Since He Went Away

by Marie Joseph

  ‘There’s an empty table over there,’ Gladys said, pushing her way to it, bemoaning the fact that they wouldn’t be able to eat their eccles cakes because they were in full view of the ladies presiding over the tea urns and the plates of iced fancies. ‘I just felt like an eccles cake,’ she grumbled, settling her shopping on the floor by her chair. ‘You haven’t been putting rouge on, have you? Your cheeks look a bit red to me. I wish you’d tell me what’s going on, because something is. I can feel it in my bones.’

  ‘Wesley is on his own again. Clara Marsden’s leaving him,’ Amy said casually. ‘But that’s not making my face red. I just happen to be hot. It’s always hot in here.’

  Beneath the little round felt hat Gladys’s face sharpened visibly. ‘She’s lucky her husband will have her back. From what I’ve been told she’s been in and out of that house more times than the neighbours can keep count. They say she has a case ready packed for when the next man comes along.’

  ‘She’s not going back to Charlie. She’s going off with someone else. An elderly man with pots of money.’

  ‘No fool like an old fool,’ Gladys said quickly. Amy could almost see her mind ticking over, weighing up the situation, thinking what to say for the best. ‘So Wesley will be coming back to you,’ she said at last.

  Amy finished drinking her tea and put the thick white cup back in its saucer. ‘What shall I say to him, Mam, if he does come back?’

  She had that closed sly look on her face that Gladys had never been able to fathom, but she said what needed saying: ‘You tell him it’s all best over with and forgotten, then you carry on like you were before.’

  ‘How were we before, Mam?’

  Gladys felt the familiar sense of not getting anywhere coming over her. They were on opposite sides of the fence, always had been. It was like talking at a brick wall. She reached down to her basket for a pair of grey cotton gloves and wrestled her fingers into them.

  ‘How you were, lady, was a married couple. Man and wife living together like God intended you to.’

  ‘Even unhappily?’

  Gladys snorted. ‘What’s happiness got to do with it? Your trouble is you’ve been going to the pictures too often. Life’s not like that. You live it and get on with it, not forever bothering about being happy.’ She glanced at the next table and lowered her voice. ‘You don’t know how lucky you’ve been. I know women with husbands who beat them, or drink their wages away of a Friday night, or make unusual demands on them, and they still stick with them. Wesley did wrong, but he’s a man. I’ve not told anybody about it, and though there may have been rumours they’ll die down when folks see you together again. You can put the whole thing behind you.’

  ‘What would you say, Mam, if I told you I’ve fallen in love? Really deeply in love, for the first time in my life. With a man who cares for me in just the same way. A good, kind, honourable man who would never ever hurt me.’

  Gladys stood up. ‘If we stop here any longer we’ll have to fork out for another cup of tea. I think we’d best go home.’

  She didn’t speak again until they reached the house. She trudged along, carrying her basket, sweating gently because whatever the weather she would never go into town without her hat and coat on. What was niggling at her was the look she had seen on Amy’s face when she talked about the man she said she was in love with. Gladys couldn’t get over it. It was as though the years had dropped away, leaving the young Amy she remembered, a pretty girl with shining eyes and a lovely softness in her expression. How long since she’d looked like that? Dear, dear God of mercy, how long?

  ‘I won’t come in, Mam.’ Amy was trying to smile. ‘I’m sorry I’ve upset you so much. I’d like to tell you more about him, but I know you can’t . . . I know you won’t.’

  Gladys inserted the heavy key into the lock. ‘There’s one thing I will say. You’re storing up a might of trouble for yourself.’

  She went inside and closed the door. Took her shopping through to the back scullery, then sat in her rocking chair by the empty grate, staring into space in the room where even in mid-summer the sun did no more than briefly touch the backyard wall. She sat there thinking for a long time, still wearing her hat and coat, and the grey cotton gloves.

  Wesley came about five o’clock, and this time he rang the bell.

