Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  ‘What’s that mark on your neck?’ she’d asked.

  Lottie had come back quick as a flash with the story that she’d been using the curling tongs when they’d slipped and burnt her neck. ‘But I washed the curls out because my friend prefers me with straight hair, says it becomes me more.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘I forget at the moment. I’ve got so many.’

  ‘Was it the boy I’ve seen you talking to on the corner?’

  ‘Oh, that would be Mollie, a girl I know who’s had her hair Eton-cropped. Everyone thinks she’s a boy.’

  Dora had given up.

  Amy frowned. ‘You look very serious all of a sudden. A goose walking over your grave?’

  Dora nodded. ‘Wearing bicycle clips,’ she said.

  After Sunday tea Bernard suggested that they went for a walk and, though they had no intention of going to the cemetery on its windswept hill, that is where they went.

  Amy had been greatly touched by the way he had removed the crusts from the egg and cress sandwiches, cutting them into triangles, layering them on to a big flowered plate. Like fish scales, she had thought. His apparent expertise was a revelation to her, and rather tactlessly she told him so.

  ‘Wesley could burn a cup of tea, and my father only used the kitchen as a short cut to the backyard,’ she laughed.

  He was walking a small distance from her, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his tweed sports jacket, his head down as if he searched for something he had lost.

  ‘I’ve had to fend for myself for a long time,’ he muttered, kicking at a loose stone. ‘After my wife died I cared for her mother, and she was bedridden for the last long endless year of her life. So I had to learn to be domesticated. To cook, in a fashion.’ He began to walk more quickly, angry with himself for giving so much away, and for moving so swiftly on to the defensive.

  Amy was wearing a pink and white print dress with a white angora cardigan round her shoulders. She walked the steep hill easily without leaning forward, and he thought she looked like a flower. Thinking this he grew even more angry.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I had no idea. I didn’t mean . . . I knew about your wife, but not about . . . It must have been awful for you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Suddenly he turned his head and smiled at her. ‘I know why you’ve chosen the cemetery for our walk.’

  ‘I didn’t choose it consciously.’

  ‘I know that.’

  They sat down on a bench lopsided with age, weathered and scarred, flaking rust. Across the wide expanse of graves an elderly couple trod carefully, bending to read the inscriptions on the headstones. The sun was slowly fading away, the air was still and grass-scented all around them. When the couple disappeared over the brow of the hill, Amy moved a small indefinite distance from him, subduing a sudden and overwhelming desire to lean against him, to feel the peace and strength of him.

  He was smiling at her, his eyes teasing. ‘We’ve come up here because all the Sunday walkers have gone. There are no nosey parkers to see you walking out with me, a man who is neither your husband nor your sweetheart. You are afraid that people would talk.’ He took her hand, leaned towards her and kissed her on her closed mouth. ‘So there you are.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘I had no intention of doing that.’ He had kept hold of her hand and was jiggling it up and down. ‘I never thought I’d feel like this ever again. Down all the years since Anna. Never once.’ He held her hand to his cheek for a moment. ‘What shall I do with myself, Amy? You remind me so much of her – even your name, the sound is vaguely the same.’

  Because she didn’t know how to deal with the situation, Amy spoke too loudly and too quickly. She felt she had to stop him from saying more.

  ‘Don’t talk like that! You don’t even know me all that well.’ She was gabbling now, embarrassed to the point of incoherence. ‘I was thinking only the other day that every single time we’ve met I’ve been in the middle of some crisis, some kind of desperate situation, charged to the hilt with emotion, tears never far away.’ She paused. ‘You’ve always been so kind to me, so very, very kind to me. You’ve pitied me. Yes, you have, you’ve pitied me.’

  She looked away from him, suddenly remembering what Dora had told her about this man – how he’d come into the house, taken her by the hand and led her upstairs, to make love to her in his bed. Because he was sorry for her, too.

  ‘You see me as a poor little woman with a husband who has left her to live with someone else. You’re sorry for me.’

