by Joan Thomas
Oh, it was dark here once, said George. Back when hyenas roamed the moors.
Hyenas? I laughed.
He started to answer but Monty was beside me and I couldn’t hear him for Monty growling and pretending to pounce on my neck.
Leave Lily be, Jenny cried. She flung her arm around my shoulders, and her hip bumped against mine. She lifted up her voice and sang out over the hills,
A north country maid up to London had strayed Although with her nature it did not agree. So she wept and she sighed and bitterly she cried, How I wish once again in the North I could be.
Up to London? I asked. Instead of answering she launched into the refrain. For the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree . . . And while she sent the words out over the Edge in her raw, melancholy voice, we followed the wandering brow of the hill away from the town. It had been a cloudy day, and soon the sky was dark above us, and the lights of Oldham just a pool twinkling distantly below, the stars fallen into the valley, the constellations of the street lights disintegrating. Off somewhere on the dark slopes sheep bells clanged. The moor was full of movement and shadows, a darkness made up of things, not the absence of things that made up the bare darkness of the prairies. My dad would know this. He must have walked like this when he was young, with stout or cider singing in his head, not exactly here maybe, but on paths very like it through the rough gorse. A north country lad. They think of themselves as northerners, I marvelled.
Jenny’s song trailed off. We tramped on in single file, no one talking or laughing now. Oldham had entirely fallen away — we were trekking through a vast wilderness, we would come soon to the end of the footpaths and the end of man-made light. We’d been brought together with no common language but with a brave common purpose, with George as our leader. He walked nimbly through the gorse, his head bent like a crane’s. He took us up and down along the Edge, holding back bushes to let us pass through. I’d managed to shake Monty off and I fell in behind George, and where the path rose steeply, he turned to take my hand. His fingers were thin and cold, they telegraphed urgency. I scrambled after him; light and joyous and sure-footed. Oh, the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree, I sang in my heart as the fog gathered in my hair.
I would happily have followed George until dawn, but Madeleine said she was cold and so we turned back. Crossing the garden on the way in, I felt a hand take me by the wrist. Don’t go in, George mouthed, his lips barely moving. While Madeleine walked Jenny to her door and Monty rolled a last cigarette, I stood against the shed and waited, cradling my arms against the cold, feeling my hand burning with the imprint of his hand out on the path (his hand that had slid up my leg at the New Year’s party). I stood trying to contain my heart thudding painfully in my chest, seized by the realization that love (which had sent me to this dark moor) was about to claim me at last.
We stepped into the potting shed, and I ran my fingers through my damp hair. George fumbled around and a match flared up. He was lighting the lantern, and so I saw that it was a declaration I was about to receive, not a kiss. He set the lantern on the ledge beside the skull and we stood facing each other, blinking in the sudden light.
I want to show you something, he said. He reached for a brown paper bag lying on the workbench and fished something out of it. Here, he said. Look at this.
The stone he pressed into my hand was oblong and black. I was so taken aback that I almost dropped it.
It’s dung, he said. Fossilized hyena dung, from the caves at Kirkdale. That’s in Yorkshire, not far from here. They found the bones of five hundred hyenas in those caves! And the remains of lynx and lions and bears. Can you believe it?
It’s a stone, I said, setting it on the workbench. Everything was a little distant, as if I were looking through a wash of water.
Well, that’s because it’s fossilized, he said, picking it back up and bobbing it in his hand. It’s coprolite. If you cross-sectioned it you’d find bone splinters inside — bones of all the animals the hyena was eating.
It looks like an ordinary stone to me, I said. My heart had slowed its pounding.
Well, yes, he said. He eyed me warmly. The fossils made it hard for people to classify things. Early on, I mean. Everything was stone. They were finding stone fish in the rocks. And so they didn’t have a clear line between what was organic and what was mineral.
Maybe there is no line, I said. Rock can grow.
He bent down from his height, his face suffused with thought. Okay, yes, he said. Stalactites, I suppose. Or coral. A lot of people think coral is rock.
Rock can grow in your body, I said, thinking of Mrs. Feazel. Gallstones.
