A Prodigal Child

by Storey, David;

  The amount of food they bought was determined not only by what they could afford, but by how much Morley had brought home from Spencer’s during the week, or, more particularly, at the end of it. On principle the farmer never allowed him any: ‘If I gev it to you, Arthur, I shall have to gev it to the others,’ which, presumably, meant the herdsman who looked after the cows and the others he employed. Nevertheless, occasionally, when Morley was leaving, having stayed behind in the evening or on the Saturday to finish the work, the farmer would call from the back door of the house and offer him a cut of pork, or slices of ham which his wife had boiled, or a piece of bacon, or, at harvest time, a rabbit. At Christmas he gave him a hen. But these gifts, spread over the year, were few and far between, and were accompanied, in their giving, by such an air of complicity that frequently Morley, had he had the choice, would have preferred to have gone without: he took them because he thought they were his due, and because, however obscurely, Spencer derived some pleasure, despite the subterfuge, from letting him have them; the gifts were invariably endorsed by his wife, who, slim-featured, would be glimpsed, smiling, in the kitchen behind.

  Alternatively, and more often, Morley helped himself: on his way home he would stop by a field and lift a root of potatoes, a turnip or a swede, some Brussels sprouts, spring greens or a cabbage; he had little compunction in taking what, in one sense, he believed belonged to him and, because of the regularity of this habit, he acquired a degree of skill which gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, not merely at getting away with it but from the modesty of his claims upon the farmer from whom, quite easily, he might have taken a great deal more. Unlike the mill-hands who came out from the town at weekends, stepping over the hedge to help themselves, Morley always went some way into the crop, digging up a root where it wouldn’t be noticed, removing a cabbage where the crop was thickest, taking out the swedes and turnips only where the uniformity of the rows had already been depleted. Similarly, he went into the orchard in the autumn and took up the apples and the pears which had already fallen and, later still, picked up nuts from the walnut tree; if, in his lunch-hour, he found the hens which thronged the yard had been laying in the barn, he took the eggs, too, always careful to take in to the back door of the farm more than he took himself; additionally, he had had the habit of leaving a little can in the sheds for the herdsman to fill with milk each afternoon, but this, on discovery, Spencer refused to allow the herdsman to do. ‘Nay, tha s’ll have to sup it, Arthur. I’ll be skint if he gi’es it to the lads like this.’

  ‘Has he given you these?’ Sarah would ask whenever Morley turned out his bag and lifted a cabbage or half a dozen eggs or a turnip on to the table.

  ‘How should I have them if he hasn’t?’ he would ask, the disingenuousness of his reply reinforced by the occasional legitimate gift when there could be no doubt that the bacon had been cured, the ham cooked, the pork roasted or the rabbit shot: as for the Christmas hen, it had become a tradition and one Christmas, even, he was given two. ‘What about the potatoes?’ she asked on one occasion when, only the day before, he had reported Spencer’s rage at the depredation of the crop by weekend visitors from the town.

  ‘I lifted them on the way home,’ Morley said.

  ‘Did he say you could?’

  ‘He didn’t say I couldn’t.’

  ‘You’ve stolen them.’

  ‘I sowed them. I’ve cared for them. I’ll lift them next week, an’ all,’ he added.

  ‘If there’s any left.’

  ‘Don’t worry: he makes a fair whack. It’s nought, what he pays, to the amount of work I put in.’

  ‘It’s his money.’

  ‘And my work.’

