Fenwick Houses

by Catherine Cookson

  Our Ronnie's eyes were like slits and he was apparently unperturbed by my onslaught, but his voice was bitter as he brought out, "What about the night I met you on the river bank with him, and he scuttled away?

  Shortly after that you were in this state, you passed out. Explain that."

  "You! you wicked devil. What if I tell Mam? What if I tell Mam?" I was spluttering in my rage, and as I spluttered a voice warned me to be quiet, warned me that my mother had enough on her plate without telling her this thing about our Ronnie that would surely drive her mad.

  I swung round to her, crying, "Mam, believe me, for God's sake believe me, there is a Martin Fonyere."

  "Well, it's a funny thing, lass, nobody has seen him but you." My mother's voice was quiet and tired now, and at this moment I remembered Sam.

  "Wait!" I cried.

  "Wait a minute." I dashed out through the scullery, down our backyard, into the back lane up Aunt Phyllis's backyard and, bursting open her door, cried, "Where's Sam, Aunt Phyllis?"

  She was sitting at the table with Don, and they both rose to their feet together.

  "What's up?" asked Don. I shook my head, still looking at Aunt Phyllis, and demanded, "Where's Sam?"

  "Upstairs."

  "Get him." I had never spoken to her in this fashion in my life, but she seemed not to notice and called, "Sam! You, Sam, come down here."

  Within a minute Sam was in the kitchen, and to his astonishment and certainly to the bewilderment of Aunt Phyllis and even of Don, I grabbed his hand and ran him through the two backyards and into our kitchen.

  Thrusting the bewildered boy in front of my mother, I almost glared at him as I said, "Sam, tell Mam what I asked you to promise not to tell anybody."

  He turned startled eyes upon me and said below his breath, About about the lad, Christine? " I nodded quickly.

  Sam looked at my mother and said very slowly, "I promised Christine not to let on that she was out with a lad, Aunt Annie."

  As if a great load had been lifted from my mother's back she sat down in her chair and pulled Sam towards her.

  "You saw Christine with a lad, Sam?"

  "Yes, Aunt Annie."

  "Can you tell me what he looked like?"

  Sam glanced back at me and I said, "Tell her, tell her every thing, Sam."

  "Well," Sam said, 'he was tallish like. Aunt Annie. "

  "AstallasRonnie?"

  "No, taller, like our Don. But thin, he was very thin and he had brown hair."

  "Is there anything else you remember?"

  "He wore nice clothes, Aunt Annie."

  "Where did you see him with Christine?"

  "They were walking along the river bank."

  "When?"

  "Oh, one night a few weeks ago, that time it was very hot."

  "Thanks, Sam," said my mother, and when Sam turned from her I put out my hand and touched his shoulder. I was unable to speak but my eyes spoke my thanks. Then I turned on Ronnie and, looking him full in the face, I said, "I'll never forgive you for this, not as long as I live."

  I went upstairs again and threw myself on the bed and cried and sobbed until I couldn't breathe, and felt that I would choke to death.

  Then the door opened and my mother's arm came round me for the first time in weeks, and I turned and clung to her, crying, "Oh! Mam, Mam, I'm sorry."

  As she patted my head she kept saying, "There now, there now. Tell me all about it, how it happened."

  It was odd that she had never asked that in the first place. And so, sitting side by side on the bed, I told her everything, or nearly so, and we were near again. Then she said, "Come on downstairs and we'll have a cup of tea." And she pulled me up from the bed. But as we got to the door she stopped and, jerking her head towards the bedroom wall, she looked at me and stated, "They've got to know sooner or later."

  My mother made it sooner, likely thinking to get it over- and done with. It was the next afternoon that she told Aunt Phyllis. I did not know she was going to tell her then, and I was at the table rolling out some pastry when I heard the commotion. It was coming from Aunt Phyllis's yard, but the next minute when I glanced towards the window I saw Don come tearing up our yard, my mother after him, her hand outstretched as if trying to catch hold of him.

