by Marie Joseph
Grapes had been what he’d enjoyed growing most. Narrowing his eyes, he remembered the bloom on them as he’d snipped a bunch off with his special scissors. He patted his top pocket as if the scissors were still there. His favourites had been the black Madresfield Court variety with their purple flesh, and not far behind the sharp-tasting white Muscats, brought to perfection in time for the lady of the house to present them to her church’s harvest festival.
‘Grapes for me?’
The man lying in the bed beneath the sloping roof of the attic room raised his head a few inches from his pillow, then let it drop back, closing his eyes as if the small effort had been too much for him.
‘The smallest bunch I could buy.’ Harry dangled them between his fingers. ‘You know how it is. You go for weeks debating every blessed penny you part with, then what the heck?’ He smiled. ‘I remember my mother going out and buying a bag of coloured sugar when we were down to our last lump of coal for the fire. Coloured sugar! Can you believe that?’
Harry was talking for talking’s sake, and he knew it. The face on the pillow was thin and drawn, his skin shades whiter than the grubby flannelette sheet pulled up to his chin. His lips were parted slightly, dry and caked with the scum of high fever, and his bony fingers scrabbled at the bedclothes like spiders scampering into a dark place to hide.
Drawing up a rickety chair to the bedside, Harry laid a hand on the burning forehead. ‘Have you had plenty to drink today?’ His voice was a concerned whisper, but tight with suppressed rage. ‘Has she been up to see you, the old faggot?’
Wearily the head on the pillow moved in negation. ‘I didn’t want anything. Nothing. . . .’
‘She hasn’t been near you, has she?’
Taking a grape, Harry split it, took out the pips, then gently squeezed the juice into the parched mouth.
‘I can taste the sun on that. Thank you, Harry.’ Heavy eyelids lifted over bloodshot eyes, reminding Harry for a second of the way his dog’s eyes had mutely expressed their thanks the day his paw had been released from a sprung-trap in the wood.
Tenderly he did the same with a second grape, then another, until the juice dribbling down the unshaven chin told him his friend could swallow no more.
And, oh yes, Roger Craven was his friend. Even with their short acquaintance it was as though he had always been a friend. Sometimes they had talked far into the night, whispering, because the wall dividing their room from the next was made of plywood. So that now Roger knew all about Polly laughing with the sunlight in her hair; about the cottage on its bleak and windy hill; about Harry’s dream of making a better life for her and his children.
And he had heard about the job Harry would find some day, working as head gardener in a big country house. With his keenly perceptive mind he had noticed Harry’s hands, the thumbs bearing the ingrained imprint of the soil as if from pressing seedlings down into plant-pots. He had listened to Harry talking about soil as if it was gold dust from heaven. And had marvelled at his dedication.
Just as Harry knew that Roger Craven had been a university man before the war, brought up in the country in a house with stables and resident maids. He knew how the drink had alienated him from his family when the problem turned into an obsession, shaming them when he’d taken to the road and rebelled against conformity. He’d ended up literally in the gutter, he’d confessed, until some Salvation Army do-gooder had taken him to be dried out in hospital before setting him on his feet again.
‘What is the purpose behind our time on this earth?’ he had demanded one night. ‘And don’t go quoting Jesus! Apply His truths and where do they get you? Take me, now. I was self-indulgent to think I could shrug off my privileged background and find His kingdom and with it the truth. But what is truth, Harry? You try and explain that to me.’
‘Go back home, Harry,’ he said now, his normally deep voice high with fever. ‘Draw the bloody dole. Starve. Live off your wife’s earnings, idle your days away sitting in a chair in that cottage of yours, but go home.’
Raising his head with an immense effort of will, Roger Craven, MA peered through the mist clouding his eyes. His swollen, sore tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth, so that his words came out as jumbled and thick as in the old days of his drinking. Groping, he reached for his friend’s hand and felt it grasped firmly.