  ‘No, Amy. I see a very brave woman who lost two babies at birth, and others too before they’d had time to grow. Isn’t that why your footsteps led you to this place? I also see a woman who is so afraid to show her feelings, to be herself, that she thinks people are fooled by her smart talk and her way of turning everything into a laugh. I see a woman so vulnerable that there’s an invisible sign on her forehead asking me to kiss her.’

  She stood up abruptly. ‘Don’t say things like that to me!’ Her eyes pricked with tears of fury. ‘Damn and bloody blast you for saying things like that to me!’

  The swearing was so unexpected, so totally uncharacteristic of her that he caught her by the arm and pulled her down to sit beside him again.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s more like it.’

  She gazed at him coldly. ‘I feel sick with disgust of you. You think you can kiss any woman who takes your fancy, especially if she’s unhappy and in trouble. You think your charms are irresistible.’ Her voice rose. ‘Charm doesn’t fox me, oh dear me, no. I could write a book about charm, a whole shelf-full of books on that subject. I’m not as easily swayed as some women in your shady past might have been.’

  ‘Dora?’ He sounded quite detached. ‘I thought somehow she would tell you.’

  She tried to move away, but his grip on her arm tightened.

  ‘Go on! Just dismiss even that as though it meant nothing.’

  Bernard shook his head. ‘You’re wrong, love. It meant a great deal at the time. To both of us. Dora is a fine and good person.’

  ‘And you weren’t ashamed afterwards?’ Amy was consumed with such a curiosity that her anger began to evaporate.

  ‘Amy . . . Amy . . .’ Gently he shook her. ‘If we’d been filled with guilt, ashamed, it would have been wrong. Dora would have been as sick with disgust with me as you say you are now.’

  Amy remembered the look on Dora’s small pinched face as she told what had happened between her and this man. Her whole expression had been smoothed into tenderness, into the quiet joy of remembering.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said slowly. ‘God help me, but I think there’s a lot I don’t understand.’

  She could have walked away and left him, knowing that he would have let her go. But she sat on, pulling the soft white woollen cardigan closer round her shoulders, feeling the day closing in around them.

  ‘What will happen now?’ she said, as they walked, still with that small distance between them, down the stony path to the cemetery gates. As they crossed the street he held her hand, but let go when they reached the other side.

  ‘I don’t know yet what will happen, Amy,’ he said. ‘I shall think about it. Very seriously.’

  A tram cluttered by. The sun had gone now, and dusk would fall quite quickly.

  He left her at her door, without touching her.

  ‘Goodnight, my dear one,’ he said. And walked away.

  12

  ‘YOU LOOK FEVERISH to me,’ Gladys said, viewing the typewriter and the blue cloth-backed manual with suspicion. ‘Was it cold up the cemetery last Sunday night?’

  ‘No, it was quite warm as a matter of fact.’ To cover her confusion Amy dropped a sheet of typing paper to the floor and bent down to pick it up.

  ‘Mrs Rakestraw saw you coming out of the cemetery gates. With a man. She didn’t get a proper look at him because she was on the top of a tram, but she was sure it was you.’ As a concession to th
e unseasonable heatwave Gladys had come out without either a coat or a hat, and looked somehow unfinished in the brown crêpe-de-Chine dress that had seen far better days. ‘I’m not going to ask you who it was, but you ought to watch your good name. Mrs Rakestraw has a tongue on her like a sozzled parrot.’

  ‘We had been for a walk,’ Amy said, despising herself for feeling she needed to explain. ‘He’s just a friend.’

  Gladys’s nostrils twitched fiercely to the left with the force of her sniff. ‘There’s no such thing as a friend if he’s a man. Married women don’t have friends of the opposite sex. A man who isn’t your husband is only out for one thing. You must know that.’

  Amy knew nothing. Since Bernard had left her at her door four days ago she had done little else but try to unravel the woolly skeins of her thinking, alarmed at the way her mind swung her up to the heights of excitement, then down to the depths of depression. He had said he would do the thinking for both of them, and a thousand times she had decided to walk the few yards down the street to his house, and a thousand times her pride had stopped her.

  ‘Wesley will come back to you,’ her mother was saying.

