The Tide of Life

by Catherine Cookson

  It was as her master drew the trap to a stop that he looked towards one of the stables and called out, ‘Abbie!’

  Both she and Lucy had alighted from the trap before the door of one of the stables opened and she saw, standing there, an old man with a white stubble of beard around his chin and up his cheeks. She half smiled to herself at the sight of him, thinking that he looked more like a sailor than a farm worker.

  Slowly he walked towards the horse’s head, whilst keeping his eyes on her and Lucy, until her master, addressing him, said, ‘Well now, what about “Corn in Egypt”, what did I answer you to that? “Seek and ye shall find”, I said, and I found.’

  She watched the two men looking at each other. They could have been father and son, but there was no liking in their glances. And they were quoting the Bible. Funny, but she always seemed to land among people who quoted the Bible…Sep hadn’t quoted the Bible. Oh Sep. Poor Sep. If only she was with Sep …

  ‘Come along, this way.’

  At the sharp command she picked up the hamper, beckoned Lucy with a lift of her chin, then followed Mr Birch across the farmyard, through the arch, across the paved court and to a door almost opposite the arch, and so into the kitchen of the house.

  Her first impression of it was its size. It seemed half as big again as the whole of the ground floor in Pilot Place. She took in quickly a bread oven to the side of a big open fire, but what looked odd to her was the absence of a fender before the fire. It was fronted only by a long raised stone slab. The whole of the floor too was made up of stone slabs. The walls were made of stone, not slabs but rough-faced stone like the outside of the house.

  ‘Put your things down.’ He was pointing to the hamper that she was still gripping in both hands. He now took off his hat and his long coat, which he laid over his arm, then saying, ‘I won’t be a minute, sit yourselves down,’ he made towards a door at the far end of the room. But before he reached it it opened, and there entered the kitchen a tall young man. Or was he a boy?

  In the dimness at the far end of the room Emily couldn’t quite make out how old he might be. But they were both now coming towards her again, her master saying, ‘This is my brother-in-law, Mr Conrad Fullwell. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’ He half smiled, then looked at the young man, adding, ‘Con works both inside and outside the house. He’s a very handy young fellow, is Con. Aren’t you, Con?’

  ‘Yes…yes, Larry, I…I can turn me hand to…to most things.’

  Both Emily and Lucy were staring at the boy now, because that’s all he looked, for all his tallness, a mere boy. His face was long and pale, his eyes large, his nose straight. But his mouth seemed too small for his overall features, and the words that issued from it came as if they were being spoken by a small child. Yet they sounded sensible.

  ‘Hello…what’s…your name?’

  ‘Emily, sir. And this is my sister Lucy.’

  Now the young fellow laughed and his face became bright as if he were deriving great pleasure from something, and he turned to his brother-in-law, saying, ‘She called…me sir. That’s funny, Larry…isn’t it? She called…me sir. Chrissey never called…me sir, did she? Just Con.’ He now turned his head towards Emily again and ended, ‘Everybody…calls me Con.’

  Emily was about to smile in return but she reminded herself not to be too free. Anyway, this was the young fellow the blacksmith was talking about who did the pawing with his hands. Well, she’d call him more than Con if he started any of that jiggery-pokery with her…or Lucy.

  He was looking at Mr Birch again now, saying, ‘I took Rona up…a cup of tea. She wanted to know…what about supper. I…I told her I had been over to Chrissey’s and asked her if she’d…she’d come back. But she wouldn’t. She said they were going…to move. Her da was seeing about a job…’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Mr Birch’s voice was curt now. ‘We’ll talk about that later. Be a good fellow now and give the girls a cup of tea. I’ll be back shortly.’ And with this he turned once more and went from the kitchen.

  Left alone now with the young boy, as she already thought of him, she watched him going busily between the long narrow wooden table that ran down the middle of the room and the delf rack that flanked the wall opposite the fireplace, bringing from it cups and saucers and milk and sugar; then scurrying to the fireplace and taking up from the hob the big brown teapot. He might talk slow but his movements were quick, bustling, as if he were in a great hurry.