  When Amy opened the door, he drooped against the wall and, in a weary humbled voice, asked if he might come in. He looked haggard, exhausted, with a stubbled chin and dark smudged shadows beneath his eyes. When he sat down in his chair he put a hand to his forehead as if to stem a stab of pain.

  Amy stood by the sideboard, waiting for him to speak, waiting for him to tell her that Clara had left him. She felt strangely aloof, almost unconcerned, as if she was watching him acting a part in one of his plays.

  ‘What do you do,’ he began at last, speaking in a low tremble of a voice, ‘what do you do when you realize one day that you’ve made a mess of your life? That you’ve made a terrible mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake?’ Wearily he moved his head from side to side. ‘You know what I’ve come to tell you, Amy, don’t you?’

  Still she waited, wanting him to tell her in his own words.

  ‘I want to come home, Amy,’ he said, holding out a hand to her. ‘I want to be given the chance to make amends, to spend the rest of my life on my knees before you, begging for your forgiveness, seeing you smile again.’

  ‘And Clara?’ Amy watched him carefully. ‘What about Clara? What does she have to say about this?’

  Wesley shrugged his shoulders. ‘What Clara says is no concern of mine. You’re the only woman in my life from now on.’ He stared down at his hands. ‘You always have been the only one, Amy, but I was too much of a fool to realize it. I’m crawling at your feet, can’t you see? If pity is akin to love, then pity me now, I beg of you!’

  ‘Have you told Clara you’re leaving her?’ Amy’s eyes never left his face. ‘Does she know you want to come back to me, Wesley? Have you told her?’

  His face flushed. ‘I don’t want to talk about Clara. That’s done with, finished. Why do you keep bringing her into it? You and me are what matter now. Just you, and me. No one else in the whole wide world. Oh, Amy, don’t stand there so far away from me. Come to me and let me feel your arms around me and the warmth of your forgiveness. I ache for you, with every beat of my heart, I ache for you.’

  ‘Stop it! Just stop it!’

  His mouth dropped open. He couldn’t believe what she was saying.

  ‘Clara has left you, Wesley. She’s gone off with someone else, and the only reason you’ve come here today is because you want me to think it was the other way round.’ Amy couldn’t get the words out fast enough. ‘Oh, you knew I would find out eventually, but by then you hoped you’d be settled back here.’ She made a dismissive movement with her right hand. ‘Of all the despicable things you’ve done in your life, this must surely be one of the worst. You wanted me to think you had left her for me, Wesley. Didn’t you? You never had a change of heart, never felt sorry. Clara has left you, so you come crawling to me. Why don’t you admit it?’

  Dora . . . It came to him right away. He’d forgotten about Dora working for Charlie, forgotten that Clara had been there yesterday.

  ‘So you see,’ Amy was saying, ‘there’s no hope for you and me, Wesley. I don’t think there has been right from the beginning. In fact, I think the best thing you ever did for me was to walk away on that New Year’s Eve, carrying your case and leaving me a note.’ She pointed a finger down the lobby. ‘Oh yes, I’ve seen the case. You were so sure I would welcome you back, you didn’t even bother to leave it in the car. You think these past months haven’t made any difference to me, don’t you?’

  ‘You’ve changed. I’ll say that much.’

  ‘Of course I’ve changed! I’ve found out for one thing that I could manage my life on my own.’ She nodded at the typewriter on the sideboard. ‘I’ve found I can do things I’d only dreamed about, that I can
make my own decisions, be myself, not merely a continuation of you.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such rubbish!’ He was recovering from the shock, blustering now. She could hear it in his voice. The hangdog look had gone, the little-boy-lost expression faded. He was getting up from his chair, he was coming towards her.

  ‘If you touch me I’ll scream,’ she said clearly. ‘If I scream Dora will hear me, because she’s just the other side of that wall.’

  Ignoring her, he took a step forward.

  ‘Wesley!’ She knew it was important that she didn’t move. If she backed away he would come after her, she could see it in his eyes. ‘Go now! I never want to see you again. If you touch me I’ll be sick.’

