by CL Skelton
They went in together and sat down at a table in the lounge, where other parties were engaged in sipping tea and nibbling scones and cakes from tall, three-tiered silver cake-stands. It was a pleasant room, faintly worn, in the Victorian tradition of elaborate flocked wallpapers and heavy wood furniture. The boy was dressed in black trousers, white shirt and black bow tie and, with the help of a young girl in a black dress and white apron, was busy bringing pots of tea and hot water to the tables. Sam knew him at once. But he said nothing, and waited for Mavis, nervous and unhappy, to catch the young man’s eye. She signalled to him and he looked over with an engaging lopsided grin, proud of himself and yet relieved to see his mother all the same. Then he saw the man with her and surprise came over his face and was followed by wary uncertainty. Sam saw a familiar long, aristocratic nose and dark blue-green eyes. He smiled when the boy approached and the youngster returned the smile.
Mavis said, ‘Geordie, this is Sam. I knew him during the war.’ She didn’t mention his last name and she didn’t say anything about friends. Sam stood and shook hands with the boy, who called him ‘sir’. Then Geordie went back to waiting on tables and Sam and Mavis drank the tea he had brought. They didn’t talk much, and when the bill came and Sam reached for it, she said, ‘I’ll pay for mine,’ with such vehemence that he felt obliged to let her. It was not a happy occasion.
Once outside she said abruptly, ‘All right, you got what you wanted, now I hope you enjoy your walk.’ She turned towards her car. He stopped her, with his hand about her wrist, and her eyes were murderous when she looked up to meet his.
‘Now look,’ she said, her voice low and cold, ‘you’re not on your bloody great estate any more. You’re in the middle of an ordinary English town full of ordinary English people. Let me go or I’ll shout for help. I mean it, Sam. I’m sorry I ever came near you, God help me, I am.’
‘That’s Peter’s son,’ he said.
‘What a good guess,’ she returned, wrenching her arm free. But he grabbed both her shoulders and backed her against the railing overlooking the sea wall. She didn’t like the look on his face and remembered suddenly that the gay and laughing Hardacre twins had tempers like the devil.
‘A guess? Why in the name of God should I have to guess? Why didn’t you tell me?’
He was so fiercely angry that she was momentarily cowed, but not for long. She had stood up to the buffetings of working-class morality too long to be subjected long to his.
‘And what is it to you?’ she demanded. ‘Who are you that I have to answer to you?’
‘He’s my cousin’s son.’
‘No. He’s my son,’ she replied. She said the words in that proud way that working-class women speak of their male offspring. The way his great-grandmother spoke of hers. It touched him. But she flew at him then in a rage equal to his, ‘He’s my son, and he’s a bastard. I know. I don’t have to be told. I’ve been told for seventeen years. And I’m done apologizing for it. Yes, Peter fathered him. Yes, we were engaged and we didn’t wait. And Peter was killed and I had his bastard. But I raised him, I worked to keep him. I stood up to all the bloody pointing fingers and wagging tongues, and I made all the apologies. Happen by now he’s mine. All mine. I’ve bloody earned him, a dozen times over.’ She turned her back and stared out to sea to hide from him the sudden weakness of tears. When he spoke it was over her head, with his hands suddenly on her shoulders, his fingers lightly protective, soothing her sudden anger.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please. Do you think any of that matters to me? Of course you didn’t wait. Which of us did in those years? We all carried death around in our back pockets. We took what we could. Why shouldn’t you have done the same?’
‘Because I was a woman,’ she snapped, ‘and had the misfortune to survive.’
‘Oh, no, no,’ he said sadly, ‘don’t talk like that.’ She softened slightly towards him and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why were you so angry, then?’
He waited a while before he answered but even so, when he did, the kindness was gone from his voice and the anger had returned, beyond his control. He said, ‘I’m glad you loved my cousin. I’m glad you gave him a son. Something for that handful of years he had of a life.’ He paused and said bitterly, ‘God damn that war, it took so much from us all.’ He was silent again and she almost turned to face him, but then he said, ‘But why didn’t you bring him to us? Why all those years on your own with him? Why didn’t you come to us instead of running away to a Halifax slum?’
