by Marie Joseph
When he began to cry she felt the pity drain out of her, leaving her mind crystal clear. Her sympathy wilted away, so that she had a sudden desire to get up and go, leaving him to wallow in his grief. She asked herself how she had ever imagined she loved this man. How could she have loved him, and dreamed of him every waking moment? Ached for his touch, and felt a day wasted when they had not been together? Run out to meet him, climbing through the hedge all those warm summer days to lie with him in this musty place. Lied to Libby . . .
‘Libby and Harry are waiting for me outside on the road in the car.’ She stood up. ‘They went to your house tonight and saw – saw your wife.’ She fought down a desire to slap him as he moaned like a wounded animal. ‘Oh, you needen’t worry, they didn’t say anything. They were only trying to warn you.’ She opened the door slightly, letting in the damp night air. ‘It’s going to be foggy, Mungo. If you come now I’ll ask Harry to run you home. We can drop you at the end of your street.’
‘I’m not going.’ The first words he spoke sounded thick in his smoke-rasped throat. ‘I’m never going back there, ever!’
Carrie was achingly tired. It had been, she was sure, the worst day of her whole life, and now she could take no more. ‘If you don’t get up and come with me, I’ll go and fetch Harry. He’s big and strong, and his evening has been ruined already through my fault and yours. He’s also a very patient man, but he’s a doctor and I know he will never leave you sitting there, rotting like the leaves.’ She kicked out with her foot. ‘You’ll catch pneumonia if you stay here all night; you must be frozen stiff now, so are you coming of your own free will or shall I go and fetch Harry?’
Carrie waited as he stumbled past her out into the darkness, through the gap in the hedge and over to the waiting car.
‘Will you take him home, Harry?’ Carrie made the request humbly, only to step back in surprise as Harry leaned over the back of his seat to open the rear door.
‘Is he ill?’ It was the doctor in him speaking now. ‘Unable to walk?’
Carrie turned to where Mungo cowered against the hedge, lighting yet another cigarette, the flame from the match trembling in his shaking hand.
‘No he’s not ill. Just very frightened,’ she said slowly.
‘Then get in.’ Harry turned back again. ‘He can walk. I’m damned if I’ll take him home. He’s not a naughty schoolboy. Anyway, I’ve had enough. I need a drink.’
‘Harry is right.’ Libby’s voice rang with pride at the unexpected limits to her fiancé’s benevolence. ‘Enough is enough.’
As they drove away, Carrie, rubbing at the window and peering out into the darkness, saw Mungo take his first stumbling steps in the direction of the town. A faint lingering pity welling up inside her died, leaving in it’s place a healing sense of relief, and the comforting knowledge that from now on the man called Mungo McDermot would in time be no more than an unpleasant memory.
From now on, the forgetting could begin.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘ONE THOUSAND FOUR hundred looms stopped mainly as a result of the strike; valuable orders lost while our continental rivals collected the orders. We taught them to weave, and now the foreign buggers are taking our trade!’
Bleary-eyed, Oliver Peel looked up from his desk and waved the tackler Jimmy Earnshaw away with a dismissive gesture.
But the little man stood his ground. ‘That faulty loom’s still banging up, maister. The weft’s not leaving the shuttle right. I can stop on and feckle it if you want me to.’
Oliver knew the worth of Jimmy Earnshaw. The small man with the bushy moustache and deeply lined face had a hundred and fifty looms in his charge. He was better than a qualified engineer at improvising with a weight or a wedge when the tension of a machine needed keeping up. He also knew that Jimmy had the sensitive feel necessary to maintain the correct delivery of the cloth, and without him the weavers would be all at sea. But at that moment a banging loom seemed of little importance.
‘Get on home, Jimmy,’ he said, keeping his right hand on the whisky bottle in the half-open drawer of his desk. ‘It’ll keep till morning.’
The little man chewed hard on the plug of tobacco wedged in the side of his mouth, and turned reluctantly to go. He didn’t hold much cop for the man slumped behind the big desk, but there were times, and this was one, when he felt heart sorry for him. Oliver Peel looked dreadful, all red-necked and bloated, with his eyes sunk deep into pads of swollen flesh. Aye, he were a sick man if ever there were one; it would be a hard man what couldn’t feel pity.