Yes! he cried. Gallstones! He laughed, he was delighted by the thought of gallstones. Gesner classified gallstones as gems — like pearls. Conrad Gesner — you haven’t heard of him? He set out to classify everything — stones, shells, fossils, animals. This was in the sixteenth century. But then he died in the plague. In Zurich. So just to amuse myself, I’m working on the index for his encyclopedia. Look, these were his categories. He pulled a folder stuffed with papers off the shelf and opened it. On the top sheet was a list of headings:
On Stones Resembling Aquatic Animals.
On Objects Resembling Human Artefacts.
On Fossils Reflecting the Qualities of the Heavens.
And, simply: Problematica.
The light from the lantern wobbled and I bent closer over his chart. Starfish, I said, recalling the specimen on the shelf in his room. How did he classify starfish?
I seemed to be participating in this discussion, but really I was not, for the worm of romance had entered my heart.
So it wasn’t George’s hand that crept onto my thigh when we were all fishes pressed together by the shed. In a flash I discarded the hand, tossed it out of my heart with a shudder. But the night we walked on Oldham Edge was as memorable as if I’d been given the kiss I longed for. I had tasted romantic hope, and then been thwarted. And this thwarting, this wound to my vanity (a tiny wound, after all, for I hadn’t let on what I was thinking), had a more potent effect on me than a kiss would have had, hardened my resolve to make of George what I wanted him to be.
I moved that night into a period of my life where every single new thought led swiftly back to George. I was with his family — every encounter was a chance to learn more about George. I’d sit on my bed reading and Uncle Stanley would appear in my doorway as if he’d stepped off a colour plate from a military history — it was Legion night, he had his puttees wound round his legs. He had my shoes in his hand and thrust them at me. I’d left them in the downstairs hall, apparently. Apparently that wasn’t allowed. I got up and took them from him and he turned and walked heavily back down the stairs without a word. From my bedroom door I watched the crease in the back of his neck disappear around the landing, watched him with interest. How had a man like Uncle Stanley ever come to raise a boy like George?
My Uncle Stanley fought in the Great War and was wounded at the Somme. He was in a hospital in France for a long time. It was just a flesh wound but it turned septic, and finally they brought him back to England. By then Aunt Lucy had left the linen shop and trained as a nurse, and she was working at the military hospital in Manchester. When they brought him in she was in the storage cupboard with a friend, bent over a letter a soldier had written to them both, and the Sister had to call for five minutes before she heard her and came out with her rosy face all covered with apologies.
Stanley Sheffield was handsome and well spoken, but there was something peevish about him. Aunt Lucy never saw this as who he was. She put it down to the misery he was in, the fleas he had brought with him from France and the smell of putrefaction rising from his bandages. The nurses were used to peevishness and just jollied the boys along. Shortly after he came to the hospital the papers were full of talk of a negotiated peace, and he asked her for help in getting what he needed to write a letter, and then had her post it to both the Manchester Guardian and the Times of London. It was a on
e-sentence letter: Reading your newspaper today I discover that I have lost the use of my right leg so that Mr. Woodrow Wilson can demonstrate his beneficence to the Huns. He had not lost the use of his leg, that was just a bit of rhetoric, but he did fight the infection for months and months before the wound finally healed over. When the infection went away and the petulance stayed, my Aunt Lucy said the war had changed him. Why would a tall, dark-haired, well-educated young man from a good family turn that sort of face to the world otherwise?
He was an only child, raised in Birmingham, the son of an actuary. He said hospital and bottle properly, so you had to appreciate the independent good sense he showed in marrying the daughter of a toll keeper. But there was a diffidence in Aunt Lucy that might have made him think he could reshape her. If so, I think he must have been thwarted: her diffidence was not a lack of definition, it was who she was. She was artless and unthinkingly kind. Why she was drawn to him, that’s another matter. By then she was twenty-four. With so many of the boys gone, it must have been like playing musical chairs, you grabbed the one nearest you and were glad of it, especially when the one nearest turned out to be a handsome man with a bit of money. They were married soon after Stanley got out of the hospital, even though the war was still on. Stanley thought he would go back to France, but that’s not where they sent him. They assigned him to Lyndhurst as a drill master for the wretched boys and middle-aged men they were sending up by then.