  There was no getting round the argument: without the occasional ‘gift’ they couldn’t have managed; for large parts of the year there were no crops to lift, the ‘gifts’ being mainly confined to the autumn. In any case, having made her protest, Sarah left it to him: it was his ‘province’, just as the house and looking after it were hers; neither, fundamentally, would have questioned the other. There were even days when, at Morley’s instigation, in the early summer, they would walk out to the farm, the child pushed before them in the pram; he would show her the fields and the prospect of the farm as if, in many respects, they were his own creation, the burgeoning crops, the neatly laid hedges, the fat cattle: it was ‘his’ world, one where his power was undisputed. She liked to be reassured she had no part of it: the neatness of the fields, the threading of the hedges, the sleekness of the cattle confirmed the domination of will over matter: ‘nature’ was as directed and as closely supervised, as scrupulously defined, as was, for instance, the ‘nature’ of their marriage; nothing was more assertive than Spencer’s grip on the land, just as nothing was more assertive in their marriage than her own determination that their life together should be shaped in the manner she desired; she bowed to her husband’s will just as, in the house, he bowed to hers.

  ‘Oh, don’t go on about Spencer this and Spencer that,’ she would say. ‘If you want to say these things tell him yourself. Don’t come home and complain to me.’

  Without acknowledging as much, she approved of his stealing and, without saying as much, she washed her hands of it.

  Morley, pedalling home with his ‘swag’, would frequently be driven to justifying his action, and had vividly imagined an encounter when, in the midst of lifting a hand of potatoes, or the heart of a cabbage, Spencer himself would appear and ask him what he was doing. ‘The fact is,’ Morley reasoned, ‘he doesn’t pay me enough for what I do. He knows he doesn’t pay me enough but doesn’t want to admit it in case it opens a door which neither he nor anyone else could close. He lets me take the odd root because he knows, if I took some every day, which I never would, it still wouldn’t make up the difference between what I do and what he owes me. Therefore,’ he concluded, ‘it pays Spencer to allow me to steal, and dishonesty on my part is only equalled by his own in never mentioning it.’

  The solution to this problem he had never worked out; if, for example, the land were nationalized and he worked for no one in particular and for everyone in general he had a good idea he would take little if any pride in his work and, whereas he might be paid more, the ‘pay’ would become, as a consequence, the be-all and the end-all of his existence, and his pride in showing Sarah a field of growing corn, or a pasture of well-fed cows, would disappear with his incapacity to relate it to anyone in particular; the fact was, Spencer ‘personified’ the farm in a way which he respected: he admired Spencer’s pugnacity, he admired his skill. His resentment only arose when Spencer’s will was imposed upon his own: but without that conflict there was nothing.

  He admired the farmer’s independence, an independence that went down to the very roots of life, and contented himself with the thought that, at some point in the future, his son, or his sons, might be able to resolve his problem for him.

  Their second child was born at the beginning of the new year. Alan was four years old and while Sarah was away at the hospital he was looked after by Mrs Foster. Morley would go in in the evenings to see how he was and found him peculiarly contented, playing with Alison, running through her toys, and provided with meals which were, on the whole, if not more varied, more plentiful than the ones he was used to: the regime of ‘measuring’ did not prevail in the Foster house and Mrs Foster was as subject to whims and fancies as were her husband and daughter. When it came time to take Alan back the boy expressed a desire, mortifying to Sarah, that he might be allowed to stay at the Fosters’ longer and it was only by the persuasion of a new toy that he could be prevailed upon to allow Morley to carry him back and set him in his cot which, dismantled, had been re-erected in the tiny back bedroom. In a pram, in the front bedroom, crying, was placed the baby.

  The Morleys called their second child Bryan. Small, black-haired, he struggled fitfully with illnesses the first few weeks, his grave-eyed look a curious echo of the gravity which characterized the relationship
between Morley and his wife. He seldom cried and, despite his illness, lay on his mattress or in his pram gazing up with a peculiar look, if not of quietude, then of resignation. The child absorbed Mrs Morley completely; it was as if she examined it for a solution to their ‘problem’: it was the latest arrival from the blacknesses which encompassed them on every side and, in its dark-eyed look (it had Mrs Morley’s eyes and not her husband’s), she gazed intently for a sign, an indication that, at least so far, they were doing ‘right’. Morley, equally absorbed, would watch her with the child, envious of its complicity; he took to drinking once again: he called at the Mitre, an almost derelict pub which stood by the railway bridge he passed under on his way home from work. He took great care to measure the amount he drank. He knew no one at the Mitre, and the bar invariably, when he visited it, was deserted. The drink was a prize, a token awarded him for having got through each day.

