A Complicated Woman

by Sheelagh Kelly

  The Armistice had instilled a spirit of amiability even in those who might otherwise have proved unresponsive. The grey-haired man with the smudged collar and skewed tie performed a quick assessment of this attractive and well-dressed young woman and formed his lips into an obsequious beam – there might be reward in it for him. ‘I shall certainly try me best to help you.’

  ‘I have the exact date when she was in residence,’ provided Oriel.

  ‘Oh well, then it’ll be no difficulty at all!’ Given the relevant month and year, the man responded with a courteous ‘Excuse me’ and clip-clopped off along a corridor.

  In his absence the old pauper who had been sweeping up the leaves shuffled in, rubbing his hands. Oriel glanced at him but he kept his eyes lowered as he attempted to get warm against a radiator. She looked away, trying to avoid inhaling the smell of poverty and disinfectant.

  Within five minutes the other man returned with dust on his sleeves and a ledger in his hands, frowning at the unfortunate individual by the radiator but withholding any recrimination, speaking only to Oriel, who decided she did not like him. This was irrational for he was quite charming in his attention towards her. ‘There now!’ He smiled, displaying a dimple. ‘No trouble at all, was it? Shouldn’t take two minutes to find them. Now, what was the name of the person?’

  ‘Maria Smellie,’ provided Oriel.

  Septimus Kendrew coped well with the shock of hearing his wife’s name and barely glanced up from his book, flicking through its pages and tutting. ‘Dear, dear, an unfortunate moniker. Ah! Quicker than I thought. Maria Smellie, aged fourteen, occupation—’

  ‘Fourteen?’ Oriel was shocked. This was even younger than her own mother had been. The poor child! ‘Are you sure?’

  The man scrutinized the page, brushing away imaginary marks that might obscure the details though they were quite legible, the action merely lending him time to think. ‘Aye, that’s right, fourteen. Her occupation’s listed as a washerwoman. There’s a few more notes on her an’ all. It seems the Master tried to persuade her to have the bairn adopted but she wouldn’t have that and ran away before it were a fortnight old.’

  This was all the more perplexing. If Maria had so desperately wanted to keep her baby then, what made her change her mind ten years later?

  ‘Is that baby the man you work for?’

  ‘What?’ Thoughts interrupted, Oriel looked confused. ‘Oh yes, it must be him. Does the record say where she might have gone?’

  ‘No, but I ought to be able to help you more than this.’ The man affected a keen interest. ‘If I could discover her whereabouts how can I find you? Should I tell her somebody’s looking for her?’

  This was the last thing Oriel wanted. ‘Oh, don’t put yourself to any trouble! I can enquire elsewhere.’ She attempted to extricate herself from his company but Kendrew was adept at cajolery, coming out from behind the desk to charm her.

  ‘It’s no trouble, honestly! It’d be an awful shame not to bring mother and son together, wouldn’t it? If he’s that desperate to find her – and he must be keen if he’s set you the task. You never know she might’ve been searching for him all these years. There are so many thousands of mothers’ll never see their sons again after this war. It seems criminal not to reunite these two.’

  Gulled into thinking that naught would come of this, Oriel scribbled her name and address on the pad that he put before her. Kendrew glanced at it. This name also jogged his memory but for the moment he was too busy attending to his prey to dally over its relevance.

  As Oriel passed the old man by the radiator the latter exclaimed, ‘I know somebody called Smellie!’ She froze but the desk attendant quickly forestalled any conversation. ‘No you don’t! Get back to work and keep your neb out. He’s a bit daft,’ he told the young woman, who smiled and left with the feeling she had had a lucky escape.

  Only when she had gone did Kendrew realize the connection. Hadn’t his stepson Nat once known people called Maguire? But then the young lady who had just left could not be related to them judging by her clothes and demeanour. After another few moments of pondering, Sep came to a conclusion: the young woman was Nat’s daughter – she did have a look of Maria, that was what had confounded him when first setting eyes on her. Of course, it might be just a flight of fancy, but whether Nat was her father or merely her employer one thing was certain: he had money. If he was searching for his mother then Septimus Kendrew was the man who could help him.

