Polly Pilgrim

by Marie Joseph

  Stark fear, like an icy finger, trailed itself down Polly’s spine. Grabbing Gatty by an arm she forced her to turn round. ‘Tell me! Has he ever tried anything on with you? Has he? You have to tell me, Gatty. No matter how hard it is, you have to say!’

  ‘No!’ The harsh denial came swiftly. ‘No, and no, and no!’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Polly tightened her grip. ‘You tell me now and I promise I’ll never mention it again. Never. I promise.’

  Something in Gatty’s expression made her draw back. An adult awareness, a daring her to persist. Suddenly the fight went out of Polly.

  ‘All right, then, love.’ Releasing her hold she took a step backwards to slump down on to her chair. ‘I’m sorry I misjudged you. It’s just that loving you I worry, and not having your dad here makes me fuss even more.’ She tried to smile. ‘But I’ll tell you something. If I thought Jack Thomson had laid a finger on you, I’d kill him. As big as he is I’d mash him up finer than those potatoes we had for our tea tonight.’

  ‘Oh, Mam. . . .’ Tears sprang to Gatty’s eyes, but dashing them angrily away she made swiftly for the foot of the stairs. ‘I’m going to bed.’ Her small face worked convulsively. ‘My head aches. Maybe I’ve got a cold coming on.’ When Polly started to get up from her chair, she waved an arm, as if warding her off. ‘Please, Mam. Leave me be. I’m all right. Honest.’

  There was no settling Polly when the small woebegone figure had disappeared out of sight up the winding staircase. There were brasses to polish, jobs to be done, but she sat quite still, staring into the fire, hands idle in her lap. If Harry had been there opposite to her, smoking his pipe, reaching out now and again to place another log on the fire, she could have talked her anxiety out to him. He would have listened, quietly, the way he always did, then put her mind at rest with a softly spoken assurance. Polly shook her head slowly from side to side. No, she could never have told Harry about her conversation with Gatty. What had been said was women’s talk, too subtle for a mere man to understand. Given even the merest inkling of suspicion, Harry would have been haring down the hill to confront Jack Thomson, stirring up trouble, forcing issues when it was wiser to let be.

  Gatty had to grow up in her own way, and if the growing up was painful then that was the way it had to be. Polly raised her eyes. But there was still the business of the ghost to face.

  Running light-footed up the stairs, she pushed open the door to her room, closed it behind her and forced herself to look up at the ceiling. Nothing. Just velvety black darkness, and the sound of the wind sighing in the branches of the tall tree outside. Then on to Martin’s room, hearing the rhythmic put-put of snoring, and telling herself that if his adenoids and tonsils had needed seeing to, it would have been diagnosed at the medical examination he’d had before starting at the Grammar School.

  ‘I’m going out for a little while,’ she whispered, standing on the threshold of Gatty’s room. ‘Down to see Bella. I won’t be long.’

  ‘You’re not . . . ?’ Panic rose in Gatty’s voice as she lifted herself up on one elbow.

  ‘Of course not.’ Polly moved forward to sit on the narrow bed. ‘I promised, didn’t I? We’ve talked about it and now it’s over.’ Gently she touched the hunched shoulder, trying not to mind as Gatty winced away, burying her head beneath the sheet again. ‘I understand, love. I wouldn’t want to humiliate you, not for the world. I was once fifteen myself, believe it or not. I suppose my mother used to get fearful for me, and it must have been much worse for her because I could never talk to her like you talk to me.’

  And that was wishful thinking, Polly told herself, as she went back downstairs after dropping a goodnight kiss on the tiny part of Gatty visible above the piled-up blankets. On a sudden impulse she went back.

  ‘Why don’t you bring Winnie out to Sunday dinner at the weekend? It seems silly that I hardly know her when you talk about her all the time.’

  ‘I don’t talk about her all the time. It’s you that’s always going on about her.’

  Polly almost sagged against the door with relief. That was better. The exasperating, contradictory Gatty she could deal with; the one a little while ago with terror staring from her eyes, she’d rather forget.

  ‘Well, ask Winnie anyway. Okay?’

  ‘I might.’

  Polly opened the front door of the cottage on to a vista of moonlight. To the east the stark mass of Pendle Hill was etched in cold-blue against a silver sky. On either side of the stony path, grass grew as grey as cobwebs, and the wall was a twisting serpent of black iron.