  And yet, one Saturday afternoon, having emptied his pockets in a manner familiar to him from his earlier days, he had found himself unable to mount his bike and had pushed it up the slope, past the Spinney Moor itself and, reminded by that building if by nothing else, he had asked himself, ‘What am I doing now? Am I going back to what I was before?’, arriving home and going upstairs and, after washing in the bathroom, going to the bedroom where, within no time, he was fast asleep.

  He woke to find the room in darkness and, feeling in the bed beside him, found it empty. Getting up he went into the front bedroom and, switching on the light, saw the baby sleeping in its cot; he went downstairs. The living-room and the scullery were both in darkness: the front door was bolted; the fire still glowed in the living-room grate.

  He returned upstairs: in the tiny back bedroom Sarah was sleeping in the single bed, Alan asleep beside her.

  ‘Is anything up?’ He gazed in at her, her figure lit by the light from the landing.

  Stirring, she gazed up from the bed.

  ‘I was sleeping in here tonight,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I preferred it.’

  ‘Isn’t your own bed good enough?’

  ‘It seems it isn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t a man to be allowed any relaxation?’ he asked.

  ‘Is breaking a promise relaxation?’

  ‘Promise. Promise.’ He chanted the words. ‘Haven’t I stood by you? Have we ever done without?’

  He went downstairs; he made some tea: he knew, having transgressed, she wouldn’t forgive him, and he knew, in any argument, he could never win. He knew, too, her will was stronger than his: hers stuck to a point and never let go; his wandered aimlessly over everything; hers was ungenerous, his forgetful.

  When he went back upstairs he paused, aware of her acutely behind the door.

  ‘Sarah?’

  No sound of any sort came from inside.

  He went to their bedroom and closed the door.

  He lay in the bed, the curtains still undrawn, and watched the pattern of the window outlined on the ceiling by the lamp in the road outside: a moment later, he got up off the bed and, creaking along the landing, opened the back-bedroom door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  There was no answer from the bed.

  ‘Do you hear? I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Too late to be sorry,’ came the quiet reply.

  ‘What more do you want?’

  ‘Actions speak louder than words.’

  ‘Your actions could kill,’ he said. ‘I used to be happy until I met you.’

  ‘You know what you can do in that case.’

  ‘This is my house. I work for it,’ he said. ‘I work harder than any other man round here,’ he added.

  ‘As hard as some, but no harder than most. They don’t come home drunk and sneak into bed.’

  ‘What more do you want, Sarah? Do you want me on a lead and to live in a kennel?’

  ‘You might as well,’ she said. ‘The way you behave.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You speak like that because you’re a woman and come out with jibes and sit and primp yourself because you’re always right. If it wasn’t for me you’d still be by that river.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be tied here like a slave,’ came the voice from the bed.

  ‘Ah, you’ve more here than you ever had,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘And no redress when you come home drunk.’

  ‘I’m a grown man,’ he said. ‘If you don’t like the way I live you’ll have to lump it. I’ve told you I’m sorry. I am. If you come back to the bed we can both forget and go on as we were afore,’ he added.

  The boy, roused by the argument, had begun to stir. ‘I’m staying here,’ she said.

  He closed the door. ‘At least I’ve that,’ he thought. ‘Though she’s scarce bigger than a mouse, she must be damned uncomfortable lying with Alan. What a woman.’

  Passing the other bedroom door he opened it, gazed in for a moment, then went in and lifted the baby from the cot.

  He carried it with him to the double bed and, folding it around with pillows, laid it beside him.

  He had scarcely lain down than the door opened and the light came on.

