by Marie Joseph
‘Nellie!’ Robert’s voice was ragged with embarrassment. ‘That’s enough! Mrs Pilgrim is going now. She kindly came to see how I was.’ For Polly’s sake he fought to keep his temper. ‘I’ll walk down with you, Polly, if you’ll wait till I get my coat.’
In his anger his movements were clumsy. The jacket didn’t swing round as it usually did, and he made futile stabs at it with his good arm.
Suddenly Polly could take no more. Trying to make things right, knowing it was impossible to make things right, she turned to Nellie. ‘I’ll remember you to my mother, Mrs . . . ?’ Her voice faltered, then she said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘Did you get the two hundred pounds you were aiming to get at the sale of work?’
‘Nobbut thirty-four pounds.’ Nellie stood aside to let her pass. Nicely spoken, you had to say that for her, even if she did wear a coat that meant you’d see her coming a mile off.
At the door Robert tried to take Polly’s hand, but she was too quick for him. ‘Polly . . . Polly. . . .’ He stepped out with her on to the short paved path. ‘You mustn’t mind Nellie. Her bark’s far worse than her bite.’
But it was no use. Polly was almost in tears; he could see them trembling on her long eyelashes.
‘Don’t humiliate me any more, Robert. Please.’
She walked away from him, head bent, and he let her go, accepting that anything he tried to say would only add to her distress. And the first thing he saw when he went back into the house was her silly little brown hat sitting on the sideboard next to his wife’s photograph.
‘She’s gone and left ’er ’at.’ Nellie gave it a contemptuous flick of a finger. ‘They’ve got dozens just like it in the hat market. Four and eleven a time.’ She walked towards the door. ‘I’d best be off. I’m late already, not that we ever start on time since the new minister’s wife took over. Folks say she has a lie-down after her dinner.’
‘Nellie!’ Robert’s voice was louder than he intended. ‘Before you go, you’ll listen to what I have to say!’ He stood where he was in the doorway, barring her path. ‘The way you spoke to Polly, to Mrs Pilgrim, was unforgivable.’ He clenched his right fist, fighting for control. ‘You have no right to barge into my house like that to begin with, and no right at all to speak to a friend of mine in such a way.’ He seemed to slump downwards. ‘I know you do a lot for me, and I know you did a lot for Jean, but that doesn’t give you the right to walk in without knocking.’
‘Well!’ Nellie closed her small wimberry eyes for a moment. ‘So that’s the way it is! I can let meself in with a key to come and scrub and clean for you. I can shop and wear me fingers to the bone keeping two houses going, but it’s a different story when you’re lying on the settee with your fancy-piece!’ Her bosom swelled. ‘It’s coming back to me what I heard about your so-called friend. Nearly broke her mother’s heart she did, going off straight from school and marrying a gypsy.’
Her voice rose in triumph. ‘An’ you don’t need to look at me like that, Robert Dennis! Your friend’s husband’s grandfather was a proper one. Clay pipe an’ all! Used to come round the backs with a donkey and cart. A rag and bone man! Lived out Downham way in a house no better than a lean-to shed.’
‘A cottage,’ Robert said automatically.
‘So you’ve been there!’ Nellie’s thin mouth wrenched itself sideways in a spitting motion. ‘So we’ve really touched rock bottom, have we? A fine thing if your cronies at the office find out.’ Moving forward with a swift snatching motion, she took the tin of scones and held it in front of her like a shield. ‘You can eat shop cakes from now on, and find out the difference! And I hope you know what you’re doing!’
There was nothing else for it but to let her go. As Robert’s anger began to leave him, he realized that the shock of what his sister-in-law had seen, or what she thought she had seen, had forced her into an exaggerated display of righteous indignation. He picked up the tray and carried it through into the kitchen.
One-handed, he rinsed the cups underneath the tap with no realization at all of what he was doing. Polly he would come to later. For the time being all his mind was concentrated on his sister-in-law. Nellie, salt of the earth Nellie. Almost twenty years older than his wife, how often had she boasted that she’d brought Jean up herself after their mother had died? Nellie, with principles so deep-rooted that even the sliding lava from a volcano wouldn’t shift them. Nellie, who firmly believed that infidelity was the greatest sin of all, far greater than lying, cheating and possibly even murder. Robert slid the tray into its place at the side of the gas oven.
