by Marie Joseph
She was so consumed with the power of her anger that even when he stretched out a hand towards her, she felt no fear, merely drew back from him with a look of such loathing on her face that he was the one to recoil.
For the space of a few seconds they stared at each other, then his hand shot out and gripped her round the wrist, in an iron grip that made her cry aloud. ‘Right,’ he said, snapping out the word. ‘Right. Now the cards are on the table, Dorothy. And I suppose you told her big brother what you found out? I suppose you told your precious dad? Was that why you were walking down Steep Brow with a face like an accident going somewhere to happen?’
‘No! You’re wrong! I told no one.’ She tried to wriggle free, but his grip tightened. ‘I was running away . . .’ Her mind was working frantically. ‘I was running away because my mother had found out that Stanley came to the house last night when they were out. She said some dreadful things, and I just walked out. I’ve done that before when my mother and me have rowed,’ she added with desperation.
‘Right!’ he said again, then before she could move to scramble from the car he had started the engine. Driving on, caring nothing once again for the springs of his beloved car, driving over the rutted road, his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator.
There was murder in his eyes, murder in the way he wrenched at the wheel. This man had killed once, and Dorothy knew that he would have no compunction in killing again. She screamed, and the sound was torn from her throat and tossed away in the slip-stream of onrushing wind.
She fumbled for the door handle, but his hand came out and held her fast.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘I haven’t told anyone! No one, Gerald. Believe me . . .’
But Gerald Tomlin was past believing anything. The temper that had got him into one serious scrape after another all his life, the temper that had caused him to reach out and choke the life out of Ruby Armstrong, was burning him with its all-consuming fire. And this girl, this slip of a girl by his side had taken his shining future in her hands and destroyed it . . . as he would destroy her.
On two wheels the red car turned the corner and roared up the unmade road to Bill Foot’s Delph. And in front of them a grassy bank sloped down to the quarry. Stopping with a squeal of brakes, Gerald reached over Dorothy, opened the door and pushed her out, sure that in her state of terror she would be an easy victim for what he planned to do.
But fear had made Dorothy strong, and instead of paralysing her, it lent wings to her feet as she ran towards the quarry, and not away from it as he had expected her to do. Her mind working feverishly she calculated that, if she could crawl beneath the flimsy railing erected not ten yards away from the edge of the sheer drop, she could make her way round to the other side, and if she could climb the grassy bank there, reach the houses seen as a row of chimneys deep in the hollow.
Then she heard a sound behind her that seemed to freeze the very marrow in her bones. The revving of an engine as Gerald drove the car straight for her. . . .
Sure of his undoubted expertise in driving the red car, Gerald was confident enough to take a calculated risk. Sure that after he had run her down he could swerve away from the brink. . . .
With all the strength at her command, Dorothy took a flying leap to land face downwards in the long grass, as Gerald missed her by a fraction of an inch, careering on, for once in his life, the last time in his life, misjudging his distance, so that the car, skidding out of control, plunged over the edge of the quarry, turning over and over, bouncing down to the bottom, where it burst into flames.
And it was Mr Crawley who found her, stumbling along the pitted road at the side of the allotments, her face dirty and streaked with tears, her yellow hair falling round her face. Mr Crawley, going home quietly after damping down his fire, to his Sunday dinner after a blissful morning with his pigeons, holding them tenderly in his hands, like the child he had never had, soothing, ringing, spreading their wings wide as he talked to them.
‘Nay, lass,’ he said. ‘Nowt’s worth crying like that for, nowt in this silly old world . . .’
And it was Mr Crawley’s arms that came round her as she gasped out what had happened, incoherent, pointing back up the hill, shaking, sobbing, trying to make him understand.
And when she had finished he took off his old tweed cap, scratched his head, then put it back again.
‘Now tell me where tha’ lives, lass, and I’ll take thee home,’ he said.
Before the afternoon was over, the clouds had formed, the sun had gone, and it was raining hard. As though the bright sunshine of the morning had never been.
Dorothy sat with her father and Margaret in a side room off the women’s surgical ward in the infirmary, staring at her mother who lay unmoving and unseeing in the high white bed.
There was nothing they could do. Nothing it seemed that they would ever be able to do ever again for Phyllis Bolton – the Phyllis Bolton they’d always known.
‘I want it straight,’ Matthew had told the Senior Consultant, a greying man with tired eyes. ‘I can cope with the truth, tha knows, so none of tha soft soap, if tha doesn’t mind.’
‘She’s suffered a massive stroke,’ the doctor had said, pulling no punches as the broad-shouldered man standing squarely before him had requested. ‘She’ll never walk again, or speak again. The most you can hope for is some slight movement in her right foot . . . unless there’s a miracle.’
‘Don’t believe in them,’ Matthew said, and thanked the doctor for his frankness, before going back to join his daughters in their bedside vigil.
‘I’ll stay at home and help to look after her,’ Dorothy promised, and what could have passed for a smile crossed Matthew’s face. He leaned over and patted her hand.
‘I know tha will, chuck,’ he said, and knowing this younger child of his even better than he knew himself, he realized that at that very moment she meant it. She were made of good stuff, his Dorothy. He shuddered when he thought how nearly he might have lost her. Felt again the upsurge of relief when, with Arnold driving his car like a maniac, they had found that funny little chap walking along Marston Road with his arm round Dorothy.
‘She’s had a bit of a shock, gaffer,’ Mr Crawley had said, and Matthew, even as he clasped her in his arms, had felt that must surely be the understatement of the year.
