“Tell me about her. It’s Pam you’re calling her, not Sam, right? Did she have a second name?”
“Galley. Like the ship. Pamela Galley. But we all called her Pam.”
“So it would have been easy for her to answer to Sam?”
“Oh yes. Though the truth is little Pam wasn’t much for answering to anything. She was the quietest kid you could imagine, and afterward she was even quieter if that was possible.”
“Afterward? After what?”
The woman shrugged, not indifferently but with a suppressed anger.
“Who knows?” she said. “But now we can guess. We just thought it was the shock of her seeing Madge Gowder die. Maybe that’s what we wanted to think. After what you’ve found out, though, it’s pretty clear… God help us!”
Sam felt that great wave of anger which had exploded in the bar welling up in her again but she forced it down. Its time would come; now what she wanted was information.
“This Madge Gowder, she related to the twins?”
“Their ma.”
“So the Galleys lived in Illthwaite too?”
“No,” said Mrs. Appledore. “In Eskdale, not far away as the crow flies. But they were kin of the Gowders.”
“The Gowders? You mean I could be related to the Gowders?” exclaimed Sam, not trying to conceal her horror.
“Aye. Well, like they say, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives. I shouldn’t worry too much though. Cousins they called each other for convenience, but the family connection was a lot further back than makes true cousins in my book. For all that, round here even thin blood’s still thicker than water. The Galleys never amounted to much, while the Gowders used to be one of the important families in Illthwaite. But they always took care of the Galleys in their way, if you call tossing the odd bone to a starving hound taking care of it. So when little Pam were orphaned, it seemed natural she should be brought over from Eskdale and left at Foulgate.”
“Natural to leave a little girl with the Gowders!”
“You’re a bit quick to judge, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Mrs. Appledore, regarding her critically. “Is that an Aussie thing?”
“Quick to judge? Were you listening when I told you what happened to my grandmother?” demanded Sam.
“OK, keep your hair on. Sorry, not trying to be funny. You’ve made a right mess of yourself, you know that? God, when I was young, I’d have given my right arm for hair like yours and Pam’s. Anyway, Madge Gowder, the twins’ mother, were still alive then, though ailing. It was her being sick and then dying that set Jim Gowder, her man, drinking away what was left of the farm. Sad really, when you think what they once were. Employed a dozen men, didn’t tip their hats to the squire, and had their own pew in the church. Madge would have seen little Pam right but, like I say, she was sick. For a while the doctor was never away, then the vicar was there as often as the doctor and we knew it couldn’t be long.”
“The vicar? Mr. Swinebank’s father, you mean?”
“Yes. And Sam, the curate. In fact, Sam was probably there more often. Madge preferred Sam. Everyone did. Old Paul was hot on hell, but Sam had the knack of making religion sound a lot more attractive somehow.”
“I bet!” said Sam harshly. In her eyes, this saintly fucking curate was still number one suspect. “So Madge Gowder died, right?”
“Yes, she died. It was little Pam who was with her, or found her, no one knows which. Someone went to Madge’s room, and there she was, dead, with Pam sitting at the bedside, holding Madge’s hand. She was in a state, but not the kind of state that drew attention, if you follow me. Just even quieter and more withdrawn than ever. You could forget she was there. I suppose eventually someone would have thought to ask what was to become of Pamela, left up there with the two lads and their drunken father. But Sam Flood didn’t hang around to ask. He took her out of Foulgate straight off. Gave her a bed up at the vicarage. His own bed. The Rev. Paul didn’t like it, nor old fish-face Thomson, his housekeeper. They reckoned that if God’s house had so many mansions, He didn’t need the vicarage, so they wanted her out. But they couldn’t just chuck her into the street. By now she was a worry to us all, quiet as a ghost and looked like one too. Like I say, most of us put it down to losing her mam and dad and then losing Madge Gowder in quick succession. There were some ready to gossip, of course. In a village there always are and generally it’s best not to listen…”
“Especially when the gossip’s about the local saint!” Sam burst out.
