by Marie Joseph
Tom stood his ground. He felt completely out of place in a room like this, with its thick carpet and billowing satin eiderdown on the bed. There was a fire burning in the grate, and he wondered what this tiny woman would say if she knew that it was the first time he had ever seen a fire in a bedroom? Down his street babies were born in unheated bedrooms, put to sleep in drawers lined with newspaper and tatty blankets. There were chamber pots underneath the beds instead of a bathroom down the landing, candles set in saucers, and coats on the bed in the middle of winter when ice formed on the inside of the windows.
He cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Peel, I want to marry your Carrie.’ He found he was gripping the mahogany bed-end. ‘I know I might not seem much cop to you, but I have a job, I have a house, and I will cherish Carrie for the rest of my life.’ He raised his voice without meaning to. ‘As long as I’m there I won’t let the wind blow too hard on her, Mrs Peel. She will only have to ask, and if it’s in my power then I will give her whatever she wants. I’ll be faithful to her; when she’s sick then I’ll nurse her, and when she’s happy then I’ll be happy too. I haven’t known much joy in my life, Mrs Peel; I was left without mother or father when I was sixteen, but I managed somehow, fending for myself and serving my time to get myself a steady job. I’ve been married before, Mrs Peel, to a young lass who got blown to bits in an explosion at the munitions factory out Darwen way. I was in France at the time, at the front line, Mrs Peel – I didn’t even get home for the funeral. She was a nice young lass, my wife, and her mother and me, we liked each other a lot.’ He coughed. ‘I would like to think that you and me might get on fine, Mrs Peel. We have a lot in common, after all, you loving Carrie and me loving her as well. I would like it fine if you came to see us a lot. Not that our house would be anything like this, but you’d be right welcome, Mrs Peel.’
He took a necessary breath. ‘I know you can hear me, Mrs Peel, underneath that hankie, and I haven’t finished yet. Not by a long chalk. I want you to know that my politics come in a different colour from what yours do, and although I haven’t been to church for a long time, if I did go it would be Chapel where the prayers aren’t all set out in a book, but spoken from the heart, in the way I’m speaking to you. And another thing. When we’re married, Carrie and me, I’m not that proud that I won’t let her buy some of her own clothes, if that’s what she wants, but everything else, Mrs Peel, everything else, I provide. I promise you this – as God’s my judge, and oh aye, I believe in Him all right – I’ll make her a good husband, and what’s more I’ll look after you. You being Carrie’s mother makes you my responsibility as well. When Carrie’s babies come they won’t have a nurse to see to them, but they’ll be your grandchildren and if any of them take after you then I’ll be well satisfied. You’re a bonny woman, Mrs Peel.’ He came round the bed and gently lifted the handkerchief from Ettie’s face. ‘So you can come out from under there and stop that play-acting. All right then, Mrs Peel?’
The tablets administered by Harry were taking effect. Ettie felt drowsy and warm, and the earnest face bending over the bed seemed to have fuzzy features, and a smile that was lop-sided in its gentleness. Her eyelids were as heavy as if pennies had been laid on them, and when she spoke her voice came muffled on the very edge of sleep.
‘I heard you all right, Mr Silver,’ she said. ‘And what you said sounded like poetry. Do you know that?’ Her smile wavered. ‘Do you know how long it is since anyone told me I was a bonny woman?’ Her hand came up and Tom clasped it in his firm grasp. ‘My husband Wasn’t a man for pretty speeches . . .’ Her head moved from side to side slowly. ‘And though I’ll regret it in the morning when I wake up, I feel, right this minute, that you might be just the man Carrie needs.’ She tried to lift herself up on an elbow but fell back. ‘You’re a nice young man, Mr Silver. A very nice young man, and kind. And do you know something?’ The drug was making her as maudlin as if she had drunk half a bottle of whisky, and realizing this, Tom smiled.
‘Yes, Mrs. Peel?’
‘I think you and I might be friends some day . . . I do. I really do. But I wish you’d have your hair trimmed a bit. You can talk like a poet, but you don’t have to look like one. Do you, Mr Silver?’