‘Goodnight then, maister.’ The tackler opened the door, and turned, adjusting his soiled mercerized cotton scarf. ‘It’s a terrible night out yon.’
‘Goodnight, Jimmy.’ Oliver took the bottle out of the drawer and tipped it into the glass hidden behind the files on his desk. It had taken him three days to find out the address of the man who had brought shame and humiliation to his house, and now he was ready for revenge.
The whisky bottle was empty when he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. He took his bowler hat and thick melton overcoat from the stand in the corner, and putting the hat on first struggled awkwardly into the heavy overcoat. Normally his drinking did not begin in earnest until he had eaten his evening meal and retired to the billiard room with his accounts. Now the drink was inflaming his empty stomach and firing his muddled brain. He turned out the light and walked unsteadily to the door, remembering to lock it behind him before dropping the keys into his pocket.
Mr Crankshaw, the mill manager, had left at the same time as the weavers streaming out into the mill yard when the hooter blew. Curling his lip at the man’s uncluttered desk, Oliver walked through the outer office and into the yard. For a moment it was as though he was blinded. He swayed, stretched out a hand and touched a cold damp wall. Then, as he shook his massive head from side to side like a wounded animal trying to clear its vision, he saw dimly in front of him the outline of the mill gates.
Some warning told him that tonight was not the night; that to take the short cut along the canal bank to the street where Mungo McDermot lived was foolhardy in the extreme. But the whisky urged him on. Lurching in a reeling walk, he turned down the short street and made his perilous way down the stone steps leading to the murky waters of the canal.
It was a stretch of rough bank often used by colliers as a training ground for their whippets, where boys dangled twine in a vain attempt at fishing, carrying their pathetic catches home in glass jamjars tied with string. Certainly not the place to be on a dark night, with fog swirling up from the dirty water, concealing the dusty grass verge and merging it with the uneven path. Two hundred yards, that was all, before Oliver came to the steps leading to the house whose number was burned into his brain.
He had no clear idea in his mind as to what he was actually going to do to the apology of a man who had, so his informant had told him, sat out the war on his backside. Oliver groaned aloud. Willie had given his life for his country – that bright shining young life holding such promise. But of one thing Oliver was sure; Mungo McDermot wasn’t going to get away with it. He, Oliver Peel, would see to it that he never worked again, even if he personally had to confront every bloody board of governors to blacken a character that already stank to high heaven.
Carrie – well, she was a woman, and could always find plenty to do around the house. He had never held with his daughters working, anyway. Women should stop at home where they belonged – where God intended them to be. Besides, with Libby gone, her sister would be a comfort for her mother.
Mumbling to himself, Oliver caught his foot on a loose stone, lost his balance and staggered to the right, one arm flailing to save himself. The stunted grass bordering the canal was slippery, and as he fought to regain his balance his feet slid from under him. The splash his heavy body made as he fell into the water seemed to be swallowed up by the fog which closed round him, and as he sank the evil-smelling water rushed into his open mouth, choking him.
&nbs
p; The silk-lined heavy overcoat soaked up the water like a sponge, dragging him down again as he surfaced. He opened his mouth to shout for help, flung out an arm to grasp the stunted grass at the side of the bank, then sank back into the water.
His bowler hat, its sleekness polished by Carrie that morning, floated away like the hump of a wet black seal. The water was in his ears, his mouth, filling his lungs as his frantic struggling took him further away from the bank into the middle of the fog-shrouded canal. Kicking out he tried to get rid of his shoes, but sodden with water they only helped to drag him down again.
The realization that he was dying penetrated his drink-fuddled brain, and as he choked and struggled the name screaming through his head was that of his son.
‘Willie! Willie!’
Then the dark waters closed over him for the last time.
When the fog lifted early the next morning, wafted away by a cold wind, they found him, every tissue in his massive body sodden with water. When Harry identified him in the mortuary he turned his head away and ordered that the coffin be immediately sealed. When Libby and Carrie, stunned and disbelieving, stood in the newly opened Chapel of Rest they saw no more than a plain oak coffin surrounded by high-banked chrysanthemums behind an alcove lined with purple velvet curtains.
