by Marie Joseph
Burying her face in her hands, Carrie tried to face up to a future as bleak and grey as the gathering clouds outside.
Libby, at that very moment, was opening and reading the letter which had arrived at Westerley by the morning post. She had seen it on the hall table when she came down for breakfast, recognized the handwriting immediately, and pushed it deep into the. pocket of her skirt. Surprised at the way her heart beats had quickened, she had said nothing to Carrie. If her twin could have secrets, then so could she.
‘I will never be another Sarah!’ Carrie had said through clenched teeth the last time Libby had tried to question her. ‘But I can’t talk about it. This is something I have to solve for myself, Libby. Can’t you see?’
But no, Libby could not see, and when Harry had told her to leave her sister to get on with her own life, she had turned on him in fury.
‘So you think I should just sit back and let Carrie make a mess of her life! Is that it?’
‘Yes.’ Harry had been adamant. ‘You can’t live your sister’s life, and she cannot live yours. Some time the division has to come.’
‘But how is it possible to divide two halves that are really one person?’ Libby asked that in all seriousness, leaving Harry shaking his head in honest bewilderment.
‘A pity I’m not marrying both of you.’ He had pushed out both elbows, moving his head from side to side as if he were glancing from one bride to another. ‘I take thee, Libby and Carrie Peel,’ he had said, and the comical expression on his ruddy face had forced a smile on her lips.
Now she was furtively hiding the letter beneath the covers of a book as she sat alone at her desk during the mid-morning break. Outside the children were chanting their games in the square of concrete playground beyond the tall windows.
‘The big ship sailed through the Alley-alley O, the Alley-alley O . . .’
Libby smiled to herself. All through prayers and the first lessons, she had been acutely aware of the letter in her pocket. Through the glass partition she had seen Margaret Bottomley standing on her raised platform beating time as her class sing-songed their way through their multiplication tables. And she had felt a strange sense of triumph that he had written, not to Margaret, but to her.
Taking out the single sheet of paper, she read:
Dear Miss Peel, I would like to thank you for returning my notebook by one of your teaching colleagues. It used to be a habit of mine to copy out verses of poems which appealed to me, and the book is doubly precious because I had it with me in France. As you can imagine, the words flowed like honey through a mind distracted by so much that was distinctly unpoetic. I am afraid I haven’t written in the book lately. I am distressed by the premature ending of the strike and afraid for the miners in their determination to go on fighting. It will be a long and bitter struggle for them, and who knows what hardships their families will have to face? Yours sincerely, Tom Silver.
There was a PS at the end. ‘One good thing came out of the strike, due to the suspension of the press. Six hundred and ninety-seven extra books were issued from the public library. Somehow that is a cheering thought, n’est-ce-pas?’
Libby read it quickly, then again more slowly. She looked at the address. Number 14, Meadow Street. She sighed. What a name for a street where no grass grew, a street backed by the tall menacing chimney of her father’s mill. A street of Victorian houses, left to rot and grow shabby as their original owners moved out to the semidetached villas spreading from the centre of the town. Lodging houses, let into rooms. . . . With a quick decisive movement Libby reached for the register with the list of addresses at the back.
Yes, she was right. Meadow Street was where most of the ‘theatricals’ lodged. Two of the children in her class were living there temporarily at number 20, and attending the school whilst their Troupe of tiny Tappers played in the Paint Box Revue at the Palace Theatre. They were undersized girls, with straight hair club-cut into fringes, and were the envy of the rest of the class in their black patent-leather bar-strap shoes and their short white socks. Frowning, Libby folded the letter and pushed it back into her pocket. Then for the rest of the long day she imagined him, tall and thin, coming home from work to one of those shabby houses set in a street where babies played bare-bottomed in the gutter, and housewives gossiped on unwashed doorsteps, arms folded across their pinnies.
No wonder he scribbled verses in his little brown book, verses about streams where fish darted like pins spilled from a paper, where birds sang, and green fields starred with daisies stretched as far as the eye could see.
