The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  ‘What time d’you call this?’ she said, giving him no chance to speak. ‘Saturday night an’ me sittin’ here like a doo-lal while you gallivant up an’ down as you please.’

  He was obviously uneasy, expecting trouble. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I meant to get back. I thought I should, but there were more there than I expected. It took a long time...’ He avoided her eyes as he went into the passage to hang up his overcoat. ‘Didn’t win owt, either,’ he muttered, half to himself.’ Not a blinkin’ sausage.’

  ‘You knew I specially wanted to see that picture, didn’t you?’ Mrs Fletcher said, her voice rising. ‘I’ve been telling you all week, but that makes no difference, does it? What does your wife matter once you get off with your blasted rabbits, eh?’

  As though he had not heard her Fletcher opened the case and lifted out one of the rabbits and held it up to him, stroking the long soft fur. ‘You just wasn’t good enough, was you, eh?’ The rabbit blinked its pink eyes in the bright electric light. ‘Nivver mind: you’re a beauty all t’same.’

  His ignoring of maddened Mrs Fletcher was almost more than she could bear. ‘I’m talking to you!’ she stormed.

  ‘I heard you; an’ I said I’m sorry. What more do you want?’

  ‘Oh, you’re sorry, and that’s the end of it, I suppose. That’s all my Saturday night’s worth, is it?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ Fletcher said. ‘I said I couldn’t help it.’ He put the rabbit back in the case and sat down to unlace his shoes. She watched him, eyes glittering, mouth a thin trap of temper.

  ‘Aye, you said so. You said you’d be home at half-past seven an’ all, and we’ve seen what that was worth. How do I know what you’ve been up to while I’ve been sitting here by myself?’

  He looked quickly up at her, his usual full colour deepening and spreading ‘What’re you gettin’ at now?’

  ‘You know what I’m getting at.’ Her head nodded grimly.

  Fletcher threw down his shoes. ‘I told you,’ he said with throaty anger, ‘’at that’s all over. It’s been finished with a long time. Why can’t you let it rest, ’stead o’ keep harping on about it?’

  He stood up, and taking the carrying-case, walked out in his slippers to the shed, leaving her to talk to the empty room. He always got away from her like that. She grabbed the poker and stabbed savagely at the fire.

  On Sunday morning she was shaking a mat in the yard when her next-door neighbour spoke to her over the fence.

  ‘Did you get to the Palace this week, then, Mrs Fletcher?’ Mrs Sykes asked her. ‘Oh, but you did miss a treat. All about the early Christians and the cloak ’at Jesus wore on the Cross. Lovely, it was, and ever so sad.’

  ‘I wanted to see it,’ Mrs Fletcher said, ‘but Jim didn’t get back from Cressley till late. His rabbits y’know.’ She felt a strong desire to abuse him in her talk, but pride held her tongue. It was bad enough his being as he was without the shame of everyone knowing it.

  ‘Oh, aye, they had a show, didn’t they?’ Mrs Sykes said. ‘Aye, I saw him in the bus station afterwards. He was talking to a woman I took to be your sister.’

  Mrs Fletcher shot the other woman a look. What was she up to? She knew very well that her sister had lived down south these last twelve months. Her cheeks flamed suddenly and she turned her back on her neighbour and went into the house.

  Fletcher was lounging, unshaven and in shirt sleeves, his feet propped up on the fireplace, reading the Sunday papers. She went for him as soon as she had put the thickness of the door between them and Mrs Sykes, who still lingered in the yard.

  ‘You must think I’m stupid!’

  ‘Eh?’ Fletcher said, looking up. ‘What’s up now?’

  ‘What’s up? What’s up? How can you find the face to sit there with your feet up and ask me that? You must think I’m daft altogether: but it’s you ’at’s daft, if you did but know it. Did you think you could get away with it? Did you really think so? You might ha’ known somebody ’ud see you. And you had to do it in the bus station at that – a public place!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Fletcher said, but his eyes gave him away.