  * * *

  In his daughter’s absence Nat felt easier but still retained the quiet air of disbelief over his sudden reunion with Bright. Laconic by nature, he rarely indulged in conversation except with people he knew well – a contrast to his garrulous partner. However, neither saw any need to voice their pleasure at being reunited, this fact being quite evident in the turned up corners of their mouths.

  Nat couldn’t stop looking at her: looked at her face edged in tawny kiss curls, her neck draped in the cream waterfall revers of her blouse, her breasts, her wrists, her ankles revealed by the calf-length skirt. Bright had been aptly named as a child. With her freckled nose, the alert brown eyes and spindly legs she had always reminded him of a baby thrush and there was still a resemblance, but the years had been emotionally cruel and the scars were evident in the lines on her face – though when she had laughed a moment ago her treacle-coloured eyes still bubbled in the manner that had first attracted him. Materially, both she and Nat had prospered, though at great price.

  ‘Have they held the funeral yet?’ His query emerged completely out of the blue.

  Bright flinched and the gleam went out of her eye. Even with no name mentioned she knew that he referred to their old friend Noel Scaum who had died from the Spanish influenza. ‘No, it’s on Friday afternoon. Will you be off?’

  He gave an abstracted nod, rubbing his thumb along the tips of her fingers. ‘Why d’you think he did it to us, Bright?’ Prior to his stabbing by person unknown, Nat had discovered that the man whom he and Bright had both viewed as their friend had been instrumental in keeping the lovers apart – and this had only come to light when they had found out that their daughter had been deceiving them too! ‘It’s frightening. You think you know somebody and…’ He finished with a helpless shrug, trying to put voice to that which plagued both their minds. His words though far from eloquent were delivered without the glottal harshness often used by local men. ‘I keep thinking… we’ve just got together after all these years an’ it’ll be just my luck to get this dago flu. If anything happened to you now I don’t think I could go on.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen!’ Bright fought the panic that was never far away at the best of times. ‘Except that we’re going to make a new life in Australia.’

  His blue eyes held a touch of despair. ‘They probably have it there an’ all. It’s all over the world. So,’ he shuffled his buttocks round and faced her squarely, his face adopting earnestness, ‘I have to tell you now before we go any further just how sorry I am about everything before it’s too late. I really am.’ He flung his arms around her and she returned his embrace with a desperation born of the knowledge that even if the Spanish influenza did not claim them, time together could be limited for these middle-aged lovers.

  A year spent in prison would have been sufficient cause for any man to react as Nat did now, but he and this woman he loved had been decades apart. His face buried in soft wool-clad flesh, he filled his nostrils with the scent of her, before sweeping his lips from neck to cheek to mouth. A flustered Bright gasped under his passionate massage of her body, and though the smell and the taste of him were intoxicating she managed to push him off with a breathless but firm, ‘No! Not until we’re married.’ It sounded ridiculous when they had a twenty-two-year-old daughter, but Nat instinctively knew what she meant.

  His eyes were still dark with passion yet his face was chastened as she held him at arms’ length. ‘You think I’m gonna run off and leave you again.’

  Bright did
not want to be hurtful, even though he had deeply hurt her in the past. ‘I just want to be… to feel right in myself.’ Cheeks flushed, she pulled her clothes straight.

  Nat took a few deep breaths to compose himself. With his ardour contained the wound in his breast began to make itself felt once more and he winced as he raised an arm to shove the dark hair from his brow. ‘I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I don’t trust meself.’ He smiled to reassure her as she shot him a look of alarm. ‘I mean I don’t trust meself to be a gentleman until we’re married. I’ve waited a long time for you – all me own fault, I know.’

  ‘Not entirely.’ Bright privately chastised herself. She had fully intended to be honest and tell him how much damage he had done. Don’t let him off the hook, Oriel would say, but Oriel did not have to suffer the risk of losing him.

  She told him then how her family had thrown her out. Nat appeared to listen, though his mind kept wandering; her face was still pink from their brief but passionate entanglement and it would take very little encouragement from those glittering eyes to induce him to try again.

