The Backward Shadow

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Fine. Well, you be the management and give your whole life to it. I’m prepared just to be the shop-girl. After all, you haven’t got a baby to look after.’

  ‘No, that’s right, I haven’t,’ Dottie retorted. ‘I haven’t got one to raise, either, or I might have the grace to be damned grateful for someone who’d do all the work of setting up a business of which I was getting equal shares while doing about a fifth of the labour.’

  There was no possible reply to this, so I merely shrugged coldly and went on washing the dishes. How I hate remembering it now!—although she wasn’t being entirely fair either; true, she did far more than half the work to do with the shop, but the house was my job and here she scarcely contributed anything except very occasionally a meal or a bit of washing up. Mrs. Griffiths was nearly always called in on the days when Dottie was supposed to be at home, and when Dottie had nowhere to travel to and actually did stay in the cottage with David, she did the bare minimum necessary to keep him clean and fed, and then let the housework go to hell while she did her accounts, wrote letters, drafted advertisements, or had Henry over for a conference. Often I’d get home tired at six in the evening to find the fire out and supper not even begun. I’d learnt to pick up a large packet of fish-and-chips or a frozen pork-pie on these occasions so I wouldn’t have to set to from scratch.

  Anyway, this pointed exchange led to a chill evening, during which we sat locked in our private silences and I, at least, spared a thought for the past and asked myself (but desultorily) whether there was any hope of ever reverting to the status quo ante. But at the time this seemed as hopeless as trying to rebuild a house from which the foundations have been blasted away.

  So the next day Dottie set off early by road for Birmingham and Ron, while I left David (as usual in shrieks of outrage at my departure, which always started the days at the shop off on the wrong foot) and drove into the village. It was the beginning of May, but there were few signs of spring, apart from new leaves and some flowers in the garden which persist in coming to birth no matter how inclement the weather. Just before climbing into the car I obeyed an impulse to throw a gardening fork into the back. I thought if the day were not too hectic I might find the energy to fulfil a promise made long ago to Mrs. Stephens, to dig the little plot behind their shop, which was next door to ours. Since the day was spoilt anyway, and since I had a slightly guilty conscience about Dottie which I wanted to expiate with sweat, I thought I might get around to it, though it seemed doubtful considering my present aversion to hard work.

  The day was so gloomy and blustery, with gusts of periodic rain, that the shop was very quiet. It was also ominously cold; something had gone wrong with the central heating. I phoned Henry to tell him and he said apologetically that he was awfully sorry, he had a stinking cold that day and was cossetting himself indoors, but that I was not to call in a professional to look at it—‘No point in shelling out, it’s probably something I can deal with easily.’ He advised me to light an oil-stove for myself and stick it out for the day. This hardly commended itself to me; to begin with the oil-stove stank abominably and to go on with it heated an area approximately one-fifth of what was needed. Everything outside that area, which included my little corner of the store-room, was left to freeze, and me in it.

  At about 3 p.m., when there still hadn’t been a single customer, I got so fed up and miserable that I pulled on my coat and went out through the back door, leaving it open so that I could hear the bell. I climbed easily over the dividing fence with my fork and at once began thrusting it brutally into the clotted earth of the tiny flower-beds surrounding a patch of grass the size of a night-club dance-floor. After a short while, Mrs. Stephens’ permanently startled face appeared at a back window between the dingy crocheted curtains, and then she came running out, tutting and jumping flat-footed in her carpet-slippers through the puddles, to exclaim over my hardiness, offer thanks for my help and cups of nice hot tea. I refused without stopping work, and remembered only as she was withdrawing, backwards due to admiration entirely misplaced, to make a perfunctory inquiry after Mr. Stephens’ health.

  ‘Oh …’ said Mrs. Stephens vaguely. ‘Not what it might be, dear. The poor lamb is not what he was, I’m afraid.’ She had spoken very softly, her voice barely carrying to me on a gust of wind, but even so she glanced nervously over her shoulder as if expecting to see his old ear glued to the window to hear whatever disloyalty might be spoken of him.