  ‘You’ll brazen it out to the very end, won’t you?’ she said. ‘You liar you. “Oh, I’ve made a mistake”, he says. “I’ll never see her again”, he says. And what do you do but go running back to her the minute you think you can get away with it!’

  Fletcher got up, throwing the newspaper to one side. ‘I tell you I don’t –’ Then he stopped, the bluster draining out of him. ‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘If you’ll calm down a minute I’ll tell you.’

  ‘You’ll tell me!’ Mrs Fletcher said. ‘You’ll tell me nothing any more. It’s all lies, lies, lies every time you open your mouth. Well, I’ve finished. Bad enough your rabbits, but I draw the line at fancy women. You promised me faithful you wouldn’t see her again. You said it sitting in that very chair. And what was it worth, eh? Not a row o’ buttons. What d’you think I feel like when me own neighbours tell me they’ve seen you carryin’ on?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t listen so much to what t’neighbours say an’ take notice o’ what I have to tell you –’ Fletcher began.

  ‘I’ve done listening to you,’ she said. ‘Now I’m having my say.

  ‘Well, you’ll say it to yourself, and t’rest o’ t’street mebbe, but not to me.’ He strode across the room and dragged down his coat. ‘I’ll go somewhere where I can talk to somebody ’at’s not next-door to a ravin’ lunatic.’

  ‘And stop there when you get there,’ she told him. ‘Go to her. Tell her I sent you. Tell her I’ve had enough of you. See if she’ll sit at home while you traipse about t’countryside with a boxful o’ mucky vermin.’

  He was at the door, pulling on his coat.

  ‘And take your things,’ she said. ‘Might as well make a clean sweep while you’re about it.’

  ‘I’m goin’ to our Tom’s,’ he said. ‘I’ll send for ’em tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll have ’em ready,’ she said.

  When the door had closed behind him she stood for a moment, eyes glittering, nostrils dilated, her entire body stiff and quivering with rage. Then suddenly she plucked a vase from the mantelshelf and dashed it to pieces in the hearth. She clenched and unclenched her hands at her sides, her eyes seeking wildly as the fury roared impotently in her.

  At half-past ten she was in the kitchen making her supper when she heard the front door open. She went through into the passage and her hands tightened involuntarily about the milk bottle she was holding as she saw Fletcher there.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Have you come for your things?’ Her voice was tight and unnatural and Fletcher took it as a sign of her lingering anger.

  He closed the door and stood sheepishly behind it, his eyes avoiding hers. ‘I just thought I’d come an’ see if you’d calmed down,’ he said.

  ‘I thought we’d heard the last of that this morning?’ Her eyes were fixed, bright and unmoving, on his face, and Fletcher caught them with his own for an instant and looked away again.

  ‘We were both a bit worked up like,’ he said. ‘I know how it is when you get mad. You do an’ say a lot o’ things you don’t really mean. Things you regret after.’

  There was silence for a second before she said, the same tight, strained note in her voice, ‘What things?’

  ‘I mean like me walkin’ out,’ Fletcher said. ‘All it needed was a bit o’ quiet talkin’ an’ it wouldn’t ha’ come to that. It’d ha’ been all right if only you’d listened to me.’

  ‘I never expected you to come back,’ she said, and moved almost trance-like across the room to the fire, still watching him intently, almost disbelievingly, as though she had expected that with his slamming of the door this morning he would walk off the edge of the world, neve
r to be seen again.

  He came over to the hearth to stand beside her. He started to put his hand on her shoulder, but as she moved away slightly he dropped his arm again and looked past her into the fire.

