by Marie Joseph
‘You bloody faggot!’
A stream of foul language hit Polly’s hearing like a blow. A four-letter word she had only seen written on walls was screamed at her with staccato emphasis, repeating itself over and over like the stutter of a machine-gun. Then, out of breath, Bella lowered her voice to its normal childish whine.
‘So you can save your breath to cool your bloody broth, Polly Pilgrim! An’ you can tell anybody what’ll listen that my Jack isn’t here.’ Her voice rose again. ‘But he’s not dead! My Jack wouldn’t die. He’s lived rough afore and he’ll do it again. He can live off owt, my Jack can. Berries, roots, anything. An’ he’ll come back to me. He’s only hiding up for a while.’
The sudden blizzard had darkened the sky, and behind Polly the open fields stretching to the little wood were one great landscape of gleaming white. She had left a lamp burning in her own cottage, but here in Bella’s house all was darkness, not even the glimmer of candlelight to brighten the day that was dying far too soon.
‘Have you got candles?’ she asked, suddenly weary. ‘I can’t go away and leave you in the dark, Bella. Tell me if you’ve got candles, and if not I’ll fetch some down and leave them on the doorstep.’
‘Candles and matches,’ Bella answered in a singsong voice. ‘Matches in a little box with the picture of a man in a striped oathing costume on it. I bet you know his name, don’t you, clever-clogs Polly Pilgrim? Seeing as how you know everything.’
It was too much. Short of breaking down the door which, flimsy as it was, had a bolt the thickness of a man’s wrist, Polly knew there was nothing else she could do. Tomorrow she would try again, and failing to make Bella see sense she would . . . oh, dear God, what could she do?
Her mother had said she had no right to interfere in other people’s lives. It was a fault of hers, Edna had intimated. But where did caring end and interference begin? Reluctantly Polly started the familiar walk up the hill, bowing her head against the freezing wind, feeling the snow sting her cheeks, making her eyes water and tearing at her clothes, chilling her to the bone.
At four o’clock it was as dark as it would be at midnight. Polly drew the curtains and picked up her library book. Published only that year, it was by a Lancashire author, a man called Walter Greenwood. Born at Salford, according to a review she had read of the book in the local paper, he had left school at thirteen, working in various mundane jobs and never earning more than thirty-five shillings a week. Love on the Dole. Polly smiled ruefully at the title. In her present mood the title struck her as a misnomer. Surely the two – love and the dole – could never be simultaneous? And yet the reviews had made it clear this book was the opposite of a hearts and flowers romance. This man, this Walter Greenwood, apparently knew what he was writing about; knew it from experience, had known at first hand the heartbreaking deprivations of the poor and destitute. Polly turned to the first chapter. ‘They call this part “Hanky Park”,’ she read. And was lost.
The sudden knock on the door startled and stunned her into a panic as acute as if she had been suddenly shot in the back. There had been no warning. No sound of footsteps on the path outside, nothing but that immediate, startling pounding of the ancient iron knocker with an urgent beat, as if whoever stood outside demanded to be let in.
The fact that the snow would have deadened any sound, failed to register. In that moment of sheer terror, Polly imagined Jack Thomson creeping silently down from the frozen fells, hungry and unshaven, demanding shelter, not daring to approach his own cottage, knowing that she, Polly, was entirely alone.
The fire glowed in the grate with the red-hot glitter of molten lava. Leaning forward, Polly picked up the poker with its rounded brass handle, forced herself to walk the few steps to the door and, in a voice weak with fear, called out: ‘Who is it?’
When she heard his voice she threw down the poker, slid back the bolts, top and bottom, and turned the key in the lock. When she opened the door wide and saw him standing there, etched against the bleak landscape, she flung herself at the tall man, winding her arms round his neck and murmuring brokenly: ‘Oh, Robert! If you only knew how glad I am to see you!’
The feel of his cold face against her own, the roughness of the chin of a man who needed to shave twice a day, filled her with an overwhelming sense of joy and relief. The sense of confusion on his strong face missed her entirely as she drew him inside.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she told him, pulling at his snow-powdered coat and scarf with her fingers. ‘I wouldn’t let myself think it, but I knew you would come.’
