Jack would be flown from the flagpole in the grounds, and the children would be decked out in costumes representing the various countries. They would march round the field singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and Mungo would recite a patriotic poem in his beautiful voice. She would be expected to play her part, and the truth was she did not care. The sun could set on the Empire, never to rise again, and she wouldn’t give a damn. At the moment Carrie could not see an inch farther than the horizon of her own immediate distress. She shivered. It would have to be left to people like Libby to worry about the Empire, and the miners and their lock-out, and the men who would lose their jobs as a result of the strike.
Libby never got involved in anything over which she could not retain absolute control. Libby had fallen in love suitably, she would marry Harry, stop work and throw herself whole heartedly into the role of doctor’s wife, while she Carrie, would still be making up her mind whether to share her life completely with the man she loved. And if she did surrender, she would have to forget that he had a wife and a handicapped son, and she would have to live in monthly terror in case anything had gone wrong.