After the armistice he took his discharge, and his uncle helped him get a place as an overseer at the mill in Oldham. Oldham was a step up for Aunt Lucy, a mill town but a more vigorous one than Salford, with a bustling market. Far enough away to feel she had her own new life and close enough that she could take her kiddies to see their grandparents. She was ready for that, so ready that she never had the nuisance of a monthly period as a newlywed. But she lost that baby in the third month, and after that, three years went by with (as Aunt Lucy put it) no sign of nothing. She’d escaped Nettie Nesbitt’s fate, but now she feared the Shillingfords’, bending politely over other people’s prams in the street, eating Christmas dinners with your neighbours because you had no one around your own table, growing thinner year by year instead of stouter.
Then one morning after Stanley had left for work, a knock came at the front door. It was the vicar and his wife. The wife was holding a wee baby wrapped up in a towel. It was tiny, just born, and its face was as red as a brick. Lucy invited them in and put the kettle on, and the vicar told her that the baby had been born the night before to a local girl. Aunt Lucy asked who the mother was. She’s a girl from a good family, the vicar said, just a little errant in her ways. Maybe we’ll leave it at that, he said. The baby was fussing then, and the vicar’s wife asked Lucy if she wanted to hold him. Lucy put her finger to his mouth and he started to suckle it. And so she said she would keep him until Stanley came home from work and then they would make up their minds. There was a woman on the lane with a baby, and when the vicar and his wife had gone she went straightaway to borrow what she called a “bokkle” so she could feed him properly. She’d told the vicar she would have to ask Stanley, but by the time Stanley got home, she was that stuck on the little flamer that Stanley didn’t have much of a say in the matter. It still broke Aunt Lucy’s heart to remember George with his thin little hands trembling in the air, making silent shapes with his mouth, and to think of the girl walking shakily down the street at dawn with her baby wrapped in a towel to hand him over to a stranger. People can say what they want about a girl like that, said Aunt Lucy, but it takes a lot of pluck.
She didn’t drink lye, I said. She could have killed herself before she got too far along. I was sitting at the table eating a poached egg.
Aunt Lucy looked at me, startled. Oh, lovie, there’s no need for that, she said. She stopped as if to catch her breath and regarded me, troubled. That girl didn’t just leave her baby on the steps of the orphanage, the way some do, she said finally. That’s what always struck me. She cared enough to knock on the vicar’s door, and she told the vicar that the baby was to be named George.
It was breakfast when Aunt Lucy told me about this, after George and Monty had gone off on a ramble. She’d been making scones and she’d ground to a halt once she launched into the story of George. She reached for the teapot and poured herself the half-cup stewing in the bottom.
That’ll be cold, I said, getting up. I’ll put the kettle on.
I was that stuck on the little flamer that your Uncle Stanley didn’t have much say in the matter, she said again. Not that he doesn’t care for him like a son, she added vaguely. He cares for George like his own son, does your Uncle Stanley.
Do you know why the vicar brought him to you? I asked.
She stood up then and turned the dough out onto the table. Oh, it’s a small parish. Everyone knew I wanted a baby, I was crazy about babies. And they couldn’t keep him, the vicar’s wife was sick. She had a growth. Aunt Lucy touched her floury fingers to her left breast. She died before the year was out.
I let a little minute pass. Then I asked, Did George always know?
If I’d had my way, he wouldn’t know to this day! Aunt Lucy said. She patted the dough into a huge disc. But Stanley was all for telling him, and one day when he was taking him back to St. Michael’s he did tell him. And then he come in the door that night and says, Well, I’ve told him. I was that vexed with your uncle, I was fit to be tied! And I couldn’t see the poor lad then till he come home at half-holiday, and I thought that was hard. But by the time he come home he was just playing the fool like always. You know the way our George is.
She reached a glass down from the shelf and began to press it into the dough. Maybe it’s for the better. It’s a miracle he hadn’t heard it before from someone in the town, there are always those who love to tattle.