Nellie at that very moment he guessed would be joining her friends of the Bright and Shining hour in the opening hymn, sure of her place in heaven when her time came to go; to be reunited with her husband who had been waiting for her ever since the day a German sniper’s bullet had shattered his gullet and left him choking on his own blood. Nellie, so good, so staunch, so loyal, so straight . . . Robert said each word aloud, the last one at a shout.
‘Damn and blast the Nellies of this world!’ he shouted. ‘May heaven preserve their pious souls!’
Cleverly he folded the tea-towel and laid it carefully down in its appointed place, regarding it balefully. It was white as the driven snow, due to Nellie’s attentions. Boiled first, then rinsed in water tinged to the right shade with dolly-blue. Nellie was inordinately proud of her whites. Childishly he took it up again to toss it down crumpled, any old how.
‘Nellie . . . oh, Nellie,’ he muttered, shaking his head.
Slowly he walked back into the living-room, sat down heavily on the brown velvet cushioned settee, and allowed himself to think about Polly.
He hadn’t wanted, he hadn’t needed that kind of complication in his life. Not yet. Not, as Nellie would say, with his wife barely cold in her grave. He tugged at the restricting sling, his expression bleak with a kind of despair. It wasn’t as if he were the sort of man who found it hard to exist without a woman. His enforced celibacy during Jean’s long illness had proved that. Robert stroked his chin, staring into the fire. A casual encounter with an easy-come easy-go type of woman hadn’t been on the agenda at all. His love and concern for his wife had taught him that desire could transcend the flesh. He flinched at the platitude, but it was the truth. And the war in France and the loss of his arm had somehow produced yet another kind of maturity, so that he had imagined he was immune from temptation.
Pleased that he was thinking now instead of merely feeling, he leaned forward, took a decent sized cob of coal from the scuttle and placed it right in the middle of the fire. That was what was needed. Calm rational reasoning. He hooked the tongs back on the tidy.
But nothing had prepared him for the tenderness and overwhelming sense of responsibility he felt for Polly Pilgrim. From their first meeting he had sensed a vulnerability in her, a vulnerability at total variance with her flippancy and the radiance of her bright smile. She needed him, and that in itself was crazy when she had a husband who through no fault of his own was well over two hundred miles away. Polly was a happily married woman, and her husband would either return defeated and disillusioned, or filled with triumph at having found what he had gone down south to seek.
Yet, when he had drawn her close her eyes had been filled with longing. She had wanted to be kissed.
Robert sighed an audible sigh.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Nellie had said.
But he didn’t know, that was the devil of it. All he did know was that he had to see Polly again. Soon . . . the sooner the better.
— Seven —
THE SNOW CAME early that year. It fell, not like a covering blanket, but as fine powder, coating the roof tops like icing sugar. It turned the streets of the town into picture postcard prettiness during the day, then into a sea of slush as darkness fell.
With another hour to go before closing time, Mr Arnold came out from the back of the shop with a pile of shoe-boxes wedged precariously beneath his chin. Thus encum
bered, he addressed his remarks to the ceiling.
‘We’re not likely to get many more customers tonight. Not by the way that snow’s set in.’ He risked a nod at the two girls standing idly by the small cash counter and gave what could, on a dark night, have passed for a smile. ‘So you can knock off, the pair of you. I reckon I can manage till closing time.’
‘Thank you, Mr Arnold.’ Winnie smiled an ingratiating smile. ‘We’ve cleared up ages ago, haven’t we, Gatty?’
‘Yes. Ages ago.’ Gatty Pilgrim, nudged into some kind of response, pushed herself away from the counter as if reluctant to deprive herself of its support. ‘Thank you, Mr Arnold.’