‘Pride,’ he whispered. ‘Sod pride! I spit on pride! Go back and tell them you’ve failed down here. Admit it isn’t the Utopia you dreamed about. Get back to where you’re loved. Family, Harry. Exasperating, bloody awful family – even that mother-in-law with the serpent’s tongue.’ His head fell back, but his fingers clung to Harry’s wrist as if he were drowning. ‘You’re not weak like me. You’ve got strength, integrity. Be the man I know you to be, and go home. Now, tomorrow. . . .’
On a rasping breath his voice petered out, and his fingers loosened their hold. Terrified, Harry bent over him, pulling back the flannel sheet with its bobbles as black as a sprinkling of soot. The heartbeat was there, faint and sporadic, but now the breath was coming laboured, heavy and choked with a mucus dribbling from the sick man’s mouth.
‘Mrs Cook!’ Feet pounding on the uncarpeted stairs, Harry raced down three flights to the basement kitchen where his landlady lived. ‘Mrs Cook! Can you tell me where I can find a doctor? It’s Mr Craven. He needs help badly. I think he’s dying.’
The thick-set woman standing by the gas cooker went on ladling soup into bowls set out on a tray. ‘A doctor?’ She spoke over her shoulder to the young girl slicing bread at a table covered with newspaper and a conglomeration of dirty dishes. ‘Take these up, Maureen, and if Mr Craven won’t be coming down, then cut two slices less.’ She turned round, wiping hands on a filthy apron. ‘So Mr Craven needs a doctor, does he?’ A wisp of hair was tucked into an untidy bun. ‘And where might I ask is the money coming from for a doctor’s visit? Where is the money coming from for Mr Craven’s board and lodging? That’s more to the point.’ Waddling flat-footed over to a massive brown teapot, she lifted it and slopped tea into five mugs. ‘I don’t suppose he’s told you that since he stopped going down to the post office for his pension I’ve never seen as much as a penny piece.’
Harry stared at her in disbelief. She sickened him with her greasy apron and her small mean eyes set close over a sharp beak of a nose. Mrs Cook had sickened him ever since he first set eyes on her, but after a fruitless search for lodgings at the price he could afford he had decided that beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Taking a mug of hot tea from the table and pouring milk into it from a bottle, he backed towards the door.
‘All day he’s been without a drink. All day long up there with his tongue hanging out from thirst. I’m taking this up to him, Mrs Cook, then I’m going out to find a doctor, and if it’s a question of payment then I’ll pay. You’ll not be involved. An’ if his money doesn’t come through, then I’ll pay you his lodgings too. I’m not skint. Not yet.’
Quite unperturbed, his landlady watched him disappear through the door, bending his head as if he were tall enough to knock himself senseless on the lintel.
‘Suit yourself, Mr Pilgrim,’ she muttered, dipping into a blue bag of sugar and measuring a spoonful into each cup. ‘Be a bloody Good Samaritan if you want to and see where that’ll get you. Bloody nowhere, that’s where!’
Balancing the tray on an ample hip, she kicked open the door and started up the stairs, down-at-heel bedroom slippers slipping from bare heels as red and shiny as tomatoes.
When Harry carried the mug of tea over to the bed set beneath the sloping ceiling of the attic room, he saw at once that his friend was dead. That in the short time it had taken him to go downstairs Roger Craven, scholar, gentleman of the road, self-professed heathen, had gently solved the mystery of his own existence, his questioning mind silenced for ever.
With reverence Harry pulled the grubby sheet up over his friend’s face.
‘But I’m not going home,’ he whispered. ‘That’s
not my way, Roger, no more than it were yours.’
Harry’s letter telling Polly about the death of his friend was, as usual, short and to the point, and apart from the obvious underlying sadness, as interesting as a flamin’ seed catalogue, she thought. Harry might be good at communicating with Mother Nature, none better, but when it came to putting pen to paper he was hopeless.
‘It seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘that an ordinary working-class man has a much better chance of being happy than an educated one. A trained mind dwells too much on things not always meant to be understood.’
‘That last bit’s not meant for you,’ Polly told Martin. ‘Your dad wouldn’t be sweeping leaves now if he’d gone to an agricultural college and got some fancy letters behind his name, proving he knew the difference between a blade of grass and a clump of lilies-of-the-valley.’