  Jim trotted along by her side, too cold to be bothered barking at a ring of motionless silent sheep, anxious only to get where he was going then back to his basket and the glowing fire.

  ‘It’s bright enough to read a book by the moonlight,’ Polly told Bella, as she stepped inside the tiny cottage. ‘It would’ve been a waste of a battery to have my torch on. Moonlight in the country gives me the creeps somehow. It’s all right in the town where buildings can throw shadows, but coming down the hill I was as exposed as a nit on a head of black hair.’

  Bella’s laugh startled Polly until she realized it was the first time she had heard her laugh out loud. Bella looked different, sounded different even discounting the laugh. Instead of her usual shrunken jumper and pinned together skirt, she was wearing a dress, black and sleeveless with a scooped-out neckline. Going further into the room, Polly could see where the sleeves had been cut out and the neckline lowered. A rim of grey shrunken vest showed like an obscene modesty vest, and two uneven protuberances stuck out where Bella had made an attempt to pad her inadequate chest into a more socially acceptable shape.

  ‘It’s the dance!’ Polly clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, love, I forgot. For weeks you’ve been telling me about the Staff Dance at the Institution, and here I am interrupting you when you’re getting ready.’ She glanced round the room. ‘Where’s the baby?’

  Bella’s pale eyelids were blinking so rapidly Polly felt she would start doing the same if she didn’t look away. Bella had tried to put her sandy hair up on top of her head, and the resultant floret on top reminded Polly of a radish curled and peeled back to embellish a party salad. Her twig-like arms emerged from the fluted edges of the badly altered sleeves, and as she adjusted the belt of her dress Polly saw her hands tremble.

  ‘I’m not in the middle of getting ready,’ she burst out. ‘The dance started at seven o’clock and it’s nearly nine now. I’ve been ready since half-past six, and I put half a Cephos powder in the baby’s bottle so he wouldn’t wake up, and if Jack doesn’t come for me soon the dance will be over and the baby’ll be yelling his head off.’ She lifted her head then dropped it to one side as if she could hear music. ‘They’d got a band, Polly. We wasn’t going to dance to records. We was having a band, and all the nurses and orderlies were going and some of the Grade A patients. Jack was on duty working the lights – for the spot prizes you know – but he said he’d get away and come and fetch me, and it’s over at ten because of the nurses going back on duty and getting the patients to bed, so if he does come now it’s too late.’ The sandy eyelashes flickered rapidly up and down, up and down. ‘I’d have walked through the woods on me own if I’d had a ticket, but Jack has the tickets and they won’t let you in without one.’

  ‘Oh, but they would.’ Polly nodded towards Bella’s coat draped over a chair. ‘You go off now, and I’ll stop with the baby. You won’t need a ticket being Jack’s wife. Go on. Off you go. I’ll give the baby a bottle if he wakes up. I know where the things are.’

  The sparse, sandy eyelashes were fluttering feverishly now. Bella’s small face twisted with the force of her emotions. Deciding what to do for the best made her pulse race. It was all right Polly Pilgrim telling her what to do. She was always telling folks what to do, come to think of it. Bossy, Jack said she was, always bossing Gatty something shocking. Bella closed her eyes, the better to think. Jack had said she must wait. ‘Stop there till I come for
you,’ he’d said. ‘Think on, now.’

  ‘I’m a good dancer,’ she said slowly, seeing herself keeping up with the twiddly bits in a quickstep. ‘It’s ages since I went dancing.’ Her thin mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘But Jack said to wait. And, besides, he’s got the tickets,’ she added. ‘There was a lot of bother last time with gatecrashers trying to get in without.’ Averting her eyes from her coat, she slumped down into a chair. ‘I’d best wait.’

  ‘Well!’ Polly stared at her in disbelief. ‘It’s nothing to do with me, but I think you’re wrong. Obeying your husband is one thing, kowtowing to him is another.’ She unfastened her coat. ‘Well, I’ll wait with you, love. If he comes in the next quarter of an hour you might be in time for the last waltz.’

