Polly Pilgrim

by Marie Joseph

  Gatty stiffened, her eyes wide. ‘Next time? Oh, Mam! I’ll never ever be so silly. You can’t think . . . ?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, sweetheart. Nobody could be that stupid!’

  They laughed together, holding each other and rocking, till suddenly Polly lifted her head and sniffed. ‘Fancy shepherd’s pie, love? Not much meat, but plenty of crisp potato topping? Carrots and turnips, and Mrs Pilgrim’s special rice pudding to follow?’

  ‘Oh, Mam.’ Gatty’s eyes filled with weak tears again. ‘You’re so good. I’ll never grow to be as good as you.’

  Polly’s shout of a laugh startled them both. ‘Don’t put me on a pedestal, love. I’m only human.’ For a moment she saw Robert Dennis’s face as he’d held her still for his kiss. ‘More human than you know.’

  There was a calm, lilting happiness to the rest of the evening. Shut away from the world in the isolated cottage, mother and daughter reached for each other, found the response they both needed, and sat together round the fire, Polly with her knitting and Gatty sitting quietly, letting the fear go gently.

  When she went yawning to bed, Polly began a long letter to Harry. She told him about losing her job, about Mr Goldberg’s Miriam lying on a mortuary slab in far off Berlin. About Bella and the baby bolted in their cottage, and how everyone believed that Jack Thomson was dead. It wasn’t easy to write his name, but she did it. Some day she might tell Harry, but not, certainly not for a long time. Maybe not for ever.

  ‘I miss you,’ she wrote. ‘I’m lonely without you, and next week it’s Christmas.’ Her pen ran dry and she dipped it into the bottle of blue-black ink. ‘You can’t be working at Christmas,’ she went on, ‘and with Christmas Day falling on a Monday that means you can come home. Even just for the weekend.’

  She took out her bank book, looked at the credit balance and sighed. There were four pound notes in the biscuit barrel on the dresser, and making up her mind quickly she took two of them out and put them in the envelope with the letter. The time for saving pride was gone. If Harry didn’t need them then he could give them back to her. But she wasn’t going to miss seeing him because he was short of money. They had to talk. For too long now she’d been in a dark tunnel, but somehow, now, there was a glimmer of light at the end of it. And she was reaching out to that light with everything she had.

  That night she slept in her own bed, without once glancing up at the ceiling. Things were going to turn out all right. It wasn’t going to be easy. Gatty wasn’t going to turn into a plaster saint overnight, and Harry wasn’t going to be easy to live with if he came home without having found what he’d gone looking for.

  But the future was theirs; they were a family, a close-knit loving family, just as Robert had known them to be.

  And they were going to be happy, maybe in a way they’d never been before.

  In the morning, when she went out to the earth closet, the snow which had fallen so silently through the night was piled in drifts like white sand dunes stretching away as far as the eye could see. The pile of logs by the back door was frozen hard and covered in snow, and when she managed to prise some loose and took them inside, they thawed in the heat from the fire-lighter, forming grey puddles on the raised stone hearth.

  Gatty was still sleeping, and Polly decided to leave her alone. There was no way Gatty could walk the miles to the tram that day, even if they were still running. There was food enough for a few days. Living in the country had taught Polly always to have a stock of the basics, but there was milk to fetch, and there was Harry’s letter to post in the box down in the village. If he didn’t get it tomorrow, it could be too late for him to make his arrangements to come home for Christmas.

  Christmas . . . Polly thought about Christmas as she tidied the room and drew the porridge in its double burner pan away from the fire. She took the tea caddy down from the mantelpiece, and stood with it in her hands, staring out of the window and dreaming. The caddy had once been her grandmother’s, and there was a picture of an old lady in a white shawl on the front, gloating at the cup of steaming Mazawattee tea in her hand. Polly stroked the tin and put it back. If the tap froze she would have to shovel clean snow into the big iron pan to make the breakfast cocoa and porridge, the way they’d had to do two winters ago, and she would have to take her iron-tipped clogs from the cupboard and wear a pair of Harry’s socks over her stockings.