  When he appeared at the kitchen door I was standing ready waiting, for in this moment I had no fear of him. Strangely, I felt strong and fortified against him. The sight of me standing thus halted him, and my mother pressed by him and stood in between us. And her voice was loud as she cried, "Now, Don Dowling, this is nothing to do with you."

  "No, be god no. No, it isn't." He turned on her with a terrible smile.

  "No, you saw to that, you padded her all over, her bloody breasts and everything, in case anybody looked at her. You're to blame for this if the truth were told. You wouldn't let me have her. Oh, no. Oh, I knew what you thought, I wasn't good enough, and now some bugger has given her a bellyful and skedaddled. And in a way I could laugh, laugh like hell at you...."

  On my mother's cry of "Get out!" he turned his face from her but did not move, and he looked at me. His eyes were hooded with a dark light, and from it I could feel pouring malevolence so powerful that I seemed to smell it, it was like a stench. And when I thought of this later I told myself it was my imagination and my inborn fear of him that had created this illusion, for whereas I had felt no fear of him while waiting for him to enter the kitchen, from the moment he spoke I began to tremble, so that my mother intervened again, crying, "If you dont get out this minute I'll let you have this." She swung round and grabbed the poker and advanced threateningly on him. One thrust from his great hand and she would have been on her back. But he did not lift his hand, he simply let his gaze linger on me for a moment longer, then said on a grating laugh, "The town will be full of soldiers in a week or two, I'll tell them where they can be supplied."

  "You! ... You! Get out!" My mother actually brought the poker down on him, but he side-stepped and thrust her aside as if she were the weight of a child. Then, turning on his heel, he went out.

  Slowly my mother moved to the fireplace and put the poker back into the hearth. I sat down by the table and rested my head on the palm of my hand, and she came and stood beside me and in a trembling voice she said a comforting thing.

  "Don't shake so, lass," she said; 'he can do nothing to you now. You have taken it out of his power, and for that I could even say "thank God" , for I'd rather see you in the pickle you're in than married to him. "

  The reactions to my condition were many and varied, and we had more visitors to the house in the next few weeks than we'd had in years, on one pretext or another. But it was my Aunt Phyllis's reactions that amazed me most. She was civil to me, even kind. And I worked it out that this attitude was due to her being relieved of her jealousy. No longer was I accept able to Don; there was no danger now that at any moment I would take her son from her. But later I think she even wished he had got me, for he was creating a name for himself among the women in Bog's End that outdid that of the soldiers. He and I did not meet for some weeks, and so I did not know whether or not he would have spoken to me, even in abuse. But Ronnie and I met every day it was impossible sometimes not to rub shoulders ~ yet he never opened his mouth to me. Mam was kind and understanding, and as the days went on I became thankful for her sake that the war was on, for people were more concerned with the day-to-day news of it than they were in the shame I had brought on her. Only Dad remained the same. Yet not the same, he was more loving and considerate of me than ever before. As for Sam, he followed me around, saying little but always there, his kind eyes telling me that to him I was still Christine, the old Christine.

  And what about myself? I laughed no longer, I could not even smile.

  At night, up in my room in the candlelight, I looked at my swelling body and had not even the strength to hate it. Quicker than I had fallen into the river I had fallen into life and I was stunned by it.

  I could not even find the h
eart in me to condemn the perpetrator, although I knew that Martin had not only run away from the priest, but had scuttled away from the house on the hill, aided, no doubt, by the colonel. In spite of all this I longed to see him, and the longing was at its height when I lay down in bed at night. For hours my eyes would stare through the window at the dark sky and my heart would be talking to him, pleading with him to come back. There was no call to him from my body now, that was taken up with the thing inside me. I did not think of it as a baby, but as something I would have to suffer and carry for the rest of my life because I had sinned, and grievously. I did not have to see the look in Father Ellis's eyes, on his odd visits, to know this. The terrifying thing was I knew with an absolute certainty that if Martin were to come back and the occasion to sin presented itself to me again I should be powerless to make any resistance. And this knowledge revealed to me more than anything else how weak I was where I loved, how weak I was altogether for I could not even hate properly Martin, our Ronnie, or anyone else at least not yet.