  As I worked under the dark grey, sullen skies, shoved about and rumpled by the wind and slapped across the face by occasional spats of rain, I fell into a dismal pattern—digging fast and feverishly in an effort to escape my mood and my thoughts, while the thoughts raced faster and more vividly in an effort to keep up. Thoughts about Toby … I still have them. But they’re infinitely different now, thank God. Then, my mind seemed like a festering sore, an all-absorbing pain, drawing all my attention in towards itself, like the skin round a wound. I seemed to see nothing, even the good clean earth I was digging, and I certainly heard nothing other than the endless, exhausting conversations going on in my imagination.

  Suddenly Henry was looking at me over the fence.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, with nothing in his voice but incredulous curiosity.

  I dropped the fork and stood still, panting and worn out as if I’d been running.

  ‘Are you all right? You look strange.’

  ‘I’m all right …What time is it?’

  ‘It’s five o’clock. I’ve been phoning and phoning … Didn’t you hear the bell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘I don’t know … since about three, I think.’

  ‘Since three!’ He didn’t look angry, just amazed. ‘But what about Billings?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Billings. The health-restaurant man. Didn’t Dorothy tell you?’

  It came back to me with a tingling sense of shock. Of course she’d told me. She’d particularly told me about Billings. He was a man after her own heart, though his field was quite different; he was what Henry called a muck-and-mystery man, a farmer with an obsession with natural methods of crop- and stock-raising who had now decided to go into—or rather, put his son into—the restaurant business, as a subsidiary enterprise to his own farm. The farm would supply the restaurant with free-range chickens and eggs, unsprayed fruit, vegetables grown in farmyard manure, and wholewheat bread, among many other things such as honey made by bees who had never soiled their feet by settling on a chemically-treated flower. Dottie had been full of Billings for the past week, the more so since he was the biggest potential customer we had yet had. He had visited the shop, listened to Dottie expound her principles, and liked them, finding them very akin to his own, as indeed she found his; and he had virtually promised to return and order all the furniture needed by the restaurant from us—small pine refectory tables, heart-backed chairs, darkly glazed ceramic bowls for barley soup, wooden plates for meadow-raised beef steaks, baskets for the chickens, rush mats for the floors, and possibly a great many secondary items such as cruets, table-napkins, and purely decorative items. I remembered now, with a flush of guilt, that a lesser reason why Dottie had hurried off to Birmingham was because she needed to find a source of ordinary glassware—jugs and glasses for the fresh vegetable juices. And I remembered too that there had been a strong possibility that Billings would call by between 3 and 4 this afternoon, and that I had been specially told to be ready for him and to welcome him with every encouraging courtesy.

  Henry was gazing at me with a sort of wonderment, his head cocked to one side, a slight frown between his eyes. He was waiting for me to speak, but what could I possibly say? I stammered something about having promised Mrs. Stephens, no customers all day, forgot about Billings, was sure I could have heard the bell … Henry’s face didn’t change.

  ‘I’m only asking myself,’ he said slowly, ‘what Dorothy’s going to say.’

  M
y blood quite literally ran cold—I turned clammy all over. Was it conceivable that I was afraid—afraid of Dottie? Of course I was hopelessly, disgracefully in the wrong, but still—that didn’t explain goose-flesh.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t come,’ I said with sudden hope.

  ‘But he did.’ He handed me a note. I took my gloves off—my hands were shaking. The note, written on a page torn from a pocket pad, simply said, ‘Called at 3.30 as arranged. Could have walked off with all your stock. J. S. Billings.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said faintly.

  For the first time in ten weeks, something other than Toby occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else. I was appalled by the prospect of Dottie’s return, and of having to confess. A totally new kind of duologue now took up all my creative slack. My end of it sounded unimaginably thin. ‘I must have been mad,’ I kept thinking to myself, wringing my hands. It didn’t occur to me then that I had been more or less mad for ten weeks.