— Nine —
ROBERT DENNIS SAT in Harry’s chair, the cup of hot coffee Polly had insisted on making for him dwarfed in his right hand. Now that she had given her feelings away in the spontaneity of her greeting, she looked shy and bewildered. Frightened almost, he guessed. But of herself, certainly not of him.
The bitter drink had been made from a bottle of Camp coffee, with its picture on the front of a British officer in India sitting smugly outside his tent, with a sepoy in servile attendance. Robert stared at the label, studying it carefully, wondering what to say next.
He had gone over and over in his mind the careful little speech he was going to make if they had managed a few minutes alone. He had been sure the girl, Gatty, would be there, watching him with sullen dark eyes, and the boy, Martin, fixing his unwavering stare on Robert’s empty sleeve pinned up above his left elbow.
What he hadn’t bargained for was finding her alone, looking so bonny, so achingly vulnerable with her blue eyes like a morning sky. He listened gravely as she stumbled through a recital of what had happened since their last meeting when he had almost, but not quite, allowed his own feelings to get the better of him.
‘Jack Thomson won’t come back,’ he said. ‘No one could live for long in conditions like this. You mustn’t be afraid, love.’
‘Since Harry went away I’ve never stopped being afraid.’ Suddenly Polly wanted to open her heart to the man who was so different from any man she’d known before. She wanted to tell him how everything seemed to be conspiring against her; even about the light on the ceiling that had foretold it all. But a lifetime’s habit of keeping her innermost thoughts to herself, the superstitious side of her nature rigorously hidden, stilled her tongue.
She smiled, the husky lilt back in her voice. ‘I talk to myself, you know, and I tell myself I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Nothing really hurtful has touched me.’ She smiled at him sadly. ‘I’ve lived in the country too long to be afraid of the dark. I haven’t got the countryside in my blood like Harry has, but like my mother said this morning, I’d like to knock on the wall sometimes and hear a neighbour on the other side knocking back.’
‘Someone like my sister-in-law, Nellie?’
‘Oh, dear. . . .’ She was relaxing now, letting the happy feeling his presence always gave her flood through her. In the firelight, her eyes were soft and sparkling again. ‘Is she friends again yet?’
‘Not yet. But she’ll come round. Polly?’ He leaned forward. ‘About the other day. . . .’
But she wasn’t listening. The relief of being with him, of feeling his strength and his wisdom flow to her through the short distance between them, soothed her like a healing balm. She was tired of the terrors clouding the normal serenity of her thinking. She wanted to forget the sound of Bella’s tinny little voice screaming obscenities, the look on Gatty’s face as she left the cottage carrying her shabby cardboard case. The way even Martin had jumped at the chance to get away.
‘I imagined when Harry went down south,’ she said slowly, ‘that things would go on just the same. Well, more or less the same.’ A strand of golden hair had fallen forward over her forehead, and with a childish gesture she blew it back. ‘But it’s worse than that, Robert. It’s as though I’ve lost him. I can’t see his face, nor remember his voice. We lived together for seventeen years, and now there’s nothing.’ She sighed softly. ‘You are more real to me, and I hardly know
you at all. How can that be?’
Robert put the cup down in the hearth. She was so honestly bewildered he wanted to reach out to her, to stroke her baby-fine hair, to pull her down on to the rug in front of the fire, unfasten her pink jumper button by button, and bury his face in the warmth of her breasts. Then make love to her, releasing the tensions of a body starved of love for far too long.
‘I am fifty years old next month, Polly.’ A surge of emotion made him tremble. ‘Four short months ago my wife died. Our marriage, before she became really ill, was fulfilled. In every way,’ he said deliberately. ‘Do you understand?’