  ‘What I said before, I meant,’ he said, speaking quietly, earnestly, with the awkwardness of a man not used to expressing the finer feelings. ‘I could ha’ told you about it last night, only I didn’t see any point. It was all forgotten as far as I was concerned. Finished. But she was waiting for me when I came out o’ the show. I told her I didn’t want to see her again. There was never owt much between us anyway. But I couldn’t get rid of her. She hung on like mad. An’ when I looked at her, all painted an’ powdered up, I found meself thinkin’ what a great fool I’d been ever to risk losing all that mattered for a brazen baggage like her. It took me a couple of hours to get rid of her. She got proper nasty towards the end. Started shoutin’ and swearin’, right in the street. It was awful.’ Fletcher sighed and shook his head and a shudder seemed to run through Mrs Fletcher. ‘I had to jump on a bus in the end and just leave her standing there. There was nowt else I could do bar give her a clout or summat...’

  As he finished talking something seemed to snap inside Mrs Fletcher and she began to cry softly. He put his arm round her shoulders, tentatively at first, then, when she offered no resistance, with pressure, drawing her to him.

  ‘Now, lass. Now then. Cryin’ won’t do any good. We’ve had our little bust-up, an’ now it’s all over in’ done with.’

  ‘Oh, why didn’t I listen?’ she sobbed. ‘None of this would have happened then.’

  He drew her down into an armchair and held her to him. ‘Never mind now, lass. No harm done. Don’t cry any more.’

  After a time, he said, ‘I’ll just nip out an’ see to the rabbits, then we can get off up to bed.’

  She held him to her. ‘No, leave ’em. Come to bed now.’

  He smiled quietly, indulgently. ‘Still a bit jealous, eh? Well, I reckon they’ll manage till morning.’

  Later still, in the dark secret warmth of the bed, she clung to him again. ‘Did you mean it?’ she said. ‘When you said you loved nobody but me?’

  ‘I did,’ he said.

  ‘Say it, then,’ she said, holding him hard.

  ‘I love you, lass,’ he said. ‘Nobody but you. It’ll be better in future. You’ll see.’

  She could have cried out then. Better in future! Oh, why hadn’t she listened? Why, why, why? If only she had listened and heard him in time! For now this moment was all she had. There could be no future: nothing past the morning when he would go out and find the rabbits slaughtered in their hutches.

  The Living and the Dead

  He picked his way gingerly between the graves like a man stepping through a pit of snakes. Yet the only serpents he feared to disturb were those from his own distant past, and surely they were fangless after all this time...

  He found now that memory had played him false. The cemetery had changed. It was bigger, for one thing; the gravestones that, seen from the station entrance on the other side of the river, had seemed to him like litter on a park slope, were set out now almost to the boundary fence, and it occurred to him that soon another field must be purchased. Waste, he thought. He himself believed in cremation, when he thought of death at all. Or, better still, burial at sea: no memorial, no mess.

  So he went on, putting his feet carefully into the long wet grasses until he reached the asphalt avenue on the other side; and as he stood there, looking uncertainly about, trying to reorientate himself, the sexton came up the slope, walking with long easy strides, clay-streaked spade over his shoulder. As he drew abreast the man spoke to him.

  ‘I’m looking for William Larkin’s grave,’ he said. ‘He’d be buried ten days or a fortnight ago.’

  The sexton swung the spade down and leaned on it, wiping his neck with a dark blue handkerchief.

  ‘New grave?’

  ‘No, family. I thought I could go straight to it, but the place has changed.’

  ‘Larkin... aye.’ The sexton was an elderly man. He glanced at the other now, but without recognition. ‘Aye... up here.’

  He shouldered the spade again and they strolled up the slope together, exchanging commonplaces about the weather. And when they had gone only twenty yards the man’s memory cleared and he found the grave without further direction.

  He looked at the marble headstone, resting one foot lightly on the kerbstone until he realised and stepped off it. It was this same unexpected but unignorable sense of propriety that, a few moments later, arrested his hands as they fumbled for cigarettes and matches. There were two inscriptions on the stone, the upper one more than twenty years old: ‘In memory of Jane Alice Larkin, dear wife and mother...’ and below this, newly chiselled into the marble: ‘and of William Henry Larkin, husband of the above... a beloved father, greatly missed…’ ‘Greatly missed…’ That was a good one. He wondered which of them had thought of that. Still, it would never do always to put the truth on a gravestone. Imagine seeing it: ‘Not before time’ or ‘Glad to see him go...’