  She arrived back sometime after eight, absolutely glowing with triumph as I hadn’t seen her glow since the mysterious events of Christmas Eve. She flung her coat off and rushed into the kitchen, where in an agony of guilty anticipation I was trying to get some supper. She stood in the doorway and flung her arms wide. ‘Ron!’ she cried. ‘Ah, Ron of the licentious ogle, of the sneering lip, of the cretinous demeanour! Ron of the once-sober-and-industrious and now degenerate Lower Orders! Ron, my creation, my angel, my craftsman! I love you!’ She disappeared with a flourish, returning a few seconds later with a large box which she set down on the kitchen table. With a conjuror’s gesture she removed the lid and reverently lifted to the light a little green glass horse. It was very roughly made, the sort of thing a child might form out of taffy, teasing limbs and ears, a ruffle of mane, a switch of tail, out of it before it grew cold and hard. But there was something very attractive about it.

  ‘Infantile,’ said Dottie, but lovingly. ‘Too literary, too explicit. But a start. A start in the right, unblueprinted, original, creative direction.’

  She produced several other little animals of the same sort. They didn’t look professional enough to offer for sale, but they had something, and Dottie said Ron was so excited about them himself that it surely wouldn’t be long before he ‘developed’ the technique to a point where they would be good enough.

  ‘It started with lumps,’ Dottie explained, pouring herself a huge beaker of cold milk, her eyes burning with an almost fanatical enthusiasm. ‘I showed him something when I was there before—a picture in a crafts magazine—he said it was nothing but a lump. Only afterwards he started to think about it, and he said it haunted him. So he began to pick up lumps of glass, left-overs, throw-outs, around the factory, and kind of look at them. He kept one on his mantelpiece at home for weeks, he said, and he kept staring at it, and handling it, until his wife got furious and slung it out. He was so angry at losing it, he realised that you could get fond of a lump. “It gave me all kinds of funny ideas,” he said. “And not that kind, either.” Oh, he’s marvellous, is Ron! I adore his awful smutty way of talking! So then he started making lumps in his spare time. Just letting blobs of hot glass fall as it would. Then he began blowing bubbles into it. Then shaping it. Of course he dared not let any of his mates know what he was doing—they’d have thought he’d gone bonkers. Then one day a lump turned into something like an animal, and that was how he got started on this line.’ She made the horse gallop across the table-top. ‘You know what I told him? I told him to go back to just plain lumps, and not try to make them look like anything except the kind of lump his wife threw away—the kind you can get fond of.’ She dipped into the box again and produced a lump, which she weighed in her hand. It really was rather a beautiful lump—like a piece of crystallised ocean. One immediately wanted to hold it. I reached for it instinctively and Dottie, grinning, held it away.

  ‘Ah ha! I knew it! It draws the hand. It even draws the face.’ She smoothed the cool thing with her cheek. ‘He was so shy about showing me this. When I raved, he thought I was having him on. I love him. I mean it. I feel I’ve started something up in him, like Pygmalion.’

  ‘Is that whole great box full of Ron’s lumps?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. The bottom’s packed with the samples of the nicest coarse-glass tumblers and jugs I could find for my dearly beloved Mr. Billings.’ My heart sank into the region of my knees. ‘Did he call? Did he make a firm order?’ I said nothing, and he asked again, ‘Did he come?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well? Tell!’

  ‘I wasn’t—there.’

  ‘What? What do you mean? Where were you?’

  ‘I was out at the back, digging the Stephens’ garden.’

  There was no question of her face not changing. It froze for a second and then went white. I knew I was for it and I shrank. I thought cravenly, I can’t face a row with Dottie, not now! I began gibbering out excuses but she cut me short.

  ‘Dear kind loving Jesus,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve bitched it. Trust you.’ She had a glass in her hand, a nice square tumbler with a solid glass bottom with a bubble in it and very thick sides. For a moment I thought she was going to throw it straight at my head, and then I thought, no, she’ll smash it on the floor. I could see the impulse tremble through her arm and be checked when it was almost overflowing into her fingers. But then she put the glass carefully back into the box and packed Ron’s things on top among the wood-shavings and newspaper. She closed the box down, keeping her head bent. I stood still, waiting. But she merely picked the box up and carried it out of the kitchen. I heard her put it down on the hall table and go upstairs. I’d never seen her even half as angry; I felt physically sick from watching it and knowing I’d caused it.