  Without Harry there’d be no Christmas tree carried up the hill on his back from the grounds of one of the big houses, no walking down to the Christmas Eve service in the church, with Harry trying not to look supercilious as they recited the Lord’s Prayer, and joined in the singing of ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night’.

  Polly’s mind drifted back, remembering the orange and shiny penny in the toes of the children’s socks, Martin’s long-coveted Hotspur annual, and one year, when Gatty was twelve, a string of red beads which she wore uncomfortably to bed, refusing to take them off. She also recalled Harry’s face when the minister one year had exhorted his congregation to be saved by standing up for Jesus, thereby making sure they went straight to heaven, and Harry refusing to sign the pledge, a sacred binding oath against drinking, swearing and gambling, and Martin crying and telling his dad that by his refusal he was asking for eternal damnation where he would burn up in the terrible Lake of Fire. Afterwards they had linked hands round the Christmas tree in the Sunday School hall, singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, then walking home up the snow-covered hill, still singing.

  ‘Oh, Mam! I wish every day could be Christmas,’ Martin had said fervently, and in a moment of unusual sentimentality Polly had said it could be, if they made it so in their hearts.

  Out here, in the country, everything outside would be still and quiet. But down in the town there’d be brightly lit shops, people jostling each other cheerfully on the pavements, their arms laden with gaily wrapped presents. Even in spite of the shortage of money, everyone managed something for Christmas.

  Especially a Christmas like the one this promised to be. Snow and Christmas went together, Polly decided, glancing at the letter on the mantelpiece, and making up her mind. Snow, and Christmas, and Harry went together, and she’d post that letter if it was the last thing she did.

  With Polly, to think was to act, and within five minutes she had written a note to Gatty in case she woke up, put the guard round the fire, found the clogs and wrapped her head and shoulders in a white shawl, tying it round the front of her red coat.

  But when she stepped outside, the force of the snowladen wind took her by surprise. It had sprung up since she went out earlier, and now the drifts seemed to be shifting, their surfaces rippled, as the tearing wind caught the snow and whirled it around with a wild and furious strength.

  There was no need for her to go out. There were eggs and potatoes in the house, and they’d managed without milk before, but the letter was in her pocket, burning a hole, asking to be posted. And she was strong. Hadn’t her beloved father teased her long ago when she grew taller and bigger than anyone else in her class – including the boys – that she’d turn out to be a lady blacksmith one day?

  The blood in her veins was still singing from the euphoria she’d felt the day before. Gatty was safe. Nothing terrible was going to happen to her. Polly felt she could have turned east and climbed Pendle Hill without catching her breath. She was young. Well, a long way from being old anyway, and Harry must get her letter.

  Somehow, they were all going to be together for Christmas. It had to be. She was going to make it be.

  Within a few yards of the cottage she was covered in snow. It stung her eyelids and pricked at her face, and with head bowed she struggled on and found herself in a waist-high drift. Fighting her way out of it, she forced her way on to what she thought was the middle of the familiar rocky road down the steep hill, but it was no longer familiar. Even the dry-stone wall was covered, level with the path. She could no longer see, and it seemed as if the starkly white landscape
had taken her and made her a part of it, without landmarks to guide her on her way.

  Above her the sky was brooding, dark and heavy with the promise of yet more snow to come. Polly wished she had left a lamp lit for Gatty, and began to worry about leaving her alone in the cottage. A few stumbling steps on and her commonsense asserted itself. She had locked the door behind her and, besides, Jack Thomson was dead. He had to be dead. Not even Jack, with his inborn sense of survival, could have existed for long in conditions like these.

  Sliding, gasping for breath, moving forward by instinct, she reached the little wood and here, partly sheltered by the trees, the snow was less deep. Polly’s breath was a hurting pain in her chest. Opening her mouth for air it was immediately filled with stinging snow, as if directed at her by the fierceness of a jet. She coughed, spluttered, then grabbed at the shawl as the force of the wind tore it from her head.

