Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  Bernard turned at the door. Came back. ‘If you touch her,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll swing for you. Gladly.’

  Wesley moved quickly, but not quickly enough for Bernard Dale. Before he could strike, his clenched fist was held in a grip of steel.

  ‘I’m warning you, Battersby. Do you hear?’

  Wesley’s eyes bulged as he tried to break free, but it was hopeless. His struggles merely strengthened the other man’s hold on him.

  ‘It was no pre-planned party. Get that quite straight. Amy wished no disrespect to your father, and neither do we. Right?’

  The way he dropped Wesley’s arm betrayed his contempt.

  ‘That was telling him.’ Once out of the house Charlie quickly regained his composure.

  ‘Better than George Raft any old day.’ Dora opened her front door and invited them in. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea. We can hear through the wall if he starts anything.’

  ‘He won’t.’ Bernard made his excuses and walked away, raising an invisible hat in a polite gesture. Remembering his manners even at a time like this, Dora thought.

  Charlie followed her down the hall. ‘He’s a bit of a funny fella, isn’t he? Not from these parts, is he?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘That accounts for him talking like a foreigner, then.’ Charlie flexed his muscles. ‘I wouldn’t like to come up against him in an alleyway on a dark night.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Dora said cheekily, putting a cob of coal on the fire and poking the ashes till they glowed a fiery red. She straightened up, putting a finger to her lips. ‘Did you hear that? Sounds like the wonderful Wesley is on his way already.’

  The humiliation was more than Wesley could take. To be made to look such a fool, such a weakling, in front of people. Charlie Marsden would have a field day reporting it all to the lads at the pub. And look at Amy, calmly picking up some of the mess on the floor, no apology, nothing. Not even some kind of explanation.

  ‘Well, Wesley?’ She had met his gaze unflinchingly. ‘I appreciate that what you saw when you came in must have given you a bad impression.’ She held up a hand. ‘No, wait. Hear me out, please. I went along with what your mother wanted today. I played the part of a loving wife and dutiful daughter-in-law, because that was the way she wanted it. But it was just a play, wasn’t it? Like the plays you act in, with you the hero, being charming to everyone, even to me because you were in public, because you had an audience.’ She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I did it for love of your father, for love of your mother, if she was interested.’

  ‘But not for love of me?’

  He was getting that little-boy-lost look about him and she couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Wesley! Oh, you’re not really listening, are you?’ She lifted her chin. ‘You have no right to walk into my house without even knocking, and no right at all to behave as you did.’

  Wesley took a step towards her, but she didn’t flinch. The white-hot anger had gone from his expression. He was actually smiling, a tight, cold little smile.

  ‘Whose house did you say this is, Amy? Did I hear you say your house?’

  The crash of the front door slamming made Dora next door straighten up from tending the fire.

  9

  ‘I THINK I’LL knock on Dale’s door on my way home,’ Charlie told Dora. ‘I’d like to shake him by the hand for the way he stuck up for Amy. I’d have laughed my socks off if I hadn’t known it was deadly serious.’

  Dora was still feeling a bit shaky, a lot put out. The scene with Wesley had left her with a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. For a moment she had glimpsed that other Wesley, the one she had always known existed, so well hidden beneath the charm and the dazzling good looks. He’d been livid and, to be honest, she could understand his feelings. It must have looked bad, them sitting round the table stuffing themselves with funeral food, even if she had only brought it home to save it from going off. So in a way it was all her fault.

  ‘I’d leave Mr Dale well alone if I were you,’ she said. ‘He’s not a violent man by nature, but he could make mincemeat out of Wesley Battersby with one arm tied behind his back. He stepped out of line tonight and he’ll need to be alone for a while to sort himself out. He has to make reasons in his head for everything he does.’

  ‘You seem to know him very well.’

  ‘I used to work for him.’

  ‘So when you work for me you’ll have me all fathomed.’

  ‘I’ve got you fathomed already.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I still think I’ll give him a knock.’