Aye, his Dorothy would be all right, and now weren’t the time to tell her that he would never allow her to sacrifice herself for the left-over life that this speechless, vegetable of a woman had in front of her. . . .
Poor Phyllis. And poor Margaret. Matthew saw that she was still crying softly into a screwed-up handkerchief, her eyes swollen to narrow slits, and her face puffy and red.
‘I want to die!’ she had screamed when the ambulance had taken her mother away and he’d had to break the news to her about Gerald. ‘I want to die. Oh, Daddy, let me die . . .’
She hadn’t called him Daddy for a long time, this uncomplicated daughter of his, and somehow it touched him more than her flowing tears and anguished cries. She wouldn’t forget this day, not for the rest of her life, but he knew, he knew as sure as the sun would rise on the morrow that, given time, his Margaret would survive. It were the other one . . . Matthew patted Dorothy’s hand again. Aye, things went deep with her. . . .
‘We’d best be going,’ he said. ‘There’s nowt we can do here.’
And with a backward glance at the still figure on the bed, they walked together down the long stone corridor with its garden-fence-green walls, out of the infirmary to where the black car was parked.
And as they drove into the circular drive and saw Stanley Armstrong waiting patiently in the porch, sheltering from the rain, Matthew whispered to Dorothy to get her sister up to bed.
‘I’ll have a word with the lad,’ he said.
Margaret, still weeping, allowed Dorothy to help her to undress, protesting that she didn’t want to live, turning a ravaged face into her pillow, and holding out a wavering hand for another handke
rchief.
‘How can I ever go out again?’ she wailed. ‘I’ll never go out again. I’ll stay in the house and never face people again.’
Dorothy tucked her in, saw that already her poor swollen eyelids were drooping and, closing the door softly behind her, ran downstairs.
The telephone was ringing as she reached the hall, and she told a stuttering Edwin Birtwistle, the captain of the local tennis club for three consecutive seasons, that his kindness in ringing was appreciated. That she quite understood he felt he must get in touch, and that Margaret was taking it all as well as could be expected.
‘Tell her that all her friends are standing by her,’ he said, and as Matthew came out of the sitting-room Dorothy put a finger to her lips and glanced back upstairs.
Matthew nodded, then pulled a wry face. ‘Bad news travels fast, chuck,’ he said. ‘Go and have a word with him – he’s waiting in there.’
‘I had to get in touch,’ Stanley said, just as Edwin Birtwistle had said. ‘Mr Crawley came over with Mrs Crawley. Oh, Dorothy . . .’ He stretched out a hand and drew her to him. ‘What can I say? I’ll never be able to forgive myself for not . . . for not . . .’
Dorothy was so tired that even the effort of forming her mouth round the words was too much of an effort for her. She leaned against him, feeling her legs grow weak beneath her.
‘You know about my mother?’ she whispered.
He stroked her hair. ‘Your father’s just told me. It’s awful . . . oh God, can anything else happen? It’s all so awful!’
Then, as they sat together on the chesterfield, he told her that Matthew had told him that he was making his mother an allowance so that he could take up his scholarship to Oxford.
‘In the middle of all this he told me that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He’s a wonderful man, your father.’
And strangely enough there was nothing more to say . . . and so they just sat there, with the rain pouring down the window panes, and when he got up to go Dorothy walked with him to the door, and stood there until he had walked-away, turning the corner out of sight. Tall, falling over his feet, head bent, the rain beating down on his thin shoulders.
She found her father sitting at the kitchen table, his hands clasped together on its scrubbed surface, sitting there as if he was wondering what to do.
Dorothy went to him and leaned her cheek against his thinning hair. ‘That was a nice thing you told Stanley,’ she said softly. ‘Now he won’t go making any dramatic statements after the funeral tomorrow about giving up his scholarship. That’s what he intended to do, you know.’
Matthew nodded. ‘I guessed as much. In fact he told me as much. He’s a grand lad, chuck.’
Dorothy moved round and went to sit opposite to her father at the big table. And the house was quiet around them, with only the steady drip of the rain outside to break the silence.
‘Aye, a grand lad,’ Matthew said again.
Dorothy saw the way his features were blurred into unfamiliar lines with exhaustion and the sadness of the day. Some day she’d tell him that what had been between her and Stanley was all over. Perhaps she’d even try to explain how her love for him had died at the moment she had taken his jacket from him and hung it up in the hall.
‘Love can die at the most unexpected moment, the most mundane moment,’ she would say. ‘How can that be? Tell me how that can be?’
And even her beloved father, in his infinite wisdom, wouldn’t be expected to understand. . . .
But she was wrong. For Matthew Bolton, aged at least five years in the space of an afternoon, and tired beyond sleep, would have understood perfectly.
How could the love of so many years have died in a single second, he was asking himself silently at that very moment? How could he have looked at Phyllis as she lashed out with her fist at Dorothy and known that never, for as long as he lived, would he feel the same way about her again?
Look after her he would. Cherish what was left of her for always, without question, but something in him had died and would never be restored.
‘Thank God there’ll be no trial and all the muck-raking that would have entailed,’ he said at last, as if they were continuing a conversation, and as if at an unspoken command they reached across the table and clasped hands.
‘It’ll be reet, lass,’ Matthew Bolton said. ‘Things usually turn out reet in the end.’
‘You sound just like Grandpa Bolton,’ Dorothy said, and as she saw the way the tears sprang to his eyes, she got up quickly and, moving over to the gas-stove, put the kettle on.
‘A cup of tea?’ she asked, being careful not to turn round.
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First published in 1991 by Century
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ISBN 9780099102113