The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  Dinner was the sandwiches they had brought and a time to stretch out in the barn. Some of the women nosed round. Joe tried to get a game of hide and seek going. Ellen found that she watched him all the time and worried when he was not in sight, even though she knew he was safe. She had not been so anxious about him since he was a small child.

  In the afternoon a steady drizzle set in and the clouds were lower so that when Ellen straightened her back and looked over the Solway Firth to Scotland, she could see only a smudge, a blur of hills while, to the south, the matching fells of Lakeland were cloud-capped. Save for the tractor and the eternal gulls, it could seem a world cut off, women and children bent double over the opened earth, picking the crop, as muddied as the earth. The afternoon seemed endless and though Ellen was used to work she felt the tug at the base of her spine and the ache in her shoulders and the damp began to get hold. Joe was determined to stick it out and he knew the money was coming at the end of the day, but he was tired, he had put too much into the morning. Ellen had to work harder, doing almost all the stitch herself.

  There were cries for the farmer to slow down. After asserting his authority for a time by ignoring the cries, he stopped his tractor at the bottom of the field and waited. ‘He’s given us ten minutes,’ Sadie yelled out the message and the women walked away from the stitches, pressing their hands hard into the small of their backs, kneading the sore muscles. The children sat down or looked for a playmate.

  The final stint was hard and fading light and low cloud darkened the field. They would finish the whole field that day which had been the farmer’s best hope.

  Joe’s clogs were now padded with wet earth and he enjoyed the extra inch or two and the feeling of clump in his walk. He had taken off his gloves because they were too caked and his hands were red with cold. One of the veins on the back of his right hand was beginning to swell up. He sucked at it. His mother rubbed his hands but that made them hurt more.

  The farmer collected the swills after the last stitch and they walked the big, denuded field to the barn, which had no light, where they waited for the lorry.

  He had them in a line for payment and counted out the money carefully to each one, grudging it, crushing them. Joe got seven shillings and sixpence. He looked at it as if it were a bar of gold. Ellen kept it for him because he was wearing old clothes she ought to have thrown out long ago and there was not a sound pocket.

  The lorry was late. The jolting which had been merry on the way out now bumped their aches into bruises and the drizzle penetrated their hearts as well as their bodies. The children were excited, with the money, with the adventure, now and then other cars, another lorry, always a cheer from the children, but the women knew the reckoning and although they would joke again in the morning, the darkening way back was a time when they drew apart.

  Ellen felt a pressure of unhappiness new to her. It was like a stone laid on her and then another stone laid above that to press the life out of her. She had been unhappy often enough while Sam was away but this was entirely different and he was home.

  She decided she would not come the next day.

  Each jolt of the lorry was like a little tap of the hammer tap-tapping her unhappiness. She could not even react to the occasional salty rude remarks of the tinker women and when Joe sought to clamber on to her she told him it was too uncomfortable. The drizzle, the growing darkness and the fundamental grimness of this being her ‘holiday’ all added to the unhappiness, but these would have been sloughed off had she not nursed the tight clench of misery which seemed a solid object in her body. It drew everything to it, everything dark and miserable fed it and made it harder, more clenched, more hopeless.

  Ellen and Joe limped off the lorry and up the street towards home. Ellen hoped that Sam would be there but when they reached the yard and she saw the yellowy glow through the curtain, her mood suddenly changed. When she opened the door and saw him by the fire, open-collared, a cigarette, pale and tired but with a clear hope of love on his face as he rose half-smiling indicating the kettle on the hob and the table laid, she wanted to move into an embrace but she could not. For a split second, her expression met his and then it snapped shut.

  ‘I think we’ll go down to Market Hill to get properly clean.’

  She had thought no such thing until that perverse split second.

  ‘This is not good enough for you?’

  ‘We’re both too dirty.’

  Joe, plastered in mud beside her, was proof of that and she glanced at him as evidence, but his state was no more than a poor excuse and they both knew it.

  ‘What d’you come back here then for in the first place?’

  ‘I thought you might be out.’

  The brutality of her answer silenced both of them.

  Sam turned away. If only he would turn back, Ellen thought, then I would stay, but he had his back to her and she left, sick at the memory of her words.

  When they returned, blooming from the hot water and the tea provided by Grace and the warmth of the house after the bitter damp chill on the flat fields, Sam was out, and it was Ellen who sat by the fire and waited.

  Joe had been so tired that even Blackie scarcely diverted him. After putting his new money with the earnings from the two previous days and counting it all up and dropping it solemnly into the piggy bank, he was easy to persuade to bed and asleep, halfway down the page of the story.

  Ellen told herself she was glad to be alone. She told herself that many times these days. She needed the silence to look at and examine this misery which dominated her. When she was alone she could breathe more easily. All she wanted was for this tightness to go away. She could think of little else while it was there. She was not herself. It soured her, against Sam, she knew, it made her say things she ought not to have said and would never have dreamt that she could say. This thing inside her, this compact of misery, was eating her, taking her over. She shied away from Sam. From talking to him. From being with him. Even from looking at him. As a wife in the house she did the least necessary. In bed she was cold.