What’s been eating you all day?’ Margaret Bottomley was waiting for Libby at the school gate at the end of an afternoon which had seemed endless. ‘You’ve had your lot sitting with their hands on their heads at least twice. Have you had a row with the doctor, then?’
Libby smiled sweetly. ‘Harry and I are always agreeing to differ, if that’s what you mean, but we don’t count them as rows. He likes me to have a mind of my own.’
‘He’s an unusual bloke then.’ Margaret sniffed. ‘I went to a meeting in King George’s Hall last night. Councillor Smith was talking about the lock-out. He seemed to think they had a first-rate organization going for them. He actually gave it out that any man in dire need could go to the public office for assistance if needs be. Then he urged them to put their pride in their pockets and think of their children. A real stirring speech it was. You should have been there.’
Libby shook her head. ‘You know I can’t go to Labour meetings, not while I’m still living at home. Harry might be tolerant, but my father certainly is not.’ She glanced up at the sky. ‘I’m only putting up with it until I get married at Christmas. Father lost a big contract on account of the transport difficulties in the second week of the strike, and we are all having to suffer for it.’ She started to walk away. ‘I’m with you in principle, Margaret, you know that, but I’m either too much of a coward, or too canny, to flaunt my beliefs openly at the moment. It just isn’t worth it.’
Margaret felt suddenly very cross as she mentally calculated the cost of Libby’s simple dress and coat. The plain tailored lines set off her figure to perfection, and the fawn leather of bag and shoes picked up the narrow binding round the neck of the navy blue linen outfit. Not for Libby Peel the necessity to keep a dress and coat like that for best. Her wages did not go to pay the rent and the coal bill, or to keep a sick mother on the tasty food her delicate stomach craved. Mrs Peel was an invalid too, but she was waited on hand and foot by a maid. And it wasn’t fair. Nothing in this rotten world was fair.
‘Tom Silver got his cards when he went back to work after coming out of the infirmary,’ Margaret said. ‘The management said it was because the compositors and the machine minders were going to have to go on short time anyway. But it’s obvious that Tom Silver was victimized. He knows it, and they know it.’ The expression on the plain face darkened with disgust. ‘The worst thing is that it’s doubtful whether any other paper will take him on. The bosses don’t like trouble-makers, especially now when things were going from bad to worse. Mr Silver was there at the meeting last night, looking absolutely awful. He never spoke, just sat there, quiet and on his own. They say his nerves have been shot ever since he came back from the war. So where’s the justice? I ask you, Libby! Out there in France, fighting for his country, losing his wife, and now this.’
She was talking quickly as they walked down the street, head jutting forward oblivious to the effect her words were having on Libby. When she turned at last and saw the expression on Libby’s face, noticing how she had paled beneath the brim of her neat straw hat, she stopped dead on the pavement. ‘You all right?’
Libby took a deep breath as her hand went instinctively over her bag where the letter was now hidden away. Oh, that proud man! He had written to thank her for the book, and he hadn’t said a word about losing his job. Not a word. ‘But he wasn’t like the others.’ Her voice came out hoarse. ‘He was just standing here, Margaret, that night
, listening quietly. He tried to stop them rioting. He wasn’t there to make trouble. It wasn’t like that at all.’
Margaret’s pale blue eyes were fishlike in their curiosity. So there was something that could ruffle Libby Peel. ‘Nobody said Mr Silver had got the sack because of that night, Libby. They’ve been laying off men from the compositors’ room for a while now, and they say the rest will be going on short time. No, it was because he was the Father of the Chapel, and a troublemaker in their eyes. Now the strike’s over I bet their next union man will be a little chap without the strength to waft a fly off his rice pudding.’
‘The management don’t choose.’
‘Hah! But they have ways and means. I’ll tell you something for nothing, Libby. This strike has done the workers more harm than good, you’ll see. They are back where they started, and probably farther back than that.’