  The tea in the pot must have been boiling for it spluttered out of the spout when he poured it into the cups.

  He pushed the cups to the edge of the table in front of where they were sitting, then handed them the sugar basin, saying, ‘Put as many in…as you want. Some people…like it sweet. Chrissey and…and Betty used to take five…spoonfuls each.’

  ‘Oh!’ She nodded at him, then said, ‘Thanks, I’ll take two, and Lucy the same.’

  After spooning the sugar into the cups they sipped at the tea, but with some embarrassment, for the young fellow stood with his hip against the side of the table watching them, but not speaking now, just staring at them.

  In the silence she thought she heard voices coming from overhead, raised voices, but decided they couldn’t be angry because they ended on a laugh. Then a minute or so later the kitchen door opened and her master entered once more and, looking directly at Con, he said, ‘Go and give Abbie a hand. I’ll be with you shortly, but first I must get’—he paused—‘Emily settled and show her the ropes.’

  ‘Yes, Larry. Yes, I’ll go…and help Abbie.’

  As obedient as a well-trained child, the tall young fellow left the room, and Larry Birch turned to Emily, who had risen to her feet, and Lucy too, and said with some hesitation, ‘My…my brother-in-law…well, he might seem a little strange to you at first, he’s somewhat retarded in his speech, you’ve likely noticed, but he’s quite all right otherwise. You understand?’

  That had yet to be proved, but she said, ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

  ‘Well now, I think I’d better show you round. This, of course, as you’ve gathered, is the kitchen. Through here is the cold store, meat store and larder.’ He led her through a doorless aperture in the stonework and into a small corridor from which opened three rooms. He went into the first one, saying, ‘This is the larder. Most of the dry goods are kept in here; flour, tea, sugar, the like. In this one’—he came out of the larder into the corridor again and pointed—‘This is where we keep the milk and cheese and butter and such. For some reason I’ve never found out it seems to be the coolest spot in the house. Some say there’s a well below or a stream runs underneath. But the floor looks solid enough and I’ve never bothered to investigate.’ He smiled thinly; then pointing to the third room, he said, ‘This is the meat store.’

  She stood for a moment looking into the small room and at the hams hanging by hooks from the ceiling, and the two halves of a pig suspended from the wall on one side, and the carcass of a sheep at the other. On a marble slab at the end of the room lay a long cut of bacon from the back to the streaky, and as she noted the slices of gammon lying near a thin-bladed knife she said to herself, Well, it’ll be a good meat house anyway.

  He was leading the way through the kitchen again and through a door and into a hall. And now she actually gaped. Here again everything was stone, but it was the size of the place that astounded her.

  To her eyes it looked very bare. There were rugs on the stone floor, but they seemed thin to her feet and their colours appeared dull in the fading light. The windows on either side of the front door looked enormous from the inside too, and the door itself looked jet black. Right opposite the door was the staircase, but halfway up it she saw that it divided, one part branching to the right, the other to the left.

  Her eyes were drawn back to the hall and to her master, saying as he opened a door, ‘This is the drawing room.’

  Slowly she followed him into the room, and her breath seemed to catch in her throat. It was a
beautiful room. She had never seen anything like it. The wooden furniture was a gold colour, mostly upholstered in blue. And this room had a wooden floor, covered by a grey carpet, and she could feel the thickness of it through her boots. There were long windows in this room too and they looked out onto the side of the house and a lawn with a sundial in the middle of it. One thing about the room appeared strange to her. The fireplace hadn’t had a fire in it for some time for there was not a sign of soot at the back of the grate, it had been brushed clean.

  They were in the hall again and he was opening another door. Here there wasn’t so much colour, it was rather a dark dull room. ‘This is the library,’ he said. There was a desk at the far end of the room and it was strewn with papers, but she noted that this room was used, for there was dead ash in the fireplace. He had called it the library but there weren’t all that many books in it. She had thought a library would be all books but the walls were mostly covered with pictures, and nearly all of horses.

