The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  ‘Is this your boy, Sarah?’

  There seemed to be something of reserve, a barrier, in her glance, then it was lost in pride as she looked it the photograph.

  ‘Aye, that’s my boy, John. He’s in Malaya with the Army.’

  ‘He’s a fine-looking young chap, Sarah. How old is he?’

  Again that unfathomable flash of something in her eyes. ‘Going on thirty. He’s a doctor, y’know. He wanted to be a doctor and he wanted to travel, so he joined the Army and got a commission.’

  ‘A doctor, eh?’ Morgan replaced the picture, impressed. ‘You must be very proud of him.’

  ‘Aye, he’s a grand lad and a good son. He wanted to resign his commission when Mark died but I wouldn’t let him.’ She shot him an inquisitive look. ‘Have you no children, then?’

  Morgan shook his head. ‘No, I’ve none.’

  ‘But you did marry, I expect?’

  ‘Aye, when I’d got settled a bit, I married.’

  He returned to his seat in the armchair and looked into the fire. Strange, but even after all this time he did not find it easy to look at her and speak of marriage.

  ‘She was a fine lass, Mary was,’ he said at length. ‘But not one of the strongest, you know. The hard times seemed to take all the strength she had and she didn’t live to enjoy many of the better years.’ He looked up at her now. ‘And you lost your man, Sarah.’

  She looked away and he sensed in her a similar discomfort to his own. ‘I’ve been a widow this past five years,’ she said briefly, then left him to return to the kitchen, reappearing in a few moments with two plates of steaming food.

  ‘Here it is, then. There isn’t a lot because you caught me unawares. Just as well I had the stew as well. It’ll stretch it a bit further.’

  ‘A mite o’ your cooking was always worth a deal of anybody else’s, Sarah,’ Morgan said as he took a seat at the table. A faint flush coloured Sarah’s cheeks and he looked down at his plate.

  They ate in comparative silence. There seemed so much to say and at the same time so much to be wary of speaking of. At length Morgan laid down his knife and fork and sat back. Sarah had already finished for she had given him by far the bigger portion of the pudding and stew. Now she watched him and smiled faintly.

  ‘You haven’t lost your fondness for Yorkshire pudding, I see,’ she said dryly. ‘Nor all your Yorkshire talk, for that matter.’

  ‘Do you know how long it is since I tasted a pudding like that?’ he asked her. ‘It’s half a lifetime, Sarah. I’m still a Yorkshireman, y’know, even if I have been away all that time. I always had an idea I’d come back one day.’

  ‘It seems like no time at all, seeing you sitting there,’ said Sarah, watching him as he felt for pipe and tobacco. ‘Though I’m sure I never expected to see you again.’

  He glanced at her as he fiddled with his pipe, trying vainly to read her thoughts. He became aware that no matter how quickly now the time might seem to both of them to have passed there still was thirty years of unshared experience between them; and those years could not be bridged by the sharing of a meal and a few scraps of conversation.

  He felt suddenly slightly ill-at-ease and he pretended to sigh, laying one hand flat on the front of his waistcoat in what, considering the amount of food they had shared, was an exaggerated gesture of repletion.

  ‘It was worth coming home just to taste that meal,’ he said. ‘You were always the best cook for miles around, even as a lass.’

  Her expression darkened without warning. ‘And as I remember you always had the smoothest tongue.’

  He pressed tobacco into his pipe, frowning, dismayed at this sudden antagonism. Surely, after all this time, she could forget, if he could?

  She brought in the pot and poured tea. ‘How long have you come for?’

  ‘For good, Sarah.’ He put a match to his pipe. ‘I’ve sold up and come home to stay. Australia’s a fine country, but this is my home. I want to settle where I can see the hills and feel the wind and the rain come down off the moors.’

  ‘You didn’t talk like that thirty years ago,’ she reminded him, and he shook his head.

  ‘No, but times change, and a man changes in some ways.’ He looked into her face. ‘In some ways he never changes though.’