  ‘It was awful, terrible. But ’tis all a long time ago. Wounds heal – what the devil am I talking about, of course they don’t. I can’t forgive any of them for abandoning me like that, my mother especially. How could she do that?’ There was intense pain in Bright’s voice and she could not withhold the tears. Nat made to offer her his handkerchief then stalled on remembering he had used it to clean his boots. Finding her own scrap of linen, she blew into it. ‘I’d never ever do it to Oriel, whatever she’d done.’

  These words stirred a hurtful memory that he had tried for years to repress: the image of his mother walking away and leaving him. He paused in contemplation, a worried look in his eye. ‘If you can’t forgive them—’

  ‘Then how can I forgive you? If you’re asking if I have, then yes.’

  Nat had never been good at voicing his feelings. He crossed one leg over the other and constantly tapped his foot at the air in agitation whilst seeking the right response. However sincere he might try to be, in his opinion the words always sounded contrived and so he had kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. He had never told her how much he had valued her friendship as a child, how she was the only one ever to kindle a spark of warmth in his barren heart. His attempt to tell her now sounded as ham-handed as ever but he said it all the same. ‘You’re a lovely person.’

  Bright’s response rather spoiled the effort. ‘Or a bloody eejit. That’s what people would say, y’know.’ Yet she herself was blessed with more insight than many, saw another side to Nat than the view he presented to the myopic outside world – cold, unfeeling, detached. She knew that there was warmth in that soul for those with enough patience to coax it out. ‘But I’m past caring what others think. You did come back to me, I love you and that’s that – though I’m not saying there weren’t times when I could’ve killed ye.’

  ‘Obviously you’re not the only one to have felt like that.’ He tapped his chest and winced.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. I forgot all about your wound!’ Bright raised her back from the sofa and made as if to touch his chest but stopped short of doing so. ‘Ye don’t moan much, do ye? If it were me I’d make sure everyone heard about it. I always was a bad patient. Ye said ye never saw who did it?’

  ‘No, I thought I’d just been punched.’ Asked if his assailant had robbed him too Nat shook his head. ‘Didn’t take a penny. It seemed to be done just for the hell of it.’

  ‘God, that’s dreadful! If he wanted to stab people he should’ve joined the army. Any idea who it might have been?’

  ‘Well, I did reckon our Oriel could’ve had a hand in it.’ It was uttered with a wry grin. He raised a hand to stroke his nose. All Nat’s movements were slow and deliberate as if he were paying great thought to how he was perceived by others. Superficially, he portrayed a man who was utterly relaxed, but the gravity of his eye betrayed a mind in constant turmoil, always ready to believe that his world was at an end. At her scolding, he played with the rent in his jacket. ‘Sorry. It were probably just some loony. We’ll never know.’

  Bright frowned. ‘Is this why you’re going to Australia?’

  ‘No, no, I’d already made me mind up before that happened. I can’t stand this place any longer. I’ve nowt to contribute to a country where they stick you in gaol just because of your beliefs.’

  She was perplexed. ‘I didn’t know you were a conscientious objector.’

  ‘Not a conscientious objector, an abject coward.’ This was slight exaggeration and just another display of Nat’s dry sense of humour. Then he contradicted himself. ‘No, not abject – angry. Why should I risk me life for a society that’s never had owt good to say for me just ’cause I didn’t have a dad?’

  ‘Still got that chip on your shoulder,’ she observed with a half-smile. ‘Does it never occur to you what that attitude of yours has put others through, Nat?’

  Her disloyal observation shocked him. She was speaking as if she had forgotten his mother’s abandonment of him.

  ‘I know you don’t like to hear the truth, people never do, but we’ve got to talk about it sometime and it might as well be now so you know exactly how I felt when you deserted me.’

  Nat jumped up and paced to the window, his back to her. Beyond the lace curtains the skies were granite but the mood of passers-by was one of euphoria after four years of war. A moment ago he had been close to euphoria himself until her ill-chosen words had bludgeoned him.