  ‘Especially now he knows which side his bread is buttered on.’

  ‘You mean now I’ve got this house?’

  ‘Well, it’s bound to have made him think.’

  ‘Think what?’ Amy wanted to weep tears of humiliation, hot scalding tears of anger. Lifting the typewriter in her arms she banged it down on to the sideboard, then twitched the cover over it. ‘Do you imagine,’ she said slowly, ‘that I am just waiting for the day when Wesley walks back through that door? To forgive him for what he’s done to me? To go on as if nothing had happened?’

  Gladys didn’t turn a hair at that kind of talk. Amy had been like it since a child – hard, secretive, keeping everything from her mother, yet confiding it all to her father. She caught a glimpse of the top half of herself in the fluted mirror, and thought how much she’d aged recently. What had she ahead of her but years of living by herself, making ends meet, going to the Co-op for a bag of broken biscuits or a few pieces of bacon off-cuts, if she was lucky. Daughters were supposed to be a blessing to their mothers, a comfort in their declining years, not sly like her daughter, telling her nothing, keeping all her doings to herself.

  ‘It would be your duty to take Wesley back if he came.’ She nodded her head up and down. ‘He might not be perfect but a bad husband’s better than no husband. If your father was still with me I wouldn’t be in the position I am now, with nothing ahead of me but the workhouse.’ She saw her reflection again and winced away from it. ‘Sitting with a row of toothless women at a long table, eating a basin of pobs.’

  ‘The workhouse is a hospital now, Mam, and I can’t see that a bad husband is preferable to no husband. Far from it. Anyway, what makes you think I’d have Wesley back? Maybe I’ve had time to think about things since he went away.’

  Gladys couldn’t get over what Amy was saying. ‘You’ve a short memory, madam. I can see it as if it was yesterday – Wesley’s father coming round to our house and telling your dad and me that he’d see to it that their Wesley did the right thing by you.’

  ‘Mam! I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life being grateful to him for that. I didn’t know it, but I have. Even if he did come back, which he won’t, would I be expected to welcome him with open arms?’

  ‘Yes!’ Gladys thumped her fist on the table. ‘You stood with him in the sight of God and made promises to stay with him. For better or worse.’

  ‘But he left me, Mam, not the other way round.’

  ‘He wasn’t brought up like us. His sort act different, have funny moral standards.’

  The brown dress was making Gladys say things she knew she’d regret. She’d forgotten to tack the half-moon-shaped sweat protectors in last time she’d washed it through and she knew there’d be two black-wet patches showing underneath her arms. She’d take it off and stuff it in the dustbin when she got home, and never mind how many more years of good wear there were in it. She folded her arms over her one-piece bosom.

  ‘One man, one woman. Like it says in the Bible.’

  ‘Where in the Bible?’

  Gladys didn’t know, so she went, leaving Amy drained and exhausted, thinking she might go and stand on the front-door step and never mind how common it was supposed to be – just in case he came by.

  ‘Are you looking for anyone in particular?’ Bernard said, appearing at exactly the same time, coming down the street to smile and talk to her. ‘You have an air of joyful expectancy about you.’

  ‘My mother’s just gone. I was seeing her off,’ Amy lied, flustered, thinking how his eyes were the exact shade of a pearl-grey April sky. ‘She thinks Wesley will come back to me one day and that when he does I should welcome him with open arms.’

  ‘Even though you know you belong to me?’

  ‘Don’t say such things!’ She put out a hand to him, then drew it back. ‘You bamboozle me!’

  ‘I intend to,’ he said smoothly. ‘I will make your life so complicated that you can bear its complexities no longer, and there will be only one way to simplify it.’

  ‘Really?’

  Mrs Rakestraw was peering round her curtain, but Amy didn’t care.

  ‘In what way will that be?’

  ‘By walking the few paces to my door,’ he said, his eyes twinkling. ‘But before that day comes you must be very, very sure.’

  He turned to go and she found she couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Mrs Rakestraw is watching us, and she’ll know now that it was you she saw me with on Sunday evening, coming out of the cemetery gates. My reputation will be in shreds, but won’t you come in for a while?’