  Again the dignity was there, the determined withdrawal. Bella stared hard into the fire. She liked Polly well enough. In fact, she supposed Polly was the nearest thing she’d ever had to a best friend, but even Polly wasn’t going to set her against Jack. Nobody could do that. ‘Would you like a cup of cocoa?’ she asked in a brittle, hostessy kind of voice.

  In a strange way, as they sipped the cocoa in a companionable silence, it was Bella who was the calmer. Now that all hopes of going to the dance had gone, she accepted the inevitable as someone of her temperament would always accept the inevitable. She hadn’t been sure her dress looked right anyway, and her hair, hadn’t looked a bit like the picture in the magazine she’d copied it from. An’ suppose Jack had been busy with the lights and she’d sat there like a wallflower with nobody asking her to dance? Or worse than that. Suppose one of the patients had asked her and leered at her with a silly vacant face, stepping on her toes and breathing hard down her neck? And suppose the baby had wakened up, in spite of the half of a Cephos powder, and cried till he choked?

  ‘I never really wanted to go,’ she said, putting up a hand to the rubber band and releasing her hair from its unlikely top-knot.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Bella?’ Putting her mug down, Polly leaned forward, as if she too had come to a decision. ‘Has Jack ever mentioned anything to you about my cottage being haunted?’

  The sudden, unexpected question took Bella by surprise. ‘Haunted? You mean by a ghost?’

  Polly nodded. ‘Gatty’s heard some tale or other. About an old man who lived in the cottage before we came. She was told this man died of shock on account of something he’d seen. Or thought he’d seen. Jack would know, Bella. He’s lived here all his life. He was born here in this house, so if there were tales he’d be bound to have heard them. Has he ever said anything to you?’

  Bella considered. Jack had told her not to tell. He had said that Harry Pilgrim was his friend, and that with new folks coming all the time to the village the story would have died out anyway. But since Harry had gone away, Jack had changed. He’d started criticizing Polly, saying she was bossy, and he’d started trying to set Gatty against her too. Bella had heard him. She’d seen the way Gatty looked at him as well, seeing him as she herself saw him, big and handsome, with his thick curly hair and his eyes the colour of green glass bottles.

  Jack had stopped telling her stories lately. Bella sighed. Nobody could tell a tale like Jack. In his good moods, after they’d made love, he used to whisper stories to her, making them up as he went along, doing the accents, acting the parts. Tickling her till she squealed for mercy, frightening her till she begged him to stop. But lately. . . . She frowned. Moody, that’s what he was. Staring at her as if he didn’t like what he saw, then going off walking in the woods, not telling her what shift he was on at work and yelling at her when his meals weren’t ready on time.

  ‘I forget the details,’ she said, ‘but something happened a long time ago.’ Her untutored mind struggled with the effort of remembering. ‘But it were more than a hundred years ago, I know that.’

  ‘Go on.’ Polly was on the edge of her chair. ‘It’s important, Bella. Go on. I’m listening.’

  ‘There was a family living in your cottage what earned their living by weaving. On hand-looms.’ Bella’s mouth chewed on nothing for a while. ‘Then when the mills got going with machinery it meant one man could do the work of five. Jack said a gang burned down a mill at Westhoughton, and another mob destroyed every single loom in the Blackburn mills. There were a name for them, but I can’t think what it was.’

  ‘Luddites,’ Polly said at once.

  ‘That’s right. Fancy you knowing that. Yes, that were the name. Luddites. There were a mill in Clitheroe what had a moat round it to keep the gangs from getting in, but one night the man what lived in your cottage got some mates together and broke into the mill. They smashed up the looms and nearly got away, but their leader got shot in the back.’

  ‘The man from my cottage?’

  Bella nodded. ‘Somehow his friends got him home and carried him upstairs to his bed. The local animal doctor took the bullet out with a knife, and they left him sleeping.’ Bella’s thin little voice sank to a whisper. ‘When they’d gone, the man’s wife went upstairs and stood by the bed holding the lamp high.’

  ‘And?’ Polly almost shouted the word.

  ‘He was dead. Bled to death, lying there in blood-soaked sheets. An’ from that day to this when something awful is going to happen, something shows itself in that room.’ Bella’s mouth clamped tight shut. ‘But I don’t know what it is. Nobody does, because nobody tells.’ She sat back. ‘An’ that’s all I know. God’s honour.’