‘She was flirting with you!’ Carrie, coming into the room and overhearing the last few words, turned to Tom in amazement as they went back down the wide staircase together. ‘It’s no wonder women fall in love with you.’ When they were back in the sitting room, she reached up and pulled his face down to hers, holding him still between the palms of her hands. ‘Oh, Tom. If you and Mother are going to get on so well, why don’t you come and live at Westerley after we’re married? She’ll be so lonely when I’m gone, and the house is so big. We wouldn’t be in each other’s pockets all the time.’
‘You don’t mean that?’ Gently Tom disengaged her hands and put her from him. ‘You said that without thinking, didn’t you?’
‘No, I mean it.’ Carrie’s face was flushed. ‘When I thought that you and Mother were going to be – well, not exactly seeing eye to eye, there was no question of it. But now . . . oh, Tom, think what it would mean to Mother having a man about the house, and think what it would mean to me to be able to keep an eye on her all the time. She’ll take to her bed permanently when she’s all alone. She will I know her, remember.’
‘Carrie!’ Walking over to the fire, Tom pushed a piece of coal into position with his shoe. ‘How old is your mother, love?’
‘What has that got to do with it?’
‘How old is she?’
‘Fifty-nine. No, fifty-eight. She’ll be fifty-nine in September. She was thiry-four when we – Libby and I were born. Why?’
‘Then she isn’t an old woman. Not by a long chalk.’ Tom put out a hand to draw Carrie to him, but at the look in her eyes he drew it back.
‘She’s a sick woman, Tom.’ Indignation flushed Carrie’s face to pink. ‘She’s been an invalid ever since I can remember. It was having us – twins – and then later Willie being killed. It’s understandable.’
Rubbish!’ Tom kicked at the coals again. ‘I know women who lost their sons in the war and kept straight on standing at their looms. I know women who have babies, one after the other, and still go out scrubbing right to the moment of birth. There’s nothing wrong with your mother but what goes on in her mind, and that’s unhappiness. She wants to be needed, love. Can’t you see?’
‘And me asking you to live here doesn’t mean I’m thinking about her?’ Carrie stood erect, both hands clenched by her sides. ‘Isn’t that caring?’
‘Caring for someone isn’t the same as letting them think you need them.’ He dismissed her last words with a wave of his hand. ‘That mother of yours hasn’t been needed for a long long time. Not by your father, nor by you and Libby. It’s staring at you from her face, love. The blank loneliness of never being needed. I know!’
‘You seem to know a lot about her in a short time.’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’
‘And you won’t even consider coming to live here?’
‘Not for a minute.’ He grinned, then saw at once the grin was a mistake. ‘Carrie, love. Can you see me being waited on by a maid in a pinny? Can you see me letting that woman who let me in call me “sir”? If she came in now to see to the fire I’d snatch the coal shovel from her. I’d be ashamed to let a servant do for me.’
‘So you think Mrs Edwards is downtrodden, do you?’ Carrie felt the sting of tears behind her eyelids. The events of the morning were making her edgy and prickly. Tom was being unreasonable. They were quarrelling for the first time, at least she was quarrelling. He was merely stating what he thought to be the facts, and expecting her to agree. She waited with eyes narrowed for what he would say next, and when he said nothing she burst out childishly, ‘All right then! Go into the kitchen! Go right now and ask Mrs Edwards if she feels in any way like a slave. Ask her where she would be if it wasn’t for us. And if she won’t tell you, then I will. In the work
house, that’s where! She hasn’t got any family or any money, and she’s practically stone deaf. So where would people like her be if it wasn’t for people like me and my kind, Tom Silver? You think the whole population should be equal. But they will never be equal, because that’s the way it has always been. Ask Mrs Edwards to take my mother’s place and she would die of boredom in a week. Ask my mother to take Mrs Edwards’s place and she’d be dead of overwork in a week.’
‘And yet I’m expecting you to make that transition?’ At last Tom felt his own temper rise. He glanced at the clock. ‘I have to go to a meeting tonight so I must go now. Maybe rushing here wasn’t such a good idea after all.’
Watching him go Carrie frowned and bit her lip. Tom would spend the rest of his life fiercely upholding what he felt to be right. She reminded herself that his sometimes unbending attitude had lost him his job once. Was it possible that the same attitude could help him to walk away from his love? She had a sudden picture in her mind of her life as it had been before he came into it, and she took a step forward, ready to throw herself into his arms and tell him that she would live with him in a tent if need be. Anywhere, as long as they were together.
