Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

‘Not in the true sense of the word she isn’t my wife. We haven’t had relations for months. I’ve been sleeping in the spare room.’

  Amy felt her face flame. Surely Charlie wasn’t expecting her to discuss her relations with Wesley? He seemed to be waiting. ‘What about Lottie?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘Doesn’t she come into all this?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘Clara never really took to her. Always found her difficult.’

  ‘Not took to her? Her own child? How can you say that?’

  ‘She got off to a bad start with her, Amy. Nearly died having her. Two days in labour then having to suffer with milk fever as well as white leg. She rejected her in the hospital, and can you wonder at it? She never fed her. Bound her breasts up to send her milk back.’ He got up to stand by the sideboard, a kindly squat little man with eyes puffy with weeping. ‘Anyway, Lottie’s a big girl now, coming up to sixteen. She’s started her monthlies.’

  He set off down the lobby without a trace of his usual bouncy tread. At the door he turned to face her.

  ‘I forgot to tell you. I came round last night – well, early on this morning really, but I only knocked once. You must have gone to bed.’ He put his hat on and pushed it to the back of his head with a finger. ‘I’ll be in touch, though God knows where we go from here.’ He nodded at the black saloon car drawing up at the kerb. ‘Looks like you’ve got company.’

  ‘Wasn’t that Amos Marsden’s lad?’

  Edgar sat down in Wesley’s chair, holding out both hands to the fire. ‘Marsden and Sons, Ember Street? I thought that was one of his vans parked lower down the street. You haven’t had a burst pipe, have you?’

  ‘No, it’s his wife Wesley’s gone off with.’

  Amy wished she hadn’t blurted it out like that, the moment she said it. Mr Battersby looked so grey, so ill, sitting by the fire in his heavy overcoat with the velvet collar.

  ‘Aye,’ he said slowly. ‘Aye . . .’

  When she began to apologize for giving him a shock like that he put up a hand.

  ‘Nay, lovey. You don’t think I was born yesterday? I telephoned him at the shop early on, and they’re stopping there for the time being. Seems Mrs Marsden has been moving things in on a regular basis for quite some time.’

  Amy put a hand to her mouth in a small gesture of comfort. ‘I didn’t even suspect anything, Mr Battersby. I had no idea.’ Her head drooped. ‘You must think me very foolish not to have known.’

  ‘No, not foolish, love. Too trusting mebbe, but not foolish.’

  ‘Would you like to take your coat off? So you’ll feel the benefit when you go. It won’t take me a minute to make a pot of tea.’

  She busied herself in the kitchen with the familiar routine of warming the pot, taking down the tea canister, setting out the cups and saucers. It was a funny thing, but in all the years of marriage to Wesley she didn’t remember once being on her own like this with his father. She’d always liked him, but felt shy in his company, almost in awe of him. Now, here for the first time without his wife, he even looked different, more relaxed, younger, with the colour coming back into his face now he’d warmed up a bit.

  ‘Mind if I put a drop of what the doctor ordered in my tea?’ Edgar held up the silver flask and winked at her. ‘Not a word to the missus,’ he said, deadpan.

  ‘You sound just like Wesley!’ Amy shook her head in disbelief. ‘I’ve never seen that likeness before, but when you winked just then . . .’

  ‘Oh, I was a bit of a lad when I was young. That’s why I’ve always been able to read Wesley like an open book.’ He took a satisfying sip. ‘You know, love, it will be a bad business if you let this sorry mess make you think you’ve failed in some way. Not been good enough, or anything daft like that. Our Wesley’s a damn fool not to recognize pure gold when he’s got it.’ He winked again. ‘I’ll tell you something. If I was ten years younger – well, twenty or thirty, I could fall for you myself.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Again, not a word to the missus.’

  ‘Mr Battersby!’ Amy laughed out loud at the surprise of it. ‘That’s the stuff you’ve put in your tea talking, not you.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. And couldn’t you call me Father, or Dad? That’s what you used to call your own father, isn’t it?’

  Amy nodded.

  ‘I liked him a lot.’ Edgar held out his cup for a refill. ‘He was one of the best, your dad. Used to see him sometimes by the bowling greens in the park. Used to take him for a pint in the pub off Revidge.’

