by Marie Joseph
It was an intimate moment there in the car with the doors and windows closed, and the scent she was wearing made his senses reel. This Carrie Peel, with her quiet ways, gentle voice and dark eyes, was a dark horse if he was any judge of women. And since his wife’s desertion Roger Fish prided himself very much on being a judge of women.
‘There are times,’ he whispered unforgivably, ‘when my life is as dark as the lives of the ponies down my father’s mine.’ He thought Carrie swayed towards him; he could have sworn it – women always fell for a bit of the old sob stuff. With a swift movement he pulled her close to him and then, as he felt the scented warmth of her, his mouth found her soft lips.
As the kiss deepened and his hand slid down Carrie’s back to draw her even closer, he felt himself thrust away with a strength he would never have believed the small girl possessed. When he reached for her again, telling himself that all women played hard to get at first, the stinging slap to his right cheek made him reel back in astonishment. What he did not know, what he could have never have been expected to know, was that to Carrie Peel he was not, in that moment, a maudlin man who had had too much to drink, but a wild man with angry frustration, holding her captive against the wall of a basement cloakroom.
In the next moment Carrie had reached for the door handle, wrenched the door open and almost fallen out of the car, frantic in her desire to get away from him. As he sat there, dazed, a hand to his burning cheek, he saw her run wildly up the steps to the big front door, then disappear inside without a backward glance.
‘Well, bugger me!’ Roger sat there, leaning on the wheel for a moment, then pulling the door closed started the car and drove away down the drive, muttering to himself at the vagaries of women, and in particular of the girl who had been thrown into a blind panic by one harmless kiss.
He was on the main road, heading for home, when the sight of the silk purse on the seat beside him made him curse aloud again. There was no way he was going to turn back and knock at the door of the big house set at the end of the winding lane. He sighed, and took the turning leading to the doctor’s house. A quick explanation and a handing-in of the purse at the door, and he could be away. Back to Burnley and the housekeeper would be waiting up for him, her housecoat tantalizingly open and her willing body ready for his caresses.
He drew up at the front of Harry Brandwood’s house just in time to see Harry getting into his car and driving swiftly away, leaving Libby standing on the doorstep with her figure in its black dress etched against the light streaming from the hall.
‘Are you coming in?’ Libby took Carrie’s purse from him. ‘Harry has gone out on a case.’ She held the door invitingly open. ‘Another panic that could easily have waited until tomorrow; another case of the one who pays the piper calling the tune.’
There were two spots of bright colour high on her cheekbones. She was gloriously, beautifully angry, and Roger did not hesitate. He might have summed one of the sisters up wrongly, but this one, well, she was a completely different kettle of fish. Snatching the trilby hat from his bald head he followed her into the lounge and accepted the drink she offered him, telling himself that as rum goes went, this beat the best of them.
When, twenty minutes later, he staggered out once again to his car, a hand to a burning cheek – the left one this time – he was laughing silently, accepting the fact that he was too drunk to drive, then reminding himself that he had driven in a far worse condition than this.
‘God Almighty!’ he muttered as he clung to the wheel, his head spinning. ‘Two of them! Two identical faces, and two identical reactions. All in the space of half an hour. By the time he was well on the road to Burnley the two faces had merged and become one, and he was laughing uproariously, slapping the wheel with the flat of his hand, his high-pitched laugh filling the interior of the little car.
‘Roger Fish is not the man for Carrie!’ Libby was sitting up in bed when Harry came up the stairs, so tired that the normal ruddy colour of his face had faded to a patchy grey. ‘I never want to see him again. How you could have possibly thought he was her type I don’t know.’
Too tired to demand an explanation, Harry began to undress. ‘I thought the evening went off rather well,’ he said mildly, then went out and across the landing to wash his hands and clean his teeth. When he climbed into bed, a solid, comfortable figure in his striped pyjamas, with his hair brushed flat against his head and a clean handkerchief in the pocket of his jacket, Libby settled herself in his arms, laying her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin.
‘I wasn’t going to say anything yet, but I should have . . . is it too soon to think I might be having a baby?’
