by Marie Joseph
The man in the trilby hat, small ferret eyes missing nothing, mumbled that he would walk up to the Town Hall and wait there. Tom dismissed him with a nod, while Libby took no notice of his going at all.
‘Libby Peel.’ Tom looked down at her, at the flushed cheeks, at the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the soft blue wool of her high-necked dress. ‘Come on, we’ll walk a bit. It’s too cold to stand here.’ Taking her by the elbow, he turned her round and guided her firmly up the side street, round the corner and into the shelter of a wide shop doorway.
And Carrie, emerging from the café, flustered and disbelieving, stood on the wide pavement looking up and down, searching for her sister and seeing nothing. Eventually she went back up the stairs to the café and asked the pink overall behind the till that if her sister came looking for her, would she please say that she had gone home?
‘I’ll do that, love,’ the woman said, then moved to the end of the mahogany counter nearest the stairs, the better to see Carrie stumbling down, small and bewildered, put into the street again.
Tom Silver was no fool. Since his wife had died he had known two women, and both times he had been the one to break off the relationship, knowing that there was something in him that stopped him committing himself completely. And now here was this lovely, intelligent young woman, all pride forgotten, staring up at him with her feelings shining from her brown eyes and trembling to his touch.
‘What is it, Libby?’ he said gently, then immediately regretted the question as her face crumpled and the dark eyes swam with tears.
‘I don’t know.’ She twisted away from him. ‘I just wanted to know how you were.’ She shivered, and made no move to stop him as he began to button up her coat. ‘I’ve been thinking about you being out of work . . . and everything, and I couldn’t bear not knowing.’ She seemed unable to take her eyes from his mouth. ‘I wanted to come and see you, but it . . . I couldn’t.’
As he lifted her hand with the diamond ring on the third finger, she realized for the first time that she had lost a glove. Not that it mattered; not that anything mattered now that he was here and she was standing close to him, with the keen wind blowing discarded cigarette packets and scraps of paper round their ankles.
He smiled the smile that had haunted her for weeks. ‘Not married yet?’
She shook her head, seeing the way his collar was frayed at the edges and seemed too big for his thin neck. ‘The wedding’s in December, the day after the school breaks up for Christmas.’ Her voice faltered, and it was as though the next words said themselves. ‘But I can’t get married, Tom. It wouldn’t be right.’ She took a deep breath, then put out a hand as if to steady herself. ‘Can I see you again? Please?’
She was so small, so vulnerable, so obviously distressed. He stretched out a hand and lightly touched her cheek, then felt a sense of shock as immediately she held his hand in place against her cheek and turned her mouth into its palm.
‘Look, lass, we can’t talk here.’ He glanced over her shoulder, away down the street. ‘That man I was with – he has a small jobbing printer’s business out Hoghton way, and there might just be a chance he could be taking me on.’ He smiled. ‘It won’t be the same as my last job, nothing like, just wedding invitations and business cards, that kind of thing, but I can’t afford to miss the opportunity.’ He gripped both her arms so that he was holding her away from him. ‘But I see that it’s important that we talk, so when can I meet you?’ He took a step forward so that Libby was forced to take a step backwards. ‘See, there’s a meeting of the Labour Council, an open meeting on Monday, at seven o’clock. I know Margaret Bottomley will be there as a representative of the women’s section. Why don’t you come along with her, then when it’s over I’ll take you home and we can talk?’
He looked round as if searching for a better solution. ‘It’s the best I can think of right now. Will you do that?’ His voice was urgent even as he consoled. ‘And don’t do anything rash till then. Promise?’
He was embarrassed; Libby could sense his embarrassment, even as he tried to be kind. The enormity of what she had just said and done struck her like a sudden blow to the head. With her nerves jangling, she nodded wordlessly and held out her hand.
Solemnly, as if they had met unexpectedly and discussed nothing more important than the blustery weather for the time of year, they shook hands. ‘Promise?’ he said again. ‘We’ll have that talk first. Right?’
As they walked away in opposite directions, she turned her head and saw that he was running, loping along at the edge of the pavement, to rejoin the man who might offer him a job. She waited until he reached the corner by the Co-op emporium, hoping he would turn and wave, but he ran on, leaving her to make her way back to the café, then on to the tram stop and Westerley.