  It was the worst thing she could have said to him, and yet in another way it was the best. The insult to his self-esteem, the affront to his sexuality, froze him where he stood.

  ‘You’ll regret this,’ he mumbled. ‘Some day you’ll realize what you’ve done.’

  ‘Go now, Wesley,’ she repeated. ‘And close the door behind you, please.’

  His mother had said that, or something similar. They were turning their backs on him, the two women in his life. He stumbled his way down the lobby and picked up the case. But he’d show them. He’d make them eat their words. One day they’d come crawling to him, and he’d snap his fingers in their faces. Like that!

  As he started the car, as he drove away, he saw, in his driving mirror, Amy coming out of the house. Just to show her, he increased his speed, turning the corner almost on two wheels. He knew exactly where she was going – next door to talk about him to Dora Ellis, with her sparrow’s body and her nitpicky eyes.

  Dora, the best friend – he held her responsible for a lot of this.

  But Amy turned right, not left, and by the time Wesley was halfway into town, driving the car like a madman, she was knocking on Bernard’s door.

  He’d been reading. His glasses were in his hand and he had the bemused look about him of a man who can lose himself in the music of words.

  One look at Amy’s face told him all he needed to know. Gently, as gently as on the night Wesley had left her, he led her into the house.

  ‘I’ve sent him away,’ she whispered. ‘I never want to see him again. It’s over, Bernard, and I’m glad.’

  His book was lying open on the little wine table by his chair. Slowly he closed it and put his reading glasses back into their brown leather case. He was an orderly man, a man who knew what he wanted, but a man of patience who was prepared to wait for as long as it took.

  ‘Come here, bonny lass,’ he said.

  His arms around her were a coming home, a knowing that she was being held safe, a quiet certainty that from now on all sadness would be shared, all happiness gloried in together. His kiss left her shaking, clinging to him, murmuring his name, sighing against his lips.

  ‘We’re the lucky ones,’ he told her, a long time later. ‘To find each other like this. To love like this . . .’

  ‘To love like this,’ she whispered, holding him even more tightly, lifting her face again for his kiss.

  Love Is Like That

  Love Is Like That

  I KNEW THE minute Jill came into the bedroom that she had been crying, so I lay still and pretended to be asleep. After all, there are moments in a person’s life when she doesn’t want to talk, even to her sister who is longing to know what is wrong, and could perhaps give her some good advice.

  Jill had given up her room for Mother to use as a study. Mother was writing a novel, a hospital romance, because my father is a doctor and can supply the medical details. We were used to hearing her shout over the banisters, ‘Darling, is it possible for a patient to propose to a nurse during a blood transfusion?’

  ‘Have my room, Mummy. The view over the Green Belt will inspire you,’ Jill had said. Just like that. She has just about the kindest heart in the world.

  And now she was crying . . .

  I could see she had got into bed without taking off her make-up, so I knew something pretty desperate had happened.

  She gave a smothered sob into her pillow, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Had a good time at the party?’ I said, which was a stupid thing to say to someone whose heart was obviously breaking.

  ‘Oh, the party . . .’ she said. ‘We didn’t stay to the end. We came away at eleven o’clock.’

  I glanced at the illuminated face of the clock on the table between our beds. It said five minutes to twelve.

  ‘Did you go back to Mark’s flat?’ I whispered, because I knew that Jill did that sometimes, although Daddy didn’t like it because of what people might think. But as Jill is quite old, nearly twenty-one, she must be allowed to lead her own life, and if she doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong now she never will, as Mother says.

  ‘No, we didn’t go back to the flat, we just sat and talked,’ she said wearily. Then her breath caught on a sob, ‘It’s all finished. You might as well be the first to know, Amanda.’

  I lay quite still; I felt as though I’d been dealt a mortal blow.

  My sister Jill had had hundreds of boyfriends. Well, six at least, but not one of them compared with Mark in any way. He had simply everything, and then some to spare. Good looks – a sort of dark version of Doctor Kildare; black hair that looked fabulous, especially when it needed cutting: lots and lots of money, and a white shiny car with leopard-skin covers on the seats.

