by Marie Joseph
‘We’re managing all right, you and me, aren’t we, chuck?’
‘We managed before she went,’ Lottie said, snatching the towel from him and finishing off herself. ‘Mrs Tunstall looked after us then and she’s looking after us now. I don’t know why you don’t marry her.’
Charlie kept his voice calm, gave a fatherly chuckle. ‘Mrs Tunstall is fifty-four years old.’ He gave Lottie’s shoulder a playful shake. ‘Besides, she’s not my type.’
‘She’d jump at the chance,’ Lottie said, picking up her hairbrush. ‘I’ve seen her kissing your pyjama jacket.’
Why had she said that about Mrs Tunstall? Lottie lay flat on her back in bed, determined not to go to sleep. If her father even thought of marrying Mrs Tunstall she would run away, catch a train to London and go on the streets. She’d smoke cigarettes in a long black holder, wear black fishnet stockings and tuck the money she earned into red garters. Once, during one of their shouting rows she had heard her father call her mother a whore, and though she’d looked it up in a dictionary under ‘h’ she hadn’t been able to find it. Then she read a paperback book bought for twopence from a stall on the market, and all became clear. Mrs Tunstall had made her throw the book into the fire when she saw it, saying the picture on the front showing a woman in black stockings and red garters smoking a cigarette in a long black holder was enough to turn her stomach.
‘I’m just going out for a while, chuck.’ Lottie opened her eyes to see her father standing in the doorway wearing his raincoat and his little trilby hat. ‘You’ll be all right?’
She feigned drowsiness. ‘Quite all right.’
Charlie hesitated, thought of going over to the bed and kissing her goodnight, then changed his mind. That revelation about Mrs Tunstall had unnerved him. The very thought of the big woman with the incipient moustache and hairy chin kissing his pyjama jacket was nauseating. It was more than nauseating – it was obscene.
‘Goodnight, then. I’ll leave the hall light on.’
‘G’night.’
Lottie waited until she heard the front door slam, then got out of her bed, pulled her dressing gown round her and went downstairs to telephone her friend Olive who never went to bed before ten o’clock.
‘Are they in?’
Olive said they were, but that they were playing bridge. As per usual.
‘I saw a dead man sitting in a car on my way home from school.’
Olive’s eyes grew round. ‘Did you tell the police?’
‘I might have been accused of doing it.’
‘Was there any blood about?’
‘I didn’t wait to find out.’
‘No, of course not. But I still think you should tell your father. I would tell mine about a thing like that. I really would, Lottie.’
‘He’s gone out drinking,’ Lottie said at once. ‘As per usual.’
Charlie drew up outside Amy’s house, switched off the lights and sat in the van feeling rather foolish, almost wishing he had followed his intention of meeting up with his pals in the pub. He stared through the van window at Amy’s front door. No sign of life anywhere, no light in the upstairs room, no glimmer coming from the back showing through the parlour window. Certainly no dead man slumped over the wheel of his car. He drummed with his fingers on the steering wheel.
Oh, Lottie, Lottie – what was to become of her? What was to become of any of them, come to that? Wesley hadn’t exactly been a tower of strength, not even the hub of the wheel, but since he went away things seemed to have gone from bad to worse. Charlie pushed his hat back on his head and whistled through his teeth, a sure sign he was upset. Damn it, he needed to talk to Amy, to ask her advice about Lottie, maybe to have a bit of a laugh about Mrs Tunstall and his pyjama jacket. He groaned. Clara had used to say that he could laugh at nowt, that it was his everlasting laughing at nowt that had driven her nearly potty. Charlie leaned forward and switched on the ignition. Maybe he’d go and have a couple of pints with the lads after all.
He was actually on the point of drawing away from the kerb when a woman suddenly shot out of the house next door to Amy’s and into the road, causing him to brake hard. Charlie wound down the window, ready with a mouthful, and instead heard Amy’s next-door neighbour, Dora Ellis, politely inviting him to step inside her house as she had quite a lot to tell him.
‘Amy’s up at the infirmary,’ she began, as he followed her down a darkened lobby. ‘Wesley’s father was taken ill right outside her front door this afternoon.’