  She did not hold his look but sipped tea from her cup, looking past him through the lace-curtained window into the narrow street. He wished once again for the power to read her mind.

  ‘So you must have made that fortune you were always talking about?’ she said abruptly and Morgan smiled at her bluntness.

  ‘Hardly that, lass,’ he said. ‘But enough to live on quietly for the rest of me days.’

  They talked on in a desultory manner for another hour, until Morgan became aware that she could not work properly with him there. He left her then, promising to call again soon, and he went away still uneasily aware of the undercurrent of antagonism which had showed itself in that one remark of Sarah’s. He visited her several times in the next few weeks and took her for drives in the country and once to dinner and a theatre in repayment for her hospitality. But always he was conscious of the barrier of reserve through which he could not seem to break.

  At last he could stand it no longer. He was sure now of what he wanted. He had known it before starting for home and it had needed only the sight of her to confirm it. She was still the same lass he had courted all those years ago, and he was still the same chap in his feelings for her. This thrusting and parrying which continued through their every meeting was getting them nowhere. If memories of thirty years ago still rankled they must be brought out into the open and examined and given the importance due to them and no more. And he knew the way to bring that about.

  Yet when he came to broach the subject he did not find it easy. After all, he thought, she had preferred someone else before, and why should she feel differently now?

  Sitting by her fireside, he made a great show of cleaning his pipe, screwing himself all the while to the point where he could say what he wanted to say. Abruptly, but with a studied casualness, he said, ‘I’ve bought Greystone Cottage, Sarah. You remember the place. We used to fancy it in the old days when old Phillips lived there. Well his son’s been occupying it apparently and now he’s dead – he wasn’t married – and the place was put up for auction. I bought it yesterday... gave ’em their price...’

  He waited for her to say something now that the first direct reference to their past relationship had been made. But she looked into the fire as though she had not heard him and made no reply.

  ‘It’s in pretty bad shape,’ he went on. ‘It’ll want a bit of brass spending on it to make it comfortable. I had a good look around. I fancy extending it a bit besides modernising. I reckon I’d as soon live there as anywhere... I can’t stop in a hotel for the rest of my life…’

  She had resumed her hand-sewing and she went on with her work, not looking at him and not speaking. He was suddenly seized with the idea that she knew exactly what he was leading to and was only waiting for him to get to the point. But what would her reaction be? He glanced at her, uncertainly. Should he, so quickly? Perhaps he should wait until she had grown more used to having him about again? But time was slipping by. Neither of them was young and each of them was avoiding talking about the important things that concerned them both.

  ‘Of course,’ he said carefully, ‘I shall need somebody to look after it for me... keep it tidy and cook…’ He stopped for a moment, then went doggedly on. ‘I know it’ll seem a bit sudden-like after all this time, Sarah, but you know there’s nobody I –’

  He stopped again, alarmed this time, as Sarah stiffened in her chair, then stood up her eyes flashing and all the smouldering antagonism he had felt flaring openly.

  ‘So it’s housekeeping you’re offering me after all these years, Mor
gan Lightly. Well if that’s what’s in your mind I’ll tell you now that I need neither you nor your money. I wonder how you can find the face to come here as you do and expect me to fall in with your plans. I managed very well without you thirty years ago, and I can do the same now!’

  ‘But, Sarah,’ Morgan said, getting to his feet. ‘You don’t understand –’

  ‘I understand well enough,’ she said in a low, furious voice; ‘and I want no part of it.’ She turned her back on him and picked up the blouse she was sewing. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’

  Morgan stood there for a moment, frowning helplessly. He could not make her out at all; and when she took no further notice of his presence he said good-bye and left.

  Driving back to town he cursed himself for being a hasty fool and shook his head in wonder at the ways of women.

  ‘I made a mess of it, Thomas,’ he confided later, when sitting in the living-room over his brother’s grocery shop in one of Cressley’s dingy back streets. ‘I should have bided my time. You can’t step over thirty years as easy as all that.’ He pulled thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘But I can’t understand why she flared up like that. I think she nearly hated me just then; as though I’d done her a wrong.’

