by Marie Joseph
He leaned back, closing his eyes for a second as if the effort of talking was too much for him. ‘My ex-mother-in-law lives alone, crippled with arthritis, and I have done what I could over the years. Her next move is into an institution, but with my contribution she was able to keep her independence. Now . . .’ He spread his hands wide. ‘And don’t go putting me down in your book as a benevolent man, because I’m not. I am of the opinion that we are like animals when it comes down to basics. I helped my ma-in-law because I like her, I like her a lot, and if things had been different she would probably have been living with us.’ He got up and walked over to the window. ‘Do you know, they hadn’t even the decency to call me into the office! Just sent a note by the office boy. Out! Finished!’
Then suddenly he turned and smiled, and at once his face looked young and boyish. ‘You’ve given me the opportunity to let fly, and now I’ve done. It had to come out, and now it’s said and over with. Thank you for coming. Even if it was on your way.’
When he opened the door he was grinning, and as she walked past him, carrying her hat, he reached out a finger, and gently flicked the dark wing of hair away from her cheek.
‘Goodbye, lass,’ he said, and closed the door gently behind her, leaving Libby to stumble down the dark stairs, knowing she had been well and truly dismissed.
She was alone with Harry Brandwood in the lounge that evening. Carrie had gone up to her room, saying she had a headache, Oliver was in the billiard room with his papers and the whisky bottle, and Ettie was upstairs with Sarah.
‘Come here, Libby.’ Harry caught her hand as she walked past his chair and pulled her forcibly on to his knee. ‘For a courting couple we don’t get many chances to be alone like this. Let’s make the most of it, eh?’
His kiss was sensual and lingering, and Libby slid her arm round his neck and responded dutifully. Then as his hand moved to her breast she jerked away.
‘Don’t! Someone might come in. I don’t think Carrie has gone to bed, and Father . . .’ She sat bolt upright and put up a hand to tidy her hair.
Immediately Harry pulled her close again, covering her face with kisses. ‘And what if they do, sweetheart? We’re engaged to be married. Remember?’ His face was hot, and his light brown eyes hazy with love. ‘Love me?’
Libby sighed and turned her cheek into the comfort of his tweedy shoulder. Oh, yes, she did love this man. She had loved him for a long time now, all through the slow months of his wooing, accepting his devotion gladly. Whenever she needed him, he was there, he always would be there, steady as a rock. Once she had teased him and said he should have been christened Peter, not Harry, Peter, the rock.
And the other one, that thin tall man with despair in his eyes and a smile on his lips, alone in that room he called home with his pride, his tenacity. He would survive. Tom Silver would never submit to the indignity of unemployment which turned decent hard-working men into grey shadows as they trudged from one place to another, begging for work. His pride would sustain him, it had to. There was nothing she could do.
And the next time Harry kissed her, her fierce response was all he desired, more than he had hoped for, and whatever had been troubling her was gone. He knew his Libby. All sunshine one minute and shadows the next. Passion rising in him like a lick of flame, Harry wrapped his arms tightly round his bride-to-be as their kiss deepened.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN JULY SARAH BATT’S father died suddenly in the kitchen of the little cottage five miles from Westerley. Bending over to tie the laces of his boots, he ended his life as quietly as he had led it, his eyes wide open as if he too had been shocked by the suddenness of it all.
‘Mrs Peel says I must stay for as long as you need me, Mam.’ Sarah, eyes sunk into the hollows of her plump cheeks, stared down at her father’s peaceful face with the broad hands crossed over the white shroud. ‘The schools have broken up for the holidays, and Miss Libby and Miss Carrie will be able to see to her.’ She leaned farther forward towards the plain wooden coffin. ‘Who laid him out, Mam?’
Nellie Batt crossed herself devoutly before covering the waxen face. Physically an older version of her stout and capable daughter, with the same red hair and pale freckled skin, she was still in a state of shock. Only a small part of her accepted that her husband was dead, and she still expected him to come in from the fields, wiping the mud from his boots on the scraper at the door before going over to the slopstone to wash his hands.