Mrs. Appledore’s hand, which had been resting lightly on hers, suddenly gripped it till it hurt.
“Listen,” she said, and her voice which till now had been conciliatory and understanding was harsh and emphatic. “You make a big thing of liking things straight. Well, there’s something we’ve got to get straight. I heard what you said in the bar and I hear what you’re saying now. But you’re wrong, absolutely wrong. What happened to Pamela Galley I don’t know, but one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that she got nothing but love in the proper Christian sense from Sam Flood!”
In this mode, Edie Appledore was formidable, but Sam refused to be fazed.
“How can you be so sure? He was a man, wasn’t he?” she declared. “He had her to himself at the vicarage. OK, you all say he was a good man, a very good man, but good and bad doesn’t come into it when their cocks start crowing. All it means is that afterward he must have known that what he’d done was unforgivably wrong, for anyone, let alone a priest, and he couldn’t live with himself, so he committed suicide. How else can you compute the data?”
“Data? Is that the way you see things?” said Mrs. Appledore scornfully. “You come here from the other side of the world and within two minutes you’re making judgments like it can be done by arithmetic.”
“So point out my errors,” said Sam. “I can only work with what I’m told and round here that’s not a lot! Someone got my gran pregnant and then she was shipped to the other side of the world in some cockamamie scheme that charities, churches and the government dreamt up between them. And the only guy Pam seemed to trust and be close to is a curate, and he tops himself. Come on, Edie! You must have wondered if something was going on. For God’s sake, it wasn’t as if there weren’t rumors flying around that he was having underage sex! What kind of community is it that can hear gossip like that and not do anything about it?”
She drew her hand away from the landlady’s and stared defiantly into her face. But the woman’s gaze was focused over her shoulder. Sam looked round to see Thor Winander standing in the doorway. His expression was untypically serious. He nodded, not at Sam but at Mrs. Appledore, then came into the room, closing the door behind him. He sat down at the far end of the table.
Edie Appledore’s attention returned to Sam and she said in a still flat voice, “You’ve been talking to Noddy Melton, haven’t you? For once, he’s right, old Noddy. Yes, there were stories about Sam having a relationship with an underage girl.”
“There you go then!” cried Sam triumphantly. “Do it with one, you get a taste for it, isn’t that what they say?”
Then something in Edie Appledore’s face made her add, “If it was true, of course. Was it true, Edie? Do you know it was true?”
The woman’s gaze moved from Sam to Thor Winander and back.
Then she said, very quietly, “Oh yes, it was true, my dear. I know that for sure. You see, the girl was me.”
8
Edie Appledore’s story
FOR A SECOND SAM WAS COMPLETELY THROWN.
Then her mind incorporated this new information and all she could see was that it confirmed her theory. A priest who could screw around with one kid wouldn’t have too much difficulty screwing around with another! It was going to be hard to press this point without hurting the woman sitting before her, who looked to be hurting enough already, but she was getting too close to the truth now to hold back.
She said gently, “I’m sorry, Edie, but sur
ely you can see that if Sam and you were — ”
“No!” broke in the woman. “You’re missing the point, which is that Sam and I weren’t! And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, believe me! What you need to get straight is we’re not talking perversion here, we’re talking love!”
This sounded like denial to Sam. She said, “Edie, you can’t have been more than a kid back then…”
“That’s right. A kid. In fact when he first came to Illthwaite on holiday to visit Thor, I was just thirteen. I remember he came into the pub and we looked at each other and that moment I grew up. I think he knew too that I was the one for him. And don’t imagine that shows he had a thing about kids! I was an early developer. From twelve on I was a stunner, though I say it myself, fit for any man’s bed. I could see it in our customers’ eyes every night of the week. You must have known girls like that.”
