Footsteps in the Park

by Marie Joseph

  ‘I’m going,’ she said, getting up and walking quickly away from him, leaving him sitting there as if he’d been struck dumb, with the two girls behind the counter watching her go with fascinated interest.

  And there they were, as Mrs Wilkinson was to tell her husband that tea-time, Mrs Bolton’s younger daughter, Dorothy, and that Stanley Armstrong out of Inkerman Street. Chasing one another out of the Market Place, him calling her name out loud, and her crying if she hadn’t been mistaken. Just like a couple of kids out of Foundry Street, who wouldn’t be expected to behave any better.

  ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather,’ she was to say. ‘I saw them with my own two eyes as I was taking the short cut down the back steps to the tram stop. “Dorothy! Don’t go. Wait for me!” he was shouting at the very top of his voice, and her running and crying. Her mother would have had a pink fit if she could have seen her daughter showing herself up in public. And you’d have thought he would have had more respect for the dead, carrying on like that with his sister not even decently buried.’

  ‘Nowt but a lovers’ tiff,’ Ned said, more interested in what was for his tea.

  And Stanley would have overtaken Dorothy’s flying figure easily, but at the entrance to the Market Place he had to pull himself up sharp to prevent knocking over a small boy with an ice-cream cornet in his hand.

  ‘Where’s the fire?’ a tall man said, scooping the child up out of his way. ‘It’ll be over afore tha gets there if tha’s not quick about it.’

  Calling an apology over his shoulder, Stanley ran on, catching up with Dorothy at the foot of the wide flight of stone steps leading into the Town Hall building.

  With his free hand he grabbed at her wrist, but she jerked away from him and hurried on, walking quickly, talking to him out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘You want to know what I feel like, Stanley Armstrong?’ she said as if he had asked her. ‘I feel as if you’ve just thrown a bucket of cold water over me, if you want to know.’

  He saw a stick of rhubarb about to fall to the ground and shoved it back into the carrier-bag, and seeing him do it was illogically, to Dorothy, the last straw.

  ‘You care more about that stick of rhubarb than what I’ve just told you. You don’t believe a single word of it, do you?’ When he didn’t answer, she said loudly. ‘I don’t swear, but bloody hell. Hell’s bloody bells.’

  He put out his hand towards her again, but she knocked it away with a fierce little swipe.

  ‘Dorothy listen!’

  ‘You listen to me and I’ll listen to you. It’s your own sister we’re talking about, remember?’

  She was walking so quickly she was almost tripping over her feet, refusing to look at him, almost beside herself with exasperation. He had never seen her other than passively what Mrs Crawley would have called ‘lady-like’, and her excitement was catching. They were approaching the bottom of Steep Brow now, and suddenly, heedless of the stares of passers-by, he caught her arm in a grip so firm she was forced to stop. He swung her round to face him, and the expression in his dark eyes was so intense, so pleading, that her angry words died away.

  ‘I’ve got to go back now, Dorothy. I can’t walk home with you shouting at me like this, even if I wanted to. I promised I wouldn’t be out long, and me mother’s in such a state I have to watch out for her all the time. But after tea tonight, Mrs Crawley’s coming in to sit with her, and I’ll come round. I’ll come up to your house about half-past seven. I’ll stand at the corner of your road, and I’ll wait for you, and we’ll find somewhere to go and talk about it. All right?’

  His voice was quiet and controlled, but his manner was as aggressive as if he were shouting at the top of his voice. ‘And in the meantime you keep it to yourself.’ He went on in that deceptively calm voice; ‘My God, Dorothy, how do you think I feel? If there’s even a scrap of truth in what you say, I won’t be able to keep my hands off him. But it’s dangerous talk. It’s worse than dangerous.’ He shook her arm none too gently. ‘If we can prove that he was seeing our Ruby, then I’ll be off to the police station so quick you won’t see me for dust. That satisfy you?’

  Dorothy sighed deeply. She felt tired and beaten, bewildered and lost. She drew in a great intake of breath. ‘All right then, but you don’t need to wait at the corner of the road. Leave it till eight o’clock, and I’ll be alone in the house. I’m tired of standing on corners, Stanley, and I never want to sit on a bench with you in the park again.’ She shuddered. ‘I might tell them you’re coming round and I might not. It all depends.’ She turned to walk away from him, and before he set off in the opposite direction, he stood and watched her go.

