The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  Hare waited till Fell had himself under control.

  ‘“If only”, Tom. They’re just about the saddest words we have.’

  ‘She was one in a million, Gerald. Nay, in ten million. I’ll never replace her. I can’t even begin to

  think of putting anybody else in her place.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But you ought to have some kind of help with the girls, you know. There’s them to think about as well as you. They’ve lost a mother, and that they can never replace.’

  Laura’s cottage was a sturdy five-roomed stone building whose fabric her father had had renewed. It stood beside and at an angle to a steep unsurfaced lane, a vehicle’s width, down which women from the town took a shortcut to the yarn-spinning mill by the river. On the town side it was almost hidden by an overgrown bank; on the other it looked across the wide valley of river and canal to low wooded hills.

  On venturing to visit her again, Hare was glad to find her in the garden. It allowed him to seem merely to be passing and saved him the embarrassment of facing her across her threshold.

  ‘Hullo, there,’ he called to her stooping figure.

  She straightened up and, momentarily dazzled, shielded her eyes with her hand so that she could see him standing against the sun.

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘You know, you really have got a marvellous view here.’

  ‘I thought you’d bought the best view in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘You mean with the new house? Something ready-made like this would have saved me the bother.’

  ‘Oh, but your new house will be much more splendid than this.’

  ‘It’s a folly,’ Hare said. ‘A pure grandiose folly.’

  ‘Why did you go to the bother, then?’

  ‘It was my wife’s idea. I thought I’d told you.’

  ‘But don’t married people come to agreement on such important matters?’

  ‘Some might.’

  She was keeping her distance, standing where he had found her. He lifted the gate latch and stepped inside, seeing her head go back an inch.

  ‘You know my wife’s gone to visit her sister in Australia?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘She thought the change would do her good.’

  ‘After that terrible accident...’

  ‘Oh, she’s over that now. Quite recovered.’

  She wiped a lock of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist that showed between her gardening-glove and her sleeve. Then she looked down at herself, as if suddenly conscious of the old clothes she was wearing.

  ‘You keep it nice,’ Hare said, waving his hand at the garden.

  ‘Father got it established. It was a wilderness when we came, and it would soon be so again.’

  He saw that she was uneasy in his presence, but he motioned to the open door. ‘I wonder if I might... for a minute.’ And when she still did not move or speak. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘I thought we’d had all that out.’

  ‘Please,’ Hare said. ‘It’ll only take a few minutes.’

  He followed her, waiting while she removed soil from her flat-heeled shoes on the iron scraper outside the door. When he reached to shut the door behind them, she said, ‘Please, I’d rather it were left open.’ She didn’t offer him a seat.

  ‘I wondered how you were making out on your own,’ Hare said. ‘How you were managing.’ She looked at him, not understanding. ‘If there was anything you needed.’

  ‘Are you offering me money?’ she said at last.

  ‘I didn’t know how your father had left you,’ Hare said.

  ‘And what would I be expected to do for it?’ She coloured then as Hare looked away. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think you deserved that.’

  ‘It would be foolish to be in need when I could help. I shouldn’t like the thought of you wanting for anything.’

  ‘It’s kind of you. But quite impossible.’

  ‘I don’t know why it should be.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. In any case, I might be leaving the district.’

  ‘Leaving?’ Hare was startled by the violence with which his heart lurched.

  ‘I’m not destitute, but I must find a way of keeping myself. My mother had relatives in the south. I thought I might get work there.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘As a housekeeper. Looking after Father all those years has left me fitted for little else.’

  ‘I could probably find you something in the shop.’

  ‘No, please.’ A little smile touched her lips.

  Panic at the thought of losing her forever brought a thought to Hare.

  ‘Tom Fell needs a housekeeper and a nanny for his girls.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘His wife’s death hit him badly. He just doesn’t seem to be able to reconcile himself to it.’ He saw that he had her interest. ‘Would you like me to speak to him about it?’

  She looked round the room then crossed to the window.

  ‘You don’t really want to uproot yourself and go away, do you?’

  ‘I do love this house,’ she said eventually. ‘I hate the thought of leaving it.’

  She stood with her back to him. He went and turned her to face him.

  ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Please don’t go.’

  They had never been so close. Even in the old days he had ventured no more than a steadying hand over a stile. Now he lifted her hot face and bent his towards it. Was he wrong or could she really not hide a hint of softness in her lips before they closed hard against his?

  ‘No.’ She twisted free. ‘Please go now.’

  She went and stood in the open doorway.

  ‘Will you let me speak to Tom?’

  ‘If you like. But I can’t stay unless you promise never to come here again.’

  A woman passed along the lane, twisting her head to give them a narrow-eyed appraisal as they stepped out of the house.

  ‘It takes only one person to start the tongues wagging,’ Laura said.

  The telegram arrived when Hare’s wife had been away six months. ‘Cynthia seriously ill,’ it read. ‘Letter following but think you should come at once.

  Hare left the business in the hands of his partner and took a flight to Australia. He had nine days in a flying boat in which to wonder just what awaited him. As they flew across the eastern Mediterranean and put down at places he had become familiar with during his first operational posting, he thought, ‘When I was here before I didn’t even know she existed.’