Margaret was on her orange box again, stabbing the air with a finger and for once Libby made no attempt to interrupt. She was back in control of her emotions, and now she was asking herself why the news of Tom Silver’s dismissal had affected her as if she had been dealt a blow to the stomach. He was just a stranger, and yet when he had made that cheeky kissing movement with his lips she had wondered how it would be if he had really been making love to her. Oh yes, she had thought about it often. In the middle of the night, lying awake, she had imagined it. . . . He had come into her life briefly, and she had thought that was the end of it, but now, hearing that he was in trouble, Libby knew she would have to see him again. ‘I’ll leave you now, Margaret,’ she said, and walked away, her feet dragging and her thoughts awhirl.
Libby’s opportunity came on 23 May, the day before the Empire Day celebrations at the school.
With a little moan, Britannia fainted over her trident at the dress rehearsal as she was being wheeled round the playground in a go-cart trimmed with flags and flowers made of crêpe paper. The part had been given to one of the two theatrical girls working in the town that week and attending Libby’s class, a girl who had a loud, carrying voice and an air of dramatic confidence which gave her speech a weighty significance.
After lessons were over and when the girl came to, the headmistress beckoned Libby over.
‘Would you mind taking her home, Miss Peel? She lodges at number twenty, Meadow Street. I don’t think there’s much wrong with her but overtiredness.’ She shook her gunmetal-grey head. ‘You know my feelings about these half-timers, but I suppose their parents think they know what they are doing.’ She stared with distaste at the patent-leather shoes. ‘I suppose pushing them on the stage does guarantee that they are dressed well and eat three meals a day, but what they can ever hope to achieve in the way of a good education beats me.’ She smiled her watery smile. ‘Meadow Street is near your father’s mill, isn’t it? Maybe you can get a lift back home with him?’
Libby nodded. The headmistress had obviously never heard that Oliver Peel walked to and from his mill – never realized that the family did not own a car, only hired one when circumstances necessitated such extravagance.
‘Of course I’ll take her home,’ she said, and in the cloakroom she pushed the child’s arms into the sleeves of a blazer and pulled on a panama hat, adjusting the elastic underneath the trembling chin.
‘Right then, Amy. Off we go.’ And taking the small hand tightly in her own she set off down the sloping street.
In that particular part of the town well over six thousand houses had been built in the period from 1878 to 1918. They were terraced houses, spotlessly clean in the main, a semicircle of mopped flagstone in front of each door, with a step and window bottom edged with a flourish of cream or yellow stone.
But Meadow Street was different. At one time the three-storeyed houses had been lived in by professional gentlemen. There was a flight of steps up to the front door, and a basement kitchen where maids had once worked. Now the original owner had moved to new houses on the outskirts of the town, leaving the street to fall into shabby disrepair, the houses let off into single rooms with the landlady and her family occupying the ground floor.
Libby handed over the white-faced child to a middle-aged woman who answered the door of number 20. She told her, in her teacher’s voice, that on no account must Amy be sent back to school until she was feeling better.
‘I think she may be sickening for something,’ Libby said, then before she could give herself time to think she turned and walked quickly back down the street to number 14.
This time the woman who answered her knock was wiping her hands on her apron, red puffy hands that looked as if they had been immersed in soap and water for a long time. Her eyebrows flew up towards the scragged-back hairline of her greying hair as she stared at the well-dressed young woman standing on her door step. He mouth dropped open in a round ‘O’ of surprise as she waited for Libby to speak.
‘Mr Tom Silver?’ Libby’s recently authoritative manner deserted her completely as she spoke his name. ‘Is he in, do you know?’
The woman nodded. ‘Aye, he’s in. Top floor, the door opposite t’stairs.’ She stood back, mouth still agape, as Libby thanked her and climbed quickly up the uncarpeted stairs, wrinkling her nose at the smell of stale cooking and a sweeter smell she failed to recognize.
She was horrified. The house was worse than anything she had expected, far worse. Brown paint peeled off doors, and the banister rail felt greasy to her touch. Heart thudding now like a drum in her chest, she knocked at the door across the top landing and waited.