‘No!’ she shouted suddenly, whirling about. She raised her right hand and struck him across the face with stinging force. ‘No, you rich bastard. You’ll not call my home a slum. It’s rough, but it’s not a slum. It’s clean and decent. And it’s my home and I’ve kept it for him all these years while you’ve lived in your bloody mansion. But I didn’t run. I didn’t run from anything. I’ve never run from anything in my life. I took my son because he were mine. I raised him. My way. I didn’t come running, begging after Hardacre money and t’ Macgregor title or your big house or any of it. I took what was mine. My son. And whatever you want to think, he’s had a good life with me. I couldn’t give him money, but I gave him love. And if you’d not lived your life among rich bastards like yourself, you’d know that counts for summat, yet.’ She drew a deep breath, while he still stared, quietly stunned by her anger and the viciousness of her hand, and she said, ‘He weren’t deprived.’ Her eyes met his, daring him to oppose her. He only shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘he wasn’t. But we were. You deprived us. He was ours too. You had no right to take him from us.’ He spoke so softly that she misread his emotions and saw only regretful sorrow in them.
She was a little shaken and said, ‘Did it matter to you?’ He grabbed her shoulders again and shook her. ‘Did it matter? What do you think we are? Of course it bloody mattered. My aunt, Peter’s mother, whom you once knew well, has no one. No one. The First War took her husband, and the Second, her son. She has no one. Only for seventeen years she’s had a grandchild, and she’s never known. That’s what you did. That’s what matters.’ He closed his eyes briefly, as if fighting to control his own anger. ‘Oh, maybe you can make amends now. Maybe a little. But you’ll never give her back those seventeen years. She’s an old lady now, Mavis. How long has she left to enjoy him?’ Abruptly he let her go. He turned and walked from her but stopped and looked back over his shoulder.
‘I’ll never forgive you,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forgive you those seventeen years.’
He walked away down the street in the November twilight without looking back again, as if he could not tolerate even to see her face. She thought surely she would never see him again, and savagely regretted the whole ill-conceived day. Whoever had said one can’t go back had been very, very wise. She got in her small red car and drove away, wondering sadly how he’d ever get home.
She never did find that out. But she did see him again, after all.
She came home one night, about ten days later, from work, not in the best of tempers since one of the kitchen maids had announced a previously undeclared pregnancy and walked out, and found, to her annoyance, a large lorry parked directly in front of her house. It was a working-class neighbourhood and there were no garages, for there were indeed very few cars. So Mavis was accustomed to keeping her favourite acquisition on the street before the house, and indeed in precisely the position now filled to overflowing with lorry. Grumpily she nosed by it in the narrow street and nipped in right in front of it, hoping to display, by parking the Mini virtually on the front bumper of the lorry, that it was in her place. The gesture was aimed not at the vehicle itself, which was more or less an innocent, but at the driver, a tall man leaning against the near side of the vehicle, smoking a cigarette.
He was obviously waiting for someone, but she didn’t see why he had to wait in front of her house. She got out of the Mini, carefully locked it and gathered up her handbag and some late shopping off the roof where
she had laid them. The man watched her curiously, the while. She could not see him that clearly in the light of the street lamps, but clearly enough to be aware of his attention, that sort of disinterested attention of people with nothing better to do. She didn’t look round. She had noticed him first as she drove up the street and seen he was dressed like a tradesman, in dungarees, heavy boots and a thick jumper. She wanted to say, as she struggled with her parcels, ‘Well give me a hand, you lazy sod,’ but she didn’t, partly because she didn’t really want a conversation with a stranger. There were always men about with an eye out for a woman alone. She’d spent seventeen years fending them off, both the kind, thoughtful ones, and the out-and-out rogues. She wanted no more complications in her life.
She managed to get all the parcels together and her key in her hand, and turned towards her door, walking past the cab of the lorry as she did so. She was aware of, rather than actually saw, his shift of position, as his eyes followed her. As she stepped around him he said, ‘Any old scrap iron, Ma’am?’ Her head spun round and she dropped the parcels. He bent, laughing, to collect them.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, almost afraid.
‘What do you want from me, Sam?’
‘Dinner?’ he said, adding after a moment, ‘it’s Saturday. A Saturday, anyhow.’
