Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  She ran off, giving a little skip now and again as if to show how happy she was.

  Amy watched her go. Charlie had said she was fifteen going on sixteen, but in her navy-blue gaberdine raincoat, with a red beret pulled low over her forehead, with her tear-stained cheeks, she could have passed for twelve.

  Amy worried all the way back to the east side gate, and was halfway down Shear Brow when a flying figure caught up with her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dora Ellis wanted to know. ‘Your ma-in-law’s on the warpath. She’d shoot you dead as soon as look at you this morning.’

  ‘Wesley’s left me,’ Amy said straight out. ‘He went outside to bring the New Year in and didn’t come back.’

  ‘Get away! You’re having me on!’

  Amy shook her head. ‘I tell you. He left a note. He’s fallen in love with someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nobody you know,’ Amy said, as they turned into London Road. ‘She’s married and they have a little girl – well, quite a big girl. I’ve just seen her, and she’s obviously not ready yet to accept what’s happened, the poor kid.’

  ‘No wonder you look awful,’ Dora said kindly. ‘And no wonder Ma Battersby looked like she’d lost half a crown and found a sixpence. You’re not going to work this afternoon, are you?’

  ‘Wesley’s not dead,’ Amy said sharply, ‘just left home. He’s moved her in with him over the Preston shop.’

  ‘To live in sin?’

  ‘What else?’

  They walked along in silence. Dora seemed to have taken it very well. Amy glanced at her suspiciously.

  ‘You didn’t know anything about this, did you?’

  ‘What did you say her name was?’

  ‘I didn’t, but it’s Clara Marsden. She’s in the Dramatics.’

  ‘Hair bleached to straw with all the nature taken out of it?’

  Amy’s bad mood evaporated. ‘The same.’ She felt a glow of affection for Dora bustling along in her scuffed shoes, a brown coat and a halo hat worn by the Minister’s wife for at least three years before Dora had come by it for fourpence in a jumble sale. ‘That’s her all right.’

  ‘He’ll be back, there’s nothing more sure. Your Wesley knows which side his bread’s buttered on. He’s just playing at being the Red Shadow, spiriting his lady love off to his flamin’ tent in the desert.’

  ‘I thought you liked Wesley?’

  ‘Look,’ Dora said, ‘I’ll pop in tonight after tea. Unless you’ve something planned?’

  ‘Well, I do have a date with Robert Taylor. He was going to fly me to Paris for me tea in his private plane, but I’m sure he’ll understand if I put him off. ‘Bye then, see you later, Dora.’

  Dora had exactly twenty minutes in the house that day to make herself a pot of tea and eat a slice of bread and jam, just something to put her on until she came home again at half-past five.

  That afternoon she was working for a Mrs Green, the wife of one of the mill bosses, a pernickety woman who had told Dora that she wanted every surface in her house so clean that you could eat your dinner off it.

  ‘Including the lavatory seat?’ Dora had said in her head, but not aloud, of course, Mrs Green being so top drawer that the word lavatory spoken aloud would have brought her out in a rash.

  That afternoon one of Dora’s jobs was to wipe over the new white tiles in the bathroom with a cloth dipped in milk, then polish them till they shone like mirrors. And it being a Friday the silver would have to have its weekly cleaning. Dora had been shown how to push a small brush down the spout of the Georgian teapot till it was as clean as the outside.

  ‘She’d have me wiping the coal over before I brought it in from the yard,’ Dora had told Amy once. ‘She’d had the fireback whitewashed to look nice in the front room.’

  ‘Really?’ Amy had said, not knowing whether to believe it or not.

  Dora banked up her own fire with slack and put the fireguard back in place. Poor Amy. Sweet, kind, trusting Amy. Eternally grateful that Wesley had married her, rescuing her from a life of shame. Kow-towing to him from ever on to show that gratitude. When Dora’s husband, Greg, had been alive he’d had a soft spot for Amy. He would lie in bed in the front downstairs room and follow her around with his eyes. He would lie there listening as she read to him when he became too weak even to hold a book in his hands. He’d liked Wesley too – in his own way.

  Dora gave her face a quick splash at the cold tap in the kitchen. Greg had been dead for over four years, but he still walked into her mind, taking her unawares, catching her off guard.