  Coming nearer to Bella’s cottage, Polly felt a sense of such loneliness it was as though she’d been cut off from life itself. The loneliness of being on her own in the cottage had been a self-inflicted, full of practical worriting, frustrated kind of feeling. It even had an irrevocability about it. But this was something quite different. She stopped, panting, feeling a trickle of sweat down her back from her exertions, and stared at the ramshackle cottage.

  Snow had changed its shabbiness into a thing of beauty. It was like a pretty little cottage on a Christmas card, all sloping roof and white frosted eaves. There should have been carol singers with lanterns held high in mittened hands, singing their hearts out, in a semi-circle. There should have been lamplight shining from the tiny windows, and a robin on the post at the gate.

  The emptiness of the tiny cottage struck Polly’s senses like a blow. The door was open, swinging on its hinges, buffeted by the wind. Snow had drifted inside, piling up in an obscene drift across the stone-flagged floor.

  Stepping through it, calling out, although she knew there would be no answer, Polly walked slowly into the tiny living-room. The grate was black and empty, grey ashes of a spent fire scattered over the hearth. Caught in the tearing wind, the rocking-chair moved of its own volition. The once white American cloth on the table in the centre of the room was grey with dust, and on the shelves of the cupboard to the window side of the fireplace the few plates and cups left intact after Jack Thomson’s last brainstorm stood huddled together in a pathetic display.

  ‘Bella?’ Polly’s voice quavered in her throat. ‘Bella? Where are you?’

  Walking slowly towards the foot of the stairs, Polly called out again: ‘Bella? Are you up there, love? Bella? It’s me, Polly.’

  Her heart was beating with dull, hard thumps. As she climbed the stairs her iron-rimmed clogs shattered the total silence. There was no handrail, only the flaking plaster on the walls at each side to hold on to as she stumbled. Downstairs in the living-room, the freezing cold air had swept the smell of neglect clean, but up here, at the top of the stairs, there was a strange sweet smell that made Polly wrinkle her nose.

  Inside the bedroom it got worse. Holding her breath, Polly tiptoed over to the far wall where the blanket-lined drawer in which Bella’s baby slept stood on an oak settle.

  And he was in there, swaddled in blankets, covered up like a bundle of washing, only the shape telling what lay underneath.

  It was a terrible thing to do, but Polly did it. The horror was there, in her mind, but she had to see for herself before she could accept it.

  ‘Dear God,’ she murmured, as her fingers tore at the coverings. ‘Bella never did anything wrong to You. Why did You have to do this to her?’

  There was the baby, his little tuft of ginger hair sticking up on top of his pointed head, the way it always did when Bella forgot to slick it down with water. Polly lifted a tiny hand, but it was hard and stiff, and the fingers didn’t curl round her own as they always had. He was very pale, but the blue tinge had gone from round his mouth. Polly lifted him and held him, but his little body didn’t bend into her own. Her tears fell on him as she gently laid him back, and she wiped them from his face with the hem of his flannelette nightie. She covered him up again and stood back from the makeshift cot, sobbing quietly, the white shawl slipping from her head and a lock of yellow hair falling over her forehead.

  Where was Bella? Still crying, Polly turned and left the room.

  The clatter of her clogs on the uncarpeted stairs seemed an affront to the dead. The white silence outside was more in keeping. Walking through the open door, Polly stood in the windswept, neglected garden, its neglect hidden by the all-enveloping carpet of thick snow.

  ‘Bella?’ Her voice was a scream tossed away by the wind, then something, an instinct barely acknowledged, told her to go round to the back of the cottage to where the old barn, its ancient timbers rotted, crouched against the dark skyline.

  Polly pushed her way onwards, her feet sinking deep, the hem of her coat wet and sodden against her legs. And saw Bella. . . .

  She was lying face downwards in a deep drift, just outside the old barn, her head on her spread arms as if she’d found it a comfortable way to sleep.

  At first Polly thought she was alive, but when she turned her over gently she recoiled in horror. Bella’s face, that thin peaked face of deprivation, had been chiselled by the frost into a mask of such ugliness that Polly turned her head, feeling the bile rise in her throat.

