by Marie Joseph
‘Don’t talk any more if you don’t want to.’ Amy was worried at the sudden pallor of Dora’s face. ‘Would you like another cup of tea with a slosh of Wesley’s whisky in it?’
‘Yes, please, but without the tea if you don’t mind.’ She held out her cup. ‘I was working for Mr Dale,’ she said, after a short nap she didn’t know she’d had. ‘He didn’t really need me, but I used to pop in and do his ironing, things like that. Light dusting he called it.’ She smiled. ‘He was lonely, not being long up here, and not knowing many people. He’d had a wicked few years himself down south after the war. We needed each other, like . . . well, like grass needs rain. But now we never speak of it.’
‘But you still love each other?’
Dora couldn’t help but smile. Amy Battersby was staring at her with eyes and mouth wide open, determined not to be shocked. There was a sweetness and innocence about her that was hard to credit when she’d been married to such as Wesley Battersby for all these years. There she sat sipping whisky out of a bright yellow cup, hardly able to believe what she was hearing, yet ready to accept and fall over herself trying to understand because Dora was her friend.
‘Amy Battersby, with the unclouded eyes, always looking for something better round the next corner.’ Now why did she suddenly remember Mr Dale saying that?
‘I’m trying to make sense of it for you,’ she said. ‘Mr Dale was kind to me at a time when kindness meant more than food or the money to make ends meet. He paid me well over the rate, and one day he came home early from work as I was dusting round the living room. I’d been crying, and he noticed, and I found myself telling him about the way it was with Greg and me, that since the war Greg had never been a husband to me, not in that sense.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘He took the duster from my hand and led me upstairs.’
The silence was so acute that a pin dropping onto the thick pegged rug would have been heard a mile away. Amy was sure of it.
‘It happened round about half-past five every Thursday afternoon for about three months. Then I got more work, Mr Dale admitted he could manage to look after himself, and the times got further and further apart. He began to call in at the hospital to read and talk to Greg, and once that happened it couldn’t go on.’
‘Oh no, of course not.’ Amy hesitated. ‘But don’t you feel sort of embarrassed when you see him now? Flustered? Uncomfortable?’
Dora shook her head. ‘No, not in the slightest. Not with Mr Dale. I told you. He just lets people be, the way they are. The way they need to be.’
Amy thought that was beautiful. In fact, she thought the whole story was beautiful, but it should have had a happy ending. Dora and Mr Dale should have walked off together, hand in hand into the sunset, meant for each other, except that by no stretch of the imagination could anybody think they were meant for each other. Even the most romantic person couldn’t see them as a modern Romeo and Juliet. They were as different as chalk and cheese.
‘I see you’re getting thick with Dora Ellis,’ Gladys said, coming in unannounced and catching them together four times running. ‘She’s rough, you know. Born the wrong side of the blanket. Her mother was that poor she used to go down on the market late on a Saturday night for the oranges they used to cut open to display at the front of the stalls. Cut oranges, bruised apples and squashed tomatoes. Scratting about for them between the stalls. No shame.’
‘Did that make her any less of a person? I never knew poverty was a sin.’
Gladys looked sharply at her daughter, not quite knowing what to make of her. In the first two weeks after Wesley left, Amy had cried a lot, then she had seemed to come to some sort of terms. She was getting thick with Wesley’s father too. Twice that Gladys knew of, since he’d had the flu, he’d come down in his car and sat round the fire smoking his pipe. Gladys couldn’t make any of it out. The pattern was wrong. Everybody was stepping out of line since Wesley had gone away. ‘Mam?’ Amy had gone red, though her mother couldn’t think why. ‘I’ve been thinking about things a lot lately – about Wesley and me – and, well, wondering if I failed him in any way. You know, let him down.’
‘In what way let him down?’ Gladys’s voice was already taut with indignation. ‘You waited on him hand and foot! I’ve seen you have his dinner out of the oven and on the table before he’s had time to take his hat and coat off.’
‘I don’t mean food, Mam. What I mean is . . .’ Amy let the words out with a rush. ‘Did you and Dad have a satisfactory relationship?’