  So they perpetrated the last sham.

  He stood there looking at the stone, not seeing the inscriptions now, his mind looking back over fifteen years and more. And so she found him, the woman who hurried down the path between the laurels from the water-tank near the sexton’s cottage, brimming flower-holder in hand, red and yellow heads of tulips bobbing at the rim of her shopping-basket. She stopped, seeing him so, and watched him for several minutes unobserved. In his navy-blue raincoat, shabby blue serge suit, and roll-necked blue jumper he carried an unmistakable tang of the sea. He was a tall man, but thin, fined down, the brown skin taut over the high-cheekboned face, with the big fleshy nose and slightly protuberant blue eyes. He had changed since last she saw him, but she knew him for her younger brother.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and her voice startled him half-round to face her, ‘you came after all!’

  Her sudden appearance threw him off-balance for a moment, so that when he spoke it was with a note of gently patronising amusement which was, however, more of a defence than anything else, for there was real affection and pleasure in his slow smile.

  ‘Well,’ he said, his voice echoing hers; ‘well, well, well – Annie; little Annie.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said as she came between the graves towards him. ‘We broadcast for you...

  ‘I was at sea,’ he said. ‘I was surprised. I wondered why you’d bothered.’

  ‘It was Henry’s idea.’

  ‘I should have thought I’d be the last person Henry wanted to see.’

  ‘It was Father... He wanted to see you.’

  ‘Him – see me!’

  She knelt and pressed the flower-holder firmly in place among the marble chips and began to insert the long stems of the tulips.

  ‘There’s no need for bitterness, Arthur. We’ve got past all that... Anyway, you’ve had the last satisfaction of knowing he went without you being here.’

  ‘Bitterness!’ he said. ‘Satisfaction! He cursed me out of the house... stood on the doorstep and told me never to cross his threshold again. You know what happened, Annie. You were there. Anyway,’ he went on when she did not answer him, ‘I was at sea. Coming back from Cuba. I couldn’t charter an aeroplane.’

  ‘How did you know he was dead? How is it you didn’t come straight to the house?’

  ‘A feller down in town told me. I didn’t know him, but he remembered me. He told me, so I came straight here.’

  He stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his raincoat and watched her arrange the flowers, breaking a stem here and there until they were balanced to her satisfaction.

  ‘You look after it?’ he asked. ‘Is it your job?’

  ‘It’s always been my job,’ she sa
id. Then, without malice, ‘The others come at Easter: I come all the year round. I’ve looked after it for Mother all this time and it’s no more hardship now there’s two of ’em here.’

  ‘There’s room for another, isn’t there?’ he said. ‘What about it then? Will you enjoy looking after Henry or Cissie?’

  ‘It might be me,’ she said. ‘What then?’

  ‘You’ll outlive those two.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Then it might be Lucy: she’s the oldest.’

  ‘Lucy?’

  She gave a quick glance up at him. ‘Father’s second wife, I mean.’

  ‘You mean he married again?’

  ‘Eight years ago.’ She got up and looked at him across the grave. ‘You wouldn’t know about that, never having let anybody know where you were.’

  He shrugged, uneasy under her direct gaze. ‘Ah. You know how it is. I’ve been all over the place: Canada, Australia, Singapore. South America now... Besides, why should I make excuses? There’s never been anybody I wanted to hear from; or who wanted to hear from me. Except you, Annie. I’ve often wondered about you.’ His gaze fell to her naked, virginal left hand, then lifted again. ‘It is nice to see you again, you know, Annie.’

  Her eyes on him had softened. ‘And you, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what could have become of you. I thought when you didn’t come that perhaps you were –’

  ‘Dead?’ He laughed. ‘Not me, Annie. You know what they say – only the good die young.’

  ‘And you’re not good, is that it?’

  Her picking up of his lightly spoken words put him on the defensive again.

  ‘I’ve never pretended to be better than I am.’