At eleven years of age, Martin was going through the stage of taking every utterance quite seriously. Looking up from his books he pushed his Latin primer to one side. ‘My dad didn’t need any old teacher telling him about gardening. He knows the names of every plant in the whole of Lancashire. He could leave that lot down at Kew standing.’ For a moment his blue eyes were wise beyond their years. ‘I got a book called Mary Barton from the school library, Mum, and in it Mrs Gaskell writes about men like my dad. It’s men like him who are the real botanists. Men like my dad don’t think soil’s mucky; they rub it through their fingers, knowing how precious it is.’ Suddenly he grinned, looking like a mischievous schoolboy again. ‘He was thinking about you, more likely. You wouldn’t be folding raincoats if you’d stopped on at college and learned how to be a proper secretary.’
Polly ruffled his hair, her expression soft with love. ‘Gatty will be home soon, so why don’t you go up to my room and finish your homework? I’ve lit the oil stove so it’s nice and warm.’
‘I don’t like your room.’ Bending his head over his books, Martin began to write.
Polly drew in a sharp breath. ‘What d’you mean? What’s wrong with my room?’ Taking a textbook from Martin’s hand she flipped it over, face downwards. ‘Come on, you can’t come out with something like that and then not explain it.’
‘Ask Gatty. She’s coming in now.’ His head lowered, Martin refused to meet his mother’s gaze. ‘She knows. Jack Thomson told her about it. She told me last week when you were at night school. She says she wouldn’t go in your room after dark, not for anything. Just you ask our Gatty.’
‘I only told him for a laugh, for goodness sake!’ Pulling off her coat and beret as she came into the warmth of the cottage, Gatty flung herself down on the chair nearest the fire. She held out her hands to the blaze. ‘He’s such a softy-baby. He’d believe anything.’
‘Well, if it’s that funny, tell me.’ Polly faced her daughter squarely. ‘See if you can make me laugh.’
The dislike on Gatty’s face was like a blow. If she hadn’t known different, if she hadn’t hoped different, Polly would have sworn hatred stared at her from the dark eyes. Crossing both arms over her chest she rocked backwards and forwards, needing and seeking comfort. ‘I’m waiting,’ she said, forcing her voice into calmness.
Gatty sighed, hunching her shoulders. ‘Well, this cottage is haunted, isn’t it? You’ve only lived here since you got married, but Jack’s lived down at the bottom all his life. It was empty for a year before you came, that’s why it was going cheap. Jack says there was a man living alone before we came, a poacher who was in and out of prison, always drunk.’ She looked towards the table. ‘I’m hungry. Me and Winnie were so busy at the shop, we only had time for a sandwich in the back. It’s half-term school holiday so we had hundreds of mothers in buying gumboots for their kids before the bad weather comes. They buy them because they’re cheaper than shoes, Mr Arnold says. He says the way things are going it’ll soon be like Victorian times with kids running around in their bare feet.’
‘Gatty!’ Polly’s voice was sharp. ‘You can have your tea as soon as you tell me what you know. I want this thing settled here and now.’ She gave a meaningful glance towards Martin who listened in silence, his eyes wide with apprehension. ‘Let’s have this ghost business over and done with right now.’
A familiar whine crept into Gatty’s voice. Her dark eyes once again slewed ceilingwards. ‘Well, if you must know, this poacher man woke up in the night, thought he saw something, rushed out of the cottage and was buried in a snowdrift. They found him frozen to death five days later when the thaw came.’ She nodded towards the pan on the fire. ‘Now can I have my tea?’
Before she had finished speaking, Polly was ready for her. ‘So tell me how, if this man rushed out of the cottage to his death – how did anyone know that he’d seen something? Did his lips unfreeze for long enough to explain?’
The faint suspicion of a smile on Martin’s lips was enough to urge Polly on. This wasn’t something she could let go. It was only two years since Martin had stopped wanting a night-light burning by his bed, and she knew the way his over-imaginative mind worked. Grimm’s Fairy Tales had scared him stiff as a child, and even now when he went out in the dark to the lavatory at the end of the flagged path, Polly would obligingly stand at the cottage door with the light streaming out. No, for Martin’s sake this ghost business had to be denied once and for all. What she had seen, what she had thought she had seen, had also to be pushed to the back of her mind for the sake of them all.