  He hadn’t asked Jill to marry him, but he was only biding his time, as Mother said.

  I was counting on being their bridesmaid, and I had planned my clothes down to the last frill on my petticoat.

  Blue, I had decided, the same deep blue as my eyes, with a cornflower worn flat on the top of my head; I am terribly tall and wouldn’t want to tower over the best man, or anything sordid like that.

  ‘Did you quarrel?’ I asked, because as anyone knows, lovers quarrel all the time.

  I mean to say, Tim and I fought regularly, and yet we had been going together for six whole months and one and a half weeks. Since my fifteenth birthday, in fact.

  Jill was taking a long time to answer, and when she spoke her voice was funny, just as though she had learnt what she was saying by heart.

  I switched on the bedside lamp and raised myself on one elbow.

  My goodness, but she had been crying all right. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had run in black rivers down her cheeks, and her dark hair had come unpleated at the back, and hung down over one shoulder. She looked terrible!

  Her face was stiff with hurt, and I switched the light off again, and lay down.

  Jill sniffed into her pillow.

  ‘He’s found someone else. A model. Her name is Lucinda, and she has red hair and speaks Russian. They met at a cocktail party last week.’

  ‘The party you missed because you had promised to watch me in the school play?’

  Jill choked, and I lay there thinking.

  I had known that Jill didn’t really want to go to that play but I had walked about looking hurt for days because she said she couldn’t go.

  I was the Snow Queen, and my costume was so delicate, so filmy, that my friend Kathy, who writes soppy poetry, said it seemed to be made of moonbeams.

  With my fair hair curled up at the ends I looked absolutely fabulous. And that’s not being conceited; it happens to be true.

  I wanted all my family sitting there in the middle of the front row, clapping like mad, and while they were doing just that Mark had gone to the cocktail party alone, and met this red-haired Lucinda.

  ‘Goodnight, Amanda,’ Jill said, and I knew that she was going to lie awake all night, staring into the darkness.

  And it was all my fault!

  I wanted to jump out of bed and throw my arms round Jill, and say how sorry I was, but you’re either that sort of a person, or you aren’t.

  So all I said was, ‘Goodnight, Jill. Don’t worry, it will work out.’

  ‘Things do, don’t they?�
�� she agreed in that funny choking voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly, and we both lay there, engrossed in our thoughts.

  Then I dreamt that I saw Mark standing outside a church. He was shabby and almost unrecognisable behind a big black beard. The church door opened, the organ music pealed out, and Jill appeared, wearing a fabulous white dress, and veil.

  The man looking down into her eyes was a cross between Bronco and Mike Same. As they came out into the sunlight, Mark walked away sadly, his head bent, and his feet, in scuffed shoes, shuffling through the dust.

  ‘There’s more fish in the sea than ever came out of it,’ Father said at breakfast.

  ‘Time is a great healer,’ said my mother, taking the third piece of burnt toast from underneath the grill.

  Jill sat there, chewing and swallowing automatically, and now and again smiling briefly at us all. When she had left for work my mother angrily clattered the breakfast things together.

  ‘I always knew that young man was a philanderer. His eyes were too close.’

  I stared at her in astonishment. Every time Mark had called for Jill, Mother had behaved as though he was visiting royalty. She had done everything but roll a red carpet down the hall.

  Tim walked home with me from school. I wasn’t allowed to go out with him; my parents are very old-fashioned and stipulate no dates until I am sixteen. Imagine!

  It didn’t really matter, because they also believed in encouraging me to bring friends home, so Tim had more or less moved in with us!

  We put a pile of records on as soon as we got into the house, and the very first song was a haunting piece about someone losing their only love. There were soaring violins and the words were so sad I started to think about Jill again.

  Tim can be very understanding for a boy, so I told him all about it.

  ‘So you see, it was my fault. I was nothing but a selfish beast.’

  Tim nodded. ‘Yes you were, and it was your fault,’ he agreed at once.