by Melvyn Bragg
It belonged in the same part of her mind that was full of awe at the glamour of Hollywood. As a Girl Guide, she had marched with the troop up the great beech avenue to the Big House for the fete. Tea was set out on the long trestle tables, draped in fine white linen tablecloths, and they were waited on by maids, some of whom Ellen knew. Miss Storey would emerge with a small group, all wonderfully dressed, and walk about with such elegance and amiability. They could go to the private zoo or wander in the Deer Park, not getting too close to the deer, and not feel that they were trespassing when they tiptoed closer to the house and discovered the vast vegetable plot or the small walled rose garden and even peeped through the windows (hoisting each other up in turn) to see the gilded mirrors and furniture they had never seen before and long curtains, mounds of cushions. The house to Ellen had been the Aladdin’s cave of Wigton, and now that the Storeys could not keep it going she lamented its passing as if she had been part of it. It had been, it was still, it would for ever be the perfect and unattainable house.
‘Them railings around the Deer Park,’ said Sadie, grown cocky, They were stopped from melting them down in the War. For bullets. That’s how important it was.’
Mr Kneale chose not to demur. It was unfortunate that on the increasingly rare days Ellen and Joe came down together the cameo, he thought peevishly, should be turned into a gargoyle by the slippered and slatternly Sadie.
To regain the initiative, he passed around his most recent photographs, which were of the Nonconformist chapels and meeting houses in the town.
At a predetermined moment, with the blessing of Grace’s knowing smile but to the slight bemusement of Mr Kneale and Sadie, Leonard murmured that he was taking Ellen ‘up street’ for a few minutes. They were gone before questions could be politely formulated.
Leonard felt braced after his aria on Mr Banks. He took Ellen’s arm – he was, after all, more than old enough to be her father and he had, for many years, stood in for her absent father – and felt the swish that comes when a fine-looking young woman walks up street under your protection. His greetings were a little louder than usual, Ellen’s a little more subdued; and though he whistled ‘Money’ once or twice, it was all but noiselessly.
They were making for a small, discreet alleyway very near the middle of the town which led into a big cobbled yard. There was only one house there – which was partly why the yard was so rarely visited. A second reason for its neglect was that it had been until lately the house of a spinster whose life had been blighted by the death of her fiance in the First World War and who had inherited the house from her parents and become more and more of a recluse. At her death she was practically a hermit, still pining to be rejoined with the fair-haired young lieutenant of the almost faded photograph beside her bed.
Though the house was double-fronted, it was shallow, with only a narrow strip of garden at the rear: land had been sold off and a high wall darkened the back rooms. There were four bedrooms – one of which had served as a storeroom. Downstairs the two drawing rooms were identical – over-furnished, under-aired, scarcely used. There was a kitchen which over the years had become not only the centre but for weeks on end the sole part of the house to be utilised and then there were ‘the usual offices’ said Leonard, a little grandly.
The house brought out that little grandness. Though shabby, though worn and desolate, it still spoke of a former style where money could be spent without fretting and objects gathered with discrimination. Even the peeling wallpaper seeping from the walls had that air about it – that air, to Ellen, of the unattainable by her and her kind.
‘When the old furniture is cleared out it will look a tidy old mess,’ said Leonard, banging a chaise longue to make the dust rise. ‘And there’s some damp – needs painting throughout. God alone knows what’s under those old carpets. But in the right hands …’
Ellen felt nervous just looking at it. How could she consider it? How could she aspire? How could she even afford just to look at it? It was such a leap. Yet there was something which had tempted her from the moment that Leonard had mentioned it and she had found herself darting into the almost secret yard on her way back from her stint at the chemist’s. It looked so secure. For all of them. For ever more. Deep in the centre of the town which had brought her up. With style but hidden away so that it could not excite comment. It would take years to put right, it would look a mess for months at least, how could they furnish it, though decayed, it might be thought too posh for them. The negatives built up as a way of making her positive.