‘So that scotches Jack Thomson’s ghost, doesn’t it?’ Taking up the pan she took it to the slop-stone and drained the potatoes to a fluffy dryness. Cutting a slice from a slab of margarine she mashed them up, with quick-tempered jabs of a fork. ‘The sausages will be ready now. Get them out of the oven, will you please, Gatty?’
‘You see,’ Polly told Martin when they were sitting round the table, ‘superstition is based on ignorance. I’d heard about the old man who lived here in the cottage before us. He was a hermit, living on scraps not fit for the pigs. The people in the village were afraid of him because he wore ragged clothes and never spoke to anyone. When they found him lying dead, they had to make something up to ease their consciences, because not one of them had ever stretched out a hand to help him. They didn’t understand how anyone could choose to live in such squalor, so they made the ghost up instead of admitting that he died of malnutrition. Lancashire folk pride themselves on taking care of their own, and when the old man died, a bag of bones, they were uneasy, and it was more comfortable to blame the supernatural than admit their own guilt.’
‘And Jack Thomson tells lies, anyway.’ Spearing a sausage on his fork, Martin bit into it. ‘He told our Gatty she was pretty, and that’s a big laugh for a start.’
The blush, rising like a scald from Gatty’s throat, filled Polly’s heart with dismay. As soon as Martin had been sent to bed, fighting a rearguard action on every step of the winding staircase, Polly sat down facing her daughter, ready to do battle yet once again.
‘Put that magazine down, Gatty. You and me have things to say to each other.’
It was a cosy scene in the big living kitchen, with the curtains drawn against the windows, the fire burning steadily in the grate, and the clock ticking away on the mantelpiece. True, Harry was away, but his being away should have brought mother and daughter closer together. She had given Gatty Harry’s letter to read, but after a cursory glance it had been passed back as if it held nothing of interest.
Polly wished she could find the words to tell Gatty how Jack Thomson had deliberately let her think he was going to force himself on her that morning in the cottage. And how he’d backed away when he saw the knife. How she had known in that instant the kind of man he was. She shuddered as the memory of his glittering green eyes came back to her. She remembered the wild animal strength coming from his big body.
‘Some men . . .’ she began, then stopped, the words choked in her throat. Sex was a word having no part in Polly’s vocabulary. Her mother would have blanched at the very sound of it. At seventeen, Polly h
ad married knowing only vaguely what to expect on her marriage night, and to ask her mother would have been unthinkable. Women put up with their husbands’ disgusting habits, then bore children as a result. That much Polly had gleaned from conversations overheard, but to talk about what went on between a man and a woman would have been worse than saying aloud the word beginning with ‘f’ that you sometimes saw written on walls.
Years of believing that her own body had rude places never to be touched had taken all of Harry’s patience and tenderness on that first night, and even now after his love-making had been accepted, he had still to see his wife’s naked body. On the rare occasions he had pulled Polly’s nightdress over her head, dropping it over the side of the bed, she had always managed to retrieve it before she went to sleep.
‘Yes?’ Gatty kept a finger on the article she was reading.
Polly clenched her fist to prevent herself from snatching the magazine away. ‘I’ve asked you to keep away from Jack Thomson,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘There are some men who like touching young girls,’ she went on, despising herself for not being able to put it more clearly. ‘You may not know this, but he got his wife into trouble when she was only fourteen. And there was talk about him going with a girl at the Home where he works. A poor girl not quite right in her mind.’
Polly’s heart turned over as she saw the colour drain from Gatty’s face. She wanted to reach out and draw Gatty into her arms, explain to her that she believed Jack had a sexual leaning towards girls young enough to be his daughter, but before she could speak Gatty was on her feet, dark eyes blazing in the pallor of her small face.
‘You’re always right, our Mam. You think you know everything! Well, if you must know, I’ve decided I don’t like Jack Thomson any more than you do. I won’t be speaking to him again if I can help it.’ Her voice broke with emotion. ‘So what are you going to say now you’ve won? Aren’t you going to say you told me so? Because that’s all I need!’