  ‘No!’ Dora stood her ground. ‘You’ll have to take it from me that he won’t want company tonight. He’s private. He lets other folks be themselves, and expects the same consideration from them.’ She showed him to the door and nodded at the van drawn up at the kerb. ‘Go home. Please. I know what’s best. Honest.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘I’ll be able to start work at your house quite soon, if that’s okay with you. Mrs Battersby will be glad to see the back of me when she hears about tonight.’

  ‘That’s if Wesley tells her.’

  Dora sniffed. ‘He’ll tell her all right. He’s good at running to his mother with his troubles. He’s been doing it for years.’

  Charlie glanced at his van, then back to the little woman standing up to him with such determination. They were soon to be employer and housekeeper, but anyone passing would never guess it. They’d think they were on far more familiar terms. He accepted it was his own fault entirely. He should never have asked Dora to call him Charlie. Look how she called the London chap Mr Dale. Authority – that was what he was lacking. He was too matey, too all-pals-together. Too ready for a laugh. Good old Charlie. Undignified – definitely undignified.

  He didn’t drive off for a full five minutes. Just sat there drumming his stubby fingers on the steering wheel, the black mood on him again. He would never have been a boss-man if his father hadn’t died and left the business to him and his brother. Without that inheritance he would still be a jobbing plumber, lugging his tools round the streets, wearing overalls, getting stuck in, doing all the mucky jobs himself instead of allocating them to his workmen. He chewed on nothing for a while.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . only the other week it had got back to him that one of his men had said Charlie Marsden was the best gaffer in town. Fair-minded, he’d said, always ready to listen. Worthy of respect, because they all knew they wouldn’t be asked to do any job the gaffer wasn’t ready and willing to do himself if needs be.

  Charlie raised his head, pushed the pea-sized hat to the back and nodded so hard it slipped forward again. Did it matter what Dora Ellis called him? There was respect there in spite of all her cheeky ways. Dora would know not to overstep the mark, and Lottie liked her too – which meant a lot.

  He started the engine, let in the clutch, moved slowly forward. Amy Battersby liked him too, he could tell. Now there was a woman and a half for you. He glanced sideways at her house and saw the living room light shining through the ruby-red glass panels in the vestibule door.

  Dora hadn’t gone straight in there as he had thought she would. It seemed they were all pussy footing carefully round a delicate situation. Not Charlie’s style at all. For two pins he’d ignore Dora and go and shake old Bernard by the hand to congratulate him on sticking up for Amy so magnificently. But that wouldn’t be dignified, would it? From now on Charlie Marsden was going to be a changed man.

  The van rattled round the corner. In this fresh mood of optimism he could see himself being Mayor one of these fine days. Wearing the chain of office and sitting in the Mayor’s Parlour. Telling them all down at the Town Hall what to do and how to do it.

  Bernard heard the van, held his breath in case it stopped, then breathed again. For a moment he had thought it was going to be Charlie come to talk over what had happened, to tread roughshod over what was better left to lie untouched.

  He stared down at a photograph in his hand, ran a finger round t
he sweet face of the lovely young woman smiling into the camera. He felt the tightening of his heart, the quickening of its beat, asked himself why he had felt the need to take the photograph from its hiding place in his desk to look at it after all this time.

  With his gift for self-analysis he knew that the moment he had gripped Battersby’s arm the years had rolled back, and he was facing the man who he still believed had been responsible for his wife’s death all those years ago.

  He got up, went to the desk, took out a yellowed piece of newsprint and smoothed it out. Usually, to read small print, he wore his glasses, but not this time. He could have repeated it word for word without even glancing at it.

  TRAGIC ACCIDENT AT BATTERSEA FLAT

  On Thursday evening at half-past seven, Anna Dale (29), wife of Bernard Dale, a local government clerk, fell to her death down a flight of stone stairs. She suffered a head injury from which she never regained consciousness. A man who witnessed the fall was taken in for questioning but released later. There are no suspicious circumstances.