  Ramming the halo hat back on to her head, buttoning the brown coat up to her neck, she rushed out of the house, walking so fast she almost fell over, leaning forward into the freezing wind.

  In the upstairs fitting room of the shop where Amy worked afternoons, she had only one fitting, with a Mrs Moffat, which was as well, as downstairs they were getting ready for the January sales.

  ‘I would like you,’ the stout little woman told her, ‘to machine-stitch a tuck along the cups of my brassière when it arrives, to take in the shape.’

  Amy wrote down the measurements carefully in her little notebook. ‘But won’t that flatten your front?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Mrs Moffat nodded all her chins. ‘Showing the shape of two bosoms is very vulgar. And remember I want steel bones in my corsets, not the other kind. And I’d like the ends well padded. I’m not one of those who fillet their corsets the minute they get home. Oh, and remember to order two extra suspenders – they make all the difference to the fit of silk stockings.’

  Compared to some Amy could mention, Mrs Moffat wasn’t really a difficult customer, and if she wanted to look like a lagged cistern then that was her choice. Amy showed her to the door, promising she would have the corsets and brassière ready for fitting within three weeks at the most.

  ‘I saw that nice husband of yours twice last week when I was meeting Mr Moffat off the Manchester train. He was talking to a young lady with fair hair.’ She tapped Amy playfully on her arm. ‘It’s a good job you can trust him, isn’t it? She was quite a bobbydazzler.’

  ‘Nice woman,’ one of the assistants remarked. ‘Fussy, I grant you, but she always knows exactly what she wants.’

  ‘She’s evil,’ Amy said, rushing round the counter and back up the stairs. ‘Didn’t you see the horns poking through the sides of her stupid hat?’

  3

  DORA GAVE THREE sharp raps on Amy’s vestibule door, called out ‘It’s only me,’ and walked straight in. Mrs Green had had her down on her knees in the spare room picking bits of fluff out of the nicks in the floorboards with a crochet hook, and she wanted to tell Amy about it and make her laugh. But Amy looked awful – almost in a state of collapse.

  ‘Everybody knows about it!’ she cried as soon as Dora showed her face. ‘They must have been talking about me behind my back for ages. Laughing at me!’

  ‘They say the wife is always the last to know.’

  Amy looked at her sharply. If Dora was trying to be jokey then she’d come to the wrong place. ‘I’m not laughing,’ she said. ‘I’m so angry, so humiliated, I could burst.’

  ‘Do you want Wesley back? Could you forgive him if he does come back?’

  Amy looked down at the carpet then up at the ceiling, trying hard to blink back the tears. Dora was her friend, but she wasn’t going to cry in front of her. Dora wouldn’t know where to look. Instead, she sat down, pulled herself together and handed Dora a cigarette.

  ‘You don’t smoke, Amy!’

  ‘I do now.’ They were long, slim black cigarettes. Russian, Dora guessed, from Wesley’s shop. ‘There’s more where these come from,’ Amy said. ‘I found them at the back of his top drawer. I’ve been having a good snoop. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘I’ve just had me tea, thank you.’

  Amy raised her eyebrows as if searching for patience. ‘I mean a proper drink. Whisky.’

  ‘Wesley’s?’

/>   Amy nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll have a double.’

  It seemed rather a lot when Amy poured it out, and it didn’t look right in cups somehow, but after the first sip you got used to it. The cigarette made her cough and feel sick, but Dora was managing both with aplomb.

  Dora sat there in Wesley’s chair, still wearing her flowered pinny, with her stockings wrinkled like a concertina, and three kirby grips fastening her hair back when one would have been quite enough. She took deep drags of the exotic cigarette, then flicked the ash on to the tiled hearth, ignoring the ashtray fastened down on the chair arm by a leather thong.

  ‘You remind me of Bette Davis,’ Amy told her, ‘sitting there smoking and flicking the ash like that.’

  ‘And you remind me of Janet Gaynor,’ Dora said after a while. ‘You look all wrong puffing away like that. And you shouldn’t drink whisky as if it was dandelion and burdock, you know.’

  ‘Charles Farrell,’ Amy simpered, screwing her eyes up. ‘Janet Gaynor and Charlie Farrell.’ She topped up her drink, passing the bottle over to Dora.

