by Marie Joseph
‘Oh, Dora, Dora.’ Amy motioned her to a chair by the fire. ‘Shall we smoke the last of Wesley’s Russian fags and drink the last of his whisky? I found half a bottle hidden in the cupboard over the hot-water cistern yesterday. Why he felt the need to hide it I don’t know.’
‘Because he was playing some sort of silly game with himself all the time, that’s why!’ Dora looked a lot better for her outburst. ‘The sad thing about me and Charlie is that, given a bit more time, he would have begun to love me back. I could have made myself indispensable to him, shown him what real loving can mean. He’s such a blessed man, Amy, but because he’s always joking no one ever takes him seriously.’
‘I know that,’ Amy said, lighting Dora’s exotic cigarette and pouring her a drink. Trying not to remember what she had said to Charlie when he had expressed his admiration for her.
‘You’re not the right shape for a Romeo,’ she had said.
Half an hour later Dora got up to go. The small amount of whisky she had drunk had loosened her tongue even more.
‘I’m not going to give up without a fight. I know what’s best for Charlie and I’m going to see that he knows it too.’
‘Maybe you’re wrong about his wife planning to come back. What makes you think he’d want her, anyway?’
‘He doesn’t want her, that’s the tragedy of it. But he married her, didn’t he, and to someone like Charlie a vow is a vow. He’s one of nature’s gentlemen, Amy. If there’s a heaven that’s where Charlie is sure to go. He’ll have her back because that’s the kind of saint he is.’ She turned at the door. ‘Just as you will have Wesley back. Because that’s the way you’re made too. But if you think that virtue has its own reward, you’re flamin’ wrong. Because it doesn’t!’
When the door closed behind Dora, Amy threw her half-smoked cigarette into the fire. She risked setting herself alight by standing on the raised tile hearth and having a good look at herself in the mirror.
Love was certainly blind if the normally cynical Dora looked at Charlie and saw a saint. Amy drew her eyebrows together and made a face at herself. Why did everyone take it for granted that she would have Wesley back, prepared to carry on as if nothing had happened? Was she as loyal as that? Loyal to the point of idiocy? Was she so steeped in religious dogma that she would honour the promises she made on her wedding day in the cold, bare chapel, a child bride with a safety pin in her skirt where it was already failing to meet?
Did ‘for better or worse’ include a constant tolerance of infidelity? Would a kind and merciful God really expect that of her?
‘People are saying that Wesley will come back to me one day soon. Dora tells me that she sees signs that Charlie’s wife will be going back to him.’
Amy had met Bernard in the street – accidentally on purpose – and this time they turned their steps towards the park to sit on a bench just inside the side gate overlooking the duck pond. The rhododendron blooms had shed their pink and white petals on the grass like giant confetti, and a weeping willow tree spread feathery skirts of green. Soon it would be dark and all the tennis players had given up and gone home, carrying their tennis balls in string bags looped over the handles of their rackets. The bowling greens were equally deserted, no click of ball against jack, no muted sound of rubber mats being skimmed across well-mown grass. Even the lake was as smooth and motionless as spread silk.
‘What will you do,’ Bernard wanted to know, ‘when that day comes? When your husband returns to you?’
Amy answered his question with another. ‘Wouldn’t it be my duty to have him back, knowing that I married him in the sight of God?’
‘Are you afraid of God?’
Amy looked startled. ‘I’m not afraid of the wrath of God, if that’s what you mean.’
‘So what are you afraid of?’
‘Many things, I suppose. Of the war that people are saying will come one day. Of noises in the night when I’m alone. Of terrible things happening to those I love. Of Dora banishing herself from Charlie’s house if his wife comes back to him.’
‘Of allowing yourself to love me,’ Bernard added, the creases round his eyes deepening as he smiled at her. ‘But I am everlastingly patient. I can wait.’ He held out his hand to pull her to her feet. ‘What has made you so afraid of happiness? Whoever taught you has taught you well.’