‘Why, Mrs Warburton, who else? She allus does the laying out, you know that, our Sarah.’
‘Then she’s missed his fingernails.’ Sarah pointed. ‘See, Mam, they’re mucky. She might have cleaned them out with the tip of a knife or something. It looks bad.’
‘That’s soil, not muck.’ Mrs Batt’s flat voice rose in indignation. ‘Your dad allus had black nails, especially the thumbs, with pressing his cuttings down into his pots, and with filling his pipe.’ She glanced over to the rack of pipes on the wall. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do with them now; there’s two hardly used, but I’ve got rid of his walking stick and his best jacket and toursers. A tramp came knocking not an hour before you got here, and I gave them to him. I think he thowt it were Christmas Day when I handed them over.’ She turned away. ‘You’d best go up and say goodnight to Patrick. He said he would stop awake till you came, an’ knowing him he’ll be lying there waiting for you. He’s going to miss his grandpa, that child is,’ she added, making no reference to her own feelings, which Sarah guessed were as cold and numb as her husband’s still body.
Wiping her eyes, Sarah climbed the narrow twisting staircase leading up from the living room, then turning right at the top she went into the back bedroom and saw her son sitting bolt upright in bed staring at the door.
Patrick Batt, the living proof of Sarah’s disgrace, was eight years old, and looked two years older. Tall for his age, he was a beautiful boy with hair as yellow as buttercups, the exact colour of Ettie Peel’s as a child. His blue eyes slanted upwards at the corners and were set over a high-bridged nose. The Peel nose, Sarah thought now, struck forcibly with the uncanny resemblance of her son to his father, Willie Peel. Willie Peel, who had crept up the back stairs at Westerley and seduced her, lying in her arms and sobbing away his terror at the thought of having to go back to the hellhole that was France in that last year of the war.
Now it was his son’s turn to shed tears of anguish in Sarah’s arms. Over his bowed head she cursed the fate that had moulded him into such an exact copy, and even in her own sorrow she vowed that never, never would the Peel family find out the truth.
‘Grandpa is with Jesus and Mary,’ she soothed. ‘Walking in a lovely garden where the sun always shines, and roses are in bloom in winter. His bad leg will never hurt him again. Nothing will hurt him. Jesus will see to that.’
‘An’ I will see to Grandma.’ Patrick raised a small stricken face, the drama of the situation thickening his young voice with resolution. ‘I made her a pot of cocoa and cut a slice of bread an’ put jam on it, an’ I can chop wood . . . and things,’ he finished. ‘Will Grandpa really have gone to heaven without making his confession?’
‘Your grandpa had nothing to confess, love’ Sarah said firmly. ‘He never said a wrong word, not in the whole of his life. He was the kindest, best man that ever breathed. Jesus will be glad to have him up there, I can promise you that.’
Then, as her tears rolled down her cheeks into the thatch of thick golden hair, she closed her eyes and sent up a private prayer of gratitude for the father who had pulled her close into his arms on the day she had arrived home, bringing trouble to their doorstep, and had promised her that her coming baby would be brought up to hold his head high.
When Patrick was six years old, astounding the teacher at the village school by his ability to read and write, she was back at Westerley, lavishing care and devotion on Ettie Peel.
‘If they were to find out, they would claim him,’ her father had said quietly one day, the pipe in his
hand smoked out, his eyes suddenly bleak. ‘Illegitimate or not, they would want him, not having a son of their own. Would be only natural.’
‘Over my dead body!’ his wife declared, rocking her chair so violently that it was in danger of tipping over. ‘Why don’t you come home, Sarah, and break with the Peels for good? Tongues would soon stop wagging here, and our backs are broad enough to stand it, anyroad. You could get a job in one of the big houses and the Peels would be out of our lives for good.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘They will never be out of my life, Mam even if I never saw them again. Patrick is his father born again, and being born on the very day his father was killed, he is Willie Peel born again, can’t you see?’