  They were crossing the hall now back towards the kitchen again and he led the way through a door to the side of the staircase and into a dining room. This, too, was a lovely room. It also had a wooden floor and a thick carpet on it. The table was long and shining and there were ten chairs around it, four single ones at each side and a big armchair at the top and bottom ends. There was silver on the sideboard and china in the two glass cases at each end of the room.

  One thing was already very evident to her. Whoever had worked here before had kept the place spotless; all the furniture had been polished regularly. Well, it would be up to her to keep it like that, wouldn’t it? And that was something Lucy could help with.

  ‘That’s the butler’s pantry.’ He pushed open a door to disclose a room that went off the hall between the dining room and the kitchen door in which the walls were mostly lined with racks to hold bottles, and at the far end was a wooden sink with a bench attached. He smiled wryly now as he said, ‘Only we no longer have a butler.’ Then turning and pointing to the end of a short dim passage, he said casually, ‘The back stairs go off there, but they only come out on the first landing.’

  He next led them back into the hall and up the main staircase, and she saw that both sets of stairs opened onto a long gallery with an ornamental balustrade around it, the same as skirted the stairs, part of it extending into a wide landing. Before going onto the landing, however, he stopped and, his voice low, he said, ‘As I’ve already told you my wife is an invalid. It will be part of your duty to see to her. You know that?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Oh yes, sir.’

  He paused, his mouth half open as if he were about to explain further, then said, ‘Come along then.’

  They crossed the landing and they paused, as he paused, outside the second door on the right. Then with a quick movement he pushed open the door, went into the room and, turning to them, said briskly, ‘Come, come.’ And they both entered and stood within the doorway and looked towards the bed and the woman sitting in it.

  The bedhead was against the same wall as the door, and when the door was opened it almost touched the side of the bed. This position of the bed immediately struck Emily as strange for the room was large and there was space to spare. She would have thought that the invalid would have wanted to be near the windows so she could look out.

  She was held now almost as if she were in a trance, or dreaming, by the two eyes that were fixed on her. They were large eyes, but pale; grey, she supposed they were, yet they seemed colourless. But Emily saw immediately there was no difficulty in recognising that the boy downstairs was the brother of her new mistress because their faces were almost identical, except that the woman’s face was much older. In a way, she could be his mother, not his sister; she had the same straight nose, the small mouth, and the long, pale face; only her face was much paler than the boy’s. She noticed, too, that her arms were long, her hands also.

  ‘This is Emily…Emily Kennedy and her sister, Lucy.’ Larry Birch was standing at the far side of the bed, his face looking stiff, and it was matched by his voice as he went on to explain, and as if she weren’t there, ‘She says she’s a good cook and used to running a house; also she can attend an—’ he swallowed slightly before finishing, ‘invalid.’

  ‘How old are you?’ The voice in its thinness matched the face; it was also slightly nasal. It was as if the words had come down the nostrils and not through the lips.

  ‘Sixteen, missis.’

  ‘You will address me as madam.’

  ‘Yes…madam.’

  ‘And she?’ The hand didn’t lift from the coverlet but the index finger was pointing at Lucy. ‘What use is she to be put to? She looks puny.’

  ‘She’ll help me in light work. I’m…I’m not expectin’ any wage for her…madam.’

  As Emily said the word her lower lip trembled just the slightest. She had thought Mrs McGillby to be difficult, but this one, she saw, was going to be worse. But her judgement was then sent topsy-turvy when the woman in the bed smiled and said quite nicely, ‘Well now, we know where we stand, don’t we? But the future will prove the reference my husband has given you.’ She glanced towards her husband, who was looking at her, his expression still stiff; then turning her attention to Emily again, she said, ‘We have supper at six; I have my breakfast at nine o’clock and my dinner at two. There are certain things I require doing for me and certain things I don’t require being done for me, but of these my husband will inform you.’