  ‘But my dad didn’t drink! Mam has a nose on her like a ferret. She’d smell it on his breath before he’d turned the corner of the street!’

  ‘Used to set the country to rights, me and your dad. He had some sound ideas for a Labour man. He’d have made a damn good Conservative, as a matter of fact.’ Edgar chuckled. ‘He called me a bloated capitalist more than once.’

  ‘He would have died rather than vote Tory.’

  ‘Aye, I grant you that. But given a fairer system where he could have benefited from the privileges of a decent education; given parents with a bit of brass, and he’d have seen things differently. I still say that at heart he was a true blue Tory. The main thing was that we listened to each other’s point of view. I taught him a lot and by the left, he certainly opened my eyes to a few things.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘I’ve not said any of the things I came to say, but I want you to know that if Wesley doesn’t see you right for money, you know where I am.’

  To Amy’s acute embarrassment he reached inside his jacket pocket.

  ‘No. Honestly, no thank you! Wesley won’t . . . he won’t neglect that side of things . . .’ The shame of it was almost choking her. ‘I get paid this afternoon, so I’m all right . . . really . . . honestly . . .’

  ‘Did he come for anything special?’

  Gladys had bumped into Edgar on the doorstep. ‘I could smell drink on his breath,’ she said. ‘It’s a sure sign of alcoholism when they’re at it in the mornings.’

  When she’d gone, Amy unwrapped the small damp parcel left on the table. The pig’s trotter, well boiled at the tripe works, its cleaves torn away, was a glutinous transparent yellowed jelly. Amy wrinkled her nose in distaste, yet Wesley had always enjoyed one sprinkled with salt and vinegar, eaten with a tomato and bread and butter for his tea.

  Had liked. Already she was thinking about him in the past tense. Scooping up the trotter and its newspaper wrappings, she carried it down the backyard, lifted the dustbin lid and dropped it inside. If she didn’t get out of the house right that minute, before anybody else called, she would scream.

  It was only when she was almost at the East Park Road side entrance to the park that it dawned on her that Wesley could come back, realizing he’d made a terrible mistake. For a moment she hesitated, half turned on her heel, before walking on past the duck pond, as cold and unruffled as a frozen sheet of glass. She walked with her hands dug deep into the pockets of her grey coat, her head down, shrunk into herself as if she willed invisibility.

  When she was up by the tennis courts, she was only a short distance away from the Battersby house, but in all the days of her marriage to Wesley she had never called uninvited, not since the one occasion when she had turned up unheralded and caught Phyllis wearing a mud pack in preparation for a Masonic Ladies’ Night.

  ‘I thought I’d just pop in,’ Amy had faltered, blushing, only to be told that ‘popping in’ wasn’t done round there, in the big houses up by the park. Not the way it is in your area, her expression had said. Remembering without a doubt the time she had accepted an invitation to tea with Amy, only to be confronted by Gladys yoo-hooing herself in without knocking, bearing a small basin of home-pressed potted meat. The look on Phyllis’s face had stayed with Amy for a long, long time.

  Amy trudged on, averting her eyes from a couple sitting close together on a bench, purple with cold but blissfully entwined.

  It was very cold in the Battersby bedroom with its pale peppermint wal
ls and dark mahogany furniture, where Dora Ellis was flat on her stomach with a long brush sweeping up every vestige of grey fluff from the linoleum underneath a bed.

  Something was going on, she was sure of it. First Mrs Battersby had opened the back door with a face on her like a wet weekend, then he had driven off somewhere and come back within the hour. Now they were downstairs in the drawing room with the door shut, having words. She couldn’t catch a single sentence, but she knew that feathers were flying all right.

  Dora got up from the floor, picked the fluff from the brush and put it on a piece of newspaper for Mrs Battersby to see. The old bat liked proof that Dora had bottomed a room thoroughly. Dora pulled a face and walked over to the dressing table for a dab of Pond’s face powder. Rachel-rose, used by Lady Rosamunde Berkeley, as it said in the adverts. Given a choice, Dora would have preferred the Sun Tan, but at half a crown a box, chance would have been a fine thing.