When Libby walked through the front door she saw Sarah Batt sitting on the high throne-like chair in the hall, being comforted by Carrie and her mother.
‘She just broke down.’ Ettie, still in her housecoat, with her faded hair hanging down her back, looked relieved to see Libby. ‘She’s been like this all week, not herself, and going in her room to cry, and I can’t get a word out of her.’
Carrie gave her sister a look which said that any explanations about what had happened down town could wait. ‘Down at the mill, fortunately,’ she said, interpreting Libby’s glance towards the door of the billiard room.
At once Libby knelt down on the dark red and blue patterned carpet, so that her eyes were on a level with Sarah’s pinkly puffed eyelids.
‘Right! Now you have to tell us what’s wrong, Sarah, because if you don’t then there’s nothing we can do to help, is there?’
Sarah’s plump face set into lines of obstinacy as she made to get up, only to feel Libby’s hands on her arms forcing her back. She sighed and gulped back a fresh flow of tears. It was no good. She knew Miss Libby of old, and Miss Libby wasn’t one for taking no for an answer.
‘It’s my boy.’ The words were dragged up from deep inside her. ‘When I went home last weekend he was coughing fit to burst.’ She picked up the corner of her afternoon apron and twisted it into a point. ‘He’s been off colour for weeks now, an’ nothing me mother gives him seems to help. ‘She’s been scooping the top of a turnip, filling it with honey, and putting brown paper under his vest, and even letting him sleep downstairs with the steam kettle going, but nothing helps.’ Her voice thickened with anxiety. ‘I’m that frightened. I should have had three brothers, but everyone of them were took off with the cough . . . with the consumption,’ she added, saying the dread word aloud. ‘An’ it runs in families. It does, an’ nobody can tell me no different, an’ me mother knows it as well. I could see the fear on her face.’
‘Nonsense!’ Libby spoke with firmness. ‘You must be talking about – what – thirty years ago? Doctors know more about it now. Besides, your boy lives out in the country with all that fresh air and milk and eggs and cream. It’s an environmental disease, Sarah. What your son’s got is more like a touch of bronchitis. Some of the kids in my class have that, but they’re sleeping four to a bed mostly, and not getting enough nourishment. It’s different in your son’s case.’
‘Why is it different?’ Sarah’s indignation dried her tears. ‘What do you thing me mam has to live on? There are no soup kitchens in the country like what there were down in the town when the strike was on. And with the fire going day and night, who’s to fetch and chop the wood now me father’s gone to his rest?’ Worry was making Sarah forget her place, and once started there was no stopping her. ‘I was warming a pat of butter at the fire on Sunday morning, and it slipped off the dish on to the coals, and you know what me mother did? She sat down and cried for ten minutes without stopping, an’ you talk about milk and eggs and cream! Oh, aye, and fresh air. Well, I grant you that’s cheap enough, but it’s the only thing what is.’
‘Oh dear,’ Ettie put a hand to her head and swayed, overcome as usual by any unpleasantness. ‘We never thought .
. . we had no idea.’
‘No. Your sort never have, do you?’ Sarah was burning her boats with a vengeance, all the pent-up anxiety releasing itself in a flood. ‘How do you think I feel when I see good meat on the table every day of the week an’ knowing there’s nothing I can do about it? Many’s the time I’ve wished I could just send even the gravy to them. Just the gravy, never mind a nice thick slice off the joint. I’d think God had stepped down from his heaven if I saw my lad sink his teeth into a meat butty. Do you know that?’
‘Take Mother upstairs.’ Libby spoke almost to herself, but at once Carrie obeyed.
‘Do this,’ her twin had said when they were children. ‘Do that,’ and at once Carrie had obeyed. ‘Do this,’ her father had said. ‘Do that,’ and again she had done what was asked of her. For wasn’t Libby the one looking into the mirror whilst she was merely the reflection? Even her first attempt at writing had come out back to front, only decipherable by holding it up to a looking glass. And now Libby was again taking charge. So, gently persuasive, Carrie led the distressed little woman up the wide stairs, leaving her sister to deal with a Sarah they knew little about, a Sarah with a life of her own far from the confines of Westerley.