  ‘Wesley is my life,’ Amy said suddenly in a broken voice. ‘I was only sixteen when we met. He was the first boy I’d ever looked at. The first boy who’d ever looked at me.’ She was talking with the cigarette stuck to her bottom lip, so that it wobbled as she spoke. ‘I was at school, coming up to sitting for my School Certificate.’ Amy removed the cigarette, stared at it in distaste and threw it in the fire. ‘I was going to be a teacher, Dora.’

  ‘You’d have made a good teacher, Amy.’

  ‘My dad badly wanted me to go to college. He’d worked out they could just about manage for money . . . this whisky is making me feel sick.’

  ‘Don’t drink it, Amy.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I will, Dora. He wanted me to have all the advantages he never had, you see.’

  ‘I never knew my dad.’

  ‘It was all planned. I was going to stop on at school and take my Higher School Certificate when I was eighteen, then I was going to college.’

  ‘I left school when I was thirteen.’ Dora felt a wodge of self-pity rise up in her throat.

  They stared sadly at each other, then into the fire. Fell silent for a while.

  ‘I met Wesley one day in the park on my way home from school. The park beds were full of tulips. Darwin tulips,’ Amy explained. ‘The sun was shining.’

  ‘I used to go with my mother to help her clean the trams at the depot, but she wouldn’t let me go in the mill. Not good enough for me.’ Dora gave a hard short laugh, startling Amy for a moment.

  ‘Wesley was on leave from France. He was wearing a checked sports jacket, grey flannels and a blue spotted cra . . . cra . . . ?’

  ‘Cravat?’

  Amy nodded a thank you. ‘He looked so handsome. I can see him now.’ A simpering smile spread across her face. ‘He stood with his fists on his hips, barring my path – and that was that.’

  ‘You’d have him back, wouldn’t you?’

  Amy stood up, clasping her hands together. ‘Not loving someone else I wouldn’t. Not still loving Clara Marsden.’

  ‘The peroxided slut.’

  ‘The painted prostitute,’ said Amy, reaching for another slim black cigarette. ‘The cheap whore.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you knew that word, Amy.’

  Amy sniggered. ‘I know a lot more.’ She lit her cigarette, inhaled, and blew smoke down her nose. ‘My dad used to say that if you couldn’t express yourself without swearing, then you should . . . ?’ She frowned, obviously having difficulty in remembering.

  ‘Shut your gob?’ Dora suggested.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ Amy contradicted at once. ‘My father was a little gentleman.’

  ‘Mine might have been of royal blood for all I know.’

  Dora had never, in all her wildest dreams, imagined that Amy Battersby could or would behave like this. Greg had always said that little Amy from next door had hidden depths, was a dark horse, a two-headed woman. It was the whisky of course, but the change in her was startling. The drink had flushed her cheeks, made her eyes sparkle and deepen to a brilliant blue. Her hair, mussed out of its usual neat cap of finger waves, tumbled over her forehead. Amy was halfway to being beautiful, and from the bottom of her heart Dora just wished that Wesley would walk in and see her looking the way she did, smoking his cigarettes, drinking his whisky.

  ‘Wesley was my life,’ Amy said suddenly, taking another swig.

  Dora nodded. ‘That was always your problem,’ she said. ‘There is no man alive worth that kind of devotion. There’s none of them worth a tuppenny button.’

  They talked and dozed, then drank endless cups of tea, till at ten o’clock Dora said it was well past her bedtime, left abruptly and went straight home to bed. Between them they had sorted out the rest of Amy’s life without Wesley as best they could. Amy would need to earn more money than the corset job paid, so Dora had offered to put a word in with one of her ladies. Mrs Green’s daughter was getting married and needed a woman for the rough, and the woman who did the outside steps of the big offices in Richmond Terrace was bad with consumption and expecting to be forced to leave any day now. Also, there was the big factory opening soon for making gas masks in readiness for another war, though Dora for one didn’t believe there would be one. Memories weren’t as short as that, surely? Greg had taken a long time to die from the effects of gas poisoning, and he was one of the lucky ones. How could anyone in their right senses even think there might be going to be another war? Over seven million men had been killed, and many many more had died of the terrible effects since then, so who could seriously think that it was all going to start over again?

