by Marie Joseph
‘But I’d come back home quickly, Harry Pilgrim,’ he muttered. ‘A man can only be a saint for a limited period.’
He moved into the shelter of the little wood where the snow lay less thickly, feeling it seep through the thin soles of his town shoes. The total silence was eerie, the beauty of the white landscape breathtaking in its splendour. But in Robert’s preoccupation with his thoughts and the effort of planting one sodden foot in front of the other, it left him untouched. Turning back would have been easy. Doing the right thing in walking away made every step a conscious, almost painful, effort.
‘You’d be proud of me, Nellie,’ he whispered, trudging past Bella’s cottage with head lowered, almost blinded now by the snow sweeping down from the fells.
Polly sat by the fire, feeling spent physically and morally. There were a thousand things she had to do, including writing a letter to Harry, but she was too wrapped up in a bewildering state of self-questioning even to make the effort of taking the notepad from the dresser drawer and the bottle of ink from the top shelf.
It was the first time she had been entirely alone at night in the cottage since her marriage, and every slight noise seemed magnified in the silence. The clink of a cinder in the hearth made her start with fear, and when for no apparent reason the dog barked wildly, she stood up, hands folded over her breasts in an age-old gesture of comfort, staring wide-eyed at the heavily bolted door.
When she forced herself to sit down again, she found to her dismay that she was trembling, then admitted to herself that she hadn’t stopped trembling since Robert Dennis had kissed her, arousing her in a way she wouldn’t have dreamed possible.
All her life she had lived by rules. Unspoken rules, but as rigid as if they had been written on her very soul.
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery. . . .’
How often as a child had she sat in the hard-backed pew of her mother’s Methodist chapel, listening to the preacher, often an unqualified layman, shouting about the evils of the flesh and the temptations of the devil. The fires of hell lay in wait for those who trod the path of unrighteousness. Even to covet another man led to eternal damnation.
‘Get thee behind me Satan!’
She remembered as if it were yesterday a little man, a weaver from the nearby cotton mill, pounding the air with his fists as he ranted on about the weakness of the flesh. Preaching to the converted, she had thought, glancing round at the congregation, the women in their go-to-chapel hats, and the men in their stiffly starched collars. Lancashire faces, often seamed with care from a lifetime of hard work and bringing up their families on a pittance.
Polly had attended chapel every Sunday morning and evening, going to Sunday School in the afternoon to teach, from the age of fourteen, young children in the big vestry, sending them home with crayoned drawings of Jesus riding on a donkey or raising Lazarus from the dead.
She had thought she knew who she was, sure in her belief, smugly confident that the evils of the flesh were words, just words, as Robert had said.
And yet . . . and yet if he had stayed, she would have taken him by the hand and led him up the steep, winding, wooden stairs. She would have closed her eyes as he helped her to undress; she would have lain in the bed she had shared with her husband and gloried in what he was doing to her, what she would be doing to him.
As though Harry and all the years of their own loving had never been.
Long before ten o’clock, Polly gave up trying to do anything but just exist. She was so tired it was an effort to light a candle, so she picked up the lamp from the table, and started upstairs.
The ancient floorboards creaked as she walked over to the double bed. Her shadow moved and swayed on the whitewashed wall as she undressed. Her reflection in the swing mirror on her dressing-table was of a pale-faced young woman, with huge sad eyes and tousled golden hair, and the cold was so penetrating she could see her nipples stand out hard as she slipped her long flannel nightdress over her head.
In that instant she imagined Robert’s head lying there, her hands stroking his thick hair as his mouth caressed her nakedness. She remembered the way his pale grey eyes had looked in the firelight, and the resolution in them as he’d put her gently away from him. He had felt all she had felt, and yet he had left her.
‘I love you,’ his eyes had said, and yet he had walked away.
She climbed into bed, turning the lamp out and sinking down deep into the billowing feather mattress. Outside the wind seemed to have dropped, leaving in its wake a stillness as deep as death itself. Four heavy woollen blankets gave weight, but as yet not enough warmth to prevent Polly from shivering.