  Cynthia had cancer at an advanced and inoperable stage. There were some new drugs which might arrest it for a time, but she must not be allowed to make that long journey home. Hare was surprised and moved by the courage with which she suffered and fought during the months left to her. She kept active for as long as possible.

  ‘I always used to say life was short, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘Well, now I know just how short, I want to make the most of what’s left.’

  It was a time of reconciliation, with bitterness gone, and, for Hare, a strangely ennobling experience. It left him needing time to think and come to terms with himself and his memories. After the funeral he booked a passage home by sea. It was during the long voyage, keeping himself to himself, that he would do his mourning, bury the past and brood on the possibilities of the future.

  He came off the train at his local station to find himself on the edge of some farewell party spilling across from the other platform. He recognised one of Fell’s daughters. She greeted him shyly.

  ‘Hullo, Elizabeth. What’s all this about?’

  Before she could reply, Fell himself came round the corner of the station-master’s office. ‘Elizabeth, the train’s due. Don’t wander away.
’ He stopped at the sight of Hare.

  ‘Gerald! How well you look. Fancy you turning up just now!’ Fell was dressed in a new suit, a carnation with fern in his buttonhole. ‘Come round here a minute.’

  He took Hare by the arm and led him along the end of the building. Laura, in a slate-blue two-piece and a hat with its veil turned back, was standing in a group on the other side.

  ‘Laura, look who’s here.’ She turned her head as the train ran in beside her. ‘We got married this morning.’ Fell laughed, thumping Hare’s back. ‘You should have come home earlier and been my best man.’

  Laura came to them. It was impossible to read any more in her smile than quiet pleasure. ‘Welcome home,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Hare said.

  ‘We’d best get on, Tom,’ Laura said.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy,’ Hare said.

  Now, on the morning after Laura’s funeral, Hare was once more in that house through whose rooms he had wandered like a man demented. The weather had changed again.

  ‘It seems,’ Fell was saying, ‘that we have one calm day for half a dozen blustery ones.’ He put coal on the fire then reached for the decanter and topped up Hare’s sherry glass and his own.

  ‘It dropped right yesterday, anyway,’ Hare said.

  ‘Aye, aye. How does it feel to be back as a visitor in your old home?’

  ‘Strange. Like a memory that won’t quite focus.’

  ‘It’s been a good home for us. You know,’ Fell went on, ‘we thought about it afterwards, but that day you ran into me and Laura on the station, you were, so to speak, coming home from your own wife’s funeral, weren’t you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘And you never said a word.’

  ‘There was hardly time. And it wasn’t a day to burden you with that kind of news.’

  ‘No. But then, you always kept your feelings to yourself more than I did.’

  ‘You knew that Cynthia and I hadn’t hit it off for some time before she went to Australia. Though we were, in a way, reconciled during her illness.’

  ‘Yes. I remember how I was when Emily was killed. Just as if the world had caved in on me. I didn’t know where to put myself.’

  But not this time, seemingly, Hare thought.

  ‘And then,’ Fell said, ‘you sold out, pulled up stakes and went off without a goodbye. Whatever made you do that? Too many uncomfortable memories?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Hare said. ‘I never really settled down after the war. Then that spell in Australia, when Cynthia was dying... I felt like a fresh start, where nobody knew me.’

  ‘And you never got married again.’

  ‘No.’

  Why shouldn’t I tell him? Hare thought. What harm can there be in it now she’s gone? It might even give him some satisfaction to know the truth. His mind framed the sentences as Fell looked into the fire, silent, his thoughts elsewhere.

  ‘I went away because I was in love with Laura. I should have made sure of her before the war, when it looked as if she was interested and we were both free. But she wouldn’t entertain me while I was tied to Cynthia and she wouldn’t hear of me getting a divorce. When Cynthia died I came home to claim her, but I was too late. So I left, rather than live in the same town, seeing her and being constantly reminded what a fool I’d been.’

  That was what he thought of saying, but before he could start the other man turned from the fire and forestalled him.

  ‘You know,’ Fell began, ‘we were real friends at one time...’

  ‘Still are,’ Hare put in, his spoken words followed by the immediate thought: But did I ever really like him?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fell turned his head and gave him an appreciative little smile in which there was a lurking sadness. ‘I often think about those years just after the war. They were the golden years, Gerald. For me, at any rate. I know you had your troubles... Some men are lucky enough to have a time like that; and luckier still if they recognise it while they’re living it. Well, that was my time, and it all fell to pieces when Emily was killed.’

  ‘But surely,’ Hare said, ‘you’ve had compensations since.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Fell conceded. ‘Oh, yes; and I’d be churlish not to admit my good fortune in marrying Laura. All the same... Well, we have known each other a long time, Gerald, and I can tell you what I wouldn’t tell another living soul.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with the man?’ Hare thought, and felt irritation move in him.

  ‘She was a good wife,’ Fell went on, ‘a good woman and a good mother to the girls. And I shall miss her. But somehow, you know, though we were comfortable and never differed in anything that mattered, I sometimes found myself with this feeling of – well, I can only call it disappointment. A feeling that something, somehow, was missing. It was never the same as it was with Emily, you know, and perhaps I was a fool for ever thinking it might be.’

