Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘You’re very close,’ he said.

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘You’re still my daughter.’

  ‘It hurts!’

  He let go. There was a red mark around her wrist. She reckoned that to go upstairs, get her make-up and cardigan, come down, cross this kitchen once again with Isaac even angrier would be dangerous. She made for the door which led to the farmyard. Her school coat was on the peg in the storm porch. That would have to do.

  ‘I’ll be back in time to help with the tea,’ Rachel said. Isaac waited for the door to close.

  ‘Well, Mother. She must think she’s rich if she can turn down a fiver,’

  ‘She shouldn’t have done.’ The tone was sincere. ‘It was bad manners.’

  ‘Bad manners. Is that what you call it?’

  She looked out of the window, miserable. In the gaiety of the morning’s preparations, in the normality of the family dinner, in the dramatic prospect of tea, she had felt that all could be well. Now she was certain that Rachel was hell bent on it.

  ‘Is there something I should know?’

  What was in the quiet voice? Menace? Pleading?

  ‘I don’t know what’ll happen between you two.’ She waited for more from him. None came. ‘I’d better get a move on.’

  It always ended up with scent and soap. Joe had tried very hard but scent and soap it was. Even in the chemist’s, where Ellen had once worked part-time, where they were indulgent to his indecisions, and suggested many combinations for the money available, it still ended up in scent and soap. ‘The very best there is,’ Lawrence assured him, ‘what the rich people go for.’ As she waited for him in the porch outside the village hall, looking at the drizzle as if she might read signs in it, Rachel knew it would be scent and soap.

  He was also wearing his school mac, plastered from his fide through the rain, his hair soaked flat, but his face, washed bright, lit up the moment he saw her. She would tell him.

  They went to the bus shelter opposite the school. There was nowhere else. She could not risk the barn. The chapel was open but that was unthinkable. Farm buildings on other land were too risky. Too wet to walk. The bus shelter it was.

  There was a narrow bench. They sat side by side very properly in case someone she knew went past. One rapid squeeze, one swift kiss, then he handed over the present. She looked surprised, told him it was the best you could get, gave him another squeeze, another swift kiss, took a deep breath and told him that she was leaving home the next day.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Joe’s voice was solemn. He was awe-struck.

  She told him.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll finish at Christmas and get a job.’

  ‘What about your exams?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I’d have had to leave. You must tell nobody.’

  Joe looked at her, searching for a new person. She looked the same, save for a seriousness about her, a grown-up seriousness, sad and calm.

  ‘What’ll he do?’

  Rachel shrugged, wearily. She had asked herself that question so many times.

  ‘What can he do?’

  ‘I’ll…’ Look after you? Help you? It was all too sudden for Joe. But there was excitement.

  ‘I know,’ she said and took his hand. ‘I’m glad I told you.’ And this time it was a real kiss, not caring who saw them.

  But after that there was not much else to do or say. He walked her back to the farm. She did not ask him to bike ahead and let her arrive alone. They parted chastely at the gate, both by this time utterly drenched.

  After an hour’s homework in her Aunt Claire’s front room - the kitchen was tiny, it was just a glorified one up, one down - she went to see Jennie who lived in an Edwardian sandstone house on West Street. They watched television and then went to Jennie’s bedroom to talk. Jennie and Linda were the only others in on it. Jennie talked to Rachel like a doctor to a patient.

  And as she walked back through the town, Rachel felt that sense of being someone less and other than yourself, that displacement which accompanies illness. The evening town seemed a foreign and a hemmed-in place. The people on the street she did not know. She felt she was being looked at and talked about. She was glad to find one of the alleys that took her into Church Street and down to the yard.

  Her father’s car was there.