  She stayed in her room all evening with the door shut, and I put David to bed in a wholly unaccustomed silence. He tried to induce me to play his usual games but I couldn’t. He went to bed whimpering resentfully and I sat by him, still silent, until he fell asleep. Then I wept with shame.

  When that was finished, I went to Dottie’s door and knocked.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘To come in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Better wait till I’ve had a night’s sleep.’

  ‘It’s tempting, but I’d rather get it over.’

  There was no answer, so I turned the handle and went in. She was not undressed, but was sitting by the window. When she turned, I could see she’d been crying too. Her face was quite drawn.

  I sat opposite her on the windowseat. ‘Say it,’ I said. ‘Please. We’ll both feel better.’

  She gazed at me for a long moment, and then sighed from her depths and turned back to the window, leaning her chin heavily on her hand. ‘What’s the use,’ she said in a tired voice. ‘I could give you hell, but it wouldn’t change anything. Not a thing.’

  ‘Dottie, nothing like it will ever happen again, I promise.’

  ‘It’s not only that. You don’t know. You don’t know.’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and then said wearily, ‘Oh, it’s—it’s a whole lot of things. I mean, even if you turned overnight into a model partner, conscientious and single-minded, it wouldn’t change the fact that you basically don’t give a damn about the whole project, that you don’t believe it stands a chance. You never have really. At first I thought I had enough enthusiasm for us both, or at least that self-interest would drive you into some semblance of caring, but I see now things don’t work out like that. You’re not—with me at all. I sometimes wonder if even Henry really is, or if in his heart of hearts he isn’t smiling pityingly at my cavortings and waiting around to pick up the pieces …’ She dropped her face into her hand for a second, then straightened it quickly, throwing a bit of hair out of her eyes and keeping her fingers over her mouth so that her voice was muffled. ‘I didn’t realise,’ she went on, ‘what a damned lonely business a business could be.’
<
br />   It’s terribly easy to fall prey to the conviction that your own loneliness is the worst in the world. Except occasionally, Dottie always seemed so strong and resilient, so self-sufficient, it was hard to believe that her loneliness went as deep and hurt just as much as mine or anybody’s. Feeling sorry for Dottie always seemed like an affront; that saved one the trouble; one could always tell oneself she didn’t need sympathy, and go straight back to pitying oneself. But now I looked at her averted face and realised some part of her misery, and how akin it was to mine, and felt a shame much more poignant than the one I had felt about my default over Billings.

  ‘Listen,’ I said at last. ‘First, let’s get Billings out of the way. All’s not lost. I’ll go myself and see him and explain—crawl if necessary. So long as he knows it wasn’t your fault, I’m sure he’ll come round.’ She didn’t move a muscle and I knew for sure then that she’d left Billings a long way behind in her thoughts, that she was now struggling away alone in some dark secret place, far from the shop and from me. She seemed to have curled into herself and the knuckles over her mouth were white as if her hand were holding back some pressure that was trying to burst out of her. ‘Dottie,’ I said, actually managing to forget myself completely for a moment and beginning to shake a little from the tension of pity and anxiety.

  She looked slowly up at me over her hand. Her eyes were desolate, and glassy with tears. ‘It’s all right,’ she said indistinctly. ‘I’m not angry any more about this afternoon. I know how you’ve been feeling. I know how terribly you miss Toby. I’m so sorry for you. Forgive me if I haven’t seemed very sympathetic. I had such dreams …’ She broke off and stared at me. Then in an altered voice she said, ‘But it’s not so bad for you. You had Toby. He’s still somewhere, your mark will always be on him, no other woman can ever wipe you out of his mind whatever happens. And you had him, you had him for a whole year, just when you needed him most. I don’t know why I should be feeling sorry for you. Maybe at bottom I’m just wildly jealous of you.’