But, as if warding her off, Tom put the width of the door between them and spoke to her through the opening. ‘Think well on it, Carrie. Go upstairs when your mother has had her sleep and talk to her. She knows and understands how I feel. She’ll tell you that happiness doesn’t always come wrapped up in expensive paper. You think deeply about it all, Carrie. Then let me know.’
His fear was as great as hers, if she had only realized it. When he left the house, taking the steps down to the drive two at a time, Tom was already doubting some of the things he had said to her. Was he being fair? He was speaking that very evening on the subject of class privilege, but here he was proposing to step over it with no regard for the implications. Oh, Carrie . . . Carrie, love. Tom swung himself on to the tram platform just as the conductor rang the bell, his face a mask of worry above his high starched collar.
‘Mother seems almost resigned to the idea of me marrying Tom.’
Carrie sat with Libby in the nursery watching Nurse Tomkin feeding the baby. It never occurred to her not to talk family business in front of the little woman carefully holding the feeding bottle at the right angle. Besides, Nurse Tomkin wasn’t exactly a servant, more like one of the family now. Those strange, short-sighted eyes behind the whirlpool lenses seemed to miss nothing.
Carrie smiled at her sister. ‘I don’t know what Tom said to Mother, but he obviously charmed her yesterday. You were wrong about him wanting to move into Westerley, Libby. He wouldn’t hear of it.’
Libby was feeling very fragile that morning. Harry, in spite of his obvious concern for her, had berated her soundly on her rudeness to Tom Silver.
‘Those two will marry,’ he had said, ‘in spite of whatever you or your mother might say. I thought it was very touching the way the chap went straight to Carrie when he came in. It was as though no one else existed. He won’t be intimidated, that one.’
There was a great weight of misery in Libby’s chest. Last night she had wanted Harry to make love to her. She had wanted him to take her fiercely, even cruelly, but ever considerate he had kissed her a chaste goodnight and actually tucked her in before going down to write a letter to the Lancet on the high incidence of heart attacks in the town. He had a theory that it might have something to do with the lack of lime in the drinking water, and though he was only skirting round the idea he hoped his tentative probings might interest someone able to follow them up in a more practical way.
Oh, Harry . . .’ Libby had cried into her pillow. ‘Why don’t you make me love you?’ Then she had stared wide-eyed at the ceiling. ‘And what will I do now that Edwin will no longer be coming to the house for lessons?’
Now she stared at her baby, bald except for a fringe of hair straggling down into the nape of its fat neck. Maybe Harry was right and she should send Nurse Tomkin back to her village. She moved in her chair with the old restlessness, her dark eyes looking for something that wasn’t there, searching for the stimulation, the excitement so necessary to her existence.
‘Mother could come and live here.’ She spoke without thinking, then shook her head. ‘But Mother will never leave Westerley. She’ll grow old quickly and die soon, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, why did Willie have to go and get himself killed? He would be married now and the natural heir to Westerley and the mill, and Mother would live the rest of her life surrounded by Willie’s children.’ She pushed at her fringe so that the calf-lick stood up in an untidy spike. ‘That bloody awful war. Its consequences never end for some, do they?’
Nurse Tomkin sat the baby up and started to wind her. The small eyes were narrowed into slits as she wrestled with what passed for her conscience. The promise she had made to Sarah Batt she had kept, but now . . . well, all things being equal, maybe she could . . . Settling the baby back on her other arm she thrust the rubber teat into its wildly groping mouth.
‘Sarah Batt’s mother died a month or so back,’ she said, as if telling the news to the baby.
Immediately two faces, identical in their expressions of concern, turned towards her.
‘Oh, poor Sarah!’ Carrie spoke first. ‘What will happen to her? The cottage was only rented to them as long as Mrs Batt lived. Isn’t that right?’