Taking off his trilby, Charlie advanced towards the rocking chair by the fire, urged towards it by this pleasant little woman who was whipping off her pinny and fluffing up her hair.
So Lottie had been partly right all along and he hadn’t believed her. Charlie said that yes, a hot drink would be welcome on such a cold evening, thank you very much. He glanced around him, touched to the quick by the threadbare shabbiness of everything.
And Lottie had been telling the truth about Mrs Tunstall, too. He’d stake his life on that.
7
PHYLLIS, SPEAKING DIRECTLY to Bernard, ignoring Amy, explained that the reason for delaying Edgar’s operation was that he had developed septicaemia. She stretched out a hand for Bernard’s cup. ‘Tea. Lovely.’
‘Sit down, Mrs Battersby,’ he said gently.
Amy had gone very white. Septicaemia. Blood poisoning. Call it what you liked. Once that set in there was very little hope. She looked at her mother-in-law sipping Bernard’s cup of tea, apparently totally unmoved. There was no point in reaching out to her in comfort. Amy was sure she would have winced away.
‘He wants to see you, Amy,’ she was saying now. ‘They’ve sedated him but he’s still awake. A minute, that’s all.’
Amy left them together, Bernard standing awkwardly, waiting to take the cup from Phyllis when she’d finished. Marvelling, if Amy could have read his thoughts, at the tight control of this too thin woman with the sharp features that seemed to be carved out of granite, a woman with the vulnerability of a steamroller, the humanity of a marble statue, as far as he could make out. Could anything crack her composure?
‘I think I’ll try again to see if Wesley answers the phone,’ she said abruptly, getting up and walking quickly down the corridor.
In the long ward a nurse at a table busily writing by the light from a shaded lamp, pointed out Edgar’s bed. She smiled a professional soothing smile and went back to her records.
For a terrifying moment Amy thought her father-in-law had died without anyone knowing. He lay on his back, his arms stretched out on top of the white bedspread, his nose as peaked and bony as her own father’s had been in his coffin. The strange bronze-yellow of his skin was accentuated by the white pillows and turned-down sheet. Amy felt awkward, surprised by her embarrassment, very conscious that the man in the next bed might be listening. He was awake; she had seen him raise his head from his pillow as she walked past.
‘Mr Battersby?’ She touched Edgar’s hand and at once his eyelids lifted a fraction.
‘Amy?’
‘Yes. I’m here.’
‘Good.’ Edgar closed his eyes again. His feet seemed trapped in with the tight bed coverings. She wanted to unmitre the corners, pull out the sheets to make him more comfortable. ‘Don’t worry, love.’
Amy bent over him. ‘I’m not worrying. And neither must you.’
She wanted to tell him that while they were waiting in the long corridor Bernard Dale had told her that gall bladders were very unimportant things, that horses and pigeons didn’t even have one. ‘Better out than in,’ she would have said, making him smile.
She prayed, but the prayer didn’t sound reverent enough for her liking. She was still acutely aware of the man in the next bed who was fixing her with an unblinking stare.
‘Don’t let him die, please,’ she asked God underneath her breath. ‘Not when I’m just getting to know him better. Not when I need him so much. Not when I’ve just found out I love him.’
‘No
need to worry about . . .’ Edgar whispered again, and again Amy assured him that worry about him couldn’t be further from her mind. He turned his head slowly from side to side. ‘About the . . .’ His voice tailed away. ‘I’ve seen to . . .’
The nurse had left her table and was standing at the foot of the bed. ‘He’ll sleep now, dear. I’ve just advised your mother-in-law to go home.’ She walked with Amy to the swing door at the end of the ward. ‘She seems to be greatly upset at not being able to contact her son.’
‘They’re very close,’ Amy told her. ‘Him being the only one.’
They didn’t talk much on the long walk back, after they’d seen Phyllis safely home. Bernard offered Amy the warmth of his coat pocket. ‘We can keep one hand warm anyway.’
‘There wasn’t the time for gloves.’ She liked the dry safe feel of his hand. ‘I bet Wesley’s mother stays up all night. Till she gets through to him, anyway.’
A policeman on his beat shone his lamp at them. ‘A bit parky tonight, sir.’