More than anything else, Ellen felt that it could be her private fortress. Put her there and she could take on whatever Sam in his newness, his strangeness, had to throw at her. There, she could build a family. There she could dig in for a life which she would not regret.
This was the first time she had been inside and it was gloomy, even a little weird in its dated stillness, something of a mausoleum. But all that could be blown away like the dust. She felt herself grow to fit it. The longer she stayed the more dry-throated she became at the thought that she might not be able to manage it.
‘Sit down,’ said Leonard, and Ellen perched on the dusty edge of a deeply-cushioned armchair. Leonard relaxed in its faded velvet opposite. It seemed rather unreal to Ellen to do something as normal as hold a conversation in the dead woman’s room, crammed as it was with her life – the lamps and rugs, watercolours, photographs, knick-knacks now out of fashion, ornate clustered chairs, a big mahogany oval table, an empty, once-white birdcage, vases of dried flowers, a glass-fronted bookcase holding uniform volumes in dark-blue bindings. In part Ellen was reminded of what she had glimpsed as a girl through the window at the Big House, and in part it resembled the house belonging to the two sisters on Standing Stone. The one she dreamed about, the other she cleaned.
‘Now then,’ Leonard continued, what I’m telling you I’m telling you in advance of others and so treat it as confidential. Miss Ivinson’s income fell below par some time ago and Willie Barwise, who had been a friend of the family and his father before him, being then Chairman of the Parish Council, exercised a perfectly legal right – with the Clerk to the Council – to purchase the house for the Council and let Miss Ivinson live in it at a peppercorn rent until her day was done. She took a bit longer than the estimate but that’s all in the game. So this, Ellen,’ Leonard smiled as a bringer of good news, ‘is, strictly speaking, a council house.’ Leonard glowed, he shone: it was not often since her childhood that he had been in a position to dazzle and impress Ellen and her concentrated attention had a stirring effect on him.
It mattered that it was a council house, Ellen thought: that meant it was not special. But she could not yet see why Leonard wanted her to be so pleased.
‘Speaking simply,’ said Leonard, unconscious of being patronising, ‘it comes down to this. Because of the peculiar but not irregular circumstances,’ he broke down every last syllable, ‘a £50 down payment is necessary, after which rent will be levied on the current council house scale, which I would guess for this size is somewhere between £1 10s. and £2 a week.’
Ellen nodded. The rent could be met. How could they raise the £50?
‘What is in your favour,’ Leonard said, smiling, ‘is that with these new council houses already built and being built and just about as big as this and with no £50 needed for a down payment and no restoration and general cleaning up to be done – I think you’ll have a clear field. At least for a while.’
To talk Sam into it: Ellen nodded.
‘Now then,’ Leonard concluded, and he looked around as if he feared he was being overheard, ‘I’ll take this one step further … I’ll give you first refusal. That is to say, if anybody else shows serious interest, I’ll let it be known there was a previous enquiry which takes precedence and come to you first.’
He had thought it all through. Ellen was moved by that. He had taken on board her enthusiasm, seen her love for the place, understood her circumstances and the potential
difficulty with Sam. Thank you would sound inadequate and yet she had never been able to hug him. The memory of her father had made it awkward and even now that memory checked her impulse.
‘You’ve been very good,’ was all she said.
Leonard knew the feeling behind the remark and smiled, widely. Tt’s nothing,’ he said, ‘and tell Sam – if he gives it the go-ahead – that there are ways of getting that £50. Just tell him that.’
‘I don’t know if Sam’ll want it.’
‘That’s between the two of you. I’m saying no more. Grace wanted to have a say but I said – say nothing. They have to decide this one for themselves. This is a turning point, I said.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now then,’ he stood up and turned around, ‘dust me off, will you?’
As Ellen did so, he hummed his favourite tune.