He hesitated, feeling her embarrassment in his own gut, seeing the blush rise from her throat to stain her cheeks with colour. ‘And so I miss very much the feel of a woman’s body against mine.’ He looked away from the shock mirrored in her eyes. ‘Just as you must be missing lying in your husband’s arms.’ His voice was a whisper now, but he forced himself to go on. ‘You haven’t got the look of a Woman, Polly, who hasn’t known the joy of sexual fulfilment. When I met you that day in the park, you were golden and glowing with the beauty that kind of constant loving gives to a woman. Not like the Nellies of this world who submit to their husbands with clenched teeth, wanting him to get it over with quickly. Your marriage to Harry was never like that, was it, little love?’
The endearment almost broke her. No man had ever spoken to her like that. Not even Harry. Their loving had been good. The blush deepened in her cheeks as she remembered the last night before he’d gone away. But the frankness, the intimacy of Robert’s conversation had touched a response in her that threatened the discipline of her rigid sense of self-control.
A tear crept down her cheek. ‘I never cry,’ she whispered, brushing it away with the tip of a finger. ‘And I don’t know why I’m crying now. Except that you make me feel that I don’t know what I’m doing or why.’ She smiled at him, almost sadly. ‘There’s only ever been one man in my life – Harry. I was seventeen when we married, and because my mother is another Nellie. . . .’ She blushed. ‘Well, I must have been a bit of a trial to Harry at first.’
‘Tell me about him.’ Robert’s eyes in the lamplight were as pale and as translucent as the inside of a shell. ‘Make him real for me.’
She seemed to pause for a long time. ‘Harry . . . ? Well, he’s smaller than you, and darker than you.’
‘Younger than me.’ Touching his hair, Robert grinned, but she was looking away from him.
‘He hasn’t your way with words. He would never have spoken to me about, well, about the things you were talking about. Not with the light on.’ Polly frowned and bit her lip. ‘He’s a man of the soil. And I mean that literally. He holds a growing seedling in his hands the way you would hold a new-born baby.’ Her expression clouded. ‘You’d have made a wonderful father, Robert. I saw you with Martin. Was there no way you could have had a family? Before your wife took ill?’
‘It never happened.’ Robert spoke gruffly. ‘So if Harry hadn’t gone away, been forced to go away,’ he stressed the word, ‘you would have gone on being happy. Okay?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And meeting me, getting to know me, would have made me just another man, a friendly one-armed man who talked your own language. A man you might have remembered in your declining years as someone you could maybe have loved.’ He spoke with slow deliberation. ‘Being married doesn’t necessarily mean that you are immune to physical attraction.’ His smile was lopsided, making him look ten years younger. ‘We’d be a couple of cold fishes if neither of us responded to another’s appeal. Even your Harry won’t be immune to that, believe you me.’
Her immediate indignation amused him.
‘Harry must be the odd one out,’ Polly said with conviction. ‘How he ever found the courage to propose to me I’ll never know. Oh, no. You’re quite wrong about Harry.’ Her blue eyes were steady. ‘If he ever let me down, I’d think the world had come to an end.’
‘When you say let you down, you mean looked at another woman? Made love to another woman?’ Robert’s gaze was as steady as her own. ‘Why do you use euphemisms, Polly? Are you too puritanical to say what you really mean?’
She was as angry as he had meant her to be. ‘I’m not puritanical! I’m as broad-minded as the next person.’ She twisted the wide gold band of her wedding ring round and round on her finger. ‘You distort what I’m trying to say. You don’t know me, and you certainly don’t know Harry. He loves me, and he wouldn’t dream of being unfaithful.’ She glared at him. ‘There now. You’ve made me say it. Does that satisfy you?’
Robert stared into the fire for a while, and as she watched him, wondering what he was going to say next, Polly marvelled at the intimacy of their friendship. She moved slightly in her chair. Was that what it was, after all? The comfortable companionship of two people who could make each other laugh one minute, and flare up the next? The lines of his strong face looked almost beautiful in the firelight. He looked like a man who knew his own mind, made unhurried decisions. A man easy to know. A man of integrity. She flinched at her own thinking. Was integrity an old-fashioned word? Was she being puritanical again?
‘Robert . . . ?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘The other day . . . in your house. When your sister-in-law came in and . . . and. . . .’
‘Caught me nearly kissing you?’
