by Melvyn Bragg
Grace next went to Wigton two weeks after she had followed Mrs Johnston’s request to explain away the ‘bastard’. She, too, was uneasy about having done it. The flurry of the moment and Mrs Johnston’s characteristic implacability had given her no space for reflection. But what option was there? The dream of the perfect moment when she would reveal herself to her daughter had never been more than a dream. And surely the word and the wound of ‘bastard’ had to be addressed and the sooner the better. And she was the one who had to do it even if, in the process, she was now convinced, it had driven a wedge between them. She feared that Mary would never trust her now.
Add to that the crushingly kindly manner in which Dr Fraser (speaking, Grace knew, for his wife) had rejected her tentative suggestion, and she felt a vertigo in her soul. She realised that now she had no rudder, no steer. She had her will, that was all, and that will could be strengthened and it could and it would see her through, she knew that. To give up her dream would bring least harm. That was her decision, her conclusion. That was what she would bend herself to . . .
When she arrived in Wigton, instead of going to the house she returned to the broken wall on the path to Kirkland where she had tried to dispel Mary’s fear. She was self-conscious about this. It seemed too ‘dramatic’, she thought, and too public, although who on earth would comment on a woman taking a few minutes’ rest on a country walk? But the turbulence she had to subdue had returned in full spate: she needed . . . space? Solitude? Both, and the courage of her mother. She sat there for a while and hoped for steadiness. There would be many times like this.
Then, briskly, she went to see Mary. She had bought her a book of line drawings of farm animals and some coloured pencils.
The girl was unaffectedly pleased to see her and the book and especially the coloured pencils, which she received like gifts from the gods. She began to fill in the animals immediately. The women watched her, some sort of harmony between them.
‘I always wanted a girl,’ said Mrs Johnston.
Perhaps the insistence on prayer in the chapel and its regular repetition throughout her childhood had given to Grace an ability to concentrate intensely, which she would otherwise not have had. Now, although she had deserted her religion, this gift remained. In her attic room, on the Sunday afternoon, the south-facing windows ablaze with sun, she sat and thought it all through. It required a discipline of devotion, but she called that up. Echoes of all the old chapel certainties whispered around the aisles of her mind. The world of the chapel was a simple place and the prize went to the righteous. She was no longer of that company. But she could find strength in what she had been taught.
Grace had, by now, experience of being failed by life and returning to it; of being self-exiled and enduring it and returning to the fray; of being rejected by love and coming out of the despair; of finding a purpose in life, and then being denied the chance to carry it through.
She would have to build a life of her own and on her own. It was a life not chosen but chosen for her, as it was for many others. She would plant the life in what she had and hope no more. She would not cry. But nor would she give in. A distant amen came to seal her resolution. So be it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Grace kept her attic view and Mary kept her distance. Once, Mary told John, they passed each other on the street when Mary was fourteen and about to leave school and work in the local factory. The encounter was in King Street. Mary was going up the street to shop, Grace coming down the street for the bus. They were on the same pavement. Each saw the other with about fifty yards between them. A drab street, that northern winter afternoon. Drab and sad with the workless men propping up the walls and the feeling of listlessness in a town that seemed to be dying by the day in the deep post-war depression.
Between the two there was a glance of light. Yet still, still it stayed, the paralysing stigma. Grace moved towards the shop frontage, Mary to the outer edge, to the pavement’s kerb, so that they would not meet. John remembered Mary telling him about it and how she dared not look her ‘own mother’ in the face and how Grace had passed her by without a word to help her and how that was what they had to do.
Grace was invited to her wedding but she did not come. She wrote such a firm and tender letter that Mary could feel neither offended nor guilty. Grace’s teaching in Carlisle was going well: young lads would come up to her on the street and say, ‘Hello, Miss. You learned me to read. Do you remember my name?’ Dr Fraser relied on her increasingly and Agnes lightened her load by bringing in another woman to help clean and cook in the mornings.
When John was born, Mary wrote and Grace came to see him. ‘And so there were the three of us,’ John said to his mother. ‘Do you remember when Grace came to see us?’
He remembered a few visits but they merged into one. He would be told, at the age of seven, or nine, or thirteen, until he left school, presumably once a year on or near his birthday, that ‘Grace’ would be coming. He would be given this information when he came back from school and his mother would make him wash his face and tidy up. Grace would be shown into the cold, underused sitting room and they would sit opposite each other at the table, which was covered with the dark green cloth. Between them there was a potted plant. His mother would retreat.
John knew that she was important in his mother’s life. He knew that he was important in hers. But he did not know who she was or why she was there until he was sixteen when his mother told him that Grace had died ‘of consumption’. She had gone to see her near the end and asked her to come and live with her so that she could be beside John and herself, but Grace had refused. Had they asked him to see her? They would all three have talked then, surely, said something at the last. Whatever it was it would have been a holding of hands. The three of them. A few honest words between them. After her funeral he saw his mother in grief for the first time.
What was Grace thinking when she sat opposite him in that parlour? This son of her daughter, this scarcely known son of her eternally distant daughter, who was always out of the room. Making tea? Fretting? Why out of the room? And what was the boy supposed to say? Did they talk to each other? What did they say?
Grace would surely have asked questions. And he would have done his best to answer but it was so strained. Even at the time. Looking back now, John could not square the strangeness of the three of them in the same house at the same time with the fact that they were mother, daughter and grandson, one blood and quite similar in the way they looked. Yet frozen in this still-life. What force society then must have had to keep them so apart, John thought later, three people who ought to have been together, familiar, friendly, in warmth, easy, giving and gaining. No. They were three independent figures temporarily assembled in that house.