‘Poor Sarah,’ Ettie raised a piteous face to her daughter. ‘We forget they have feelings, don’t we?’
‘Now what we are going to do,’ Libby was saying downstairs in the hall, ‘is this. I will get Doctor Harry to drive out and see your boy this evening.’ She stood up. ‘The doctor is very good with children. He will examine your son, and whatever is necessary will be done. You must go too,’ she added, ‘then if there is nothing to worry about Harry will drive you back here. If you are needed, then you must stay there. Mother will have to do without you for a while. It might even do her good. She relies on you far too much. I would come as well, but Carrie is going to an organ recital in King George’s Hall with a friend, so I will have to stay at home with Mother.’ She waved a hand impatiently. ‘It’s ridiculous that Mother won’t stay in the house alone, but there it is. I can’t think what she’s going to do when I get married and Carrie tries to lead a life of her own. Why some women allow themselves to become so helpless I don’t know.’
All the time Libby had been talking, arranging, organizing, Sarah’s mind had been whirling round and round like a moth caught in a gas lamp. The thought of seeing Patrick again without waiting for her next weekend off was an opportunity she could not bring herself to refuse. Then to have him examined by a clever doctor like Doctor Harry – and he must be clever when it cost folks a mint of money just to see him for a few mintutes – oh, dear Mother of God, how could she refuse? She twisted her apron into a harder knot. Libby’s doctor would know what to do. Sarah bit her lip so hard that a blood blister formed. And it would be all right because Doctor Harry had never seen Willie . . . he hadn’t been coming to the house when Willie was alive, so he would never put two and two together. Men weren’t like that, anyroad. But if Patrick died because she was too frightened to accept help – oh, dear sweet Jesus! She couldn’t lie awake, not one more night, imagining the worst. She was nigh out of her mind with worry; it was eating her away, and she could take no more.
‘Can you do that?’ Libby was saying into the telephone. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, Harry, but you must see . . . We were staying in tonight anyway. You can be there and back in two hours.’
Like a butterfly Libby had flown straight from one crisis to another, persuasive, sure of her fiancé’s cooperation. It was as though she had never met Tom Silver down the town, never trembled at his nearness and asked him to meet her again. First things had always come first with Libby. Besides, Harry was the rock she had clung to for a long time now, and it was unthinkable that he would let her down.
She raised her voice impatiently as he made objections. ‘This is something I’m asking you to do for me, Harry. For all of us.’
‘He’s coming.’ Libby replaced the receiver and turned to march into the kitchen with Sarah following like a devoted dog at her heels. ‘I’ll get a basket of things together whilst you go up and get your coat and hat. We’re lucky that it’s Saturday and the doctor doesn’t have an evening surgery. So things are working out already, aren’t they.
Then, infuriating Mrs Edwards in the kitchen by taking things off the pantry shelf without so much as a by your leave – the boiled ham that was for the Sunday tea and the eggs for the deep custard to go with the stewed damsons – Libby filled a basket to the brim. It was as if the episode of less than an hour ago had happened to another person altogether, a wild woman who had completely taken leave of her senses.
It was cold in the pantry with its stone floor and deep shelves. It smelled of apples, pickled onions and spices. Mrs Edwards watched in grim silence, arms folded across her one-piece bosom.
‘Sarah’s mother is ill,’ Libby told her. The lie came easily. Sarah’s secret was Sarah’s secret, and her silence about her son had been respected since long before Mrs Edward’s time. Libby walked briskly out of the kitchen, watched balefully by the disgruntled cook. Now she had to start again with tomorrow’s menus, and if they thought she was going to put herself out then they had another think coming. Oliver Peel was stingy enough with his money as it was. If he had to make do with cheese and onion pie for his Sunday tea instead of a nice thick slice of boiled ham, then he could like it or lump it. Mrs Edwards thumped the mixing bowl down on the table so that the spoons jumped into the air to fall back with a tinkling clatter.