Gladys’s eyebrows shot up almost to her hairline. She knew what Amy meant, but never ever had she thought the day would come when her own daughter asked her a question like that. It was beyond belief.
‘I’ve put it badly.’ Amy looked distressed, forlorn. ‘I didn’t mean to be personal. No. What I wondered was . . . is that side of marriage all-important?’
‘I made your dad sign the pledge in that respect long before he was forty, if that’s what you mean.’ Gladys fidgeted with her belt. ‘There are some women who like that sort of thing, of course, but usually they’re the sort who charge for it.’ She didn’t know where to look. Any minute now and Amy was going to come out with something she’d rather not hear. Like that woman in the paper who got a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s unnatural practices. Whatever they might be. Surely Amy wasn’t hinting at something like that?
‘I thought,’ Amy whispered, ‘that because I wasn’t keen on that side of marriage then Wesley wasn’t either. You’d always said that side of things was best left to the man. So I’ve been wondering . . .’ she swallowed hard ‘. . . if I let him down.’
Gladys’s indignation was getting the better of her. ‘If you had shown him you were keen he would have lost all respect for you. A wife’s role is just to put up with it as her duty, though some men are never satisfied. I once heard tell of a poor woman out of Altom Street whose husband used to be at it during his dinner hour. He should have been castigated.’
‘You don’t like men, do you?’
‘I think they’re the cause of most of the trouble in the world.’
‘I think you were only pretending to like Wesley.’
‘What a thing to say!’
‘Mam?’ Amy almost stretched out a hand to touch her mother’s cheek, then drew it back. ‘Let’s start talking properly to each other. Like we are now. Telling the truth. Saying what we really mean.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Did . . . do you like Wesley?’
Gladys was getting totally out of her depth again. This was the way Amy and her father used to talk to each other. Asking questions about feelings, probing for the truth. Making her feel left out. Thinking they didn’t consider her clever enough to join in.
‘I was proud of the fact that Wesley didn’t wear overalls to work,’ she said at last. ‘That he never came home in his dirt, always finding himself a white-collar job. I used to like to see you together, and I used to like telling people he was my son-in-law when he was up on the stage singing.’
‘But do you like him, Mam? Really like him?’
It was too much. For the hurt he’d caused Amy, Gladys could cheerfully have knifed him.
‘Of course I like him,’ she said. ‘What a thing to ask. You know better than to talk like that.’
Amy took a long time getting off to sleep that night. She no longer listened with bated breath for every creak in the house, every rattle of the windows, every sigh of the wind outside. No longer did she imagine a footstep on the stairs. She left the door unbolted in case Wesley decided to return in the middle of the night. The bed felt too big for her, perhaps because she still kept to her own side of it. Wesley had been a fidgety sleeper, kicking out with his feet, snoring at times when he lay on his back. She stared up into the darkness, crossed her hands on her chest and hoped that at that very moment he was snoring his head off, with Clara Marsden livid and sleepless by his side. Never having envisaged a Red Shadow who snored.
Amy laughed, then immediately sat up, the small sound fri
ghtening her to death. Maybe she had laughed too much? Sex – she even thought such a word with difficulty – hadn’t impressed her all that much. A paragraph in a library book had been a real eye-opener when it said that as the hero made love to his young bride on their honeymoon, she had ‘screamed her ecstasy to the stars’.
She lay down again. Had she disappointed Wesley because never the slightest scream had passed her lips during his lovemaking? Was she cold? Frigid even? Was that why he had turned to someone more . . . more rousable? Hotter? Charlie had said this wasn’t the first time his wife had strayed, so was that the reason Wesley had fallen madly in love with her? Because Clara was more of an expert?
When Wesley came again she would ask him straight out had she been unsatisfactory in that connection. She would stay calm and unruffled, and she would put it to him, and if he told her that yes, she had been a great disappointment to him, then she would know that his leaving had been her fault.