“Yeah, my best friend’s one of them,” admitted Sam. “All the same, it doesn’t make it right — ”
“You’re not listening! There wasn’t anything to make right. We just looked. Sam must have got a real shock when he found out how young I was. He never caught my eye after that, not till he came to be our curate. I was fifteen by then. I make no bones about it, I went after him. Few months more and I would be sixteen and legal. I could be wedded with my dad’s permission and bedded without it! Not that I wanted to wait. But Sam wasn’t having any, even though once we started seeing each other, it was clear he fancied me as much as I fancied him. God, he must have had the willpower of a saint, the tices I put on him! But his beliefs made him hold out till I was legal. At least that’s what I thought. No kid looking forward to Christmas found the days drag by as slowly as I did those last few weeks till my sixteenth.
“And at last it came. It was on a Saturday. My mates kept me busy all day, and that night Dad and the regulars put on a bit of a party for me here in the pub. Sam didn’t come. I didn’t mind. What he and I were going to do to celebrate didn’t need a roomful of people. Next day, Sunday, I went to church in the morning. Sam was taking the service. He kept on looking toward me from the pulpit then looking away. God, I could hardly keep still in my seat, people must have thought I’d got worms! Sam and I usually met on a Sunday night after evensong but I couldn’t wait. I helped Dad in the bar that lunchtime till it got toward closing — it was two o’clock on a Sunday back in them days — then I told Dad I’d do the clearing up when I got back — he liked to go fishing on a Sunday afternoon — and I set off up to the vicarage.
“I knew the vicar took the Sunday School in the church at two o’clock, and as I went by at about five to, I saw him and his housekeeper going in as usual with armfuls of books and such to get things ready. Sam had his Bible class in the vicarage at three. That gave us a good hour. Long enough, I thought. But no time to waste.
“I went at him like a… I don’t know what. I kissed him, I caressed him, I felt him roused, and when he didn’t move quick as I wanted, I even took his hand, God help me, and put it between my legs. It must have been like dipping it into a bowl of hot honey.
“And he pulled away.
“I didn’t know what was happening. He was talking, saying that he couldn’t, not till we were married, his conscience wouldn’t let him, we had to wait, stuff like that. I wasn’t listening. I was bewildered, ashamed, angry, humiliated. I opened my mouth to yell at him. Then there was a tap at his door.
“I straightened my clothes. All I wanted to do was get out of there. It was Pete Swinebank outside. He was only a kid then, just eleven. I’d forgotten he might still be around. It didn’t matter now anyway. I pushed by him and headed back here to the pub.
“Dad had gone off fishing as usual, but there were still a few men in the bar, drinking up. He trusted his regulars, Dad. And it was true what they say about the old days, you didn’t need to lock your front door, at least not in the countryside. Someone shouted at me as I went past the barroom door, but I didn’t stop, I just headed straight up the back stairs to my bedroom. I flung myself on the bed and lay there crying.
“A bit later I heard the regulars leave. But not all of them. There was a knock at my door. Then it opened. And Thor looked in.”
She paused and turned her gaze once more to the far end of the table. Sam turned her head. Rapt by Edie’s narrative, she’d forgotten all about the presence of another listener. Somehow he didn’t look like himself, but older, careworn. Even when their gazes met, he didn’t smile.
Edie Appledore said, “Thor asked me if I was all right. He’d brought a tray up with tea and biscuits. I sat up and looked at myself in the mirror. I was a mess. But Thor didn’t seem to notice. He poured the tea, took a flask out of his pocket and added a shot of Scotch. He said it would do me good, then he sat on the end of the bed and we smoked a couple of cigarettes and talked. He was always good for a laugh, Thor. One of my favorites in the bar. Easy to talk to. I found myself telling him what had happened. He said Sam must be mad… the loveliest lass in the valley… now, if it had been him — that kind of stuff, just what I wanted to hear. And somehow, it seemed inevitable that after a while he put the tray on the floor and lay down beside me, and suddenly my body was on the boil again, and our clothes were off and he was on top of me and I was yelling encouragement…
“And that was how Sam found us when he pushed open my door.”
She stood up abruptly and started opening drawers.
“I gave up smoking twenty years ago, but I could do with one now,” she said. But her voice suggested she was just looking for an excuse to turn her back and hide her tears.
Thor Winander spoke, simply and undramatically.