Nurse Tomkin nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She prized the teat from the baby’s mouth to stop the milk from being gulped too quickly. ‘I saw Sarah when I went back last weekend. She’s in a right mess. She was going out scrubbing at one of the big houses, but now they are cutting down on staff she’s got the sack.’ She sniffed. ‘It’s all these mills closing, and the mines paying the miners next to nothing. The women come out from the town and take our jobs. For less money,’ she added bitterly.
‘So Sarah is without a job?’ Libby exchanged a glance with Carrie, a glance which the little woman noted with satisfaction – so far so good.
‘Yes. Before long she’ll be without a roof to her head, and she can’t go for a living-in job because of the boy.’ The grey head dropped over the tilted bottle. ‘He’s a right larnt-up one, that lad. Too big for his boots, if you ask me, but a clever scholar, they say.’ She waited, holding her breath. Well, she hadn’t broken no promise yet, had she?
‘So there would be nothing to stop Sarah coming back to Westerley?’ Libby’s voice was eager, her lethargy forgotten now that there was something she could organize.
‘There’s still her son.’ Carrie sat forward, clasping her hands round her knees. ‘But Mother wouldn’t mind having Sarah’s son living with her. Not if it meant getting Sarah back. Would she?’
‘But why hasn’t Sarah got in touch?’ Libby frowned. ‘She knows how upset Mother was when she left. I used to think that Sarah meant more to her than we did.’
‘Pride.’ Carrie nodded. ‘You know what Sarah was like, how she would flare up if we tried to talk about her boy.’
‘Hiding her shame,’ Libby broke in quickly. ‘As if that mattered now, after all this time.’
‘So we’ll write. Now. Today.’
‘Can she read?’
‘Oh, heavens, Libby, her son will read the letter to her.’
So fascinated was Nurse Tomkin at the turn of the conversation that she was allowing the baby to suck at an empty bottle. Listening to those two was like listening to one person speaking. Two minds perfectly attuned, and she had said practically nothing, given nothing away.’
‘Sarah is past thinking straight, if you don’t mind me interrupting,’ she said. ‘That lad of hers grows out of his britches faster than a stick of rhubarb growing from a muck heap. His mother is going without, if you ask me.’
‘Without food?’ Carrie was horrified.
Nurse Tomkin nodded. ‘If I was you, Mrs Brandwood,’ she focussed her myopic gaze on Libby. ‘I would get the doctor to drive you out there this Sunday.’ She ho
isted the baby on to her shoulder and rubbed its back in a circular motion. ‘I’ll be here to see to the baby.’
‘But it’s your weekend off,’ Libby protested, not too vehemently.
‘I don’t mind.’ Nurse Tomkin closed her eyes to hide the glitter of triumph at the way she had managed things. ‘Why not take your mother with you, Mrs Brandwood? The country is lovely just now. It would do her good to get out of the house; this business yesterday must have upset her a lot.’
She smiled to herself as the two sisters immediately got up and clammed their mouths tight shut. Their reticence didn’t bother Nurse Tomkin. She had been the one to answer the telephone when the police rang, hadn’t she? And she had already found out enough to be going on with. She would ferret out the whole truth one way or another, and for the time being she had done her good deed.
It rained hard on Sunday, but they still drove out to the country. From the car window Ettie watched the rain falling on the fields and the little gardens fronting the stone cottages.
‘Are you sure we ought to be interfering like this?’
She asked the question to Libby’s back, but Libby was, as Carrie would have said, ‘on the warpath’.
‘We are doing the right thing,’ she said firmly.
But when Sarah, painfully thin and tired-looking, opened the door to them, Ettie forgot her misgivings immediately.
‘Sarah? May we come in? I have something I want to ask you. It’s a favour, a very great favour.’ She glanced up at the grey sky. ‘We are getting wet, dear. It won’t take a minute. May we come in?’
The little back room of the cottage was so small, the ceiling so low, that when they all sat down Ettie had the feeling that the walls were closing in on them. She smiled at Sarah. ‘Don’t look so scared, dear. We heard about your mother, and we are sorry, so very sorry.’
Sarah nodded. Her mouth was hanging half open, giving her a look of utter stupidity. It was all far worse than Libby had expected it would be. The whole atmosphere smelled of poverty, and Harry was shifting in his chair, obviously wishing he was miles away. So with her usual lack of finesse, Libby came straight to the point.