  The war had been on six months, people had stopped sleeping in the air-raid shelters every night, and the song of the moment was "We're Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line'. One morning early, about four o'clock. Dad came up to my room and woke me saying he would have to go for the doctor for Mam. By nine o'clock that morning my mother was in hospital. Three days later she died saying, "

  Christine, my Christine. Oh, lass, oh, lass. " And the world went on with its business of fighting, but our house became a thing apart, like a deserted planet. The rooms seemed much larger and completely empty, and Dad turned into an old man within a week, and instead of the being my prop I now became his. I could not believe my mother had gone, and I cried unceasingly for days, but Dad did not cry. He seemed to be dried out, and the fact that I became worried about him took my mind somewhat from myself and also made me forget, at least for intervals, the fear of the coming event, the fear of giving birth to the baby, the fear of the pain that would rend me in two, as Aunt Phyllis had described it to me.

  Dad was working again, and he and Ronnie were on the same shift. For hours at a stretch I would have the house to myself, and I would be so lonely at times that I wished I was with my mother. I never left the house unless I had to, and then I tried to arrange it when Ronnie would be indoors, thus giving me less time to suffer his silent condemnation.

  And though I was thankful that people now had less time to be concerned with the scandals around them, when Mrs. Campbell became a regular visitor to my Aunt Phyllis's kitchen, as also did Miss Spiers from the end house, I did not have to think deeply to imagine the gist of their conversation.

  I was getting so big now that I did not want to be seen. I had no pride within me to keep my head defiantly high, and my laugh that could have sustained me, or at least formed a facade about my true feelings, was dead within me. So, with no attempt to titivate myself up, I would go down into town to get the groceries.

  And on one such visit I ran into Mollie. She must have been aware of what had befallen me for otherwise she would have made some comment on my rotund figure, but she seemed very pleased to see me, even delighted, and wanted me to go and have a cup of tea with her. She told me she was working in the munitions factory, and ended, "What do you think? I've got a place of me own, two rooms and a kitchen By! I wouldn't call the Queen me aunt." Then she had grabbed hold of my hand and said, "Come and see me, Christine, will you? It's 2iB Gordon Street." And I smiled at her and promised I would. She must have felt a bit awkward with me for she had not sworn once.

  Christmas came and added to the nightmare of my existence for at this time I seemed to miss my mother more than I had done immediately after she died. As for Dad, his sorrow and loneliness were such that I wanted to cry every time I looked at him. How Ronnie was affected I did not know, for he showed the same taciturn face which had become usual with him.

  By the end of March my body was so distorted that I be came sick with the sight of it. Only when you have a husband and are carrying something for him can your bloated and stretched skin take on the appearance of beauty, but when there is no one to call this thing

  'ours' and it remains yours alone, it is impossible to see beauty in it.

  At seven o'clock on a Friday night towards the end of March, as the air-raid siren screeched a warning over the town, a fiery pain brought my swollen limbs to a sudden halt. I was at the cupboard getting my coat before going over to the shelter, and I found myself transfixed, one foot forward, one hand out stretched, my mouth open and my breath seemingly stopped. When I managed to reach a chair I thought, this is it. I was alone in the house and I became terrified Aunt Phyllis would be already in the shelter. But just then I heard foot steps hurrying up the backyard. It would be Dad. I kept my eyes on the door but it was Ronnie who came through it. He stared at me for a moment and I tried to speak, to tell him to go for Aunt Phyllis, but I could not for the pain had come again. Then he had hold of my hand and he was talking, but gently:

  "Come on, lie down. Oh, my God! To see you in a state like this.

  Oh!

  Christine. "

  I realized that he was crying and some part of me outside of the pain was horrified at this and was yelling, "No! no! I dont want him to be sorry," for if he were sorry for me all the old business would start again. I remember pushing him aside and getting up and saying between gasps, "Go and get Aunt Phyllis," and of being surprised when, immediately, like an obedient child, he ran out of the kitchen and through the front door, which was the nearest way to the shelter, to bring her.