  ‘Have you taken the baby with you?’

  He had scarcely seen her so enraged.

  She picked the baby up.

  ‘Never ever do that.’

  ‘What do you want?’ he called. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’

  He followed her into the other room: she laid the baby in the cot, then, as it began to stir, she picked it up again and rocked it.

  ‘Now you’ve woken it.’

  ‘You woke it,’ Morley said. ‘You whore.’

  He hurled the door to and could hear the floor creak as the Pattersons got up in the house next door.

  He went back to bed, curled up, and endeavoured to sleep.

  In the morning he got up, dressed, and went to work without any breakfast. He didn’t come back until late; he expected the house to be empty, yet the light was on in the living-room: smoke curled up from the chimney.

  He felt relieved; all day, the terror of the empty house had matched the rage he felt at his wife.

  When he opened the door he could hear the boy singing in the living-room, his voice faltering, however, as he heard his step.

  Yet, as he took off his boots, the living-room door opened and the boy came out.

  Morley held out his arms: the boy sprang up.

  ‘How have you been, young ’un?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Tea ready for me?’

  ‘We’ve eaten it.’

  ‘Nought for me, then, I take it?’

  The boy laughed; Morley swung him round.

  ‘Do you want some, Dad?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

  Beyond, in the lighted room, he could see his wife with the baby.

  ‘Ought going?’ he asked, casually, calling through.

  She didn’t answer and, as he stepped into the room in his stocking feet, the boy still in his arms, he said, ‘Ought going?’ again and she added, ‘Your supper’s in the the oven.’

  ‘There, then,’ he said to the boy. ‘Some supper at last,’ setting him on a chair beside him. He didn’t glance at his wife, calling to the baby, kneading it as he passed it on his way to the table.

  It was as if, on his return, nothing of the previous night had happened; later, Sarah came up to bed and he lay beside her, his hand, finally, creeping out, only to encounter the rigidity of her arm which, after clenching for a moment, he released.

  ‘She’s taken me again,’ he thought. ‘I’m as fastened up as ever.’

  A quiet tyranny began: under it Sarah suffered intensely. She hated Morley, yet she bore his children; the whole house and everything in it was synonymous with his presence. She would gaze out from the front-bedroom window at the distant prospect of the town as someone might gaze out from the walls of a castle, knowing, as a refuge, it was a place they could neve
r leave: from the back-bedroom window, she would see the hills beyond the valley, the wooded slopes and the undulating contours of the moorland, and think, ‘At least, Bryan will escape,’ for, in a curious way, she already saw the eldest boy, in his moods and energy, as belonging to his father.

  Her power over Morley she maintained by refusing him her love. ‘If I had lived in another street,’ she thought, ‘I would never have met him: there is something absurd in the fact that the whole of my existence is dictated to by someone I only met by chance.’ It reduced everything to the level of that compulsion which, when she was hungry, told her she ought to eat, when she was thirsty she ought to drink, and when she was tired she needed to sleep; and yet everything in life proclaimed ‘love’ as something different. She looked at her youngest child and in its eyes recognized the same perplexity gazing out at her: ‘Where am I? Who am I? What have I done?’

  Now, at odd moments, when she looked at Morley, it was like gazing at a stranger; the things that seemed of greatest account in their lives – their marriage, the intimacy which bore them children – were the most superficial elements in their existence: Morley, the intangible spirit of Morley, the man who sat there, had as little to do with her as the man next door.

  When, at other instances, she saw him talking at the door – to Foster, or to Mrs Foster, or to the Pattersons, or even to the neighbours in the gardens beyond – she would decide, ‘Yes, he is different, he is separate, he is integral to himself, and has no part of me at all. Yet how he enjoys his separateness: he laughs and shouts.’ And her rancour would rise at his independence just as, when she was younger, before they married, she had marvelled at it, felt frightened by it, and had thought it a challenge she ought to meet.