  Yet, at moments like this, sweetly weary, so warmed and fed after the day on the field, half drowsing by the fire, waiting for him, she wanted to tear out this awful thing inside her, she wanted to talk to the Sam she had married and loved and waited for and sort it out and start again and pretend this had never happened. How silly not to go away with him! Not to be part of his adventure! How timid and mousy of her!

  Sam had always said, when they were courting, that in her quiet way she was the boldest of them all. So what was this fear? She tried to bounce herself out of it, to laugh at herself and scold herself and tease herself out of it and sometimes she thought she was succeeding. Australia would appear in her mind as the glowing Eden which Sam saw it to be. She could not imagine the particulars of what would happen there but there would be some people she knew and that would be good… but her enthusiasm died at the thought of what she would leave and never see again. At that thought, a terror set in, over which she had no control.

  And there was Joe. Sam hitting Joe. That hardened her. That pulled her back. That, she thought, was the biggest cause of her immovable misery.

  But still, would it not be a better opportunity for Joe – they said it was a better opportunity for the children – was she denying him a better life, as Sam said she was? Joe would like it well enough, she knew him. He liked what was new. He would soon forget Wigton. The trip on the ship would be the best holiday of the boy’s life -unrepeatable. Sam had said that as well.

  When he came in, Ellen was asleep. Her face was glowing, from health and from the fire. Her body had slid forward in the chair and she sprawled, in her sleep, provocatively. Her head rested on her right shoulder and the black hair fell over part of her face. Sam watched for a while, latched the door quietly, watched some more. The gas mantle puttered very gently and the sound of the fire was faint.

  He had drunk two quick pints and then stopped there and only had another half. But he w
iped his mouth with his sleeve as if this would wipe away the smell of beer on his breath. He sat down in the chair opposite and lit up. Perhaps it was the rasp of the match that woke her. She sat up straight, smoothing her skirt. Her eyes were soft, half full of sleep. They could have been loving. Sam, softened a little by the beer, was equally loving.

  ‘Time for bed.’ Ellen’s tone was abrupt and uninviting.

  ‘Can’t we talk?’

  ‘What more is there to say?’

  ‘There’s a lot to say, Ellen.’ She knew that but the thing inside her had clenched tight again and would not let her soften.

  ‘If you ask me we’ve said too much already.’

  ‘How can we have said too much when we still don’t know where we are?’

  ‘I know where I am.’

  Her expression darkened and Sam caught a glimpse of the misery eating into her.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘I should give up going to Australia.’

  ‘But you want to go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve proved to me you want it badly. More than anything.’

  ‘Not more than anything.’ He spoke quietly.

  ‘I couldn’t be the one who stood in your way.’

  ‘What are you saying, Ellen?’

  ‘Go on your own.’ The misery flooded into her face, drawing the warmth and the soft sleep out of it, tightening the skin, straining the eyes. ‘Go on your own.’

  ‘And send for you later?’

  ‘So you have thought about it.’ Ellen’s accusation was almost triumphant. ‘Going on your own.’

  Sam was confused.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go with me?’

  ‘Why did you hit him?’

  It was the first time in the two weeks that she had asked him directly.

  Sam tried to answer and then shook his head.

  ‘You promised me.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I just want to know why.’

  ‘If I could undo anything I’ve done, it would be that.’

  ‘But it’s done.’

  ‘The first and last time.’

  ‘How can I know that for certain?’ Ellen was full of earnest enquiry. ‘How can I?’

  Sam looked at her for some help.

  ‘You’ll have to take my word.’

  ‘You gave me your word.’

  He had no answer. There was a silence. Ellen looked at him but Sam’s gaze was turned away. There was an unhappiness in his attitude and half-averted face which touched her and this time, gently, she repeated.

  ‘Why did you hit him?’

  But to dig up the answer was too much for him. It was beyond him to articulate what might have been some sort of exonerating reason, at least an explanation, just something to give him a position.

  ‘Mammy.’

  Joe was at the top of the short flight of stairs, clutching the front on his pyjama bottom. Sam turned to him and smiled, a little. Joe looked at him with what Sam interpreted as insolence. Ellen had risen to her feet on the first syllable of Joe’s little cry, her face, her body urgent with concern and Sam felt jealousy surge up inside him and, as Ellen was passing him, he grabbed her wrist, firmly, not roughly.

  ‘Why do you always have to jump and run after him? He’s got you on a string.’

  ‘Let go!’

  ‘Mammy!’ There was fear in the urgency now and Ellen tugged away her arm with unnecessary violence.

  Again Sam looked at the boy and as Ellen went up the stairs he thought he saw victory in the child’s gaze. He had to make himself go numb. He had to lie doggo now. Keep that sight away.

  He heard Ellen chide the boy gently and then turn the mattress, put on a dry sheet, most likely a towel on top, make him change his pyjamas, stay to settle him down.

  Sam waited. She sang, very softly; he strained to hear but it was for Joe’s ears only. Sam had loved to hear her sing.