Harry’s thoughts as he sank into a sleep from which the telephone bell was to propel him out of bed and into his trousers at five o’clock the next morning were a mixture of pride and satisfaction. Now his Libby would have something more to occupy her mind than a jealous monitoring of the restricted time he was able to spend with her.
It was as well he could not see the expression on his beloved’s face as she stared up into the darkness, her palm still itching from the slap she had administered to Roger Fish’s leering face, a heavy depression settling on her as she realized that now she would be more a prisoner to the house than ever, that her craving for excitement and freedom was to be thwarted for a long, long time to come.
CHAPTER TEN
‘IT WILL BE a boy. I know it will be a boy. I order it to be a boy!’
It was the end of March before Libby told her mother about the coming baby, wanting to be, as she confided in Carrie, quite sure first.
Ettie’s heart was playing her up again now that she was realizing that even without Oliver’s brooding presence Westerley was still a house where the most frequent comings and goings were by the tradesmen to the back door.
Carrie seemed, to her mother’s eyes, to be drifting more obviously into spinsterhood with every passing month. Without her twin she was only half a person, a shadow, and since the dinner party in January Libby seemed to have abandoned the idea of finding a husband for her sister.
But a baby . . . well, that was what they all needed. Ettie smiled at Sarah Batt busy in the corner with her sewing. ‘We order a boy, don’t we Sarah? And more than that – I have a feeling he will be just like Willie.’ Her blue eyes grew dreamy. ‘The Lord works in a mysterious way, and somehow I know He is going to give me back my Willie in my grandson. I have never felt that Willie was really dead. I always felt that one day the door would open and he would walk in with his fair hair shining and his blue eyes teasing, the way they always did. And now I know. Libby is going to give him back to me, aren’t you, love?’
‘Mother!’ Libby exchanged a glance with Carrie. ‘That’s a fanciful notion. It could be a girl. There’s a fifty-fifty chance of it being a girl. You know that.’
‘No!’ Ettie rose from her chair in her excitement. ‘Sarah! Give me a length of cotton from the workbasket there. And Libby, give me your wedding ring.’
‘What on earth for?’ Libby, pleased at seeing her mother’s face crease into lines of animation, decided not to argue but to humour her. Holding up her left hand she slipped the heavy gold band from her third finger. ‘Now what?’
‘Lie down. Put your feet up on the chesterfield. Sarah thread the cotton through the ring. Now, hold it in your fingers over Miss Libby’s stomach. Like this, Sarah. No, don’t put any pressure on it.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘If it swings round and round then it will be a girl, but if it swings backwards and forwards, then it’s a boy.’
‘I don’t like to, Mrs Peel.’ Sarah, her round face troubled, held out the ring and the length of cotton. ‘I don’t think we are meant to tamper with fate like this. The Lord will send Miss Libby whatever he thinks fit, and I’d rather not . . . It’s wrong, that’s what it is. Wrong!’
Ettie’s face fell, but Libby, lying flat with her toes upturned, spoke sharply. ‘Sarah! Don’t be so silly! It’s only a game! C�
�mon now, this is even better that reading Old Moore’s Almanac. Let’s see if it really is Willie’s reincarnation I’ve got in here!’
‘I won’t do it!’ Flushing bright scarlet, her round eyes starting from her head, Sarah threw the ring from her. ‘You’ve no cause to speak like that, Miss Libby! You’re upsetting your mother. Just look at her. If she has an attack it will be all your fault!’
‘But it was Mother who began it.’ Bewildered, Libby sat up, and as she bent down to pick up the ring from the carpet she saw Sarah Batt’s feet in their sensible lace-up shoes scurry away. Then, as she raised her head, she saw the door bang closed behind the hurrying figure.
‘Now what have we said?’ Libby stared at the door, then sighed as she saw the way her mother lowered herself back into her chair, steadying herself on the arms, then dropping suddenly as if she had an arthritic hip. ‘What’s got into Sarah lately? I’m supposed to be the one who makes scenes and goes off in huffs. Pregnant women have a free licence to do that!’