In the end, they had fish and chips from the local chip shop, at her plain, scrubbed kitchen table. She said, smiling wryly, ‘Bet you haven’t had these for a while.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I have not.’ He hadn’t had fish and chips since the day he walked out of Mr Ormsley’s chip shop down near the harbour in Brid. After cooking them every night for four months he’d never been able to stand the sight of them again. However, he revised his judgement that night. They were good, and the company was excellent. It was a lovely evening. Mavis, after an initial shyness, had shown him her home. She didn’t apologize for it, for which he was deeply glad, but she was a little touchily defensive all the same. She wouldn’t let him light the coal fire, but insisted on doing it herself, on her knees before the tiled hearth. He liked the house. It was like Mick Raddley’s in Bridlington, which he had always liked as well, though Mick’s wife would flee into the kitchen if ever he came through the door.
‘I’m sorry for my behaviour last time,’ he said at last. ‘I should not have walked away.’
She nodded. She sensed he was not, however, forgiving her, only regretting his own bad form. In fact, as long as she knew him, she always sensed he had never forgiven her for keeping Geordie from his grandmother, just as he had said he would not. It was, she came to learn, so unlike him, the only bitterness she ever saw in his warm and forgiving nature, and all the more impressive for that. Twice she tried to raise the subject, and twice met a sudden, dark wall, as he dodged her and became unreachable. She learned not to raise it again. Just now, she hadn’t the nerve. She said only, ‘How do I make amends?’
‘What?’
‘You said I could make amends, a little. To Peter’s mother. How?’
He got up from the table and walked slowly about the kitchen, ducking his head under the washing airing on the rack hung on pulleys from the ceiling. He held the mug of tea she’d given him with both hands, sipping it thoughtfully. He said, ‘Let me take him to Scotland, to meet her.’ She turned away, with a soft sigh. After a long while she looked back, studying him. It was hard, seeing him dressed like that, and in her own kitchen, to imagine him as the same person as the gentleman she’d met riding over the gracious grounds of his estate. It was hard, even, to see him as a threat. She said at last, in a small voice, ‘He’s all I have, Sam.’
‘We won’t take him from you,’ he said, astonished at her fear. ‘What do you imagine us to be?’
She shrugged. ‘He’s young. Impressionable. You, all of you, are very impressive. I could lose him, anyway.’
He said suddenly, ‘Mavis, does he know who we are? Does he know who he is?’
‘Sure he knows. He’s an Emmerson, that’s who he is. He’s my son. And Geordie Emmerson’s nephew. And Geordie’s going to be in Parliament next time, when we throw your lot out,’ she added defiantly.
‘What makes you imagine you know how I vote?’ She shrugged, and he pursued, ‘And he’s not only an Emmerson. He’s a Macgregor. And he’s a Hardacre. Does he know any of that?’
She looked down at her tea, idly pursuing a chip across the crumpled newspaper.
‘He knows all he needs to know. That his father was a fighter pilot and a brave man, and he died for his country. A little too soon,’ she added with almost a smile, ‘to marry his mother.’ She looked up sharply, and said, ‘It’s hard being a bastard around here, Sam. I know. I’m one too, and I grew up in just this kind of place, in Newcastle. So’s my brother. It’s made us both learn to fight. It’s made my Geordie the same. I don’t think he needs to know whose bastard he is, as well. That just makes it harder. It just draws the line under the fact that you don’t belong. Not here, there, or anywhere.’
‘Oh, he’d belong,’ Sam whispered, ‘if you’d give him half the chance. So would you. If you’d get down off that damned working-class high horse of yours and treat people as people. Sometimes the damnedest snobs are the ones working from bottom to top. And as for your brother, I wish him well, if he stands for Parliament. Maybe he’ll have my vote. But I won’t apologize to him, or you, or anyone for who I am. No one chooses the way they’re born.’ He set the cup on the table and said, ‘May I help you wash up?’
‘Of course not.’ She stood. ‘Are you going?’
‘I think I’d better,’ he said, quite solemnly.
‘We’re only going to argue. I used to do this kind of thing for fun,’ he said, laughing and remembering. ‘But with you it just makes me sad.’ She nodded, faintly remorseful, and saw him to the door.
As she stood there, looking out at the lorry on the street, she said suddenly, ‘How did you find me, Sam?’