  She stopped speaking but continued to stare at them now, and Larry Birch, coming round the bed, said in the same brusque way in which he had ushered them into the room, ‘Come, I’ll show you where you sleep.’

  Out on the landing they moved some way from the door before he stopped and, turning to her said, ‘My wife suffers a great deal. It…it is her spine; she can’t walk at all. There are times when she may prove a little difficult; you’ll have to show patience.’ He now went before them to the far end of the landing and, pushing open a door to disclose another large bedroom, he said, ‘This is my room. The others on the landing are guest rooms.’

  He continued along a short passage before mounting another flight of stairs; steeper these and narrower, more like those in Pilot Place, Emily thought. But the attic room he showed them into was larger than the front room in Pilot Place, and comfortable. It held a double bed and had woollen rugs on the floor; also there was a real wardrobe standing in the corner, besides a chest of drawers and two chairs, one a basket rocker.

  When he said, ‘I hope you’ll find it comfortable,’ she turned to him and smiled, saying, ‘Oh yes, sir. Yes, sir. It looks lovely. Doesn’t it, Lucy?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’ Lucy was gazing round the room in admiration.

  ‘Well then—’ He was smiling now as he said, ‘Go down and get your hamper and when you’ve changed make us something for supper. It doesn’t matter what it is tonight, as long as it’s something hot; my wife is partial to savouries.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ll do that right away. You stay here, Lucy.’ She almost ran past him now onto the landing and down the stairs.

  Lucy, standing in the middle of the room, began to cough, and he turned from the door and looked at her and asked, ‘Does that cough hurt you?’ and she answered, ‘No, sir. No, sir. Well, not much.’

  He stared at her for a moment longer before going out of the room, but at the top of the steep stairs he paused and with his first finger and thumb he pressed tight down on his eyeballs as if to relieve some kind of strain; then letting out a breath that was an audible hiss, he went slowly down the stairs and towards his wife’s room.

  PART TWO

  THE MASTER

  One

  It took Emily a week to get into the swing of things and each day she learnt something fresh from the minute she rose in the morning until she dropped into bed at night. One thing she learned quickly; there wouldn’t be much time for either her or Lucy to enjoy their attic bedroom. Six to six, he had said; it was more like six to eight or
nine, or, as last night, nearly ten. But that didn’t matter; they had a roof over their heads, she was earning money, and there was plenty to eat. Oh aye; you couldn’t fault the table, and she had the best of everything to cook with.

  It would, she decided, be a wonderful job, she would feel she had fallen on her feet if it weren’t just for one or two things, the main one being she didn’t think she would ever come to like her mistress. Not that she hadn’t been civil to her; this morning she had even thanked her when she had combed her hair. But that was one of the snags; every morning she seemed to find more things for her to do. The first morning she went to attend her she had carried up a can of hot water, which she poured into the dish and placed on the side table, and her mistress had washed herself. By the time she had emptied the slops, made the bed, under and around her, which was a difficult job, and tidied the room a good half-hour was gone. But the second morning, it was nearly an hour before she could get downstairs because on that morning her mistress said that she must be washed down for the doctor was coming; yet the following morning, when no doctor was expected, she still demanded to be washed all over. And that arrangement had gone on for the rest of the week. Then this morning she had asked her to comb her hair again, and it was well over an hour before she could leave her.

  But one good thing was, once the morning session in the bedroom was over, Con then did most of the running up and downstairs during the day.

  It was strange but she found she liked Con. Although he would stand staring at her at times with that odd smile on his face, she wasn’t afraid of him; and she didn’t think she would be even if he put his hand on her and, as the blacksmith said, got up to his patting games, because she could soon put a stop to that. She had discovered she just had to speak to him sharply and he would obey her. Moreover, he liked Lucy, and she him; they were like two children together. Lucy had talked more to him than to anyone ever before, even herself. Last night they had sat here in the kitchen cleaning the silver, he putting the polish on and Lucy rubbing it off, and she had been amazed at the chatting and mingled laughter that went on between them. Already, too, Lucy seemed to be putting on weight.