In their religious superstition her parents did see at once, but what they could never understand was their daughter’s obstinacy in wanting to remain at Westerley. It was no use trying to make them realize that Sarah’s devotion to her mistress was the selfless love of a daughter-in-law, the protective caring for a woman whose grandson she now held in her arms, trying to comfort his childish grief.
‘Lie down and try to get to sleep.’ She tucked the covers up to his chin. ‘We have to be very brave for Grandma’s sake, an’ I know you will look to her, love. I’m going downstairs now to talk to her, and tell her all the things she likes to hear about Miss Libby and Miss Carrie, to take her mind off. That’s what she needs, her mind taking off.’ She kissed the flushed cheek, and felt herself jerked forward as two thin arms came from beneath the flannelette sheet and gripped her tightly.
‘Are they really like two peas in a pod?’ Patrick was stalling for time, willing her to stay. Sarah sat down on the bed and nodded, telling the tale he never tired of hearing.
‘It’s like one person, except that there’s two. If they have their backs turned there’s no difference, and even when they’re both looking at you it’s hard to tell. Same noses, mouths, eyes and hair, and most of the time they dress alike because they like nothing better than foxing folks, especially Miss Libby.’ Sarah put out a hand and gently closed her son’s eyes, seeing as she did so Mrs Warburton from the end house doing the same for her father when she was called to do the laying out. She bit her lip and fought back the threat of tears. ‘Miss Libby is noisier than Miss Carrie. Always wanting her own way, and acting like a baby sometimes instead of a grown lady. An’ worrying her mother with always arguing with her father; not a bit like Miss Carrie, who’s all for a quiet life.’
‘Miss Carrie’s your favourite.’ Patrick’s voice slurred on the edge of sleep.
Sarah stood up carefully, then began to back away. ‘Yes, she is that. An’ you know why? Because Miss Libby’s always ferreting her nose into things that don’t concern her, that’s why.’
‘An’ Mr Peel?’ The voice was whisper-soft now.
‘Like a bull. A big, black, roaring bull. Put him in a field an’ you wouldn’t tell the difference.’
Sarah closed the door, letting the latch drop quietly into place. Then, with every stair creaking under her ample weight, she went downstairs to her mother, who was waiting for her, staring into the fire.
‘Without a hand stretched out to me when life is too unbearable for me to carry on, I will die. Without you I will die.’
Mungo McDermot had done the unforgivable and telephoned Carrie at Westerley, throwing her into a blind panic, telling her that he would wait at the summer house all day for her to come to him. ‘And every day until you do,’ he had finished, his voice hoarse with anguish.
‘I can only stay for ten minutes,’ Carrie told him, wrinkling her nose at the damp earthy smell in the little shuttered meeting place, bewildered at her claustrophobic reaction and the unresponsive stiffening of her body as Mungo held her close.
‘Beatrice is always like this in the school holidays. She cannot abide me about the house.’ He looked thinner than ever, all eyes, with a nervous tic throbbing at the side of his cheek. ‘I interrupt her routine, she says.’
When his hand strayed to the loop-button fastening of Carrie’s thin summer dress, she jerked away, then gripped his hand tightly to prevent it from straying further. At what moment, she asked herself, had she stopped loving him and seen him as he really was? A weak man who would have taken her virginity, maybe got her with child, with no intention of ever leaving his wife – just to gratify his own desires. The puritanical phrases milled round in her brain, as years of submission to a domineering father, combined with religious beliefs and a girlish naïvity towards the facts of life, rose to the surface and killed her infatuation stone dead.
‘I don’t believe you can’t get out to meet me,’ Mungo was muttering, his head bent, the thin spot on the crown of his head filling Carrie not with tenderness as before but with distaste.
She was very dignified that July morning, filled with pity as she wondered how she could tell him that she no longer loved him, that somehow love had died, forcing her to see him as he really was.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said softly, trying to spare him. ‘We are a close family. We don’t, my sister and I, just leave the house without saying where we are going. If I said I was going for a walk or a bicycle ride it would be more than likely that Libby would say she would come with me, and besides, Sarah, who looks after Mother, has gone home for a while because her father has died.’