‘But I’ve never been really unhappy, that’s what I can’t understand.’ They walked back to the gate together, hand in hand. ‘These days I don’t know what’s happening to me. I have a feeling that there’s a curtain in front of me, one of those long beaded curtains, and if only I could bring myself to stretch out a hand and part the strands, I would stop being afraid, stop always feeling I should do the right thing.’
‘The right thing for you is to come to me.’
‘No matter who I hurt in the process?’
‘The only person you will hurt if you deny your feelings for me is yourself,’ Bernard said, walking so quickly now she had to lengthen her own stride to keep up with him. ‘And me of course. But I have survived before and I will no doubt survive again.’ He let go of her hand. ‘But I hope you won’t deny this special love which has come to us like a miracle. It’s so very, very rare.’
‘You’re bamboozling me again,’ Amy told him. ‘I’m in no state to make any kind of decision. It’s an obsession I’ve got, and don’t tell me it isn’t. I know an obsession when I’ve got one!’
‘Good,’ Bernard said as they reached the door. ‘Then we’re getting somewhere.’
‘I really feel,’ Ethel confided in Amy, as they stood together whispering in the shabby kitchen of The Cedars, ‘that I’m getting somewhere fast with her. I let her have a small drinkie in the morning and another around half past five before we have our tea. Before we go up to bed I give her a wee dram to make her sleepy.’
‘She’s barmy,’ Phyllis said in her normal voice when Amy went through into the drawing room. ‘But she means well.’
Amy had got into the habit of calling in to see her mother-in-law about twice a week on her way home from Mrs Green’s spotless house, where that particular day she had spent an hour and a half in the bedrooms cleaning the bedsprings with a small painting brush. After the pristine sparkle of the house she’d just left, the shabby comfort of the drawing room and the kitchen, where nothing was streamlined and where even the wooden spoons were stained with the colour of jam made long ago, almost made her want to cry.
Bernard had taken a few days’ leave to walk in the Ribble Valley, to climb Pendle if the weather held, he had said.
‘My father used to take me for walks,’ Amy told him. ‘He had a hermit friend who lived in a trailer halfway up Whalley Nab. And another friend who lived in the Ribble Valley. My mother can’t bear the countryside, so she was glad to send us off on our own. We used to bring wild flowers back and press them in between sheets of blotting paper in books. My father showed me how to mount them in scrapbooks and write a description of them underneath.’
‘Come with me,’ Bernard had said, smiling as he waited for her to refuse.
‘Your mind seems to be elsewhere today,’ Phyllis was complaining.
Amy couldn’t take her eyes off her. Since Cousin Ethel’s arrival Phyllis had gradually lost the puffy look around her eyes. The fear had gone from her expression, the lonely bleakness quite eradicated. Since Ethel had moved in with her missionary zeal, determined to make herself indispensable, Phyllis was more or less her own self again.
‘Wesley is far from happy,’ she was saying now. ‘Has he been to see you lately?’ She nodded at Ethel staggering in under the weight of a large old-fashioned mahogany tray. ‘I’m telling Amy how worried we are that life doesn’t seem to be going right for Wesley.’
‘We think the Will may have upset him,’ Ethel dared to say.
‘More likely his new friend isn’t looking after him properly,’ Phyllis said.
‘Hardly a friend, Mrs Battersby.’ Amy was surprised to find herself on t
he receiving end of a furtive wink from Ethel who was passing Phyllis a cup of tea, sugared and stirred.
‘Do let me press you to a sultana scone, dear.’ Ethel shook out the folds of a tiny linen napkin and laid it across Amy’s knees, pulled up one of a nest of tables, asked Amy twice was she sure she could manage, then sat slightly behind them on a humble-looking chair. ‘We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him walk through that door any minute now,’ she added archly. ‘He did hint that he might . . .’
‘Then I’ll be going.’ Amy stood up, scattering scone crumbs, almost knocking over the table. She stared around her with a wild expression, trying to remember where she had put her coat and hat, and immediately Ethel rushed to fetch them from the cloakroom where she’d hung them tidily away.
‘Sit down, Amy! Come back, Ethel!’ There was no disobeying Phyllis when she used her committee voice. She took a sip of tea, holding the saucer against her chest in case of spills. ‘You mustn’t be embarrassed about the house, dear. I’m sure my husband knew exactly what he was doing when he left it to you.’