How warm she would have been held close to Robert. How safe and secure she would have felt with their bodies entwined. Even the promise of a hell to come would have held no terrors for her.
I love him, she thought, and how can that be when I haven’t stopped loving Harry? Turning over on to her back, willing a sleep that would not come, she opened her eyes.
And saw the light on the ceiling. As marked and definite, as wavering as if a lamp had been held in a trembling hand, the shape shifting and flowing, reminding her in its fluid-like form of an amoeba seen through the lense of a microscope in a long ago school biology lesson.
‘Oh, God!’ The two words were torn from her as she sat up in bed. She could feel the hairs standing up on the back of her head. Terror pricked at her armpits, and a cold rivulet of sweat trickled down her spine.
Shaking with fear, Polly groped on the bedside table for the matches, fumbled to get one out of its box and dropped it; scrabbled feverishly for another and somehow managed to light the lamp.
Now the only light on the ceiling was the one from her own lamp, but she knew the other was still there. And if the room had been cold before, now it was like a tomb. She could smell the decaying scent of death. She could see the stains on the bare, wooden floorboards where once a man’s life blood had seeped away.
All sense of reasoning seemed to have left her. If rational explanation existed for the light, Polly was beyond seeking it. Her heart pounded. She could feel it beating in every pulse in her body.
Tottering on legs turned to jelly, she crossed the landing into Martin’s room. His bed had a young boy’s smell about it, and beneath his pillow a schoolboy’s annual protruded with its hard-back cover showing a boy in cricket flannels, holding aloft a bat in triumph. A brown and bruised apple core lay rotting gently on his bedside table, and a tattered copy of The Hotspur was open at a page showing Mr Smugg the Housemaster of Red Circle School wielding his cane.
Desperately Polly tried to conjure up a mental picture of her son running wild in the summer fields, firing imaginary bullets at anything that moved. The lamplight – the reassuring normal lamplight – picked out points of light on his collection of steel engravings on the walls.
Drawing her knees up to her chest, Polly tucked her feet beneath the hem of her nightdress. She lay there, waiting for a dawn that seemed an endless time in coming.
The bus wasn’t in its usual place by the church when Polly got to the village at her usual time, but there were two small black saloon cars abandoned at the side of the main road, with sheets of newspaper laid over their windscreens.
To make any kind of sense, Polly knew she should collect a few things from the one shop selling everything from flour to paraffin and go home. But she wasn’t making sense. Not yet.
Since five o’clock that morning she had crouched shivering with her red coat over her nightdress by the empty firegrate, telling herself it wasn’t worth lighting a fire when she had to go to work in two hours’ time. Her whole body was numb with shock. The emotion she had felt had drained away, leaving her sick with a creeping sense of dread. For at least an hour, she stared down at her feet in their felt slippers, a last year’s Christmas present from Harry, trying to summon up enough courage to go upstairs to her room and get dressed.
Morning was a long time in coming, and when it did the sombre lig
ht was grey and heavy, as though the leaden sky outside was pressing down on the steep sloping roof of the cottage. The total silence was a cloud, folding her in, and in his basket the dog slept, twitching his ears now and again, making her start in terror and glance over her shoulder towards the door.
If she’d lived in the town the street lamps would have been lit. Even inside the houses, gas jets would be sighing in their mantles. But the oil lamp shed only a pool of light, and beyond it darkness lurked, vague with shadows, blotched with mysterious shapes.
It was no good trying to convince herself that the light on the ceiling of her room had been conjured up by her inflamed imaginings. Polly had never quite believed in the hell promised her by the Methodist lay preachers of her childhood. Hell was here, she believed, and not always of your own making. And wickedness was not enough to consign you to the fiery flames. Even wickedness came in differing shapes and sizes.
No. The light was a warning. A sure warning that something terrible was going to happen. Maybe something so awful she would die with the pain of it. Just as the hurt of what had happened in the upstairs room all those long years ago lingered still, refusing to go away.