  He came back to her and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘If I come inside I will want to make love to you, but the time is not yet. You have a lot of mind searching to do. Making love is not the most important thing there is, although I know how pleasurable it would be with you, Mrs Battersby.’

  He grinned at her embarrassment, lightly touched the tip of her nose with a finger, then turned and bowed politely at the twitching curtain across the street before walking quickly away, going into his own house and closing his front door behind him with a decisive click.

  Amy wanted to tell Dora about the way things were between her and Bernard, but as she was far from sure herself, what could she have said? Besides, Dora seemed preoccupied these days, giddy with happiness one minute, down in the dumps the next. Something was going on, Amy was sure of it, and if Charlie hadn’t stopped calling round since that last awkward meeting Amy would have asked him straight out.

  ‘Charlie’s wife’s been round to the house twice lately,’ Dora was saying. ‘She’s still got masses of clothes there and she keeps sorting through them, chucking things out, telling me to send them to a jumble sale. Good stuff that I’d keep for myself if she was my size, if she wasn’t such a funny shape. She’s got bosoms on her like melons. I looked at the size in one of her brassières the other day and guess what it was?’

  ‘Thirty-eight C cup,’ Amy said at once, with professional certainty.

  ‘Men like big chests,’ Dora said, squinting down at her almost flat front. ‘I bet Charlie Marsden does. I caught him eyeing me up one day when I was bending over the washing machine. I expect he was wondering if I’m a man in disguise. Men like big bottoms as well – big bottoms and big bosoms.’

  Amy laughed. ‘So where does that leave us?’

  Dora turned away, drooped against the wall, defeated, dejected.

  ‘Tell me what’s really wrong?’ Amy asked softly. ‘I know something is.’

  ‘I think Charlie’s wife is planning to come back to him,’ Dora said in a rush. ‘I think all this about sorting through her clothes is an excuse to come to the house.’ She gave a shuddering sigh. ‘I’ve noticed she only comes when she knows Charlie could be home from work.’

  Amy sat down suddenly. ‘If you’re right and she
and Charlie get together again, that could mean that Wesley . . .’

  ‘Will come back to you.’ Dora started off down the lobby. ‘You’ve always known he would; you must have realized it was only a matter of time.’

  ‘Dora! Come back!’

  Amy’s voice stopped Dora in her tracks. Slowly she turned and walked back into the living room.

  ‘What have I said now? Husbands always go back to their wives after they’ve had their little flings, just as wives always go back to their husbands. It’s common knowledge.’

  Amy ignored her. ‘You’ll still have your job at Charlie’s house, Dora. You’ll still be housekeeper there. Busty Bertha doesn’t do a hand’s turn. She’s as much good as a chocolate fireguard round the house.’

  Dora flung her arms wide. ‘You honestly expect me to carry on washing Charlie Marsden’s shirts, mending his socks, cooking his meals, being a substitute mother to his daughter, cutting his hair – oh yes, he likes the way I make the most of what he’s got . . .’ She dropped her arms dramatically to her sides. ‘Have you no finer feelings, Amy Battersby? Do you think I’m made of wood?’

  ‘You mean you love Charlie?’ Amy shook her head from side to side. ‘Oh, dear God, what a mix-up. What a terrible thing to happen.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful thing to happen! Can’t you see? Me and Charlie were meant for each other. We laugh at the same things – we laugh all the time. And what’s more, he treats me like a lady, did you know that? He fills the coal scuttle before he goes off to work. “That’s no job for a lady,” he says. To think that not that long ago I was lugging eight buckets of coal up a flight of stone steps to the mill offices, after carrying eight lots of ash down to the bins in the mill yard. Charlie cherishes me, don’t you see? He brings the heaviest of the shopping home in his van, he appreciates what I do for him. He cut his chin shaving the other day and I wanted to lick the blood away for him. He drank too much beer another time and I told him off, and do you know something? He almost cried. Nobody has ever cared for him in a down-to-earth practical sense like that, certainly not madam with her bottle-blonde hair and her big titties.’