In literature we read “Pied Beauty.” Glory be to God for dappled things —. It was a list of all patchy and freckled and variegated things: the hide of a cow, a mottled sky. I pulled a sheet out of my notebook and began to copy the poem, raising an absorbed face now and then to where Mr. Ballard Ballard paced at the side of the room with an unlit cigarette in his fingers, droning on and on about Gerard Manley Hopkins’s attitude to the Catholic Church. Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, I wrote, Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings. I would take it to George. It was a category for Conrad Gesner: On Dappled Things.
Then the class was over and I slipped the page into my notebook and moved with the crowd to the refectory. I didn’t wait for Madeleine, I was too hungry. I squeezed into the middle of a long table, pulled out my sandwich and began to eat, and then to gag on a piece of paper in my sandwich. I pulled it furtively out of my mouth and scraped the liver sausage off with a bread crust. The paper was transparent with grease, but I could make out two pencil images: a robed woman (a figurehead, it looked like, from a ship) and a clock reading four o’clock. Then I understood: it was not a figurehead at all, but the statue that stood up on the ridgepole of the Public Library on Union Street, tipping ever so slightly towards the street. Don’t go, something inside me said, but I knew I would go. Madeleine was not in the corridor after class, but Jenny was. Will you stop in and tell Aunt Lucy I have to work at the library? I asked. I won’t be home for tea.
I set off walking. I could see him when I was still a long way down the street: he was perched on the stone balustrade of the library. His long legs dangled over the edge, as though he were sitting on a bridge looking down into water. I made as though to walk right on past, and he jumped down, staggering a bit, and caught up to me, clamping his hand on the back of my neck and turning me around, steering me back in the direction I had come. We walked half a block up Union Street like that and then he dropped his hand and we walked along quickly and in step, keeping pace for a ways with the trolley car hauling itself up the street, dodging an old woman holding an open umbrella up against the blue sky, dodging a boy on a bicycle.
I was waiting fo
r him to slow down, to turn towards me, to say something in his reedy voice. All I could manage was, Fancy running into you like this, and he smiled one of his sardonic smiles, one that said, Clever, and we walked faster and faster. Then we were in the shop district on King Street and I was walking on the inside, nearest the shops. I could see myself in the windows striding along in my blue uniform, my satchel slung over one shoulder, and I was stirred by the glamour of the scene, my long hair lifted by the wind, both of us as tall and slim as we ought to be for such a picture, our figures against the moving automobiles and the ornate doorways on the other side of King Street. And still he didn’t talk, and the desire to provoke him rose up in me and what I did when we were almost to the top of the street was whip around a corner into a narrow passageway and press myself against the stone wall. He turned back around to find me — he was almost off-balance — and I reached for him with my free hand. I could feel how thin his waist was, almost nothing to hang on to (I can still picture his startled look as well), and that’s when I stretched myself up to his face and kissed him.
I can’t say whether he kissed me back or not. I don’t know how he reacted after the kiss, because then there was no looking at each other at all. We broke apart and started walking again the way we had come, down King Street and up to the Mumps Bridge, where we stopped and watched the traffic on the motorway beneath and he reached down and picked up a handful of cinders and drizzled them over the railing. Then I pressed myself between him and the railing and turned my face up to his and we kissed again, longer this time, long enough for me to be aware of a figure brushing past us on the sidewalk and the honking of horns on the bridge. Then we turned in the direction of home, and I told myself that I would remember the Mumps Bridge all my life, and thought with excitement about the person brushing past us, imagining how it must have looked to him. We walked more slowly now, along the motorway at first and then up Manchester Street, past the Gardener’s Arms, where the sign creaked in the wind as we walked under it, past the Ling Far Chinese Restaurant with its smell of frying shrimp, past the Working Men’s Hall. Maybe he had in mind to take me somewhere or show me something (he must have done when he dug my lunch out of the icebox and planted a note in the liver sausage), but I’d showed him what his real plan was. If his silence on our way out was aloof, his silence now was stunned, bashful, gob-smacked.