She drooped her head. ‘I wanted you to kiss me. I’ve been thinking ever since how it would have been if you had kissed me. So I’m not . . . I’m not the prude you take me for. I must be going crazy. But it’s just that in the midst of everything that’s happening, the knowing that you are my loving friend means more to me than I can ever say.’ She lifted her head. ‘I’m not stupid, Robert. I know that if Harry hadn’t gone away, I would never have felt like this. We would probably never have even met. I wouldn’t have gone after that job and I wouldn’t have been trying to read my own shorthand that day in the park. Harry would have stood between me and these kind of feelings. I’d have been safe.’
‘And now?’
‘I don’t know.’
Her voice was the merest whisper as he came over to her. When he knelt down beside her and kissed her slowly, the touch of his lips was like an electric shock going through her. Her arms went round him and she held him close, straining him to her.
‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ she sighed. ‘It’s wrong and I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. Help me, Robert. Please help me. . . .’
It was her softly breathed plea that unnerved him. He was aching with desire for her. The long years of celibacy when he had cared for and treasured his wife through her long illness had made him strong in the way nature never meant a man to be. How often had he bent over his wife’s bed to kiss her goodnight with a hunger inside him like the grind of an actual physical pain? Jean, his wife, had trusted him, just as Polly was trusting him now. He closed his eyes, sensing the rising passion in her.
Gently he put her from him. Deliberately he stood up, walked over to the peg behind the door and took down his coat. Trembling, he wound the long woollen scarf round his neck and picked up his hat from the dresser.
From her chair she watched him, her blue eyes dazed with love, wide with disbelief. Going over to him, walking with that animal grace he had noticed the first time he met her, she put her hands on his shoulders, looking up into his face.
‘You’re the puritanical one now, aren’t you, Robert?’
Groaning, he bent his head, burying it in the softness of her neck. ‘Don’t tease, Polly.’
Even through the thickness of his overcoat she felt the hardness of him as he drew her close. When he spoke his voice was so low she had to strain to catch what he was saying.
‘More than anything in the world . . . more than you know, I want to make love to you. But you asked me to help you, little love. And because you’re so dear to me that’s what I’m doing.’
‘I asked you to help me?�
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She was so honestly bewildered he lifted his head and held her from him, looking deep into her eyes.
‘I know you, Polly. I know you through and through. If we were to make love you would feel committed to me.’ Tenderly he traced the outline of her generous mouth. ‘You’re not the sort of woman who could do that and not be committed.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe there are some women who could behave like men, taking passion as they found it, even glorying in it, sure their marriage wouldn’t be hurt in any way.’ He shook her gently. ‘Maybe the day will come when women consider themselves to be the equal of men in that field, but not yet. And not you. Your man will come back to you, Polly my love. He’ll come back to you and your children, and your life will go on. And I don’t want that life cluttered with guilt, or even thoughts of me.’ He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘I’m an old man, Polly. Old enough to be your father if I’d started young. And I won’t take advantage of your loneliness, because that’s what it is. Believe me, sweetheart.’
‘So you’re saying goodbye?’ She looked pensive for a moment. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to see me again?’
Stepping back from her, he put on his trilby, pulling the wavy brim down over his forehead. ‘I’ll be around. Isn’t that what Robert Young said in his last picture?’ He opened the door, letting in a blast of freezing air. ‘Soon Christmas will be here. I’ll see you before then.’ Pulling up his collar, he stepped outside. ‘But if there’s no bus down in the village, I’ll be back.’ The old grin was there, teasing and making him look ten years younger. ‘Then the fine speeches I’ve been making will be just words. That’s all they were, Polly. Just words. . . .’
The snow was still blowing furiously as he made his perilous way down the steep slope, but the sky had lightened imperceptibly, and already he had made up his mind to walk the five miles back to the town if necessary. And if that made him a craven coward, then so be it. If running away from love made him less than a man, then he accepted that also. But his thoughts of Harry Pilgrim, the man he had never met, were less than charitable. He reminded himself that he had never known the desolation of being without work; that in similar circumstances he might have gambled everything on making a fresh start elsewhere.