And Grace knowing all about Mary and about John, and John knowing so little about Mary and nothing about Grace and yet put there, opposite her, like someone summoned from afar to an intimidating court and placed there for an audience. No, that was too formal. It was humbler and finer than that. And no again: it was not the surface of things that permeated his feelings. It was the unspoken that he remembered. He could return to it with warmth and liking for her. Later, as he dwelled on it, he searched in his memory for any evidence that she had recognised those unspoken feelings.
And then she would go. As far as he remembered, she never kissed him or shook him by the hand. But on the table she would leave an envelope containing a ten-shilling note.
Now and then. The three of them were together but apart; their life as a family was that.
How deep could shame and modesty and the compulsion to observe the ritual of secrecy go? In his mother it plumbed the deepest reach of her nature. How strong could self-possession be? In his grandmother it could service a sort of torture. His own ignorance, John was to think, was such a loss. He would have liked to know her: he would have loved her and she him. How good that would have been. Now he had to make it up. Now he had to imagine her, just as, increasingly, he h
ad to imagine his mother. Memory was not enough.
She woke in a slurry daze, her eyes all unseeing, her mind still in debt to sleep. She did not know who he was, this man, near her, smiling. But she was good-mannered.
‘Hello,’ she said tentatively.
‘It’s John.’
‘Oh. Is it John? Oh, I’m glad.’
‘It’s me.’
‘Hello me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. Maybe that was how it was for her now.
He took her cold, bony, large-veined, brown-speckled hand. ‘I’ve been with Grace,’ he said.
‘Have you? Isn’t that good? That’s good.’
‘And you. With you as well. All of us were together.’
‘Isn’t that good . . . ? Grace was . . . She was very nice, was Grace . . . She had a lovely look about her.’
‘So did you. I always thought you were the best-looking . . .’
‘Go away! No. No . . .’
‘Do you want to go back to sleep?’
‘Just for a little bit. Wake me up, mind.’ Rather feebly, she shook her forefinger at him.
‘I will.’
‘Good lad.’
And that would be the best of it now. As her dementia fastened its grip, her anxieties and her fears grew and her only defence was sleep. Days of sleep.
There would come a time soon when all she could do was drowse and make soft, short sounds. He would put his head close to hers and take her cold hands in his. Her eyes would open but mostly find no focus, just look ahead. She was in no pain that he could see but what of that he could not see? ‘It’s so hard for me now,’ she had said, just a few months before. At times, even then, she would sing, fragments murmured but the melody still recognisable.
Should he not help her find a way to go, to die? But then there would be a smile and a slight pressure on his hands from hers and all he wanted for her was that she lived as long as there was no suffering and as long as that which was in her kept this sweet, brave woman alive.
He stayed a while longer and then drove away, going first to Wigton where he wanted to look in on a friend.
He walked around the small town centre, which had once to him been a metropolis of alleys and cuts, streets, squares, yards; at night a jungle with muted sounds like a low wind muttering between the branches of the old town where low lights speckled feebly against the stars. Now, at twilight, despite the mid-century gutting and transplanting of the place, John could conjure up what had been and see where Grace would have come as a girl and where Mary was adopted and protected by the intense closeness of it all. And where he as a boy felt that the world was all about him.
He walked along Water Street in the dusk and came to the Congregational church, no longer a church, just a property, still up for sale. Water Street, in his memory for ever a seething stream of skinny children, cattle being herded to the station, horses, women on the doorsteps, pigs squealing in their pens, upended bicycles being mended on the pavement. All gone now, a car park, an emptiness.
The door was ajar. He went down the stone steps and pushed it open to look in at the hall. In the far corner a woman was sweeping the floor. She looked up and nodded pleasantly but said nothing as he came in and sat down and looked around.
This was where they came. This was where they had danced. It is at this time, just after the war in the middle of the last century, that they still meet most happily.
He felt a deep but tranquil sorrow. All gone. The town now lost to the character of his own past there. Churches and chapels, little shops and narrow alleyways, common frugality and livestock inside the town itself, all gone, like so many of the people. Mary now only just holding on, himself next in line.
And yet as he sat there he felt a sweet sorrow, a sure recollection of a happiness taken from the grip of deprivation. Just ordinary people getting on with their lives and making the best of not giving in.
And then Fred Ingrams on the trumpet wet his lips and Tommy Jackson hit the drums and all of them, the Studholme boys and Queenie, Kettler and other people from the town out for an evening’s celebration, Grace and Mary and himself, all of them formed up in the twin circles, and the music started up and they moved left to right, right to left, and they danced, one last time, they danced, and how magnificently they danced, when they danced the Valeta!
Also by Melvyn Bragg:
Fiction
For Want of a Nail
The Second Inheritance
The Cumbrian Trilogy:
The Hired Man
A Place in England
Kingdom Come
The Nerve
A Christmas Child
Without a City Wall
The Silken Net
Autumn Manoeuvres
Love and Glory
Josh Lawton
The Maid of Buttermere
A Time to Dance
A Time to Dance: the screenplay
Crystal Rooms
Credo
The Soldier’s Return
A Son of War
Crossing the Lines
Remember Me . . .
Non-fiction
Speak for England
Land of the Lakes
Laurence Olivier
Cumbria in Verse (edited)
Rich: The Life of Richard Burton
On Giants’ Shoulders
The Adventure of English
12 Books that Changed the World
In Our Time
The South Bank Show: Final Cut
The Book of Books