‘She’s a Catholic,’ Ettie said sadly, as if that explained a lot, then looked hurt as her daughters burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps it was a silly thing to do. It’s just that I want it to be a boy so very much . . . so very, very much.’
‘I’ll do my best, Mother.’ Libby stood up and went over to the window. ‘By the time those green leaves have turned to brown you’ll know one way or the other.’
She turned round, snatching up her coat from the chair where she had thrown it when she came in, thrusting her arms into the sleeves in her old restless way. ‘Oh God! I’ll never have the patience to wait until then. I’m tired of being pregnant already. Harry’s quite disgusted with me because I haven’t even felt sick yet. Most of his patients go into a decline from the minute they conceive. Still, it’s early days yet. I may start eating coal and fancying beetroot with custard any day now!’
But at the end of a disappointing August, when rain fell almost daily from bleak skies, Libby was still disgustingly healthy and so bored she felt there were days when she could throw herself on the carpet and scream aloud.
Reading the local papers from cover to cover she saw that Tom Silver had been made a councillor. There was a photograph of him staring into the cameras with a dedicated expression in his dark eyes, and a report which said that for a new boy Mr Silver was already making his presence felt. On one occasion he had stood up and berated his fellow councillors for taking plants from the conservatory in the park for their own gardens. And on another occasion he had brought to the notice of the meeting the state of the market place when the stalls were taken down on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‘Hordes of ragged children scrambling about for cut oranges and bruised apples,’ he had said. ‘We know the high incidence of unemployment in this town, but must we revert to Dickensian times? Are our children so undernourished that they have to forage in overflowing dustbins?’
He had gone down personally, the report stated, and talked to the children, taking the names of some of them and visiting them in their houses. What he had seen had appalled him.
‘Houses so poorly furnished that there weren’t enough chairs to go round. Bugs in the walls, and bare flag floors. Mothers with nothing to give their children but great doorsteps of bread sprinkled with margarine and sugar, and everywhere the smell of poverty . . .’
Libby put the newspaper down and stared into the coal fire burning high in the wide tiled fireplace. It was as though Tom Silver was there in the room with her, talking, pointing with a thin finger, black hair falling forward over his forehead, reminding her that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, and always would be if something wasn’t done. He was reminding her of the children, the bright pupils who, having missed their chances of a grammar school education, were now thrown out of work by the closing of the mills, and forced to queue at the labour exchange. For what? Three shillings a week at the most,
Libby shivered. She had been in danger of forgetting all that.
She was like a big fat cow, waddling around, feet splayed, back arched, stomach sticking out. With characteristic dramatic honesty Libby berated herself. Complacent wasn’t the word. No, the word was unfeeling, uncaring. Her pregnancy had slipped by and in those long waiting months she had slipped quietly into the category of those who had, and to hell with those who had not.
She would write to Tom Silver. She would sink her pride, because after all she was a married woman now, and the humiliation of that September night when he had called her bluff was a thing of the past. She would write to him and congratulate him on speaking out, and more than that, she would pledge herself to join the fight after the birth of her baby.
Heavily she got up from the chair and went over to the writing table, but when she bent her head over the thick notepaper and wrote the date at the top in her flowing hand, the headache that had been threatening all day erupted into a thousand hammers beating her skull. Her throat ached and suddenly the room took on the dimensions of an overheated prison cell. Pushing the paper away, she walked flat-footed into the hall.
For Libby to think was to act, and within a few minutes she was outside, a long cardigan hanging loose over her smocklike summer dress, her head bare as she breathed deeply of the humid air blanketing the street like a shroud.
She had meant to walk down the park gates and wander up the Broad Walk towards the duck pond, her usual afternoon walk, but the main shopping centre of the town was only five minutes’ walk away and beyond that was the market place. Libby walked on, ignoring the stares of passers-by. With characteristic defiance she had made little attempt to disguise her condition, refusing to stay in during daylight hours, as was deemed to be right and proper by her contemporaries. To be pregnant was normal. To be large and ungainly was normal also, and if people wanted to stare, let them stare.