  Bella’s little hands were clenched into solid paws, as if she had just laid down defeated by her anguish, her waiting for Jack to return. Polly touched the rock hardness of them, kneeling down in the snow, leaning over the still form as if she would will warmth into it from her own body.

  There had been no warmth in Bella’s drab life. She had spent long days waiting and hoping, trying to bear the creeping suspicion that Jack was dead. She had seen her baby die, and she had crept out into the blizzard to die herself. Was that the way it had been?

  ‘Oh, God! Dear God!’

  Had Bella been lying there yesterday when Polly was urging Gatty up the hill, too obsessed by her own anxiety even to glance towards the cottage? Had she not cared enough? Tears flooded Polly’s eyes, and she made no attempt to brush them away. Was Harry right? Was there no God looking down in His mercy on the Bellas of this world? Yet, wasn’t He supposed to care even about the fall of a sparrow?

  Polly knelt there, the sadness gradually erupting into a wild unreasoning anger. ‘Hadn’t Bella suffered enough? Did You have to take her baby from her?’ she shouted to the empty, leaden sky.

  With her baby dead, what was there left for Bella? She’d loved her home, that derelict shell of a home, with its sticks of furniture and her pots on the cupboard shelves. And she’d loved her husband. Right or wrong, she’d never wavered in her love for him. Polly went on kneeling there in the freezing cold, naked, raw and bleeding with the torment of her thinking.

  In those moments she was Bella’s mother, not her friend. All her maternal feelings, her compassion, her longing to protect, to guide those she loved rose to the surface of her emotions.

  The sky was turning black. There was going to be another heavy fall. Tenderly, Polly leaned to wipe the snow from Bella’s face, then stood up, swaying with grief.

  And saw, through the open-ended back of the barn, Jack Thomson hanging from a beam, as frozen as washing put to dry on a line, tongue lolling, green eyes staring in a last awful grimace, staring at the ground from a head sunk forward on to his chest.

  Polly screamed, and screamed again, and it was a terrible sound in all that white frozen wilderness, with no one near enough to hear.

  — Eleven —

  WHEN THE LETTER came addressed to Harry Pilgrim, Maureen, the maid-of-all-work at Mrs Cook’s lodging house in Acton, picked it up from the mat inside the front door, held it to her nose and sniffed.

  ‘April Violets, honest to God,’ she told herself. What in the name of heaven was a quiet-spoken man like Mr Pilgrim doing getting a letter like that? It wasn’t from a man, that much was
sure, an’ it wasn’t from his wife back in Lancashire either. This letter had a London postmark, and the writing was different: slanting backwards and small with twirls on the g’s and the y’s. Maureen pressed it to her nose again, before taking it down to the basement kitchen.

  Mrs Cook, having a bit of a rest now the early morning rush was over, turned the letter over and held it up to the light, narrowing her eyes into suspicious slits.

  Maureen tried to be helpful. ‘You’ll not be seeing nothing through that envelope, Mrs Cook. The paper’s as thick as me little finger. Shall we be giving it a whiff of steam from the kettle?’

  ‘What an idea!’

  There’d been nothing remotely interesting in the letters from Lancashire. It hadn’t been worth the bother of steaming them open. Besides, this one could probably be got at with a pencil, the paper being so thick. Mrs Cook got up from her chair, rose on to her toes, leaving her down-at-heel slippers behind, and propped the letter up in front of the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Mr Pilgrim can have it when he comes in; when he condescends to come in.’ Sitting down in her chair once again, she folded her hands over the greasy apron stretched taut over her ample stomach. ‘Mighty pleased with himself is our Mr Pilgrim at the moment. Ever since Norma Shearer called to ask after him last week.’

  ‘She wasn’t like Norma Shearer!’ Maureen looked mortally wounded. ‘Norma Shearer’s eyes are much closer together. She was more like . . . more like Vivien Leigh.’

  ‘’An who’s she when she’s at ’ome?’ Mrs Cook was in one of her rare good moods, and Maureen was eager to make the most of it.