The wallpaper, she thought, should be light-coloured throughout. Even yellow.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘I won’t ask you to do this again,’ said Annie as they drew out of Wigton.
‘Don’t worry yourself.’
‘Just this first time. Just to get myself used to it.’
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ Sam offered her a cigarette.
‘No. Jackie does enough for the two of us.’
She gave the faintest smile as she mentioned her husband’s name but that was the only smile.
Annie’s unsunned broad spotted face was clamped in concern. Throughout the bus ride to Carlisle she gazed out of the window, partly because the scenery was not all that familiar – she made few journeys – partly because she did not want to meet Sam’s sympathetic eye. It was a hot day and the bus stank of nicotine.
From the Carlisle bus station which served south and west Cumberland, they walked the couple of hundred yards to the bus station which served the north and east. Annie looked out most carefully along their route and Sam helped her identify the chief landmarks: HRH Majestic Theatre and, across the road, just before the turning, the Barley Mow. Annie stood stock-still before both, until she was sure they would not slip from memory.
The next bus they caught had the humiliating, dread name ‘Garlands’ on its list of destinations. This was a single-decker bus and fuller, in mid-afternoon, than the Wigton bus had been. Annie had kept her head bent as she had arrived in the new station and she kept it low throughout the journey. This time she did not object when Sam paid both fares, too ashamed to look up even at the conductor.
They walked the last half-mile to the lunatic asylum they called Garlands. Sam took Annie by the elbow as they went through the big iron gates and spoke for her at Reception. They had come from the bus, with others, self-absorbed, like a congregation. Visiting hours were narrow and strict. They had arrived a few minutes early and found a seat on a narrow bench with others huddled in a misery of silence.
‘You can go in now.’ A crisp Sister made the announcement and the visitors heaved themselves resolutely off the benches and made for the ward.
‘Ward C,’ Sam murmured, just for the sake of saying something.
The disinfectant smelled to high heaven. Depressing dark green tiles. Footsteps on the wooden floors sounded threatening. The beds in the wards close together and spartan. Only about half the inmates had visitors.
Jackie was sitting up, his hair freshly combed, his slim neck looking even smaller in the oversize brown and white striped pyjamas. He gave them a drugged but warm smile.
‘There,’ Sam whispered, ‘he does recognise you.’
That had been one of Annie’s greatest fears.
‘Now then,’ he said.
‘Hello, Jackie.’
Annie went first and stood by him, not knowing whether it was allowed to give him a kiss, not accustomed to public show and distrustful of it. So she simply stood her ground and looked down on him.
‘Top feed,’ he said, looking up at her. ‘Three times a day.’
‘I’ve brought two plate cakes. One’s from Francis.’
Annie drew the cakes out of a white paper bag, looked for a place to put them, saw the empty, minute side table and put them there.
Then she stood once more in silence.
Jackie looked and then swerved away and caught Sam’s eye.
‘Ah. That’s my pal!’
‘That’s right, Jackie.’
‘That’s my marra.’
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s my pal.’ Tt is.’
‘Well. You old bugger.’
Sam took a step forward, bringing him beside Annie. ‘I’ve brought you some fags.’
‘Woody Woodbines?’
‘Woody Woodbines.’
‘We’re not allowed to smoke, in here, except under supervision. That’s it. All a fiddle.’
Jackie looked from left to right and then a hand darted out for the cigarettes which were pushed deep under the sheets.
‘Right up my street,’ he said.
‘How are you?’
‘I just kip, Sam. Mostly I try to kip. Don’t stick your neck out in here, you know.’
‘Do they look after you?’
‘Top feed. Three times a day.’
‘You’re looking well.’
‘That right? Lots of our lads in here, you know. Lots worse than me. Terrible at night time, Sam, when I try to kip. Terrible at night time.’
His worn face, until then so eager and pleased to see his visitors, crumpled in exhausted fear. ‘Terrible at night time in here.’