  ‘You touched her conscience, turning up like you did,’ Thomas said. ‘And I’m surprised at you, I must say, running to her of all people as soon as you get home. After what she did to you... Running off and marrying that chap the minute your back was turned, and you with it all fixed up for her to join you as soon as you got settled down a bit.’

  Morgan sighed. ‘Aye, but she was a grand lass, Thomas – and still is! A fine, proud woman. That’s what’s wrong with her – pride. If I could get round that I might do it yet. A fine woman... Just the comfort for a chap like me in the twilight of his days.’

  ‘Twilight of your days!’ Thomas scoffed. ‘You want to go talking like that it your age! How old are you – fifty-two-three? And a fine upstanding chap with a bit of brass behind you. You shouldn’t go short of comfort. There’ll be plenty ready to see ’at you’re comfortable. And a fat lot o’ comfort she was to you. I never knew her well but I heard tell ’at you never knew which way she’d jump next.’

  Morgan shook his head and smiled reflectively. ‘I thought I knew, Thomas,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew, lad.’

  Christmas came, and then the new year, bringing with it weeks of dry, biting winds; until February arrived, ferocious with driving snow and ice: a month when it did not rise above freezing point for days together. And at last, when it seemed that the long grim winter was without end, the earth softened to the coming of spring. Catkins flickered like green light in the dark winter woods and crocuses appeared, white and mauve and yellow, in the public gardens of the town.

  Morgan filled his days with the leisurely pleasures of looking up old friends and renewing old acquaintanceships, and with his plans for making Greystone Cottage his home. His solitary home, it seemed now. For in all this time he had not seen Sarah once; but she was never far from his thoughts.

  On a bright Sunday morning early in May he went as usual to Thomas’s house for Sunday dinner. He found Meg, Thomas’s wife, preparing the meal in the kitchen over the shop.

  ‘Thomas is up in the attic, Morgan,’ she told him. ‘He’s taken it into his head to sort out some of his old belongings.’

  Morgan climbed up into the top of the house and found his brother bending over a tin chest, looking through a collection of dusty books. He paused for a moment in the doorway and watched him. In the crouching attitude of that slight figure he saw for an instant the dreamy, bookish lad of long ago. Then, almost immediately, the spell was broken as Thomas straightened up and looked round.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Morgan. Come in, come in. The sunshine shafted down through the skylight and Thomas screwed up his eyes behind his glasses. ‘I just bethought me to look at some of these old things of mine.’

  Morgan sat down on a rickety chair and Thomas resumed his inspection of the dusty books, lifting them out one by one from the trunk, dusting them over, and peering at the titles. Occasionally he would stop and flip over the pages, reading a passage at random.

  ‘I had a look at some of these the other week,’ he said. ‘First time I’d touched ’em in years.’ He sat down on a box facing Morgan, a heavy, well-bound volume in his hands. ‘Remember how I scraped and saved to buy these, Morgan? I did all manner of jobs.’ He read out the title on the spine: ‘A History of England and its People, in ten volumes. I reckoned there couldn’t be much history I wouldn’t know if I read these.’

  Morgan nodded. ‘You were a rare lad for learning, Thomas.’

  Thomas weighed the book in his hand. ‘And now these books are a history in themselves, Morgan. My history: the history of a failure.’

  He removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his handkerchief. ‘It’s funny the tricks life plays on you. When we were lads I was the one who was going to set the world on fire – me – Thomas, the scholar. Instead, I wind up keeping a backstreet grocery shop, while you, the rough and ready lad, come back from the other side of the world with your fortune made, just like somebody in a book.’