Carrie was weeping silently, but Libby, dry-eyed, stared at the box which held the remains of the man she had tried in vain to love and had finally hated.
‘It’s my fault.’ Carrie repeated the words she had been saying ever since the police had called to report the finding of the body. ‘He was going to find Mungo,’ she had wailed. ‘That’s the only reason he was where he was, and now I have to live with that for the rest of my life.’
‘He was drunk,’ Libby said. ‘He could have stepped out in the road under the wheels of a car. It was the drink killed him, so stop it! Carrie! I won’t hear you torturing yourself with remorse. Our father was sick in his mine, and if he had been on his way to find Mungo, who knows what might have happened?’ She turned to Harry for reassurance. ‘If he hadn’t been drinking he could have got out of the canal, and if he had found Mungo he might have killed him.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Better to have drowned than have committed a murder.’
With his arms round both girls, Harry led them out of the darkened alcove, past the curtained partitions and down the steps, nodding to the undertaker who watched them go with clasped hands and a suitably doleful expression.
‘We should have had him brought back to the house. It seems dreadful leaving him there all alone.’ Carrie got into the back of the car and buried her face in her hands.
Libby, with two high spots of colour burning on her cheekbones, turned round from the passenger seat.
‘And have Mother upset more than she is already? With him lying there in the billiard room with a lily in his hand, and Mother lying upstairs in bed having a heart attack at the thought of it? Father is dead, Carrie. There is nothing you can say or do that will bring him back again. He’s dead, and Mother is alive. She’s the one we have to be thinking about. I am right, aren’t I, Harry?’
‘You never loved him.’ Carrie’s voice from the back seat was no more than a whisper, but on hearing it Libby whipped round again.
‘Did you love him, Carrie?’ Her voice rose. ‘Did any one of us love him, if the truth were told?’ She beat with a clenched hand on the back of the seat. ‘Father was impossible to love and dying hasn’t suddenly changed him into a plaster saint. So stop being a hypocrite, Carrie, because that’s what you are!’
Harry, driving with his usual caution, raised both eyebrows as he decided to let them get on with it. It was an uncanny experience listening to the sisters quarrelling. It was as though Libby was talking to her own conscience and it was answering back through Carrie.
‘You’re so hard!’ Carrie was moaning through her sobs. ‘You’ll be telling me next you’re glad he’s dead!’
‘I am not glad he’s dead.’ Libby, the voice of reason, spoke again. ‘But I can’t feel anything. I can’t at this moment think of one kind thing he ever did or one kind word he said. I wish I could, but I can’t.’
‘He was our father . . .’
‘Oh yes, he was our father. He got Mother pregnant, then when there were two of us and girls at that he turned away from Mother and from us, to Willie.’ Libby’s head drooped. ‘It was Willie, always Willie . . .’
‘Do you think he’ll be with Willie now?’ Carrie’s voice was calmer and through the driving mirror Harry could see her dabbing at her eyes with a screwed-up handkerchief. Silently he willed Libby to say what her sister wanted to hear, then gave a resigned sigh when the answer came.
‘I doubt it. Unless Willie went straight down to hell. Because that’s where Father will be, make no mistake about that.’
So why, Harry asked himself as he stopped the car outside the big house with every one of its windows curtained out of respect, why in the name of all that made sense was it Libby who with her sister’s arm round her, was crying her eyes out as they went up the steps together?
‘The wedding must go on. Exactly as planned.’
Ettie Peel, dressed in the morning for once, was sitting in the high-winged chair by the fire, the day before the funeral. Harry stared at her as if he doubted the evidence of his own eyes. It couldn’t be, and yet the small, timid woman seemed to have grown physically since hearing the news of her husband’s death. Gone was the hang-dog expression and the nervous habit she had of rolling finger and thumb together. It was as though with the dominance of Oliver’s presence removed from the house she had come into her own, found that she could make decisions, and with the discovery grown in stature. For hours she had been closeted in the billiard room with Mr Crankshaw, the mill manager, listening, accepting advice, and agreeing that for the time being the mill would carry on as before.