  But she didn’t turn round, just walked away, her hands deep in the pockets of her blazer, her feet trailing as if she was in no hurry to go home, in no hurry to go anywhere at all.

  Twelve

  ‘I’VE BEEN DOWN to the selling-out shop and fetched four bottles of stout,’ Mrs Crawley said, almost before her head came round the door. ‘So get the poker in quick, Mrs Armstrong, and we’ll waste no time in giving it a bit of bite.’

  Ada did as she was told. She thrust the long poker with its brass handle into the glowing fire, positioning it between the bars of the grate, and watched as Nellie Crawley took off her headscarf and coat, draping them over the back of a chair. She moves about this house as if she’s lived here all her life, she thought, not unkindly. It was queer how things turned out. She didn’t even have to get up from her chair to get two pots from the scullery. Nellie Crawley knew where they were.

  ‘Don’t move, love,’ she was saying. ‘I’ll see to it. By heck but it’s cold out. Him as said “Ne’er cast a clout till May is out” knew what he were saying. I didn’t cast me vest all last summer, and I doubt if I’ll be doing it this. Best place to be is round the fire on a night like this. I’ve got goose-pimples on me goose-pimples if tha wants to know.’

  Ada smiled briefly. If anyone had told her that in such a short time she would have come to know, and aye, – why not say it? – come to love the loud-mouthed blowsy woman from across the street, she would have said they were daft. Coarse Nellie Crawley might be, as ‘common as muck’ folks in the street said, but she didn’t know what she’d have done without her these past few days.

  ‘Here we are then, love, one for thee and t’other for me.’

  Nellie set two pint mugs down on the hearth, and smiled.

  ‘That’ll put some lead in tha’ pencil, cock.’

  Ada nodded. She knew that all things being different, Nellie Crawley would be spending her Saturday evening goodness knows where. Setting off down the street in her black costume, and her pill-box hat with the eye-veil pulled down over her thickly powdered face. Setting off to meet a man? A lover? Or merely to sit in the corner of some public house with a couple of blowsy friends, drinking the hours away till closing-time, leaving her little husband nodding over the fire, listening to the wireless. So they said. It had long been a matter of conjecture in the street as to where Nellie went or what she did on her nights out. But it was none of their business. And none of hers, Ada reminded herself, feeling a twinge of shame as she remembered her own theories as to the kind of woman Nellie Crawley was. ‘No better than she should be, and as brazen as brass with it,’ she had said herself, on more than one occasion.

  Nellie leaned forward, took the poker out of the fire, spat on it and returned it. ‘Your Stanley upstairs?’

  Ada shook her head. ‘He’s gone out, Mrs Crawley. I might as well tell you, I’m a bit bothered.’ She twisted a corner of her apron round in her fingers. ‘He’s gone up the park end to see his girl. Matthew Bolton’s daughter, our Ruby’s boss at the mill.’ She gave the poker an extra riddle, turning it round and round in the red embers. ‘What her mother thinks about it, I don’t rightly know.’

  Nellie’s voice rose on a squeak of indignation. ‘Your Stanley’s as good as any of them toffee-nosed sods any old day.’

  ‘I know. Don’t
get me wrong. I just don’t want him to get hurt more than he has been, that’s all. It doesn’t do. Not that I think owt will come of it; it never works when the money’s on the wrong side, and if our Stanley sticks to what he says about not going to the university . . .’ She sighed. ‘I’ve persuaded him to bide his time in that direction; there’s neither of us thinking straight just now. He were upset about something at tea-time, something more than our Ruby I mean. He’d met that lass down on the market and I think they’d had words. She’s bonny enough, but I bet she can be a bit of a tartar. But our Stanley’s a sensible lad.’

  ‘And as good as them any old day, Mrs Armstrong. I don’t know the lass, not moving in such exalted circles like, but she could do a lot worse for herself than your Stanley, whether he’s been to Oxford University or not. If he does leave school he’ll not be on the dole for long won’t your Stanley, you mark my words.’

  ‘She’s only seventeen.’