Yet, in spite of all this reasoning, if she really was lacking in that respect, why was it that she couldn’t rid herself of the image of the quiet Mr Dale coming into the house in his dark suit, taking the duster from Dora and leading her gently upstairs? Whispering to her in his Robert Donat husky voice as they made love. And why was the very thought of it making her knees wobble? Even in bed.
Dora’s Mrs Green brought her younger daughter into the fitting room the next afternoon.
‘Winifred is to be bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding.’ Mrs Green spoke at Amy, not to her. ‘I’d like her fitted with a brassière.’ She turned to the cringing stoop-shouldered girl. ‘Take your coat off, dear.’
Though Amy did no more than advance smiling with the tape measure, the girl backed away with a look of horror. ‘I don’t want a brassière, Mother. I don’t need one.’ She crossed both arms over a blossoming chest. ‘Please. Don’t make me.’
Mrs Green tapped an impatient foot. ‘You are not being bridesmaid wearing a liberty-bodice underneath a twenty-five pounds Kendal Milne frock, with shoes dyed to tone.’ She addressed a point to the side of Amy’s head. ‘She’s afraid that a brassière will reveal her secret to the world.’ She lowered her voice slightly. ‘They’re no bigger than a couple of walnuts anyway.’
The girl’s blush brought actual tears to her eyes. Amy smiled at her. ‘No one will be able to tell you’re wearing one, love. I promise.’ Gently she slid the navy-blue gaberdine raincoat from the girl’s arms. ‘I’ll measure you on top of your gymslip. See? That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ She took the measurements as unobtrusively as she could.
‘Lottie Marsden’s mother makes her wear one like two ice-cream comets stuck on her chest. It won’t be like that, will it?’
‘Are you in the same form as Lottie?’ Amy wrote the figures down in her little black-bound notebook. ‘Is she your friend?’
Winifred sniffed. ‘Lottie Marsden? She’s nobody’s friend. She tells lies. And goes with boys. And her father drinks. Who would want to be her friend, for goodness’ sake?’
Immediately Amy’s sympathy for the peaky-faced girl evaporated.
‘The brassière will be ready within the week, Mrs Green,’ she said in her professional voice.
By one of those coincidences, as though there was something in telepathy after all, just as Amy was thinking about Lottie Marsden that evening and what the girl in the shop had said, Charlie rang the doorbell.
‘I’ve come about Lottie,’ he said, without preamble, so obviously worried he forgot to take off his hat. ‘She’s knocking about with some boy, and I know for a fact he comes in the house. I smell him.’
‘Smell him?’
‘He works in the fish market. His father’s got a stall. They go off to Fleetwood every morning for the fish. He skives off work and Lottie skives off school, and they meet in the house.’ He sat down without being asked to, forgetting his good manners for once. ‘God knows what they get up to.’
‘How old is he, Charlie?’
‘She says he’s eighteen, but he could be anything from twelve to forty. Lottie makes things up to suit herself.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘At her Auntie Maude’s. At least she’s supposed to be at her Auntie Maude’s, but she could be anywhere. She took her mother’s black leather coat from the wardrobe.’
‘It never suited her,’ Amy said quickly, then could have bitten her tongue out.
But Charlie didn’t notice. ‘I was wondering if you could have a word with Lottie? Her mother was no good at that sort of thing, said she would have to find out for herself soon enough.’ He coughed. ‘I can’t say anything, can I? It’s not a father’s job.’
‘You mean you want me to talk to Lottie about things her own mother should have told her long ago?’
Charlie looked as if he was wishing a hole would suddenly appear for him to drop into. ‘You know. The things your mother told you.’
‘She told me nothing. I got into trouble when I was sixteen, remember? It wasn’t because I didn’t know where babies come from, or how they’re made. Girls at school go pretty deep into those subjects, you know. It was because she never explained to me how an innocent kiss can become something else – how when a young girl falls in love, helplessly in love, she wants to give, not to hold back, That’s what my mother should have told me, Charlie. And that’s what Clara should have told your Lottie. Don’t you see?’