  She felt sure her ears were flapping, she was straining so hard to hear, but it was no use, the doors in this big old house were too thick – not like at home where if next door turned over too quickly it was you who fell out of bed.

  ‘I’m not surprised at what’s happened,’ Phyllis was saying for the fifth time. ‘Marry out of your class and this is what happens.’ Her face looked pinched and old. ‘This girl he’s gone with. I hope she comes from a good family, and it’s not just someone who’s got her claws into him.’ She went to stare through the window. ‘We should never have forced Wesley to marry, especially the way things turned out.’

  ‘Amy couldn’t help her baby being stillborn.’ Edgar was still treasuring, still holding to himself the moment when, on the mention of her father, Amy’s whole expression had softened, grown calm. To have been loved like that by a daughter . . . He pulled his pipe from his pocket, took out a soft leather tobacco pouch. ‘As I remember it, the lass was lucky to pull through.’

  ‘That terrible mother of hers!’ Phyllis twitched a lace curtain into place. ‘When I think how she described to me in detail on more than one occasion exactly what had “come away”, as she put it.’

  Edgar winced. His grandson. The pain inside him was a sudden twist of a red-hot knife. How could she say such things without knowing that it nigh on killed him? Did she never stop to think that the lad would have been a Battersby, the only one to carry on the line? Did she not realize that by now he could have been at Oxford University, where Wesley could have gone if he hadn’t been so pigheaded, so adamant on wanting to leave school? He’d had the brains all right, but he wouldn’t listen, not Wesley.

  ‘That’s another thing about Amy’s mother,’ his wife was saying. ‘Her sort just love to go into detail about their insides. If they’re not having miscarriages, they’re having hot flushes, or hysterectomies. Having “all taken away”, as they say.’ She inclined her head towards the ceiling. ‘Like Dora up there. I remarked that she looked at bit harassed this morning and she says she thinks she could be having an early change – and she can’t be a day over forty.’

  ‘Have you ever stopped to consider how hard Dora works?’ Edgar could feel his heart begin to race. ‘You know damned well she’s up at five most mornings to clean the offices in Peel Street mill, then when she’s finished she goes straight on to cleaning for folks like us. Do you ever look at her? Really look at her? Because if you did you’d see she’s as thin as a picked sparrow, with a cough on her like the death rattle. She looks as if a puff of wind would blow her away.’

  Phyllis always knew how to deal with her husband when he got on his Bolshie soapbox. She changed the subject. ‘You’re not putting Wesley in the wrong, are you? The only thing he did wrong was to marry that girl.’

  ‘Because he got her into trouble. Because for once in his life he stood up to his responsibilities.’

  ‘She’s kept him down.’

  ‘In what way has she kept him down?’ Inside his head Edgar’s heartbeat was a tom-tom banging, thudding, hurting his skull, and the pain in his side was beginning again.

  ‘Well, up to you putting him in charge of the Preston shop he was doing very well as a railway officer. He would have got promotion eventually. How could he have taken her to meet anyone of importance?’

  ‘Such as?’ Edgar’s voice rose. ‘The boss of the LMS Railway Company? The Branch Secretary of the NUR? The Minister of Transport? The ruddy Mayor? Good God, woman, he was a railway clerk, dishing out tickets through a window, and how long did it last anyway? Two years? Three?’

  ‘She talked him out of trying for RADA. He’s wasted on an amateur society. He has a God-given voice.’

  ‘He wouldn’t even do his piano practice, or take any exams. You know that he’s never stuck to anything requiring any effort.’ Edgar was finding it hard to catch hold of his breath. His face was puffy, his eyes bleak. He looked in a state of collapse, but his wife wasn’t seeing him, or hearing him. Listening only to herself.

  ‘We never begrudged him anything.’

  ‘More’s the pity, woman! Can’t you see that?’ Edgar clenched both hands on the arms of his chair. ‘I’m hoping that by walking out on his responsibilities he’ll come to his senses. Realize what a jewel that lass he married is. Stop looking for something he thinks is greener. Stop always wanting different.’

  Phyllis left the room at that, straight-backed, shaking with an anger held under tight control.