Down in the village Polly stood irresolute, looking back up the hill, her footsteps a pattern of steppingstones behind her. The whole landscape merged into a vista of dazzling white. Beautiful and awe-inspiring, as Polly knew her mother would have said. As long as you could watch it through a window, with a cup of tea in your hand
She hesitated, knowing she could go to Bella’s cottage, and knowing equally that Bella would never let her in. Bella was waiting for Jack to come home. She had bolted herself inside till the day he came walking light-footed up the path, with his cap pulled low over his forehead, and his green eyes glittering.
He could be in there even now . . . Polly shivered and started to walk. It was four miles at least to the outer perimeter of the town, where the trams wheezed to a halt and after a while clanged their way back down the Whalley Road into the town. If the trams were running she would get to work, late of course, but she knew she had to try to get there. Even if she walked the whole way she still had to try.
The houses she passed seemed shrouded in silent meditation. Two boys pulled a milk churn along on a home-made sledge, and once a man turned out of a gate, as determined as Polly to get to work, trousers tucked into gumboots and a football scarf wound round his neck.
Polly concentrated on keeping her balance, but part of her mind was wandering free. Gatty would have to come home. Martin would have to do the same, and she would write to Harry and, in spite of all her good resolutions, plead with him to return.
Polly tried to ‘see’ Harry’s face as she plodded along the road, keeping to the middle where the snow lay less thickly. Somehow they would have to try to be the way they were before he went away. Winter would end and spring would come. The lanes would be enclosed with hawthorn blossom. The air would be filled with its sweet almond smell. By the door of the cottage the rose bush would hang heavy with perfect blooms, dark red at the heart of each one, and down in the meadow by the stream, shiny celandines would twinkle like stars in the tall grass.
Robert Dennis would be – just as he had said – a nice man she used to know. A man she could have loved if her life with Harry hadn’t been set on its preordained path. She would think of him sometimes, without guilt or remorse. He would slip in and out of her dreams until one day he vanished. And she forgot him.
‘Robert . . . oh, Robert.’ Polly whispered his name over and over, as if already he had gone from her. For ever.
At last she rounded the bend of a short steep hill and saw, with an overwhelming sense of relief, a tram with the conductor standing on its platform drinking tea from a billycan.
‘Want a bit of me bacon butty?’ he called out. ‘Warms the cockles a bacon butty does.’ His red face was split into a cheeky grin. ‘You look like a proper robin redbreast in that coat, love. Stand on a corner and open your mouth and I reckon folks would post a letter in it!’ He struck the bell with a flourish, closing one eye in a wink. ‘Don’t mind me, blondie. It’s just the cold what’s frozen me assets this morning, that’s all.’
Polly made her way over the ribbed floor of the car to a vacant seat by the window, and as the tram clattered its way down the long straight road into town, she saw how the snow was already turning into slush, grey and dirty-looking from the traffic, and watched the people hurrying along the pavements to work.
‘There’ll be. more than me late this morning,’ Polly said to herself, willing the tram to go faster. As she got off, she smiled at the conductor, who responded by rolling his eyes up in mock ecstasy.
She covered the distance to the mill in less than fifteen minutes, turned into the yard and saw a small group of machinists staring up at a notice pinned to the office door.
Pushing her way forward, Polly read it in total disbelief.
‘It is with regret that we have to announce the closing of this factory. Unemployment and insurance cards can be collected from the office at 10 a.m. Signed E. Goldberg.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ Polly turned to a woman with a scarf tied over a grey felt hat. ‘Mr Goldberg wouldn’t do a thing like that!’ She started to walk away from them, towards the factory door down the sloping yard. ‘He’d tell us himself.’