  Bright knew she was risking everything, yet it had to be said. ‘There’s no other word for it, Nat. I understand why you did what you did. I know you were frightened – well, so was I! Bloody terrified. Especially when they put me in the lunatic asylum.’

  He turned to her, aghast that only two minutes ago he had used the word loony.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t leap up and murder ye.’

  Immediately he wanted to comfort her and took a step forward, hands outstretched. ‘I wasn’t thinking that!’

  ‘Yes, you were! I can see it from your face. God knows I’ve seen it enough times. I was fifteen, I was terrified beyond any nightmare you’d care to invent, I was all alone—’

  ‘But I had no idea!’ Nat’s dreams were crashing around his ankles. ‘Of course you hadn’t, you weren’t there.’ Bright felt her insides quivering at the awful memory.

  He was subdued, his face deeply troubled as he stared with unfocused eyes at the carpet. After a heavy pause he asked in the manner of a very small boy, ‘D’you want me to go?’

  A surge of panic. ‘Bless your heart, no! I’ve only just found you again.’ She jumped up and tottered across the room on raised-heeled shoes that she was obviously unaccustomed to wearing, for she stumbled before linking her arm with his and guiding him back to the sofa. ‘I’m not laying the blame, I just want ye to know what it was like so we can start our new life knowing all about each other.’

  Deeply affected by her revelation, he allowed himself to be led. ‘If it’s any comfort, I never had it easy by running away, you know,’ he muttered as they lowered themselves on to the cushions simultaneously. ‘I aren’t gonna palm you off with any excuses. I couldn’t think of owt else to do but run. I mean, what sort of a father would I have made at fifteen – even now come to that? I never had a family like yours.’

  Bright’s lips adopted an ironic twist. ‘Neither did I when I needed them.’

  His face collapsed, his blue eyes grave as he reached for her hand. ‘I did try to see you but your brothers gave me a good clattering.’

  ‘Aw!’ She touched his arm in sympathy.

  ‘No, I deserved it.’ He waited. ‘You can argue with me if you like.’ When she merely smiled at his joke he went on, ‘After that, I just decided to get on with me life. Bugger her, I thought.’ His lips formed a tight, unhappy grin; he was still hurt from her accusations even though he knew them to be justified. ‘If she won’t let me make it up to her then she can go and
sing for it.’

  She lowered her eyes to the navy-blue wool of her lap where their hands lay intertwined. ‘When ye came storming round here the other day, accusing me of sending Oriel to destroy you—’

  ‘Aw look, I’m sorry. That was ludicrous!’ He had the grace to blush, and covered his eyes with his free hand. ‘That’s what comes of a bloke living on his own for all these years with nobody to talk sense into him. I know you’d never bring her up to hate me.’ He raked his hand up into his hair. ‘But she hates me all the same.’

  ‘She doesn’t. If you knew her – I’m sorry, that wasn’t meant as an accusation, honestly!’ Bright could not help but interpret his look of indignation. ‘But once you get to know her properly you’ll find out that Oriel isn’t capable of such hate. She was just hitting back at you for not loving her.’

  ‘I do!’ He couldn’t actually say, I do love her. His feelings about Oriel were complex. Yes, he did love her but he also found her behaviour towards him infuriating. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like for me having her working in my house and not being able to treat her like a proper daughter – and all the time she knew who I was, the little devil. I don’t know how you can say she’s not capable of hate. She was prepared to see me ruined.’

  ‘Try looking at it from her point of view, Nat. She felt abandoned.’

  Still he kept his gaze averted whilst the conversation dwelled upon his irresponsibility. ‘Happen you did too, but you didn’t try to ruin me.’

  ‘What good would that have done? If I was a bitter person I’d be long dead by now.’

  Nat silently disagreed. Often his bitterness had been the only thing that had kept him going.

  Bright lay back on the sofa, entwined her arm around his, snuggled up and asked to be told what had happened to him since they had last been together. He glanced at the clock and sighed, dreading that Oriel would return to interrupt this intimacy, but related all he could remember whilst she hung on his words, unconsciously stroking the light covering of hair on the back of his hand.