‘What’s up with you?’ Winnie took Gatty’s arm as they left the shop. ‘You’ve hardly said a blinkin’ word all day.’ She peered sideways into her friend’s averted face. ‘You’ve hardly said a blinkin’ word all week, come to that.’ Her feet slipped on the melted snow, and she let out a squeal. ‘Why don’t we go to the second house pictures? It’s Boris Karloff in “The Ghoul” at the Rialto an’ it’s only a hop, skip and a spit to your bus stop from there. Aw, come on, Gatty. Give over looking as if you’ve lost half-a-crown and found a threepenny bit. An’ put your beret on. You’re beginning to look like Mother Christmas with all that snow on your hair.’
Stopping suddenly, Gatty burst out: ‘I don’t care! I wish I was flamin’ Mother Christmas, if you really want to know. I wish I was anybody but me! I wish I was dead!’
There was a small silence for a moment. Winnie, her sharp features quivering as if she’d smelt something nasty, stared in acute and genuine dismay into Gatty’s strained white face.
She was Gatty’s best friend. They had been best friends ever since Gatty had walked into the shoe shop to start work on her fourteenth birthday. Together they had shaved the soft down from their legs, smoked their first cigarettes, giggled themselves sick at nothing, sat on the double seats in the back row at the Majestic cinema, and allowed themselves to be furtively squeezed by a succession of boys. Untouched by any of the finer feelings of love, they had stood in the darkness of shop doorways, exchanging long hard kisses with the boys of the moment, made dates they had no intention of keeping, comparing notes the morning after, in between trying on shoes in their dark green dresses.
Now, as Winnie stared in dismay at Gatty’s woebegone face, her sharp mind was working overtime. Apart from sudden death in the family, there was only one kind of trouble bad enough to make her friend wish she was dead. Winnie’s small eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. But Gatty wouldn’t do . . . wouldn’t do that without letting on. Surely?
The youngest of three sisters, Winnie knew more than most what doing that could lead to. Both her older sisters had got into trouble and been forced to get married; Mollie crying right through the service in a grey two-piece, and Doreen brazen as brass, with a stomach on her like a load of hay. Winnie blinked the feathery snow from her sparse eyelashes.
‘Right then! Instead of going to see Boris at the Rialto, let’s go round to my house and pick some chips up on the way. We can eat them out of the bags and put our feet up on the fender. Me mam’s always out of a Saturday.’ She gave Gatty’s arm a little shake. ‘C’mon. We can’t stand here, me feet’s freezing.’
Gatty stirred, as if coming out of a dream, but she allowed herself to be propelled across the street, welded to Winnie by their linked arms. As they hurried down past the Arcade, heads bent against the whirling, dancing snow, they could have been taken for little girls in their cheap coats, with their thin legs in rayon stockings and shoes better fitted for walking along some seaside promenade at the height of summer. Every now and then Winnie stole a look at her friend’s averted face, but she didn’t speak. Time enough when they were in out of the cold, with their chairs drawn up to the fire and a pot of tea apiece to wash down the vinegary chips. In spite of her anxiety, her mouth watered at the prospect.
‘Now then,’ she said, when, after no more than a few minutes’ wait at the chip shop, they’d been served with four pennyworth of glistening chips apiece, ladled into little paper bags then wrapped warmly in newspaper. ‘We’ll soon be at our house, kid, and just hope me mam’s left a good fire going. Me bum’s numb.’
Winnie was like that. Sprinkling her conversation with rude words like ‘bum’ never failed to make Gatty giggle. Winnie and her mother used them all the time, but Polly thought it was awful talking like that. She’d said so, many a time, and privately Winnie had decided Mrs Pilgrim thought she was a cut above.
‘Your mam won’t have to mind you being a bit late,’ she said, as they hurried along carrying the fragrant parcels. ‘She can’t keep tabs on you all the time. You’re fifteen, for heaven’s sake.’
The snow by now had turned to sleet, stinging their faces like the prick of fine dressmaker needles. Winnie opened the door of the first house in a terraced row, and hurried down the lobby to turn up the gas in the back living-room.
‘Now then,’ she said again, poking the fire into life. ‘Come and get your chair up and your feet on the fender.’ Eagerly she unwrapped her own chips. ‘Get stuck in, Gatty, then tell me what’s up. You didn’t say you wished you was dead for nothing.’