She plodded on, past the Town Hall and over the road to the market, where at the end of that Wednesday market day the stallholders were packing their goods away into crates before beginning the task of taking down the stalls. By now her head was throbbing and her face burning as if she had been sitting in the sun too long. She had brought no basket, no purse, and if she had done so she would have handed out the money to the children she saw diving underneath the stalls, waiting with hands outstretched for the display oranges cut into two pieces to show their juiciness.
Horrified, Libby watched the children, some of them wearing clogs and some boots several sizes too big for them. Waiflike children, with white faces and straggly hair. Dirty-legged, cheeky mites, more ragged than any she remembered teaching in her church school before she had married and forgotten how poor the poor could be.
The cobblestones seemed to be pushing their way up through her thin summer shoes with their pointed toes and bar-straps. Now Libby left the fruit and vegetable stalls to cross to the secondhand clothes stalls, with their hanging rows of musty-smelling coats and frocks, and their rows of shabby shoes and tangled piles of stockings.
‘Are you all right, love?’
Libby blinked as a woman dismantling a stall spoke kindly to her.
‘You look all in.’ She came round the front of the stall and touched Libby’s arm. ‘Don’t you think you’d better be getting home, love? It’s starting to rain, and from the look of that sky we’re in for a real wetting. Would you like to sit down for a bit? There’s a box behind here, and I think there might be a drop of tea left in the can.’ The woman turned to call out to her neighbour on the next stall. ‘This lass is all in, but I can’t get her to say nowt. I think she’s sickening for something. Her time’s not up yet, though. She hasn’t dropped. She’s carrying too high to be going into labour just yet awhile.’
Libby walked away, hearing them talking about her as if they were referring to someone else. She could not understand it. She had come down here to find Tom Silver. She hadn’t known it before, but it was quite clear now. What wasn’t clear was the fact that now there were stalls where she had thought to see an empty
market place, with Tom standing on a makeshift platform telling a mysteriously disappearing crowd that he was on their side.
‘That’s right love. Get back home.’ The woman’s voice spiralled after her as, stolidly placing one foot in front of the other, Libby forced herself to walk on. She was muddled, with the heat pricking all over her body. She welcomed the rain, she really welcomed it. In fact, she would lift her face and feel the cool drops wetting her skin.
‘It’s a long way to Westerley.’ She said that aloud, then smiled at the absurdity of it. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary.’ That was how it should go. Tipperary, not Westerley. She would laugh at such a silly mistake, if only her throat hadn’t closed up in that painful way.
She was trudging past the park gates when she remembered suddenly that she no longer lived at Westerley. That was good. Where she lived wasn’t so far as Westerley; where she lived was only a few turnings farther on. And when she got inside out of the rain Tom Silver would be there, setting a match to the fire and ordering her to take her stockings off. He would be bossy but kind, his thin face set into lines of mocking humour. He would give her a mug of tea, not a cup, because folks in the street where Tom Silver lived never drank from cups. Cups with fluted rims edged with gold were for the sort of woman she had become. The woman whose babies were put into treasure-cots with organdie drapings, not into an empty drawer lined with newspapers and old blankets.
The red-brick house with the surgery built on to the side was there, just a few more steps, and it was here she lived, and she was glad, because she could go no further. . . .
‘You have looked after scarlet fever patients before, nurse?’ Harry took the shabby Gladstone bag from the little woman and led the way upstairs. He failed to see the glint of indignation in Nurse Tomkin’s grey eyes behind the whirlpool lenses of her round spectacles.
‘Yes, doctor.’ The answer was mild and deferential, but what Nurse Tomkin was saying underneath her breath was that she had nursed more scarlet fever patients than what he’d had hot dinners. With her sixtieth birthday farther behind her than she was prepared to admit, Nurse Tomkin had done her training in a Manchester teaching hospital and been filled with righteous indignation when the powers-that-be had refused to accept her application to go to France during the war. Properly trained she might be, but she still believed that a hot bread poultice slapped on to a wheezy chest worked wonders. Aye, and a good suck at a whole bag of acid drops, with the spit shot into a bowl, was the only method guaranteed to cure bleeding of the gums. Scarlet fever! She had her remedies for that, too. She’d soon have it sweated out of this young doctor’s wife.