  Upstairs in the bedroom she ran a finger across a polished tallboy, held it out to Dora Ellis. ‘I won’t have skimped work,’ she said.

  Edgar thought a breath of fresh air might revive him, but when he stood up the carpet rose, undulating before his eyes, like the waves of a turbulent sea.

  It was too cold anyway, he told himself, and when Dora came down he would ask her to make him a cup of coffee, three-quarters milk, the way he liked it. Somehow he felt cold right through to his soul.

  It was lovely and warm inside the Conservatory up by the tennis courts. Amy breathed in the damp, mildewed smell and stood for a long moment staring up at the array of colourful Prince of Wales plumes with their feathery fronds.

  It was another world in here, a soft gentle world with no harsh wind to sting her face, a shut-away world of steamy humidity, a foreign world with foreign flowers cascading down the edges of a man-made waterfall. A trellis of passion fruit crawled across a high archway like a flight of humming birds. There were banana trees, pineapple plants, and a Chinese Funeral Cypress, dignified in its oriental beauty. Amy didn’t need to look at the small aluminium tags to know the names of the tropical plants.

  Her shoes made ringing noises on the iron grids. She knew it was pointless to keep asking herself the same questions over and over again, but her mind was a mouse on a treadmill trapped in a cage. Going round and round, round and round.

  Why? Why had Wesley chosen such a cruel way to leave her? A humiliating way, with the family there to witness her reaction. Was it because he needed an audience response? Because he thrived on it just as he did on the stage? Would his imagination have been fired at the way it would be, with them all out looking for him as the bells rang in the New Year, and people thought of fresh beginnings? Was that why he’d chosen such a time? To embark on his own fresh beginnings? Striding off down Balaclava Street in his long white riding mac, carrying a case, throwing his head back and muttering to himself: ‘This is a far better thing I do than I have ever done before – a far, far better place . . .’

  Amy pulled herself up sharp by a towering date palm, folded both arms across her chest in a gesture of self-comfort, rocking backwards and forwards. Wesley could do Ronald Colman’s voice to perfection, though Wesley would never sacrifice his life for a friend as the film actor had done in A Tale of Two Cities.

  How did she suddenly know that for the truth? Amy stretched out a hand to a wanton display of Love Lies Bleeding – read it aloud with a curl of her lips. Wesley hated this place. Said it gave him the willies looking at plants that threatened to shoot out a long green tentacle
and throttle you where you stood.

  But her father had loved it. Amy remembered him pointing to a poisonous plant, explaining that if you chewed it your tongue went numb.

  ‘How about taking a leaf home and putting it in Mam’s tea?’ he’d teased, and she’d leaned against him, feeling his laughter through the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

  He would have known what to say, how to comfort her best. Amy lifted her head to blink tears from her eyes and saw Lottie Marsden trudging down the path from the tennis courts, head down, walking pigeon-toed as if her shoes were too tight for her. Lottie, with a mother who had never ‘taken to her’, a mother who had spent the night in Wesley’s arms.

  She caught up with Lottie by the duck pond. The girl was leaning over the railings, dirtying the front of her coat. Amy spoke to her quietly, not wanting to startle.

  ‘Hallo, love. You remember me, don’t you? At the last Dramatics. You were selling programmes.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  Amy blinked, remembered that Wesley had said Charlie’s daughter could tell lies to music. She tried again.

  ‘I think you do know me, so why don’t we go back to my house and we’ll make toast by the fire?’

  Lottie turned then, and Amy saw the little white rivulets where the tears had rolled down her none too clean cheeks. She guessed they’d been wiped away with her navy-blue leather gauntlet gloves.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  Lottie fixed her with a hostile stare. ‘I’ve never seen you before in my life,’ she said coldly. ‘And my parents have told me not to talk to strangers, especially in the park. They worry about me all the time.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ Amy said carefully. ‘If I had a pretty daughter like you I’d never know a moment’s peace.’

  For the mere blink of a moment the dark eyes were less hostile, then the shutters were down again. ‘My mother’s the worst. She thinks I’m still a child.’ Lottie gave a silly trill of a laugh. ‘I must go now. They had to bring the doctor to her one day last week when I stayed out late, she was so upset.’