  Wind suddenly buffeted the windows and tossed the bare branches of the lime trees in the avenue. Hot coals fell in the fireplace. The two old friends sat silently looking into the flames.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ‘The Apples of Paradise’ is a re-working of Thomas Hardy’s story ‘Fellow Townsmen’. I had brooded for some years about an alternative denouement to Hardy’s tale, whose irony he either did not see or chose not to use, but which appealed strongly to my own artistic temperament. At first I saw the writing of my own version as no more than an interesting exercise in which I retained some elements of Hardy’s plot and planted other clues to its origin in the names of its chief characters. Hardy’s are Barnet, Downe and Lucy Savile. Barnet Fair is rhyming slang for hair, or in this case Hare. Downe becomes Fell, and Lucy Savile’s initials are retained

  in those of Laura Sherwood.

  While this necessary acknowledgement of its source inevitably emphasises the similarities, and invites disparaging comparison, ‘The Apples of Paradise’, in its execution, acquired enough independent life to persuade me to offer it for publication.

  The Running and the Lame

  There were people getting onto the bus before Mrs Brewster was safely off, and the driver was letting them. You got the odd one like that, careless, surly, as though they weren’t lucky to have a job in times like these. Her walking stick and shopping bag slipped along the stretched arm whose hand clutched the rail while her foot felt for the ground. She wondered with a touch of panic if he would be heedless enough to close the doors on her before she was down and clear. The stick slid free and fell, coming to rest half on, half off the platform, as both her feet touched the ground and she stepped back onto the pavement and regained her balance. Then someone from behind nipped nimbly past her, grasped the stick and put it into her hand, his other hand supporting her elbow.

  ‘You all right, Ma?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mrs Brewster said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  She peered at him as she waited for her heartbeat to slow, but she had on the wrong glasses for recognising anyone at this range. All she could make out was a youngish man with dark hair, wearing a blue anorak with a broad yellow stripe down the sleeve. God! She was a mess these days: overweight, short of breath, arthritic in her joints, half blind. Fit for nothing but the knacker’s yard, Randolph might have said. It had been one of his ‘speaks’ that he came out with whatever the company, asking what was vulgar about it when she chided him. She would have to stop coming into town if she couldn’t get off a bus without danger. But her local shop had closed six months ago and the neighbours she’d been friendly with had lately moved away. She hated to be dependent on anyone, let alone strangers.

  ‘It’s Mrs Brewster, isn’t it?’ the man asked, and she peered at the pale outline of his face once more.

  ‘Yes. Do I know you?’

  ‘I know you.’


  There was no clue in the voice. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t place you.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘My eyes aren’t what they were.’

  She had known so many people in the old days, and many more had known her. Great heavens! She had been mayor of this town and a justice of the peace. All that had happened after Randolph had gone. While he was alive she had been content to back him up; then when he died the Labour Party had offered her his safe seat on the town council. She had taken the gesture as a great compliment, to Randolph as well as herself. How proud he would have been of her, and how distressed to see her now.

  ‘You can manage now, can you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right now.’

  ‘I’ll be getting on, then.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you for your trouble.’

  People weren’t all bad, Mrs Brewster thought, as the man walked away. You could think otherwise from all that was reported in the newspapers and on television, and, of course, she had known a lot of cupidity and mischief while she was on the bench; but there was still some politeness and disinterested concern in the world. Helping lame dogs over stiles; helping fat old women off buses.

  Mrs Brewster’s first errand was to the post office, to draw her pension. On her way across the marketplace she was greeted a couple of times. Sometimes she didn’t recognise people who spoke to her, but she always called out a cheery reply. Sometimes, she suspected, she responded when the greeting was not meant for her, but she would rather risk looking foolish than snub someone. ‘I saw old Mrs Brewster in town this morning,’ she could imagine them saying. ‘Blind as a bat, but she still soldiers on’.

  As she passed under the bulk of the town hall, the clock in its tower struck a quarter after eleven. Oh! but they’d had some times inside those walls: Mayors’ Balls, Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club dances; brass band concerts and choirs; the small parties and receptions she herself had held in the Mayor’s Parlour during her year of office. She had met Randolph at a dance in there over fifty years ago. He had only recently come into the town to manage his uncle’s foundry, which he later inherited. When they had been introduced and had danced together, he took her down to supper in the Winter Gardens. He didn’t seem to want to leave her. She felt his gaze on her all evening and he came back to her every time she was for a moment unattended. He told her then that he fancied standing for the council and astounded her by telling her he was a member of the Labour Party. Men who owned or managed businesses stood as Conservatives, or Independents – which was the same thing under another name. Randolph overturned the natural order. Her father, himself a Liberal, said as much later when she wanted to ask Randolph to the house. Randolph had laughed. ‘They don’t know how to weigh me up. Even my uncle looks at me a bit sideways. “As long as you do your work and don’t start wanting to hand the business over to a commune”, he says, “l don’t see as it makes much difference. Except, o’ course, I shan’t be able to put you up for t’ Conservative Club.”’