  Polly sat as still as a waxwork, her mind going round in frantic reasoning. As if she was sitting on the front row at the pictures, she saw the woman standing by the bed, the lamp held high in her hand as she gazed down at her husband’s face, candle-pale, with his blood drained away into the mattress. The horror of it froze her rigid, so that when the baby began to cry and Bella went upstairs she scarcely noticed her going.

  She had seen that eerie ring of light on the ceiling three times now. When Harry was gassed in the war, when her father died, and on the night before Harry went away. And nothing bad had happened to Harry. He wasn’t doing the work he wanted, but he was optimistically hoping for better things. Martin was settling down well at his new school, and Gatty . . . Polly hesitated. Well, Gatty had obviously had some sort of a scare. Maybe Jack Thomson had asked her for a kiss. But that was all, Polly was sure of it. Gatty was very naïve, in spite of the rouge on her cheeks and the packet of cigarettes hidden in her handbag. Polly nodded to herself. She didn’t believe in ghosts, never had, but she did believe that a deep sense of unhappiness could perhaps linger in a room, manifesting itself years afterwards when the person presently occupying that same room was unhappy herself.

  As she had been unhappy the night before Harry went away. . . . Yes, that was the explanation. It was her own thoughts put the light there. That was the explanation.

  When Polly climbed back up the hill, the dog bounding ahead, her composure was restored. She had rationalized her ghost and come to terms with it. Not even the sight of Jack Thomson weaving his drunken way home on the other side of the wall had the power to scare. Waving his arms about he yelled something at her, but Polly ignored him. At every step, she told herself that better things would come. Harry would find what he wanted, and Gatty’s friend would come to Sunday dinner along with Polly’s mother, and she would beam on them all. Compared to poor little Bella at the bottom of the hill, her life was rich was blessings.

  As she reached the top of the hill, the light of the moon seemed even more white and incandescent. By the time Polly reached the cottage, her normal sense of well-being was complete. She knew, she just knew that something good was going to happen. The effort of climbing had sent the blood pounding through her veins, carrying away with it her former feeling of depression.

  Life was too short to spend wallowing in misery, looking for trouble, anticipating disasters. The swift climb in the moonlight had revitalized her. Tomorrow was another day, full of exciting possibilities. She had never stayed ‘down’ for long. She just was
n’t made that way.

  Nothing had changed for the bad with Harry going away. He was all right, and she was all right. Their separation was a temporary thing. The whole Depression choking the life out of the north was a temporary thing. Soon smoke would belch forth from the tall mill chimneys again.

  And even if she was wrong, then it would all be the same a hundred years from now. That great blue cold sweep of Pendle Hill would be there, that much was sure. She trudged on, the certainty of her optimism like a singing in her heart.

  The next day, walking down the street in the late afternoon, after her day’s stint at the factory, Polly saw a tall man wearing a brown trilby hat walking towards her. When he stopped and raised the hat and she saw the light from a standard lamp shine on his thick, silver-streaked hair, she remembered him at once.

  — Four —

  POLLY’S MOTHER’S REACTION to the news that a strange man was coming to dinner evoked the response Polly could have anticipated, word for word.

  ‘What did you say his name was?’

  Polly told her.

  ‘Robert Dennis?’ Edna chewed it over as if it had rude connotations. ‘I’ve never heard you mention him before.’

  ‘He’s a friend.’

  Edna made a sound half-way between a sneer and a Victorian pshaw. ‘Married women don’t have men as friends. I wasn’t born yesterday. Your Harry would have something to say if he knew you’d taken up with a man as a friend.’

  Polly opened the door of the fire oven and stared hard at the hotpot in its brown dish. She’d saved the rounded ends of the potatoes till the last, layering them like fish-scales on the top. Already they were taking on the shiny brown crispness absolutely necessary to a real Lancashire hotpot. She slammed the door shut and got on with peeling the carrots.

  To tell the truth, she was regretting her impulsive invitation herself. What on earth had made her ask the tall man to share their Sunday dinner? She frowned. Was it because he had so obviously wanted to keep her talking there on the windy corner of the street? Almost as if he’d had no home to go to. Or was it because it had registered for the first time that his left sleeve hung loose; that in spite of his cleanliness there had been about him an air of neglect, from the soft collar of his shirt in need of turning to a button hanging by a thread from his coat?