Amy perched on the edge of her chair, watching the window for the sight of the familiar black car. ‘He did?’ she said, wondering what was coming next.
‘He did it so that Wesley would see how silly he was for carrying on this little tiff between you.’
‘And how highly his father thought of you,’ Ethel agreed at once.
Amy got to her feet, this time with no intention of sitting down again. She clenched her hands by her sides. They were as red and mottled as potted meat, and her knees were sending shafts of agony down to her ankles. Before Amy dusted the bedsprings, Mrs Green had asked her to roll up the oilcloth in the walk-in pantry and scrub the floorboards underneath with hot water, bleach and an egg-cup of Jeyes fluid. The oilcloth had cracked and Amy had felt at that moment as if something inside her had cracked too.
She hated working for Mrs Green. She wasn’t cut out for slaving over what she considered to be unnecessary jobs. She was meant to go to work dressed decently, with a clean white collar tacked in the neck of her dress every single day. She would have got her Higher School Certificate if she hadn’t been seduced by Wesley. She could have been a teacher, a top-flight secretary, a civil servant in a government department. But for Wesley Battersby sweeping her off her feet when she wasn’t ready to be swept anywhere, she could have been anything she chose to be.
‘Wesley didn’t walk out on me because of a little tiff,’ she said, holding her head up and speaking loudly. ‘He left me to live with the wife of one of his friends, and he’s going to marry her when the divorces come through.’
‘Divorce isn’t a word we use, dear,’ Phyllis said.
Amy ignored her. ‘I think that Mr Battersby left me the house because he wanted me to have something, something of my very own, for the first time in my life. He was trying to give me the security that Wesley never could.’ She felt the tears coming and tried to choke them back. ‘I know that what I’m going to say will embarrass you, even make you squirm, because feelings are like divorces – they’re dirty words.’ Her breath caught on a sob. ‘Before Wesley went away I couldn’t have talked to you like this. I couldn’t see that down all those years since I married him he had taken my mind and made it his own.’ She lifted her head. ‘Now I can tell you how much I loved Mr Battersby, and I hope and pray that he knew it, too.’ The tears were running down her cheeks but she made no move to brush them away. ‘An’ I hope that somehow, somewhere, he can know of my gratitude and of my joy in the marvellous thing he’s done for me.’ She picked up her hat and coat. ‘He was . . .’ She had been going to say what a lonely man she had found him to be, but stopped herself in time.
The black car was drawing up outside and she was so determined not to see Wesley, especially at that moment, that she rushed from the room and let herself out by the back door.
Closing it just in time to hear Wesley’s voice greeting his mother: ‘How are my two lovelies today?’
She could picture him breezing in, coat flying, dark eyes laughing at them, bringing them instant joie de vivre, making them feel they were his own precious ones, that he was the most wonderful man in their world – in the entire world.
‘Oh, Wesley, Wesley . . .’ she whispered softly, finding herself running down the road, running so hard she felt her heart would burst.
Wesley found Arnold Porrit in charge of the shop when he arrived back at Preston.
‘Five Woodbines, please.’ A boy of about eight years old pushed two pennies across the counter. ‘They’re for me dad,’ he said quickly, spotting Wesley coming through the door.
‘An’ the same for me,’ his mate said, standing on tiptoe to push the coppers at Arnold.
‘For your dad?’ Wesley asked.
‘No, sir. For me mam. She’s got bronchitis and she says they clear her tubes.’
Arnold watched the slightly bigger of the two boys palm a box of book-matches from the counter, but said nothing. All he wanted was to get away to catch his train to Bamber Bridge, have his tea, then go playing football down the fields with his mates. If he was lucky he might get away before his boss began asking questions – awkward ones, like where was Mrs Marsden?
Arnold went through to the back for his empty lunchbox and his cap. ‘Night, Mr Battersby,’ he shouted. ‘I’m off!’
But his boss was running up the stairs, calling her name. ‘Clara? I’m back. Where are you? Clara?’