‘It is indeed, officer. Not a bit like spring.’
‘I’m surprised you know what “parky” means, coming from London,’ Amy said.
He laughed. ‘I even know what a chip butty is. I could murder one right now.’
Amy felt awful. It was all her fault that he was hungry. To be polite she ought to offer to make him a meal, even though it was the middle of the night. Food hadn’t interested her all that much lately, but she knew there were eggs. Boiled? Poached? Fried with a few potato scallops? Scrambled in a pan with a drop of milk and grated cheese? An omelette? Mumbled? With bacon? Had she any bacon? She couldn’t very well knock on Dora’s door and wake her up to ask to borrow a rasher of bacon.
By the clenching and unclenching of her hand in his pocket Bernard guessed she was fretting herself about something, but he didn’t ask. Instead, when they reached the house he took the key from her, turned it in the lock, and opened the door with the flat of his hand.
‘If you’d like . . .’ Amy began, but already he was backing away. ‘Don’t go,’ she heard herself say too loudly. ‘The least I can do is . . .’
So gently she could hardly believe what he was doing, he came back to her and held her face between his hands. ‘It’s been a long day, Amy, for both of us.’ For the briefest of seconds he laid his mouth on hers. ‘Pretty Amy,’ he said softly, tucking her hair behind her ears and smiling. ‘Pretty Amy.’
After she’d closed the door she leaned against it, clasping both hands to her breast. She ran a finger round the shape of her lips, hardly able to credit what had happened. She was thirty-seven years old, going on for forty, for heaven’s sake. She had been married for more than twenty years, and in all that time Wesley had been the only one. No other man had touched her, nor had she wanted them to.
But Wesley had gone away. He had rejected her, left her in this awful state of numbness, feeling useless, fit for nothing but the knacker’s yard. Ugly, unattractive, no glamour, nothing. Slowly she walked down the lobby into the living room, straight to the scalloped mirror hanging from its gilded chain.
‘Pretty Amy.’ What gentle eyes he had and his voice reminded her of someone – who? – slightly husky, melodious – who?
She was getting into bed when it came to her. Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps, that lovely film actor, that real English actor – till you remembered he was partly Polish. That was who Mr Dale – Bernard, as he had asked her to call him – reminded her of.
Amy wished she could tell Dora about the kiss, but even as she wished it knew she never would.
Next door, so slight she made no more than a mound in her bed, Dora Ellis had wakened with a start as Amy closed her front door. Since she’d put Greg away she had woken at the slightest sound, alert in the fraction of a second, ready to go to him if he needed her.
So Amy was back. If it wasn’t the middle of the night she would get up and go next door to tell her the unbelievable news.
‘Think about it,’ Charlie Marsden had said, sitting by the fire and drinking her last bottle of milk stout. ‘You’d be better off in more ways than one if you came to housekeep for me and our Lottie. Ten till six and a chance to put your feet up when you felt like it, and a proper wage. Not peanuts like you get at the mill and from old Ma Battersby. She wouldn’t let you have the steam off her tea, that one.’
‘But you’ve got a housekeeper,’ Dora had pointed out. ‘Amy once told me you’ve had her for a long time.’
That was when he had got up to go, putting on the too small trilby, pushing it to the back of his head with a finger.
‘She’s getting past it,’ he’d said. ‘Time she retired. It comes to us all in the end.’
He’d winked at her and gone away, asking her to think over what he’d suggested and let him know within the week.
Leaving Dora to float up to bed and fall asleep with a smile on her face.
Charlie had a look in at Lottie before he went to his own bed. She was lying on her back with her mouth slightly open, making little puffing noises. It was obvious she hadn’t moved since he went out.
He wouldn’t need any rocking himself, come to that. It had been an inspired notion to ask Dora Ellis to come and housekeep for them. He’d had no idea how hard her life was, how lacking in creature comforts that house of hers. Frayed carpet, chipped fireplace, threadbare curtains – that long illness of her husband’s must have drained her mentally and physically. There’d be things she could have from here. Clara had thought nothing of buying new before the old was worn out.