The grey hat nodded. ‘He did tell us, chuck. At eight o’clock this morning, clocking-on time. Right upset he were an’ all. Explained it all nicely, not that I understood a word of it. Something about us being laid off permanent on account of him going bankrupt.’ She glanced round at the other workers. ‘We offered to stop on and finish what was on the tables, but we’re not allowed to.’ She pointed a hand in a woollen mitten towards the main building. ‘All that good stuff in there, and going to waste as far as I can see. Bales of stuff and half-finished coats, and us wanting to get on with it, and not allowed.’
‘The union,’ another woman suggested. ‘I keep on saying we should appeal. What’s the good of paying your dues when this happens? I allus said they were out for themselves, spouting on about their members, then doing bugger all when it comes to it.’
‘We’re entitled,’ a sharp-nosed little girl piped up, ‘entitled to our rights. Who does he think we are? Just bloody nowts to be pushed around?’ She spat on the ground. ‘He won’t be missing out, not old bloody Goldberg. Like all the rest. Out for what he can get and stuff anybody else.’
‘That’s not fair!’ Polly spoke in a clear unswerving tone. ‘There couldn’t have been a fairer boss than Mr Goldberg. You saw him the other week when he tried to explain things to us. He was nearly crying.’
‘Oh, aye. He was nearly crying all right. An’ why? Only because his own nest wasn’t being feathered the way he’d expected. I know his sort.’ She jerked her head towards the empty office. ‘Where is he now? Why isn’t he in there, soft-soaping us?’
‘Oh, shut up, Agnes!’ The woman in the grey hat raised her voice. ‘If you’d been on time – which you never was – you’d have heard what he had to say. Just because you can’t get up of a morning. Polly’s right. Mr Goldberg’s a gentleman, an’ it’s not his fault this has happened.’ Her face wrenched itself out of shape as she tried to remember. ‘He said that as he can’t get any more stuff on tick, an’ the bank won’t lend him any more money, then he can’t pay our wages.’ Her voice rose in triumph. ‘An’ go on, Agnes Butterfield! Crack on you’d work for nowt! My God, that’d be the day!’
‘Then where is he?’ Agnes jabbed a finger at her. opponent. ‘Why do we have to wait till ten o’clock for us cards? Is he too much of a gentleman to hand them over himself? Frightened of muckying ‘is ‘ands, is he, or summat?’
‘There has to be some explanation.’ Polly looked round and saw Mr Goldberg’s secretary coming up behind them, the neat tidy girl who had got the job she had applied for, because this efficient-looking girl had been able to type faster and understand her own shorthand. Polly looked at her
and thought she’d been crying.
‘I heard what you said.’ The young secretary was very dignified in her navy-blue coat with brass buttons down the front, and her matching hat with its wavy brim pulled down over her pale face. A bunch of keys dangled from a gloved hand. ‘And yes, there is an explanation.’ She seemed to hesitate, then went on as if suddenly making up her mind. ‘I may be doing wrong in telling you this.’ She was very correct, very precise. ‘Mr Goldberg got a telegram last night.’ Her eyes, behind round tortoiseshell spectacles, filled with tears. ‘His daughter over in Germany has been killed.’
‘Killed?’ Blank faces were turned towards her. ‘Killed?’
The girl’s small mouth trembled. ‘There was some sort of a student protest. The wire didn’t say much, but Miriam, Mr Goldberg’s daughter, took part in it. Against the new – the new order out there. And in the fighting, she was killed.’
‘He’s gone,’ she went on. ‘He came into the factory this morning to tell you about the closure, when he could have gone last night.’ Her pointed chin lifted. ‘That’s the kind of man your boss is.’ Her composure wavered. ‘And even if I’m lucky enough to find another job, I’ll never get another boss to work for like Mr Goldberg. If you’ll come with me you can have your cards. . . .’
‘She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, Polly.’ The little woman in the grey, scarf-trimmed hat walked by Polly’s side out of the yard and into the short street. ‘What was she doing over there when her father was here? Families should stick together.’ She tightened the knot beneath her chin. ‘My daughter lives next door, and I’ve a son in the next street. That way I can keep both me eyes on them.’