When it opened almost immediately and she saw Tom Silver standing there, she put a hand to her mouth. The man was ill. He had been discharged from the hospital, but the line of purple stitch marks on his forehead stood out like swollen veins against the pallor of his skin.
His surprise was as great as that of the blowsy woman downstairs, and all the more apparent because he tried to conceal it.
‘Well, well! Miss Peel?’ He pretended to look round. ‘Where’s the basket?’
Libby blushed. ‘Basket? What basket?’
He put a hand as if to support himself against the door frame. ‘The basket of goodies brought by the lady of the manor to succour the starving poor. That’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it, to dispense a little charity?’
Libby’s blush deepened. ‘As a matter of fact I had to come this way. A few doors down the street. A child in my class was taken ill at school and I have just brought her home, and I thought . . . I thought that as I was so near I would call and see how you were.’ She was gabbling, unsure of herself for once. ‘I got your letter last week, but you didn’t say . . . you never mentioned losing your job.’ A door opened along the landing and a tousled curious head peered out. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I was,’ she finished desperately, ‘and to say that if it was because of what happened that night I am willing to write to your editor . . . to your manager and explain. Many I come in?’ she added, with a sideways glance along the landing at the half-open door.
‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ Tom Silver held the door back for her to enter. Then with an exaggerated gesture he took a handkerchief from his pocket and dusted off a chair. ‘I’m right out of sherry unfortunately, but I can offer you a cup of tea if you don’t mind it being in a mug.’
‘Stop it!’ Libby sat down gratefully, trying to still the trembling of her legs. ‘Why must you always mock me?’ She lifted her chin. ‘I bet you didn’t mock Margaret Bottomley when she brought the book back to you. I know you didn’t because she was full of it.’
‘Full of what?’ Tom sat down opposite her and raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You’re trying to tell me she was impressed by my charm? Sorry, love, but if you’ve come on her behalf then you’re wasting your time. Miss Bottomley is just not my type.’
Libby clenched her hands into fists. She glanced round the room, at the single bed in the corner, the tiny fireplace, the round table covered by a skimpy cloth, the rows of bookshelves, and the curtain concealing what was a makeshift ward
robe. ‘Look, Mr Silver, I’ll say what I have to say, then I’ll go.’ She bit her lip. ‘You are obviously far from well. That cut on your head might be healing, but you were concussed, and concussion can do funny things. You’re depressed and bitter, and I want to help if I can. It was awful, your coming out of the infirmary to find you job had gone. You didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t fair.’
‘But life isn’t fair, is it, Miss Peel?’ He smiled. ‘You’ve had your hair cut. Take off your hat and let me see.’
Mesmerized by the steady gaze of the dark eyes Libby did as she was told.
‘It’s lovely,’ he said at last. ‘It suits you. Before, it swamped your face, now it shows up your bone structure. You will never look old with cheekbones like that.’
His eyes were the strangest eyes she had ever seen. Piercing, dark and yet kind. She shifted in her chair. This interview was not going at all the way she had planned it should. She had expected him to be well, grateful for her concern and offer of help, and instead he was so much in command of the situation that she felt about eighteen, being interviewed for a place at teaching college. She coughed nervously.
‘With your permission I will go and see your boss at the Weekly Times. If he did what he did because he thought you were behaving in an unseemly manner that evening . . .’ Her voice tailed away at the sound of her stilted phrases. Oh, God, what a mess she was making of things . . . she could see his face darkening in anger.
‘You will do no such thing, Miss Peel!’ I absolutely forbid you to go to my place of work. My recent place of work.’ He slapped his knee hard with the flat of his hand. ‘I could have gone cap in hand if I had wanted to. I could have told them things they don’t know. Things you don’t know.’ He waved a hand to encompass the shabby room. ‘God knows I wasn’t earning much, but when I was on full time it paid the rent of this room, and I was able to send fifteen shillings week to my late wife’s mother.’ He nodded. ‘So you know about my wife, then? I’m not surprised. I don’t suppose there’s much your Miss Bottomley doesn’t ferret out.’