Sarah, this new, clear-headed Carrie now thought, who once gave in to a man like you and even now, eight years later, is too filled with shame to want to talk about her illegitimate son.
‘You must not! You must never touch me like that again!’ Carrie forgot to be kind as Mungo’s open-mouthed kiss descended, covering what seemed to be the whole bottom half of her face and filling her with nausea. Jerking away, she stood up, pulling her dress down and fastening the top buttons with shaking fingers. ‘It’s wrong! I’m not like that. I thought I was, but I’m not. You wouldn’t do that if you had any respect for me.’
‘You don’t love me,’ Mungo stared up at her, his mouth working convulsively. ‘You led me on, and now you think you can cast me aside . . .’ He waved a limp wrist to encompass the gloomy interior of the summer house. ‘You have been the one bright star in my apology for a life, and now you tell me I mustn’t touch you. Oh, God . . .’ He dropped his face into his hands. Shaking with hard sobs he rocked himself backwards and forwards, moaning, whimpering, saying her name over and over again. ‘Carrie, Carrie, oh, Carrie, my own sweet love.’
She had never seen a man cry before. She had seen her father incoherent with rage, heard his voice bellow as his face contorted with anger, and she had shrunk from the sight. But nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. Mungo’s lack of control shocked her so that all she could do was stand there and watch him disintegrate from a man into a pitiable object devoid of dignity and self-respect.
And she had done this to him.
‘If you leave me,’ he was saying now, the words ragged and torn with anguish, ‘if you leave me, then I will kill myself. I will do away with myself, I swear.’
Carrie felt the sweat break out all over her body, felt it run down her sides and stand in cold beads on her forehead. With one part of her she was kneeling down by his side, comforting, wiping his tears away, soothing, promising, but with the other part – the part that was in control – she was watching him with the aloofness of a bystander.
‘You will not kill youself, Mungo.’ Her calm voice was the one she used to tick off a naughty child at school. ‘People who threaten to do that never do. You have your boy to think about. He needs you more than any normal boy, and your wife . . .’ she made herself go on, ‘she needs you too, for support . . .’ Her voice tailed away. How hypocrictical can you be, Carrie Peel? Never once, in all the time of your loving, did you give a thought to his wife and her needs. She backed towards the door. ‘I’m going now, Mungo. I’m sorry . . .’ Pull yourself together, she wanted to say, but that would have been too cruel. ‘When you think about it calmly you will know there was never an
y future for us. Mungo . . . no!’
With a sudden movement he pulled her to him. Through the thin material of her dress she felt his body, every hard inch of it, pressing against her, devouring her with its closeness. One hand squeezed her breast, whilst the other held the back of her head, his teeth sharp against her tightly clenched mouth, his tongue probing, daring with insistence.
With all his strength he was straining and writhing, forcing her body to meet his demands and Carrie realized that to fight back would only inflame him the more. She went limp in his arms – not stiff, just totally unresponsive, some inborn instinct telling her this was the only way.
When he pushed her from him she fell painfully on to the rotting floorboards, hurting her knee, embarrassed almost to the point of faintness. Staggering to her feet, she opened the door and escaped into the warm sunshine. She was shaking as if with a violent fever, but she forced her trembling legs to obey and tottered towards the hole in the hedge and out on to the main road.
‘Carrie! Come back! Don’t leave me! Carrie . . . Carrie . . . Carrie . . .’ Mungo’s voice called out to her.
With head bent and taking small slow steps, Carrie set off for home, her knee throbbing and her heart pounding. If she could get into the house without anyone seeing her; if she could lock herself into the big bathroom and sink into a tub of hot water, then maybe she could wash away the memory of the morning. She shuddered as she thought of what might have happened. But now that it was all over she could tell Libby how foolish she had been, and some day they would laugh about it together, with their arms round each other, stifling their giggles as they had done for as long as she could remember. Libby, the sensible one, who would never have got herself into a mess like this. Libby the strong one. ‘Oh, Libby . . .’ Carrie muttered, trudging on, near to home now, to her other self who would listen and understand . . .