  Bernard had trained his mind over the years not to think on things destructive. A spiritual man rather than a religious one, he had accepted his wife’s death while never really coming to terms with it. But he had discovered that in spite of his resolution it only needed one small thing, the way a woman turned her head, the apprehension in her eyes, the vulnerability of a woman when life kicked her in the teeth . . . He put the photograph and the cutting back into the document drawer of his desk, grabbed his coat and hat from the pegs at the foot of the stairs and went out, crashing the door behind him.

  For almost an hour he walked hard and fast, climbing the steep streets, away from the centre of the town, till he could look down on twinkling lights, the pencil shape of mill chimneys pointing to the sky, while behind him stretched over thirty miles of fields and woods to the sea. He stood, hands deep in the pockets of his raincoat, aware of the darkness, the unheard pulsating life of the town, his own heartbeats. Above him the sky was alive with stars, but he did not look up. He knew that he was going to have to relive it all once more in his mind, hoping that one day it would make some kind of sense. Turning, he retraced his steps, walking slowly now, head bent, shoulders hunched, lost in memory.

  He married his Anna in 1925, a marriage long delayed because as the only child of ailing parents it was taken for granted she would stay at home and look after them. When Anna’s father died, the wedding took place and they moved in with her mother, not the best of arrangements, they both agreed, but Bernard liked his mother-in-law, admired her independence and the way she fought to the last ditch not to move in with them to the new flat he found in Battersea, finally accepting with great reluctance that she was far too frail to manage on her own.

  Without needing to close his eyes Bernard could ‘see’ the flat with its front door built in to make it look like a house – very important, according to Anna. The flat was filled with new and wonderful amenities, such as a white-tiled bathroom and toilet, a separate balcony, a separate space for clothes drying, and out in the small back garden a coalshed with an attached lean-to for Bernard to keep his bicycle and the lawnmower they would buy one day. There was a wide cream fireplace with a raised tile hearth, walls distempered to a pale peppermint green with a picture rail to break the monotony of completely bare walls. The outside was pebble-dashed with a slate roof, and the elderly couple living downstairs were so quiet Anna felt obligated now and again to knock on their door, just to check that they hadn’t quietly died without telling anybody.

  He had walked the whole length of a long road without noticing, registering nothing but remembering that Thursday evening of twelve years ago as if it was yesterday.

  He was relaxing after work, sitting in his chair with a book open on his knee, watching Anna opposite to him, busy with her sewing, hemming something or other with quick busy fingers, looking up now and again to smile at him. Her mother had gone to bed straight after tea, reeking of wintergreen, clutching a stone hot-water bottle to her chest, suffering from a summer cold which she swore was ten times more upsetting than the winter variety, always destined to settle on the chest unless ruthlessly dealt with from the first sneeze.

  Why hadn’t he been the one to jump up and go out to the corner shop when he found he had run out of cigarettes? Why had he let Anna go? Why, in God’s name, why? She had said she needed a bobbin of white cotton and would get that at the same time; she had said it was such a lovely evening she wouldn’t bother with a coat, and she had said she would be back in a few minutes.

  The recollection of those few minutes sent him reeling into a dusty privet hedge, off balance, consumed by the hurt that he sometimes felt would never go away.

  There had been noise, a neighbour came in, said something. Bernard ran to the top of the stairs and saw Anna lying at the bottom with an arm across her face, the position she often slept in. The man bending over her looked up, his handsome face shocked into an ugly mask of horror.

  Anna was dead. Bernard knew that the minute he touched her. Guessed that her neck was broken. His reaction had been swift, immediate, taking the man so much by surprise that he made no attempt to defend himself.

  ‘I didn’t touch her,’ he found the breath to say. ‘I spoke to her, that was all, and she tripped. I swear to God I didn’t touch her.’

  Bernard had lifted the man off his feet by the lapels of his jacket, jerked him up, held him dangling, shaking him in the way a terrier shakes a rat.