‘We owe it to the weavers,’ she had said. ‘You must engage an under-manager, Mr Crankshaw. That will be possible, I suppose?’
Then, assured that with the recent closure of two mills in the town there was likely to be a queue for the position, Ettie had nodded, satisfied, and thanked the bewildered little man for his cooperation.
Harry, entering the house as Oliver’s mill manager was leaving, had thought that he too had grown in stature, running down the steps and heading in the direction of town like a man who had just had a purpose in life handed to him on a plate.
‘You can trust me, Mrs Peel,’ Mr Crankshaw had said. ‘I will try and see you don’t have to worry. I promise you that.’
But Ettie looked far from worried as she talked about the wedding, now only four weeks away.
‘People will talk,’ she said, ‘but let them. Your parents had planned to move to their retirement bungalow before Christmas, and your new assistant starts the first week in January, Harry, so if we postpone the wedding there are going to be a lot of people with their plans upset. And besides, the concept of a whole year of mourning is going out of fashion. We saw enough of that with the old Queen.’ She nodded at her two daughters sitting side by side on the chesterfield. ‘I will wear black, of course, perhaps with a touch of white at the throat, but you must wear the outfits you had planned to wear.’ A suspicion of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘You are carrying lilies, Libby, and your dress is mauve georgette, Carrie, so the niceties are being adhered to, in a way.’
‘That is very noble of you, Mrs Peel.’ Harry was ashamed of his overwhelming relief. Not even to himself had he admitted his despair at the thought of the postponement of the wedding. He glanced over to where Libby sat, staring into the fire as if they were discussing a matter which had nothing to do with her. A far from imaginative man, he had wakened in the night a lot lately from a dream where he waited at the altar in vain for his bride to walk towards him. Once he had gone through the whole of the wedding ceremony only to lift the veil from his wife’s face and see that it was Carrie smiling up at him. Then turning round in horror he had seen Libby in a
bridesmaid’s dress laughing at him, tossing her head back and laughing, with all the astonished guests in their pews gazing at them in open-mouthed dismay.
‘I don’t know what we would do without you, Harry.’ Ettie groped for a handkerchief and dabbed at her dry eyes. ‘We’re a pretty helpless lot without a man. You think everything is in order for tomorrow? I hope we haven’t left anybody out, but poor Oliver, he hadn’t many friends . . .’ She sighed. ‘Even the collection at the mill for a wreath was pitifully small. I suspect Mr Crankshaw put most of it in himself. I would have liked to have thought that the weavers were saddened by Oliver’s passing. It would have been nice to have seen some of them walking behind the hearse . . . As it is, there will only be three cars.’
Libby opened her mouth to say something, only to be gently kicked into silence by a sideways movement of Carrie’s foot.
‘It will soon be over, Mother.’ Carrie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘We are the only ones who matter really. Father never gave a damn about what other people thought about him, and if he knows, I don’t suppose he’s caring now.’
‘I just wish he could have died in his own bed.’ Etties next sentence caused an amused exchange of glances between Libby and her fiancé. ‘It would have made the whole thing more decent somehow.’
Oliver Peel was buried in the windswept cemetery on the very day the coal owners’ terms were agreed in Lancashire.
‘How Father would have gloried in the miners’ defeat.’ Libby, ready before Carrie, walked without knocking into her sister’s bedroom. ‘But I’m not sure it is defeat. The trade unions will go from strength to strength now, and a lot of the pits will go bankrupt. Nothing will ever be the same.’
Carrie, pulling on a pair of black kid gloves, widened her eyes in protest. ‘How can you talk politics at a time like this? Sometimes I think you have no feelings.’
Libby gave a twitch to the back pleat in her twin’s coat. It’s because I have feelings that I worry, can’t you see? All that suffering and all that hunger, all for nothing. I’m not sure what we should be mourning today, Carrie. Our father, who if he were still alive would be storming up the stairs waving the newspaper and shouting that the coal owners will have the whip hand from now on, or for the whole futile army of tired and defeated men going back for less than they were getting before. I’m sorry, but it’s all mixed up in my head, and I can’t decide who or what to cry for. Does that make sense?’