  In their youth the brothers had felt their dissimilarity too keenly for real closeness, but now Morgan felt a surge of affection for Thomas. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, lad,’ he said gently. ‘There’s all kinds of failure and all kinds of success. You’ve been happy, haven’t you? You’ve made Meg happy, I can see that. All I have to show for everything is a few quid in the bank. I’d be a liar and a hypocrite if I said that didn’t matter. It’s a great comfort, Thomas. But there are things I’d rather have had.’

  Thomas smiled and touched Morgan’s knee. ‘I’m all right, Morgan. It’s just you coming home that started me off thinking back. I’d not have had it any different – not if it had meant not having Meg.’ He put the book aside and bent over the trunk.’ She’d skin me alive if she heard me talking like that.’

  In a few minutes Meg came to the foot of the attic stairs and called them to lunch. Morgan put his pipe away and stood up to go.

  ‘Just a minute, Morgan, before you go.’

  Morgan turned and looked at his brother. Thomas, with a strange half-embarrassed expression on his thin face, was fumbling in his pocket. ‘I’ve got something belonging to you that I think you should have.’ He produced an envelope. ‘It’s been lying up here for years. I thought it was no good posting it on to you after all that time; but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.’

  He handed the envelope to Morgan, who took it and turned it over to look at the writing on it. There was no stamp, just his name in dried and faded ink.

  ‘Well, what on earth is it?’ he said.

  ‘It’s probably nothing much at all,’ said Thomas. ‘But it is yours and I think you should have it. Don’t you know whose writing that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s hers – Sarah’s. I reckon it was to tell you she wouldn’t be coming out to you after all.’

  Morgan made no move to open the envelope. ‘Tell me, Thomas, just how you came by it.’

  Thomas sat down again on the box.

  ‘It was after you’d gone down to Southampton to see about your passage. I was coming down to see you off and visit Uncle Horace, remember? Well, you’d been gone a few days and Sarah gave me this to give to you. She was hanging about one night at the end of the street, waiting for me. I reckon she didn’t know your address.’ He shook his head and looked penitently at the floor. ‘I don’t know how it happened, Morgan, but what with one thing and another, I clean forgot it. I remember I wasn’t too fit about that time. It was the year I cracked up and had to go into the sanatorium. Anyway, it wasn’t till months later that I came across it again in a book. I reckoned if it had been all that important Sarah would have surely seen me t
o ask if you’d got it. As it was, by that time she was married to Mark what’s his name and had a kiddy too. I saw no good reason for bothering any more. I know I’d no right to keep it back, but I reckoned you were well out of it.’

  Morgan’s eyes were fixed on his brother’s face. ‘And you mean you’ve hung on to it for thirty years?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I couldn’t bring meself to burn somebody else’s letter, you see, so I shoved it in a book again and I didn’t come across it again till a week or two ago when I was rummaging about up here. I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since whether to give it to you and own up or destroy it and let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Morgan ripped open the envelope and read the letter inside. Thomas stared at him as the colour drained from his face.

  ‘For God’s sake, Morgan, what is it, man?’

  Morgan shook his head. ‘Nothing, Thomas, nothing. It just brought it all back for a minute, that’s all.’

  He refolded the letter and returned it to the envelope which he put carefully away in an inside pocket. Of what use was it to rant and foam at Thomas now? As he had said, he was ill at the time, seriously ill and not to be held responsible for a careless mistake. And nothing would be gained by telling him now that this letter, delivered at the right time, could have changed the course of two people’s lives.

  ‘I... I am sorry, Morgan,’ said Thomas, peering anxiously at his brother.

  Morgan turned abruptly to the door. ‘Forget it, Thomas,’ he said. ‘It was all a long time ago.’

  They went downstairs as Meg called again. Throughout the meal Morgan was withdrawn and silent and it was not long after when he took his leave. Back at his hotel he sat down and wrote a note to Sarah. He thought for some time before putting pen to paper, and at length he wrote:

  ‘My dear Sarah, the enclosed letter has only just come into my hands. It has explained many things to me and the fact that owing to a series of mischances my brother Thomas delivered it thirty years too late may help to ease what must have embittered you for so long…’