  She came down with the wet sheet and the pyjamas.

  ‘Did you think I was going to hit you?’

  Sam’s question came out of thin air. Once said, though, and with bitterness, he stuck to it.

  Ellen, who had softened to Sam as she had sung their child to sleep, was pushed back into her defiance. ‘You might have done.’

  ‘Do you think I might have done?’ Sam’s question was terribly deliberate.

  Ellen knew there was something of madness about herself and maybe Sam too, but she was powerless. ‘You hit Joe.’ ‘Do you think I would ever hit you?’

  She stood, holding the wet things, her misery now fully possessing her. He too was possessed, by a dreadful anger which took all his force to control.

  ‘Well?’ His voice was harsh. ‘Would I?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  Could he not see that she was imprisoned in this misery? That she had been taken over by it? And could she not see the hurt and anger and shame in him and the words which would not come to relieve it?

  ‘Yes or no?’

  She was unable to surmount this obstinate, all-oppressing unhappiness.

  ‘If it comes to that,’ she said, turning and dropping the wet things in the basket, Then it’s – yes.’

  Sam took in his breath sharply, held it a while and then let it out slowly. He nodded and his lips tightened. He seemed to be staring beyond the room, beyond the town, far away.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘that’s about it, then, isn’t it? That’s about it.’

  Ellen opened up the bed and made it, all done swiftly. She changed as chastely as if they had never known each other. In no time she was in the bed, curled up at one edge of it, utterly lonely.

  After a while Sam turned off the gas light and took out a cigarette and lit it from a live coal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was hard for them even to look at each other in the face after that night.

  Joe had kept his distance for these two weeks, easing out of the house when Sam came in, edging into his mother’s zone when they were together, and to Sam’s sorrow Ellen had let it happen. He had endured it because he knew that time would heal it. But that time had not been granted. Ellen’s other force, her helpless rootedness, had kept the wound open. Sam had been patient then and waited. Now there was nothing to wait for.

  He would go alone. After he had established himself he would ask them to join him.

  ‘Plenty of other married men do that,’ Alex asserted. Tt seems to me rather preferable.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘More sensible altogether,’ said Alex.

  You are a very clever man, Sam thought, do you really mean this?

  ‘I thought it would be easier for them,’ he lied.

  ‘If you want my opinion, you’re dead right. Damn!’

  The brown missed the corner pocket. Sam stepped up to the table. They had the snooker room to themselves. He concentrated on the game. It cleared his mind. Alex’s opinion was important to him. They would go together. He had to find ways to continue on the path which had become inevitable. He was driven, he felt, and whatever the consequences, he had to follow this path. It was as if he were in the sea swimming all day and all night against a tide. But he could not give up.

  When he walked down to the factory, when he did his work there, when he walked up the street, placed his bets, had a pint, had a word, he was self-conscious. Just as he had been the day or two after his return from Burma. Now, again, he felt as if he were being singled out. Going to Australia and without his family. His common sense told him that people were far too busy with their own lives to worry about him, but it was so.

  He felt singled out and he did not like it. So he lied, transparently to Alex, about his reasons for going alone and, unused to lying, he felt uncomfortable, sullied by it and tried to talk about it as little as possible, although many of those he met were honestly interested. Ellen, too, lied when challenged as to why he was going alone: he preferred it that way, she said, and so did she, let h
im get sorted first, better for Joe. People said she was sensible. They had heard some bad stories about Australia as well as the cheerful messages, and they were not always to be trusted, cheerful messages.

  If only he could see around it, in some way. But his mind was so set on it. Like a hard anger that had to find a release. It was a burden, this set purpose. It grew heavier the nearer the time drew for its execution. He had hoped Alex would support him – as he had – but secretly and more desperately, he hoped Alex would do something to dislodge this boulder in his mind and heart and let him start again.

  ‘No quarter,’ said Alex, after he had taken the game – Sam was badly off form. ‘You’re doing the right thing. My shout. One for the road.’

  They would travel together. The boat was leaving Southampton at the end of November, less than a month away.

  Sam did what had to be done without fuss, without lowering his guard. He gave in his notice to the factory. He put all his papers in order for the voyage. He paid the rent up to Christmas – to ensure the full month’s notice – even though Ellen said she would probably be moving out before then.

  ‘It’s just as well she comes back to live with us,’ said Leonard.

  They were all in the sitting room for Sunday-afternoon tea. It had the atmosphere of cold meats after a funeral.

  ‘And it won’t be for all that long,’ said Grace, smiling, provocative. Ellen shivered a little and not just at the chill which always lay on this room. There was very little got past Grace.

  ‘Speaking selfishly and for myself,’ said Mr Kneale, beaming in the light of his remarks on what was an unaccountably sombre occasion, ‘it will be like the old times. Not that I would wish the war back,’ he looked at Sam apologetically, ‘but I have to confess that I’ve missed having Ellen and little Joe about the place.’

  He nodded contentedly, his curls bobbed and his moon face dipped towards the cup and the little finger jutted out at polite attention.