  There was a flight of sandstone steps which led up to Peter Donolly, Photographer, in a studio which overlooked the pig auction. She sat on these. In the twenty minutes which seemed hours, three men passed her - all nodded - and a gang of boys began to cluster significantly near and creep relentlessly nearer. She left the steps and stared through the gate at the empty auction pens. She liked pigs. They made her laugh. Her father butchered his own and she had watched him do it ever since she could remember. What a big grinning beast a pig had seemed to the small girl and how wonderful her father who could suspend it so easily, cut its windpipe to stop the squealing, scrape off its bristle and then, when all was set, open its throat, wasting scarcely a drop of blood. He would watch her to see if she flinched, but not once. She would find it harder to face now - school had softened her, her father often said that.

  She had to face him. The boys who had gathered around her in a loose semi-circle parted easily with only one or two little hoots. From her look they could see she was way beyond them.

  He let her come in and sit down. He was uncomfortable. He was always uncomfortable in any house but his own and wanted to get out as quickly as possible. Her Aunt Claire sat on a hard chair by the table. Her father was in the big armchair. Rachel took the smaller one opposite him. The light had not been put on and the small room was only relieved of its thrifty gloom by the modest coal fire.

  ‘I'll just finish this tea and then we’ll be off,’ he said in a pleasant tone. ‘It won’t take you long to pack your things.’

  Rachel had not been prepared for this. Not this calm. Not this gentleness. Her Aunt Claire looked at her: what did the look say? What could she say?

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ He smiled, and in the smile she saw the anger in him and knew how deep it was. ‘I want to stay here.’

  ‘Upstairs.’ He slung back his tea from the unaccustomed cup. ‘I haven’t all night.’

  Rachel looked at her Aunt Claire, who sat stiff-backed, knees pinned together, full apron flowing to her ankles, anxious as a schoolgirl under examination. The glow of the fire made her silver-grey hair gleam. Her hands were on her knees, palms down.

  ‘He is your father,’ she said, ‘after all,’ knowing she was expected to say something, having to feed the silence, wanting to be fair all round.

  ‘Upstairs.’ He looked at his watch.

  Rachel could not move. There was a burden on her, as solid-seeming as a weight. Her father commanded the room outside her and the space in her head. All she could be was still.

  ‘Would you have done this, Claire? Defied your father?’

  The little countrywoman concentrated on Rachel and in a measured tone she said,

  ‘I’m not having you hit the girl, Isaac Wardlow, not in my house.’

  ‘I’ve never struck her.’

  ‘I know you, Isaac. And I’m not frightened of you.’ Again said very carefully, very fearfully, but said. ‘Maybe it would be better if I had.’

  His look to Rachel had in it an anguish which made her turn from his gaze. But she took strength from it.

  ‘I’m not coming home,’ she muttered and waited for the blow.

  Isaac stood up and the force of the man spread to the walls. The two women were frozen, neither daring to catch his glance. He looked from one to the other.

  ‘Do I have to carry you off?’ he asked hoarsely.

  Rachel had said all that she could manage. He turned to the older woman. Claire was gazing directly into the fire, her skin’s rosy sheen at odds with the tightness of her expression.

  ‘I could take you,’ he said, holding up his right arm, ‘in t
his one hand.’ He opened the palm of it and then, slowly, he closed it. ‘Like that.’

  But all he got was silence. Finally.

  ‘If I’d defied my father like this, or if any of my sisters had done this, and the same goes for you, Claire, however hard you look away, by God we would have known about it!’ He walked to the door slowly, like a man wading waist-high through sea.

  ‘He is your father,’ Claire repeated.

  ‘She doesn’t want me for a father,’ Isaac said, opened the door, and left.

  In the yard where he had parked the car, he stood still for a few moments, feeling rather dizzy as happened to him now and then. The boy came round the corner, hands in trouser pockets, expression clear as a bell, whistling. He made for Claire’s cottage.

  ‘You!’

  Joe had no doubt who was being called out. He turned and smiled at the stranger in whose face he then recognised Rachel. He took his hands out of his pockets.

  ‘What name do you go by?’

  ‘Joe Richardson.’

  Isaac paused. The dizziness had not cleared.

  ‘Off Sam?’

  ‘He’s my dad.’