‘I drove around half the night, last week, until I found your car.’ It was the truth.
She said slowly, ‘Was it that important to you? I mean, to find Geordie again?’
‘It was. But I did it, actually, to find you.’
She studied his face in the lamplight, unable to read his subtle eyes, nor to untangle truth from teasing. She said slowly, ‘I’d need time, Sam. To tell him about it all. To let him get to know you, first. He’s just a boy, Sam. I can’t send him off with a stranger.’
He was silent for a moment and then suddenly he reached for her with both arms, and embraced her with tremendous warmth, ‘Oh, God bless you,’ he said.
It took time; it took a lot of time. It was eight months before Sam took Geordie Emmerson to Scotland. But it was time enjoyably spent. He left to her the explanations and let her make all the first moves. When she was willing, he took them both out, to dinners, once to the pictures, another time to York to the theatre, another, out for a run on the Dainty Girl. That was undoubtedly Geordie’s favourite outing. The time came when Sam could stop in at the hotel in Scarborough to take Geordie out for a beer, just the two of them together. Sam enjoyed it all immensely. In fact, winning Geordie’s friendship and confidence was the easy bit. Unlike his mother, Geordie was not impressed by Hardacre money, or style. He liked the big house, but it didn’t worry him. Indeed the only reason he went there, but rarely, was his mother’s wary objection. She didn’t mind her son mixing with Sam on what she considered neutral territory, but within the brick walls of his estate was another, more doubtful matter.
But Geordie had no such concerns. He was of another, new generation, the post-war generation, aware in a new way of social mobility, and the first children of the Welfare State. Perhaps their confidence that they would shake the old bastions down was ill-placed, but it did not change the fact that they felt it. Ironically the only member of the Hardacre clan of whom Geordie Emmerson was in any awe was his own contemporary, Paul Barton, whose little skiffle band had matured into a highly prof
essional group playing the clubs and dance-halls of the North. Geordie was every bit as enamoured as Paul with the throbbing new music of the young, and drove his mother mad at weekends with his own banjo and guitar, but Paul was leagues ahead of him, and a hero in his own right.
As for Sam, Geordie adored him. Not because, as Mavis feared, he was wealthy, but because Sam treated him like a man. He took him out on salvage tugs and let him do things that would have stood his mother’s hair on end, and Geordie worshipped him accordingly. It was Mavis, then, who he found he must win, and that was a far more difficult task, but no less enjoyable. He had always found her attractive, an attraction he’d been a little hard put to suppress when she was yet his cousin’s fiancée. Indeed hers was one of those female faces that never left him throughout the years, and would come to him at times, in dreams. But she had not been, then, as beautiful as she was now. There had always been a shy uncertainty about her, a vaguely beaten-down look, inheritance perhaps of her rough childhood with a brutal mother and her drunkard common-law husband. And Peter Macgregor, he sadly admitted, had not always helped, with his slick, thoughtless public-school aplomb, dragging her, too hastily, into situations with which she could barely cope.
But now she’d made her own way in the world for too long to be so deeply impressed by anyone, or so he thought. He never fully realized quite how much she was impressed by him. Her response to her own awe was to come out fighting; she put him in his place so many times that he began to feel the social misfit, beside her.
She was fiercely, even savagely independent. She would accept his paying for meals and theatres, because he was the man and, in her world, that was how men were to behave. But she shied from coming again to his home, and she rarely allowed him to hers. Sometimes he wondered if she feared seduction. At others he suspected she was, out of habit, carefully protecting her reputation. He was aware, as no doubt was she, of the twitch of lace curtains along the street whenever he arrived at her door. They were watching, as they had watched for so many years, and they were aware now that her son no longer lived at home. And yet he doubted they’d condemn as quickly as she expected. Nor would he cause much stir among them; they didn’t know who he was. Mavis told anyone who really pushed too hard that he was a friend, a scrap-merchant from Bridlington and they all accepted that. He looked like a scrap merchant and he drove a succession of battered vans and lorries. The fact that his name was on them would cause no stir. They didn’t know his name, and they didn’t expect the owner to drive lorries. As long as he spoke to no one, and was not thus undone by his accent, they would regard him as just one more tradesman courting a local lass. Surely they would forgive that?