He didn’t know where to look. She was saying things she’d no right to, without Wesley there. What he’d always liked about Amy was the way she could always see the funny side of things, the way a man could feel unchallenged in any way when she was around. Not that she wasn’t pretty; come to think of it she was more than pretty in her own way. Usually her hair was tamed back with a slide, but now she had it falling to the side across her forehead, giving her a totally different look. She was flushed too, and no wonder with the conversation taking such a turn. She looked as if she’d just come out of a hot bath. Kissable . . . Charlie took his hat off. It was a funny thing, but right till this moment he had never considered Wesley’s wife to be anything out of the ordinary. He ran a finger round his collar.
‘I saw Lottie once, a while ago, and she pretended she didn’t know me,’ Amy said.
He tried to bring his mind back to matters in hand. ‘She’s like that. Awkward. Embroiders the truth.’
‘Her mind’s disturbed, Charlie.’
‘You will talk to her?’
He was going to cry again. Amy was sure of it. He was such a harmless little man, kind to the point of idiocy. Wesley had often said that Charlie Marsden would give his last penny to any beggar who stretched out a hand, even if final demands littered his mantelpiece.
‘Come to your dinner one Sunday,’ she said impulsively. ‘I’ll do roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and I’ll see if I can find a way to talk to Lottie then. In a little while, when we’re both less emotional about things, more reconciled.’
For a startled moment she thought he was about to kiss her. He took a step forward, seemed to think better of it and stepped back.
‘You’re a good woman, Amy.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t insult me! I’d much rather you told me I filled you with uncontrollable desire.’
He couldn’t believe the things she was saying. Wesley would have been shocked to the marrow to hear his wife say such things. Was she teasing him? Flirting with him? Egging him on? He’d always known that Amy Battersby had plenty up top. Once, when he and Lottie were having a proper conversation, she had told him that Amy’s name was up in the assembly hall at school, picked out in letters of gold:
‘Amy Renshawe. English Literature Prize 1915.’
‘We’ll be glad to come to dinner in a few weeks’ time, whenever you say,’ he said. ‘Just thinking of a roast dinner makes my mouth water. Clara wasn’t one for cooking. We usually had sausages and mash on a Sunday.’
Amy tried her hardest not to look too pleased.
‘Sausage and mash can be very
tasty,’ she said with deep insincerity. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Charlie, but my friend from next door will be in any minute. We’re going to the pictures to see Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls, and I’ve to bank the fire up yet.’
Charlie bumped into Dora on the doorstep, snatched his hat off and said something about two smart girls and if they couldn’t be good then to be careful.
‘What a lovely man he is,’ Dora said. ‘And good-looking with it.’
‘Charlie good-looking?’ Amy put the fireguard in place. ‘How long is it since you had your eyes tested, Dora? I can’t see Charlie as being anything to write home about at all. Nothing about him to turn the milk sour, I grant you, but no Tarzan neither.’
‘Do you know how much a nice piece of topside will cost you?’ Gladys dropped in on her way back from the market. ‘You’ll get a large tin of corned beef for eightpence from the Co-op, with divi to take into account. It all adds up.’ She put a small parcel down on the table. ‘I bought a quarter of ham sliced from the bone, and got him to wrap it twice. There’s two ounces here. Give me twopence and we’ll call it straight. What are you going to give them for pudding? If this dinner comes off.’
‘Apple sponge and custard. I think Lottie will like that better than rice pudding,’
‘What are you doing for money? I know it’s none of my business, but you’ve never said and your wages won’t get you far, unless you’ve a bit put by.’
‘I’m all right, Mam. Wesley will be calling again soon for us to talk over the situation. He’s never been mean with money.’
‘Generous to a fault,’ Gladys agreed. ‘Just as long as he’s not for forgetting his obligations.’
‘Mam! I don’t look on him as a meal ticket.’
Gladys could barely conceal her irritation. Amy was standing there smiling with her hair needing brushing back, wearing too much lipstick and smelling of scent first thing in the morning. She knew what it was all in aid of Amy was waiting and hoping that Wesley would walk in. She was trying to snare him back by tarting herself up like they advised in magazines. Gladys quite forgot that only a very short while ago she was wishing that her daughter would make more of herself