‘They’d choke me.’ Gatty stared down at the chips. ‘I can’t eat nothing. You’d best have mine.’
Every one of her senses seemed to be sharpened to the point of actual pain. The chair she sat on was one of a set of four, covered with long silver horsehair which pricked the backs of her knees. The cut steel of the fender beneath her feet hadn’t known the touch of emery paper in years, she guessed, and the ashpan was so full it jutted forward into the hearth. Her Grandma Myerscough would have died of shame rather than see her fire-irons unpolished like that, and there was a half-drunk cup of tea on the mantelpiece with a lipstick mark on its rim.
It was funny she hadn’t noticed these things before. Gatty bit into a chip without really noticing what she was doing. Winnie’s house was dirty. She, Gatty Pilgrim, was dirty. Not outside, but deep inside her with the memory of what had happened to her in the wood that day.
‘I’ve done something awful,’ she said suddenly. ‘I let a man do something bad to me, and I might be going to have a baby.’
There. It was said. The terrible secret was out and with its release the tears came. Her wail of anguish was that of a small animal bewildered by agony and fear. The bag of chips slid from her knees into the hearth, and the tears spurted from her eyes as if from the rose on a watering can.
Winnie, at no small sacrifice, wrapped up her chips and laid them down close to the fire to keep warm. Silently she fished up the sleeve of her green dress and handed Gatty a rather grubby handkerchief.
‘A man?’ she whispered. ‘Which man?’
Gatty held the handkerchief screwed up tightly, making no attempt to wipe the tears away. ‘It doesn’t matter which man. He doesn’t come into it,’ she snapped. ‘You’re like my mother,’ she accused unfairly. ‘Always asking questions that don’t matter.’
Winnie’s sparse, over-plucked eyebrows raised themselves into the wide expanse of her wide white forehead, but she bit back the sharp retort trembling on her lips. Searching carefully for the right words, she decided to probe gently. ‘You was raped, Gatty. Is that what you mean?’
‘No! Yes!’ Gatty’s voice rose in the terrible wail again. ‘Rape is when a man jumps on you and strangles you unconscious. Isn’t it?’ Lurid pictures of hard-eyed men throttling the life out of innocent maidens with long hair streaming down their backs flashed into her mind, culled from illustrations to the stories in the new True Life magazines. ‘I let him kiss me, Winnie! I wanted him to!’ Her mouth was open. She was making no attempt to cry decently. The tears were running down her chin, making little black splashes on the front of the hideous green dress.
‘You don’t make a baby with kissing.’ Winnie thought she began to see the light. In all her escapades with boys, the other thing, the unmentionable going-the-whole-way follow up
to the hard kisses and furtive fumblings, had been unthinkable. You could do anything – well, almost anything – but not that. Doing that would have landed her in the same boat as her sisters, an’ two in one family was enough. Winnie felt flabbergasted as the extent of Gatty’s ignorance struck her like an actual blow. She hurried on to explain. ‘Kissing’s all right, even French kisses, though I don’t put up with them. Too much spit for my liking.’ She smiled an understanding, worldly-wise smile.
‘I’m not talking about kissing!’ Gatty’s head drooped over her swelling throat. The horror of what had happened, and the even worse horror of what the future might bring, gave her the courage to go on. She swallowed hard. ‘He tried to . . . he lay on me, and his hand. . . .’ Her voice sank to a whisper. ‘I was fighting and kicking, an’ I don’t know whether he . . . whether we. . . .’ Terror stayed her tongue, and she sat there, huddled into herself, the tears pouring down her pale cheeks.
‘So he may not have . . .’ Winnie coughed delicately, ‘gone the whole way?’
‘I don’t know! Oh, God, I don’t know! It’s the not knowing what’s killing me!’
‘There has to be penetration,’ Winnie said suddenly, remembering the word from an Agony Aunt’s column in a magazine. ‘This girl wrote in and that’s what they told her in the reply.’
She was going to say the word again, but Gatty stopped her by raising her voice in a wail of protest. The quite ordinary word filled her with revulsion. Penetration. Oh, God, it elevated her fear out of the realms of possibility into a distinct medical supposition. It petrified her and it made her wish she had never told Winnie.