  ‘You knew she was afraid of you,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘You knew she couldn’t stand you touching her – you knew!’

  Nothing was ever proven, and even Bernard himself didn’t believe that the man who had convinced himself he was God’s gift to women had done any more than tease Anna, maybe stretch out a playful hand. So that she had jerked away, missed her footing, stepped off into space, into a void of nothing, with a concrete floor to break her fall.

  Bernard blinked the tears from his eyes, straightened up and walked on, calmer now he had forced himself to live it through. It was a long time ago and a hurt so deep cannot be sustained for ever, but back there in Amy’s house he had looked into her husband’s face and seen again the face he had tried to forget, the handsome weak face of a man who sees himself as irresistible, who cannot bear to think he could ever be rebuffed.

  Bernard had come to the end of the long road. Round the corner, laid out beneath the night sky, was the town with its ribbons of light, the blackness behind that was moorland and hills, little running streams, stone cottages and drystone walls. A countryside he loved, a place that had brought him to a kind of peace.

  Wesley and Clara were silent on the way home. He was still smarting from the shame, the humiliation of being bested by a man he considered to be beneath his contempt. Dale had seemed quite at home sitting round the table with Charlie Marsden and the sharp-tongued Dora, all laughing their heads off and tucking in at food bought specially to see his father off in style. Amy had disappointed him – appalled him would be a better word.

  ‘How was Amy?’ Clara seemed put out too. ‘I believe Charlie was with her, or was that another of Lottie’s flights of fancy?’

  ‘He was there all right.’ Wesley pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator. ‘Amy was having a party, a champagne party. The last person she expected to see was me.’

  ‘Amy? A party? With champagne?’ Clara laughed out loud. ‘Good for her! I’ve thought before that let off the leash your wife could be a bit of a lass.’

  ‘Let off the leash?’ Wesley turned a corner practically on two wheels. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, you kept her down, didn’t you? Most people guessed that. Just because you did the right thing and married her when you got her pregnant in her gymslip, you saw to it that she was subservient to you, out of what you felt should be gratitude. I bet she cleaned your shoes.’

  ‘Only because she wanted to!’ Wesley overtook a red Ribble bus with no more t
han an inch to spare.

  Clara closed her eyes and decided that if she was to arrive back at the flat in one piece it might be advisable to change the subject.

  ‘Lottie had a boy in with her, but he skedaddled the minute he heard my key in the door. She denied it of course, but it appears she was telling the truth for once when she said that Charlie was at Amy’s house.’

  ‘My house.’ Wesley jerked at the steering wheel, causing Clara to clutch at the door handle for support. ‘My house, given to me by my father on my wedding day.’

  ‘To you, or to both of you?’

  ‘To me! To me!’

  It was no good asking him to slow down, not in the mood he was in. Clara tried again: ‘Lottie told me that your next-door neighbour, Dora Ellis, is going to work for Charlie as his housekeeper. Do you reckon there could be any truth in that?’

  ‘No.’ Wesley was sure about that one. ‘Dora Ellis works for my mother, has done for years.’ He gave a hard laugh. ‘But she won’t be working for her much longer when I call in on Mother in the morning and tell her what I found. Mother will be shot of her so quick Dora won’t know what’s hit her.’

  Clara shut up. Something had rattled Wesley badly, something much more than finding Amy having a bit of fun with friends. Maybe it wasn’t in the best of taste on the evening of his father’s funeral, but life was for the living, to be enjoyed, not endured. She felt no personal sense of loss at old Mr Battersby’s death, never having met him, but he was an old man, into his seventies, and he and Wesley hadn’t exactly been buddies.

  She couldn’t remember her own father, but she had gone to her mother’s funeral in a red hat, and why not? Why pretend feelings that weren’t there in the first place just to put on a show? When she died she wanted a jazz band at her funeral, no mention of God, no hymns, and anyone who cared to come wearing bright colours. She didn’t want to live too long, growing old and decrepit, losing her hearing, her sight and, God forbid, her teeth.