  ‘Aye, reet enough, but at her age I’d been working for four years and courting strong. More bloody fool me.’

  ‘She’s still at school, Mrs Crawley.’

  Nellie took the poker out of the fire, nodded with approval at its red and glowing tip, and thrust it into one of the mugs of stout, beaming all over her thin face with satisfaction as the dark brown liquid frothed and hissed over the rim.

  ‘Get that down tha gob, Mrs Armstrong. That’ll warm the cockles reet enough, and stop fretting about your Stanley. He’ll likely know half a dozen more girls afore he decides to settle down.’ She passed over the flowing mug and put the poker back in the fire. ‘Don’t seem right to me keeping a lass at school when she’s a grown woman.’ She put her feet on the fender and pulled up her skirt. ‘Nowt like warming your bits and pieces in front of a good fire. Aye, I’ve seen them High School girls, titties bursting out of their gym-slips, making eyes at the boys from the Grammar School. I’ll tell you straight, Mrs Armstrong, I don’t hold with too much of this education for girls. For boys it’s all right, I suppose, if they’ll clever like your Stanley, but what happens to them girls wagging their behinds in their gym-slips? I’ll tell thee. They gets married straight from school, knowing nowt. What good is Shakespeare and that algebra stuff when the babies come along? Tha doesn’t need to pass an exam to know how to change a mucky nappy. Come on, get tha feet up aside mine on the fender, and later I’ll nip down to the chip shop and fetch us a three and a fourpenny. And no arguing about the money, either. I got me divi last week, and it’s burning a hole in me pocket. What’s money for if tha can’t spend it, I’d like to know.’

  Ada’s eyes swam with the ever ready tears, and she groped in her apron pocket for a handkerchief. ‘I’ll never be able to pay you back for what you’ve done for me these past few days, Mrs Crawley.’ She blew her nose hard. ‘I had a letter from my brother up in Maryport this morning, and he finds now he won’t be able to get down for the funeral Monday morning. It would mean him coming tomorrow, see, and he’s frightened to take the time off his work. He says they’re looking for excuses to lay men off at the mine, and he has four children still at school.’ She sighed deeply. ‘We were very close when we were young, but well . . . tha knows how it is. There never seemed the money for the train fare, and over the years we stopped going, and when me husband was alive we didn’t seem to need no one else. And since then it’s been work and more work. We were such a happy family, the four of us, not always quarrelling and bickering like some folks. And now there’s only Stanley and me left. I can’t credit it somehow.’

  Nellie thrust the poker into the second mug of stout. ‘Aye, this fear of coming out o’ work makes cowards of us all. I’ve seen men lie and cheat and do their own kith and kin down to keep a job. My old man’s as soft as they come, but he’d make a bargain with owd Nick himself to stay in work. It’s getting to the stage when them that has a job feels ashamed. You know summat? I don’t get me groceries all at once from the Co-op now. I gets them a few at a time so I don’t have to walk up the street With a laden basket.’ She tilted her head back and drank deeply, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I’ll bet they’re short of nowt where your Stanley is tonight. I’ll bet that Matthew Bolton has never had to want for a bob or two.’

  ‘All the same, I’d have liked our Jim to be at the funeral Monday,’ Ada said, starting to cry again. ‘Our Stanley’s only a boy; it’s too much for him, he’s been so wrapped up in his books he hasn’t left enough time over for just living, and now it seems all that learning is going to waste.’ She choked on a sob.

  Nellie patted her knee. ‘Have a proper cry if tha feels like it, love. Don’t mind me, far better that tha gets it out of tha system now than bottles it up. Worst thing anyone can do is to bottle it all up. I knew a woman once who never cried once when her old man passed over while watching a football match, and six months later to the day she were riddled from head to foot with the arthritis. Couldn’t move nowt but her eyeballs. And I’m not going to tell thee that time heals, because it bloody doesn’t. All time does is stop it bleeding a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘I wish our Stanley had worn his suit to go up there,’ Ada said five minutes later. ‘But he’s gone out in his pullover and a sports jacket that doesn’t fit him no more. I’d like him to have looked his best. But they won’t listen.’