  The older man looked him over as the boy just stood there.

  ‘You’re more like your mother,’ he said, eventually.

  He watched the boy knock and be admitted. Then, cautiously, he got into the car and drove off slowly.

  ‘He didn’t hit you,’ Claire had said, as soon as Isaac had left. ‘He didn’t even offer to.’

  ‘He would have done if you hadn’t been there.’

  ‘But he didn’t. I think he wanted you back.’

  ‘He wants his own way, that’s all.’ Rachel spoke in tones older than the older woman. She was tired.

  ‘We’ll have some tea now,’ Claire said. ‘And I made scones this afternoon.’ She put on the light. The central bulb under the transparent shade blinked the small room bright and yet Rachel had preferred the dark. When the knock came to the door, her stomach clenched once again.

  ‘It’s open,’ Claire said. He came in.

  ‘It’s just Joe.’ Claire’s relief made Rachel smile. ‘I was just making a cup of tea, Joe.’

  She went into the minute back kitchen, leaving them alone.

  ‘I saw your dad.’

  Rachel waited.

  ‘He seemed all right.’

  ‘I thought you did homework straight through.’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  She crooked a finger, flashed a look at the back kitchen and lifted up her face for a swift kiss. Joe felt bold.

  ‘These scones have to be eaten now,’ said Claire, ‘they’ll be stale tomorrow.’

  They ate dutifully. Joe and Claire had no trouble talking the news of the town which for the older woman was more engrossing than fiction. Joe’s access through the pub made him a valuable source and Claire took advantage.

  Rachel followed him out, dark now, and they found a doorway in one of the narrow alleyways which slit back into High Street. She told him why her father had come but could not and did not want to try to articulate the confused deeper feelings she had, how moved she had been by her father, how - could this be true? - sorry for him, yet the anger was still there, unsoftened despite the softer feelings. Joe kissed her consolingly without suspecting the quiet revolutions she was undergoing.

  He stayed up an extra hour to fulfil his stint. Rachel slept badly: she missed the night noises of the countryside.

  Her mother was waiting for her after school three days later and this time Claire left the two of them alone.

  Rachel saw her mother’s distress and caught it. Yet for a while the two of them just fussed over the tea Claire had laid for them and her mother answered questions about the dogs and dug up some gossip from the village and told her how much the aunts and uncles had liked the birthday tea, admired the house, admired the farm. There was, though, a bus she had to catch back to the village. She took out a cigarette and, after a brief hesitation, offered one to Rachel.

  ‘Dirty habit,’ she said as she waved away the smoke from her face. She was not a skilful smoker. Rachel had already learned to breathe out the smoke steadily through her nose.

  ‘Now then.’ She flicked a tiny amount of ash into the fire. ‘I’ll tell you the truth, Rachel. I feel shamed.’

  Again she tapped the cigarette at the fire. Rachel had not expected this.

  ‘It’s getting around. I was here on market day and there were one or two questions and looks. Just enough. We’ve never known anything like this in my family, Rachel. I call them everything when they deserve it, but we’ve never had anybody running away from home like this and in public’

  Rachel did not want her mother to start crying.

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He says nothing. But I know he wants you back. He’s moping, that’s the best way to put it, he’s moping. The house is very empty without you.’

  The girl was moved.

  ‘It’s more than him, though. To tell you the truth if this gets out much more I’ll not want to show myself.’

  Rachel looked closely at her mother’s face, at eyes which would not look directly at hers. She saw it lined too early, too thin, once fine now worn, the good fair hair too cheaply attended to. She knew the work, early morning until bedtime, a toil inside and outside the house to serve the ambitions of the man who had captured her and held her. She wished she had enjoyed a kinder life.

  ‘So it’s for my sake, you see,’ she whispered, afraid she might be tearful. ‘He didn’t put me up to it. If you do come back I want you to say nothing about this. I don’t want him to think it was me.’