He’d tell Mrs Tunstall the very next day. No need to wait for Dora Ellis’s decision. When he’d mentioned the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner, the expression on her face had been like the sun coming up over Pendle Hill. They’d had a good laugh tonight. She was a bit of a caution all right. He got into bed still smiling.
In the room across the wide landing Lottie was having one of her nightmares. She was seven years old . . . she was coming home early from school because she’d been sick . . . her mother had known she was sick when she sent her that morning . . . she was coming in the house by the back door, whimpering a little because her stomach was still hurting . . . she was hearing something upstairs . . . her mother talking to someone in her bedroom . . . ‘Mummy?’ she was creeping up the thickly carpeted stairs, needing to tell how bad she felt, wanting to be comforted, reassured that being sick on the floor at school was nothing to worry about. That by tomorrow everyone would have forgotten about it.
She turned on her side, buried her face in the pillow.
She was opening the door of her mother’s bedroom, seeing the man on the bed fighting her mother, jumping up and down on her . . . she was hearing her mother making that terrible noise . . . screaming? Shouting for help? ‘I’m coming, Mummy,’ she had yelled, bursting in on them.
She was awake now, suddenly, as if a light had been switched on in her head. She was struggling to get out of bed, beating back the waves of sleep.
‘Lottie! Wake up, chuck. You’re only dreaming. Come on now, lie down again. Go back to sleep.’
She opened her eyes and saw her father, clutching his pyjama trousers round him, hair tousled, blinking in the sudden glare of the electric light.
‘I was only trying to stop him killing her,’ she said from the pit of her dream.
‘I know, chuck,’ her father said. ‘Hush up now. Go back to sleep.’
Twice during the night Wesley had got out of bed and, lifting the heavy lined curtains away from the window, had tried to peer out. The sea was there, he could hear its ebb and flow, but the trams had stopped running a couple of hours ago. He felt uneasy, disturbed in his mind, but couldn’t think why.
From the bed Clara called his name. She was all softness, warm and inviting, crazy about him as he was about her. After they had made love she sat up and asked him for a cigarette. She switched on the lamp at her side of the bed and sat smoking, totally oblivious to the fact that she was naked.
>
Amy would have made some attempt to cover her breasts, but then Amy didn’t smoke, or wrap her legs round him when they made love.
‘When are we going to get out of that flat?’ Clara asked him. ‘I can’t stand much more of it. You promised it was only a temporary thing. A house you said, Wesley. You promised me we would move to a house.’ She pouted. ‘You promised you’d climb up and get the moon down for me if only I’d leave Charlie and go away with you. Remember?’
When she lay down she snuggled her head on to his shoulder and slept almost at once. Wesley stared wide-eyed into the darkness. Her hair tickled his chin; on her breath he could smell the wine she’d drunk. He moved his arm gingerly so as not to disturb her. Oh, dear dear God, a house . . . the moon . . . each one as unattainable as the other.
His father had long since developed cloth ears when money was mentioned. Wesley could see him now, bull-necked and intractable: ‘I’m putting you in the Preston shop as manager,’ he’d said. ‘Manager and nowt else till you prove you can handle cash. Aye, and keep your fingers out of the till.’
The memory of that awful confrontation came back with such intensity that tears welled up in his eyes. They were the tears of self-pity, hurt pride, and wounded him as deeply as if all the hurtful things had been said only yesterday. The only decent thing his father had ever done above the bounds of duty was to buy their house when he married Amy. ‘To make the best of a bad start,’ he’d said at the time. ‘To give you a chance to make something of yourself.’
Wesley buried his chin deep in the softness of Clara’s hair, dozed for an hour, then woke again. He felt genuinely sorry for Amy. Hated upsetting her. She’d done nothing to deserve all this. Falling in love with Clara had nothing at all to do with Amy, who had somehow dissolved into a shadowy figure, no longer at all essential to his happiness.
No longer essential to his happiness – what a terrible ring of finality the words had to them. Life could be very cruel. And love. His eyes filled with tears again. He would call and see the old man this coming weekend, try and talk to him, make him see that everything wasn’t just black and white, that sometimes people were victims of circumstances, that when you loved a woman beyond all understanding it was like being swept along on a relentless tide. That Clara possessed him body and soul.