  Dora wished her mind would stop going round and round so she could get some sleep. She pulled the blankets over her head and snuggled her stone hot-water bottle uncomfortably to her chest.

  She’d seen Adolf Hitler on the Pathetone News at the pictures the Saturday before Christmas, and wondered who had told him he suited that awful stub of a moustache. His fight was for the peace of the world, he’d said, stabbing a finger in the air. Look how all the Germans kow-towed to him – they wouldn’t do that if they thought he was dead set on another war. No, she could forget that kind of silly talk. There would never be another war – folks weren’t as daft as that.

  When she slept at last it was to dream of her mother taking the tiny Dora with her to work, both of them snuggled into one shawl because they didn’t own a coat between them. It was to dream about her mother standing in the kitchen of a big house scraping a piece of bread round the bacon fat left in the frying pan and handing it to Dora to eat. It was remembering how good it had tasted to a child who had left her house with nothing more than a drink of cold water to line her stomach.

  Dora fell asleep smacking her lips.

  At around half-past three, after no more than an hour’s restless sleep, Edgar Battersby made up his mind to drive over to the Preston shop as soon as it came light and have a straight talk to Wesley. He was bound to be there. It had long been an unspoken agreement that Edgar would keep away, leaving the business entirely in his son’s hands, but when wholesalers started sending bills to him, Wesley’s bills, Final Demands to be blunt, there was a deal needing sorting out.

  If only he could feel better – if only he didn’t feel so under the weather most of the time. If only Phyllis would stop this constant everlasting championing of her son. Edgar tried to subdue a cough, failed and reached out to his bedside table for a Victory V lozenge.

  By his side Phyllis feigned sleep. It was a long time since she had said a personal prayer, not having felt the need, she supposed. She closed her eyes in church naturally, folded her hands and joined in the prayers for the sick, the dying and the soldiers fighting in the Spanish Civil War. And for those less fortunate than herself, of course. Now, at this moment, she asked God to send Wesley to see her soon, so that she could reassure him that she understood. That whatever he did
or did not do she would always understand.

  He wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been driven to it. It was all right Edgar sticking up for Amy, but he was a man and couldn’t or wouldn’t see that it had been a wrong marriage from the beginning. Wesley needed someone to back him up more, be more of a conversationalist, dress up more. Encourage him. Do more entertaining of her husband’s business contacts, instead of always having her nose stuck in a book. How did Edgar think she’d felt during the war when week after week in the local newspaper there were photographs of soldiers home on leave from France marrying into good families? Directors’ daughters in wreaths and veils, with four bridesmaids, even though there was a war on. With detailed descriptions of the dresses. ‘The bride wore a dress of white slipper-satin with a train, and her mother’s veil of Brussels lace with an orange blossom headdress.’

  Why was it Amy’s clothes always seemed to resemble uniforms? She’d been a lady tram conductor to the life at her wedding to Wesley, in that awful square chapel with not even the Minister dressed properly. And what about one of her uncles at the reception tapping cigarette ash into the turn-ups of his trousers when he thought nobody was looking? No one could forget a thing like that.

  ‘Please, God, let Wesley come tomorrow,’ she prayed. ‘Let all this be for the best.’

  She slept and woke at six o’clock to find Edgar by her side burning with a fever through his winceyette pyjamas, breathing with puffing rasping noises, mumbling to himself. Fit to go nowhere, not even well enough to get out of bed.

  ‘Mother sent for me,’ Wesley told Amy, walking in on the Sunday morning, looking sheepish and defiant at one and the same time. ‘Father has influenza and the doctor says he’ll be in bed for at least a week.’ The front door key, on its ring, dangled from his fingers. ‘So I thought I’d come round and collect a few of my things.’

  ‘Kill two birds with one stone?’ Amy suggested. ‘Thinking I would be in chapel?’ She had always thought that anger was hot, searing like a flame, but the crawling sensation down her spine was the drip of water from an icicle. ‘You can put that key down on the table, Wesley. I don’t think you have the right to be able to walk in just when you feel like it.’ She was trembling now, standing there on legs that seemed to be disintegrating. She banged the flat of her hand down hard on the table. ‘The key, Wesley!’