Arnold closed the shop door behind him and set off down the street towards the station. He knew where she was all right. He’d seen her getting into that old man’s car, showing her legs and a lot more besides. She’d said that Mr Brown-Davies was kindly giving her a lift to the library. A likely tale, in Arnold’s opinion. Just who did they think he was, imagining they could fob him off like that? A ruddy Ovaltiney?
‘I wasn’t born yesterday, love,’ Dora, told Lottie, when she found the tweed cap behind the sofa. ‘You have him round every time your father goes out in the evenings, don’t you?’ Dora sniffed at the cap and got a strong whiff of lavender-scented Brilliantine, the solidified type, she guessed. ‘How does he know you’re on your own? Do you hang a flag out of the window?’
‘Oh, no. I just ring him up and tell him the coast is clear,’ said Lottie.
Dora felt her mouth drop open with the shock of hearing Lottie tell her what was obviously the truth. She sat down at the kitchen table and motioned to Lottie to do the same.
‘I think it’s time you and me had a bit of a serious talk, don’t you?’
‘If it will make you feel better.’
Dora gave the cap a furious skim across the table. ‘You’re not talking to your mother now, madam. It’s me, Dora, sitting here. Dora, who wasn’t born yesterday. Dora, who cares what happens to you. Who doesn’t want to see you get yourself into a mess and spoil the life you haven’t started to live yet.’ She groped in her apron pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘I couldn’t bear to see you go the way of . . .’
‘My mother?’
‘I didn’t say that!’ As a matter of fact, it had been Amy whose name had popped into Dora’s mind. Amy, who had once admitted that what her mother had told her about sex could have been written on a pin-head and still left room. Amy, who looked like being bound for life to the wonderful Wesley, a man who wasn’t fit to tie her shoelaces. Dora took a deep breath. ‘I know you understand the mysteries of the human body, because I’ve seen your biology drawings.’
‘The vagina,’ Lottie prompted.
‘Yes.’
‘And the womb,’ said Lottie helpfully.
‘Stop it!’ Dora reached for the cap being cradled tenderly in Lottie’s arms and flung it across the kitchen. ‘You think you’re God-Almighty clever, don’t you, madam? You think you know it all! Well, let me tell you something – you know nothing! But you’ll listen to what I’m going to say if I have to sit on your head to get some sense into you. You will listen hard and if you still
go on and get into trouble, it won’t be because no one cared enough to explain.’ To her surprise Dora needed the handkerchief again, this time to wipe her eyes. ‘You’re upsetting me, madam, and I don’t upset easily,’ she sniffed.
Lottie’s face was a study. Reaching out across the table she laid a hand on Dora’s bare arm. ‘Jimmy and me haven’t done anything dirty,’ she whispered. ‘Honest.’
‘I never said it was dirty!’ retorted Dora, only to be shushed into silence by a squeeze of Lottie’s hand.
‘Jimmy and me are courting strong, but he respects me. We’re saving up to get married when I’m seventeen. Jimmy’s father has promised him a stall of his own in the fish market when he’s eighteen, and I’ve started a bottom drawer off with two tea-towels and four yellow dusters. I’ll show them to you if you like.’
‘Sometimes people can get carried away,’ Dora said carefully, still determined to have her say. ‘Especially boys of Jimmy’s age.’
‘That’s what happened to Mrs Battersby, isn’t it? She was still at school like me when she had to get married, wasn’t she? So Mr Battersby never really respected her. No man respects you if you give him your body before you’re married. Jimmy says my mother has no respect for herself, that’s why she goes with men. Jimmy says that something in her past must have made her feel worthless.’
‘He’s got an old head on young shoulders,’ Dora said faintly. ‘I’d like to meet him one day.’
‘He can gut a herring quicker than you can bat an eyelid.’
‘That’s worth knowing.’ Dora smiled. ‘I’m liking him more by the minute.’
‘You do believe that we intend to wait till we’re married before we think of going the whole way?’ Lottie’s young voice was unsteady.
Dora gazed deep into the troubled dark eyes. ‘I believe you, love. Implicitly,’ she said, meaning it too. ‘But I think you should invite Jimmy round when your father’s in, so you can introduce them.’