There was a single metal folding chair, green, beside each bed. Sam motioned to Annie to sit down. As she did so, he noticed that her lower lip jutted in front of the upper lip and her eyes glistened from withheld tears. Though the heat was oppressive, she had not unbuttoned her navy-blue coat, loaned her by Mrs Charters and rather too small. In her hands she clasped the empty paper bag which had held the cakes.
‘I’ll leave you,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll be back before time’s up.’
Neither of them registered much. Annie’s nod was all but imperceptible. Jackie’s head had gone back on his pillow, his mouth had opened, he looked at the ceiling.
Sam strode rather quickly through the low intermittent murmuring in the ward, down the pungent corridors, back through Reception and out into the grounds – green and flowered and expansive – which would have brought credit to the small country house Garlands had once been. He counted eight men working in the gardens, in the heat, and wondered how many of them were inmates. There was a shaded bench beside a huge burgeoning bush of rhododendrons whose foreign luxuriance and deep and certain reds seemed to flaunt themselves in such a place. He took out a cigarette and tried not to think.
Not to think of the history behind the men confined here. Not to think of those who had cracked up over there. Not to think of Ian, of the children in that village, of the cries, of the wounds, the wounded, the dead. He had to fix his barrier against that and he had thought he was succeeding.
In the distance, two men in army greatcoats, despite the heat, were walking very slowly, very close to each other as if so afraid to walk alone that they had to grasp tight. One of them wore a bush hat. Sam had once thought he might use that dashing Australian hat in civvy street or give it to Joe, but he had done neither. It was still at the bottom of his kitbag. But the romance of it, as he saw now, broad-brimmed, risibly useless for modern combat but fiercely cherished, perfect against the sun as it had been against the tropical downpour, adding glamour to the meanest. The hat itself, never mind the sad ex-soldier supporting it as he edged around the gardens, triggered a cloudburst of memories, so that, for a few moments, Sam felt that he was losing his self-control. Something about the bush hat undammed him.
He stood up and moved away, feeling a coward that he did not go over and talk to the pair so painfully walking and that he did not stay where they would surely pass.
He kept to the paths, although there were no signs about keeping off the grass. He walked quickly and chain-smoked: both helped
.
The bell went – a big old school-handbell that rang out the five-minute warning. Half an hour was the allotted time. With the two bus journeys and the waiting between it had taken Annie and Sam the best part of an hour and a half to get there.
He went in as the Sister clanged the bell even more forcefully to announce two minutes to go. Already as he went into Ward C most of the visitors were leaving; more keenly, he noticed – or was he mistaken? – than they had arrived.
There was a slice taken from one of the cakes. Annie pointed to it. Sam smiled. It was some sort of victory.
Jackie now looked fretful. His talk was near babble. Whispered. ‘I’m clapped out,’ he said, several times. ‘Blisters. Ill give you blisters. Big as pancakes. I’m a dead loss.’
‘No you’re not,’ said Annie, without a tremor. ‘No you’re not.’
The Sister’s baying voice replaced the bell and the command had to be obeyed.
‘I’ll be back next week,’ said Annie emphatically. ‘This time. Same day. I know the way now.’ She reached out her short stubby arm and he grasped it with both of his thin hands. The pyjama sleeves fell back and Sam saw how terribly thin his arms were. Jackie began to shake his head. The Sister was right behind them now.
‘Time to go home,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Time’s up. Time to go.’
Sam turned around angrily, but the Sister’s smile was full of understanding.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Joe took careful aim at the solitary tree in the Waste, a narrow spindly thing twisted and slanted and no use for play but a good target for an arrow. He missed and the arrow sped on the bounce into the steps which led up to the house which sold lemonade and made clogs. He tried and failed again with his second arrow. For his final attempt he allowed himself three, quite big, steps forward. This time the arrow glanced off one side of the trunk and Joe felt that Robin Hood was looking down on him with pride.