  Eighteen hours later the child was born, and Aunt Phyllis had been right about the pain. It was a girl with a face the shape of Martin's, and I had no interest in it.

  The next night Don Dowling came in roaring drunk and sang and shouted in their front room, and since I was lying in Dad's bed in our front room it was as if he was standing by my side. When Aunt Phyllis came in to see me she made no comment whatever about the oration, and the situation should have appeared weird but I was so weak and dazed that her strange attitude must have seemed simply part of the pattern of this awful, pain-filled thing called living. But when the nurse came in for the night visit she hammered on the wall, shouting, "If you dont cease that noise I'll go and get a policeman."

  Aunt Phyllis was in our kitchen when this occurred, and shortly afterwards she went in next door and there was no more noise. Vaguely it occurred to me that she could have stopped it sooner.

  It was the first of June, nineteen-forty, a beautiful day, warm and mellow, and the wireless was telling of the evacuation from Dunkirk.

  There had been no 'washing hanging on the Seigfried Line' after all. I was standing in the scullery doing the dinner dishes. Outside in the yard, in her pram, lay Constance. Why I had called the child Constance I dont really know, maybe because it expressed my feelings for her father, constant, ever constant, and alongside this love there was growing daily for this child I had not wanted another kind of love.

  Now, when I took her in my arms and fed her, I knew I was no longer whole, part of me was in her. She had also brought a feeling of family back into the house;

  she had, I knew, eased my father's pain, and his love for her was as deep as, if not deeper than, the love he had for me.

  Ronnie paid little attention to her he would glance at her but never spoke to her or talked the baby twaddle that Dad did and which, strangely, I found it impossible to use but to my growing concern he had once again turned his attention to me. He was all forgiveness and solicitude, and this solicitude did more to bring me back into an awareness of life than anything else, because it created in me the old fear. I was now sleeping upstairs again, and each night I dreaded a midnight visit. just to talk.

  As I finished the dishes Sam came up the yard and stood by the pram, looking down on the child and touching her with his finger, and he turned and smiled at me through the scullery window. Then coming in, he said, "By, she's bonnie, Christine."
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  I smiled at him, there was no need for words with Sam.

  "Where's Stinker?" he asked.

  "I'll take him for a run on the fells."

  "I haven't seen him since the middle of the morning, Sam," I replied;

  'he should be in for his dinner, he's never this late. "

  I was never to see Stinker again. He did not come in all day, and Dad, as he had done once before, searched the fells for him. On the Sunday, remembering where Don had found him in the stables. Dad visited them again, but there was no sign of a dog of any kind, nor had anyone noticed the children playing with a strange dog.

  When he brought this news back I began to cry.

  "Now, now, lass," he said, 'you know what dogs are, he's gone on the rampage. In about three days he'll show up, tired and hungry. It's the nature of the beast. "

  Three days passed and Stinker did not show up, and on Tuesday afternoon a man came to ask if he could see Dad. I told him he was down on the allotment. An hour later Dad came slowly into the scullery, the blue marks on his forehead where the coal had left its design were standing out visibly. He came straight to the point, patting my shoulder and saying "Prepare yourself for a bit of a shock, lass.... Stinker's dead."

  "Oh, Dad, no!" I sank down on to a chair and said in a whisper,

  "Where?" and then, "How?"

  I watched him draw the back of his hand across both sides of his mouth before replying, "He was drowned, lass."

  I was on my feet now.

  "He couldn't drown. Dad, he was a swimmer, he couldn't drown."

  Dad filled his chest with air and let it out slowly before speaking again.

  "He was drowned, lass, in a sack filled with bricks."

  I closed my eyes, then pressed my palms over them, but it didn't shut out the picture of Stinker in the sack full of bricks. Dad's voice was going on, rising in anger, but I only heard snatches of what he was saying, such as "I'll make the swine pay for this. I'll find out before I die who did the day's work, by God! I will."