‘A straightforward case of bronchitis,’ Harry said, coming back to Westerley exactly two hours later, ruddy-faced and cheerful. He jerked his head towards the door of the lounge. ‘Sarah has gone straight up to your mother. I think she feels a bit guilty now about all the fuss, but worry’s a funny thing. It grows like a fungus once you let it catch hold.’ He sat down on the chesterfield and patted the cushion by his side. ‘Come here, love, and let me look at you. Let me hold you, and touch skin that isn’t sweaty, and look into eyes that aren’t bloodshot . . . Oh, God, its been one hell of a week. Half my patients have flu, or think they’re going to have it, and my father is slowly passing some of his patients over to me. Not that it does my ego any good.’ He laughed his uninhibited laugh. ‘They take one look at me and ask straight off where my father is. You have to be at least fifty before some of them class you as a real doctor.’
Libby stayed exactly where she was. ‘What was he like, Sarah’s son? I’ve often wondered. She won’t talk about him, ever. She must have been genuinely worried to agree to you going out to see him. Is he like Sarah, all red hair and big teeth and a bit, well, you know, a bit slow?’
Harry shook his head, reached into his pocket for his pipe, held it out for permission, then started to fill it.
‘I was surprised. Really surprised. He’s a little corker, that lad.’ He puffed for a while and threw the spent match into the fire. ‘Bright as a button, with an intelligence far beyond his years. He more or less confided in me that both his grandma and his mother worry their guts out about him. He’d got hold of a Pears Cyclopaedia from somewhere and he was reading it when we got there, sitting up in bed and going through it alphabetically, reading it as if it were a book of fiction, and understanding most of it if I’m any judge.’
‘And his chest?’
‘Rattly, granted, but nothing a week in bed and warmth won’t cure.’ The pipe was going nicely now and Harry leaned back, a man at peace with the world. ‘Whippet breed definitely, not like Sarah and her mother with arms and thighs on them like a couple of lady blacksmiths.’
‘Then you went for nothing really?’
He shook his head. ‘I went for you love. For your sake, and that’s enough for me. Now come here, and let’s forget young Patrick Batt. Let’s talk about the wedding and decide where we’re going for our honeymoon, and what changes you’re going to make in the house, and important things like the kind of flowers you are going to have in your wedding bouquet.’
Libby
moved reluctantly to sit by him and he put his arms round her. When she stiffened in his grasp he rubbed his cheek against hers as if to force a sign of responsiveness from her. When he kissed her she clamped her mouth so tightly shut that he pushed her away to stare at her in bewilderment.
‘What’s the matter, love? Look, Libby, I’m too tired and old to play games. I’ve told you, it’s been one hell of a week.’
She twisted round to stare into the fire. ‘Harry – I’m so very, very sorry, but I can’t marry you. I know it’s a terrible thing to say now at this moment, but better now than later. I’m sorry.’
‘What did you say?’ Roughly he pulled her round, holding her so that her arms were pinioned. Then he kissed her roughly. ‘Do you know what you just said? Do you? As he felt her lack of response he drew back. ‘Stop play-acting, Libby! Stop it!’ The colour in his cheeks slowly drained away as he stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. ‘You mean it, don’t you? What brought this on?’ He made a move towards her, then as she shrank away his temper flared.
‘What is it now? Is it because you still want me to move my practice down into town and work a clinic for the under-privileged? Because we’ve been over that, Libby, over and over.’ His face darkened. ‘You can keep your Bolshie ideas after we’re married. You can go to your meetings, and you can wave a red flag as often as you like, but I won’t be intimidated. If I want to treat patients who pay me in a lump sum instead of sixpence a week to the doctor’s man, then that’s my affair. My father worked all his life to build that practice up, and I intend to carry on where he leaves off. You’ve got it all wrong, Libby. A new-born baby with a dislocated hip is just as pathetic as a baby bowed with rickets, and a child can die of diptheria without being half-starved into the bargain. Wake up, Libby! Stop setting yourself up as some sort of saviour, because it doesn’t suit you. Beneath all that idealistic talk you’re still you, knowing which side your bread’s buttered and accepting it. So come here, and never let me hear you say you won’t marry me ever again. If you leave me I’ll be just as bereft as if I was an out-of-work labourer in a flat cap standing on street corners. I bleed, too, Libby. Never forget that!’