“So you see, young Sam, your namesake was the very best of men, and my dearest friend, and I killed him. By the time I got dressed and went after him, he had vanished. I didn’t realize then it was for good. We were wrong to try and fob you off with evasions and half-truths, but it wasn’t clear that any of this really had anything to do with you. Pain makes you selfish, and just about everyone in Illthwaite feels pain when they recall we had a man like Sam Flood in our midst and he chose to kill himself. What they don’t know and what I’ve never had the courage to tell them is that that guilt isn’t theirs. It’s mine alone. I killed him.”
“We killed him, Thor,” said Mrs. Appledore gently. “Don’t take it all on yourself. But I hope you can see now, lass, that whoever abused little Pam Galley, it wasn’t Sam Flood. He never did a dishonorable thing in his life. He loved me. I offered myself to him, I put his hand between my legs and he had the willpower to turn away. You don’t think a man like that could have abused a child, do you?”
Even if Sam had still thought it, in the face of such loss and grief, she would have found it hard to say so. But when she ran the equations across the blackboard in her mind, she found the conclusion proved beyond all doubt.
“No,” she said, “I don’t. I’m sorry. It must have been terrible for you…”
“Must have been? Still is. Time heals, you can forget most things. But you never forget your own birthday. And every one I’ve celebrated for forty-odd years now I’ve had to think, tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day the only man I ever really loved drowned himself because of me. You should take a look at the birthday cards I get. No one round here knows all the truth, but they saw what Sam’s death did to me, and they’ve got long memories. I don’t get many of them jokey cards, believe me.”
“I’m really sorry,” repeated Sam, rising. “Look, I’d better go.”
“Go where? You got somewhere to stay?”
She hadn’t. Nor had she thought about it. She hadn’t thought about much but her grandmother for the past few hours.
“Thought not. You can’t go rushing off into the night looking like that — you’d frighten the owls. Your room’s not taken. Get yourself back in there for tonight at least.”
Edie Appledore was right. The prospect of driving off and looking for a room somewhere was less than appealing.
“Is that OK? Thanks a lot. I’m really sorry for bringing all this pain back to you.”
“At least I’ve not cut my hair off,” said Mrs. Appledore. “You’d best start wearing a hat tomorrow, else folk will think you’ve escaped. We’ll talk more in the morning, dear. You’ve likely still got questions to ask.”
“One or two,” said Sam, making her way to the door. “Just one more now. I take it my grandmother had been shipped off to Australia before this happened.”
“Oh yes. Couple of weeks.”
“And from what you say, I can’t see that my namesake would have been all that keen on this. So how did it happen?”
“No, he wasn’t too happy. He talked to me about it a lot. That was one of the things I loved about him. He talked to me about everything, like I was fifty rather than fifteen. It was only when it came to sex he remembered my age.”
She laughed, with surprisingly little bitterness. It seemed to Sam that despite their feelings of guilt at their involvement in his death, Edie and Thor had memories of her namesake so delightful they transcended negative feelings.
“He was really concerned about little Pam. She trusted him more than anyone else in the world, I think. But even with Sam it was a silent trust. She never talked about what was going on inside. But Rev. Paul was pushing him all the time, saying something had to be done about the child. Clearly she couldn’t go back to Foulgate. The only alternative seemed to be social services, though we called them something different back then. Once they got their hands on her, she’d just have vanished into some children’s home, and Sam refused to countenance that. Then the vicar and Dunstan got their heads together. Dunny had lots of connections in the Catholic Church, of course, charities and orphanages, that sort of thing. It was just after the Pope had made him a knight or something, and the nuns all thought the sun shone out of his arse. He knew all about this scheme for sending orphans to Australia. The way him and Rev. Paul told it, most of them were snapped up for adoption by caring families as soon as they arrived. It seemed an ideal solution. Sam had doubts, but finally he was persuaded this was the best on offer for the kid. A new chance in a new land where the sun always shone and the rivers ran with milk and honey — how could he stand in the way of that? But no one knew the lass was pregnant. You’ve got to believe that, dear. No one knew she was pregnant.”
The Stranger House Page 31