  Rachel waited until the weekend and returned at an inconspicuous hour on Sunday afternoon. She strapped the bag on her back carrier seat; Joe put the case on his handlebars. He did not go beyond the gate.

  Isaac took it carefully and so did she. A new degree of politeness entered in, not elaborate, not so dramatically different from before, but less shouting, more respect, a tension but no anger and, for a time, a sadness that had not been there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sometimes his father brought his cup of tea upstairs, half way through the evening, a break from the pub. Joe now worked in the otherwise unused parlour of the flat, more space. It was difficult for him not to feel impatient when his father came in, a resentment that his self-allocated routine was being breached, his time raided, the job he had set himself casually interrupted, but the impatience was also fuelled by guilt, that he could not meet the modest expectation of attention his father wanted. Sam was aware of that but arrived with his cup of tea nonetheless. He stood beside the fire, Joe at the table.

  ‘Handy in a way,’ he said, ‘me and your mother downstairs all night gives you this place to yourself,’

  ‘Yes.’ Joe had often thought that but in the grip of this almost panicky resentment he resisted any agreement which might lead to conversation. ‘I’m doing Latin,’ he added, hoping that this would act as a deterrent. But how could his father know how much he hated Latin and therefore how much harder Latin was than any other subject and therefore how much edgier he was about interruption? Yet it was complicated, as everything seemed to be getting more complicated these days, reasons, explanations, excuses, qualifications, subtleties, glosses, all taking over from black and white, wrong and right, good or not. Because he could have liked Latin had it not been for his teacher, Miss Castle, who disliked him so much. He would have liked to like Latin, it would have made him better at it and when he read the translation of The Aeneidy part of which was their set book, he was wrapped up in it, but then the Latin got in the way. When he read Cicero’s speeches in English he thought they were such great ways to make arguments. It was some language for speeches! But the language lay there on the page resentful, offering him no help. It was Miss Castle who sat on that page like a thumb on his neck and he could never get her pressure off him.

  ‘I’ll just be a minute or two,’ Sam said. The
boy’s surliness was transparent. Sam admired the way he stuck at it. He had made a point of never pushing him about his homework, never asking about it. It’ll do him good to know he’s done it on his own, he told Ellen when she pointed out his lack of encouragement.

  ‘I read the play,’ he said, ‘most of it.’ Sam smiled broadly and even sunk into himself as he was, Joe responded to the fun and fullness in that smile. ‘I liked it. I’m not saying I understand all of it by any means. Still, I tackled it. And I liked it.’ And he wanted an argument about it with a son who no doubt understood every word and liked an argument. He knew he had to begin it.

  ‘King Lear goes all wrong from the start,’ Sam said. He took out a cigarette. Despite all, Joe had to repress an inward groan. It would be at least a full cigarette’s worth of time.

  ‘He should never have given away his kingdom.’

  ‘They were his daughters.’

  ‘I don’t care who they were. He signed his own death warrant then and there.’

  ‘He’s old. He’s over eighty, it says. He’s not well. It’s very hard work being a king. Especially then when you were in the middle of it.’ Joe rose to the bait.

  ‘He could have given them titles. He could have given them money. But why he wanted to give them his kingdom I’ll never know.’

  ‘Maybe he needed to be looked after for a change.’ With a rather rude obviousness, noted but ignored by his father, Joe put down his pen and leaned back in the chair. ‘I know it turned out to be a mistake but he couldn’t have thought that at the time. He must have thought it would work out O.K. Look at what they said.’

  ‘Flarch. Just sucking up. He must have been in negotiations. Kings did their own then, didn’t they? He must have learned diplomacy. How could he be taken in by that pair of fishwives?’

  ‘Cordelia doesn’t flarch.’

  ‘She’s worse. I can’t understand Cordelia. Why does she make such a fuss? I thought she was just showing off, how much better she was than her sisters.’

  ‘Well, she is.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that.’ Sam nodded, took a puff, smiled broadly again. ‘That Fool’s got more sense than anybody else, even though he is only a Fool’