  Then, remembering how Ruby hadn’t listened either, she started to cry again, softly, as if there was a well inside her that would never dry up.

  ‘I like your jacket,’ Dorothy said insincerely when she opened the front door to Stanley’s ring. ‘I’ve never seen it before, have I? Here, give it to me, and I’ll hang it up.’

  She took it from him, noticing the frayed edges to the cuffs, feeling the rough texture of the cheap material, and, turning round to face him, thought how pale and ill at ease he looked in the green sweater with its V neck showing off a quite hideous red spotted tie. She much preferred him in his school blazer and striped tie, she decided, despising herself even as she thought it.

  And as she stared at him, in the few seconds it took for her to see how different, how out of place, he looked against her home background, it came to her that she didn’t love him. Not really love him. She liked him, and she wasn’t a snob like her mother, heaven forbid, but in that flash of a moment, Dorothy’s infatuation, her seventeen-year-old’s infatuation for the gangling boy standing beside her, died. And if Phyllis had been able to read her daughter’s mind, she would have been silently applauding.

  Dorothy was appalled, horrified and bewildered, and to cover her confusion she took him by the hand, and led him down the oak-panelled hall and into the sitting-room.

  How was it possible? she was asking herself silently; how was it possible to love someone one minute and then look at him and know that you had been wrong? Was this what her father had meant when he had advised her to take her time? She squeezed Stanley’s hand in contrition, pleading with him in her mind for forgiveness.

  Stanley stared round him, trying hard not to stare and failing completely. His eyes took in the size of the room, more than twice the size of the living-room at home, the height of the ceiling, the depth of the cushions on the three-piece suite. He blinked at the brightness of the cream-tiled fireplace with its raised hearth and its twinkling brasses. His toe traced the pattern of the thick carpet, and he boggled at the bookshelves let into wide niches at each side of the fireplace. Leather-bound books, in sets, arranged in rows of equal sizes, their bindings matching, looking as if the only time they were taken down was for dusting. He pulled at the knot of the hideous tie as if it were strangling him.

  ‘Well, sit down then,’ Dorothy said, and he obeyed, sitting on the very edge of a chair, hitching up his trouser legs, and speaking in a low voice as if he were in chapel.

  ‘Did you tell them I was coming?’

  Dorothy sat down opposite to him on the massive chesterfield, curling her legs up beneath her. ‘Well, I daren’t after what you said this afternoon, dare I? But in any
case, Gerald was here, and I went up to my room.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘Honestly, he gives me the willies. I know I won’t be able to talk naturally to him till this thing’s sorted out. I’ve got a feeling he knows I suspect something.’ She twisted a strand of hair round her finger. ‘He’s like a slimy snake, except that snakes are really dry.’

  Stanley stared at the cut-glass sherry decanter on the low table by the side of his chair, flanked by four glasses arranged in pairs. Just for a moment he forgot the seriousness of what he had come for as he thought of the contrast between those sparkling glasses and the amber-coloured liquid, and the mugs of stout he guessed his mother would be drinking with Nellie Crawley.

  ‘You haven’t said anything to your mother and father? You kept it to yourself like I said?’

  Dorothy narrowed blue eyes at him. ‘I daren’t say a word about anything, I told you. I’m scared of you, you were so fierce this afternoon. No, I’ll keep it to myself for the time being,’ she said calmly. ‘I had a long think about what you said, and you’re right. I’m too impulsive, always have been, and he’s not likely to run away, is he? Not when he’s decided to brazen it out.’

  ‘Aw, Dorothy.’ Stanley’s tone was rueful. ‘All right then, just suppose there is something in what you say? No, he won’t run away, just as long as he doesn’t suspect that we suspect.’

  ‘We? I thought you rejected everything I said? That’s how it seemed to me this afternoon.’

  Stanley’s thin face took on what she thought of as his suffering look. Its holier-than-thou look, she thought with a twinge of irritation. Funny how different he looked sitting there in her own familiar surroundings. Uncomfortable, wary, frightened almost. As if he were perched there on the edge of the chair ready to get up and run from the room at any given moment. Poised for flight. Out of place. He didn’t match, she thought sadly. Everything else in the room matched, but Stanley Armstrong didn’t. Suddenly she felt scared.