The Tide of Life

by Catherine Cookson

  He now turned and dropped their parcels onto the table; then going to Lucy, he put out his hand and his fingers traced the bonnet around her face. Then moving his long arm, he turned it in Emily’s direction and caressed the curling fronds of the feather on the hat. Now he lifted his eyes and looked at Larry standing behind them, and he said, ‘You’ve bought…them these, Larry? Oh, that…was nice of you. And don’t they…look lovely?’ As his eyes came to rest again on Emily, saying now, ‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ her face crumpled. She turned her head quickly and glanced over her shoulder, and Larry said, on a sound that held both amusement and bitterness, ‘What did I tell you?’

  It was too much. Almost staggering to the table, she dragged out a chair, dropped onto it and buried her face in her folded arms, and cried as she had wanted to cry for weeks now. She cried for Sep; she cried for the loss of the house in Pilot Place, the house that she would always think of as lovely; she cried because Lucy had the disease; and she cried for herself because she was ignorant and didn’t know how to choose clothes.

  They stood about her, Lucy close to her, her thin hands gripping her arm, and Con on the other side, with Larry behind her. They, too, had their hands on her. Con was stroking her shoulder, and Larry touching her hair, but so tentatively she never felt his hand at all. But she listened to his voice talking quietly, saying, ‘There now. It’s over. Come on. It’s nearly the end of the day, and what a day all round. But there’ll come another…Never say die.’

  She raised her head and straightened her shoulders, gulped in her throat, then rubbed her hand over her wet face. It was funny; she wanted to laugh now, someone had said to her, ‘Never say die.’ Miles from Shields and the place where she imagined the saying had been born through adversity, someone had said to her, ‘Never say die.’ Huh! It was funny. Life was funny.

  Never say die.

  Three

  It was on the following Sunday, and again her half-day, when Emily decided to wear her new frock. There was no reason, she told herself, why she should do so, because she wasn’t going anywhere special, just for a walk. And not in the direction of the village either. She had said to Lucy earlier they would take a tramp over those hills they could see from their bedroom window; they looked quite near and she often wondered what lay beyond them. Perhaps they’d be able to see Chester-le-Street from there; and Durham. No not Durham, that was too far away. But some day she’d go to Durham, and to Newcastle, and Sunderland, and all those places. Yes, she would some day.

  As she bent her knees to look at herself once more in the mirror she admonished herself for being in ‘one of those moods’. And it wasn’t new; the mood had come and gone all the week; in fact, ever since she had bought the clothes. One minute she was up in the air full of defiance and telling herself what she could do, and what she was going to do, the next minute she was in the depths reminding herself that she was nothing or nobody, and she’d better be careful and not open her mouth wide and speak out of turn; she was forgetting herself, and in her position she couldn’t really afford to, no matter how she felt, because after all jobs didn’t grow on trees.

  So, as they were only going over the hills, why did she want to put her new frock on? It would only be covered up by her old coat. One thing was sure, she’d never wear that coat again…or the hat. That hat! Never!

  Oh, get on with it. She supposed she was in a temper because he had told them to take their half-day today because he couldn’t take them into the town tomorrow, and he hadn’t said why. She straightened up so abruptly that she almost overbalanced Lucy.

  As Lucy watched her now pulling off her workaday clothes and getting into her bonny frock she asked, ‘Do you want to walk over them hills, Emily? Can’t we just stay around the yard and the farm?’

  ‘Stay around the yard an’ the farm!’ Emily almost barked at her. ‘Our one free time in the week and you say stay around the yard! I’m sick of looking at that yard. That’s all I see for nearly seven days a week; the inside of this house, that yard, and the farm. Do you know we never see a single soul from one week’s end to the other but them about here, except perhaps that Mrs Rowan, and then she just flits in and flits out. By!’—she let out a long-drawn sigh—‘I never thought I’d miss Shields but I’d give my eye teeth to be back there again, wouldn’t you?’

  They looked at each other, and Lucy nodded, saying, ‘Aye, I would, Emily. I’m not taken with the country.’

  Again Emily was barking, ‘Well, you should be! Because it’s good for your cough. That’s another thing I want to have out with you: what are you eating to make you sick? You had nothin’ that I saw yesterday to make you sick.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the fat in the mutton stew.’

  ‘I cut nearly all the fat off…Anyway, you’re not eating as you should.’

  ‘I never feel hungry, Emily.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you this, I bet you do this afternoon when we get back from our walk ’cos I’m goin’ to walk you off your legs, and there’s nothing better for giving people an appetite than walkin’. So get your coat and hat on and put on an extra pair of bloomers. An’ that scarf round your neck. An’ be quick about it, because I can’t wait to get out of here.’

  Lucy didn’t do as she was bidden straight away but stared at her beloved sister before she complained, ‘What’s the matter with you, our Emily? You’re always going for me, you never used to be like this.’

  Of a sudden Emily flopped down on the side of the bed and she stared at Lucy for a full minute before she said, ‘I don’t know either what’s come over me. I thought about it last night, and I’ve come to the conclusion I’m just now feeling the shock of Sep going. They say that you don’t feel the shock of things happenin’ like that until long after. Then this house, one thing happenin’ on top of another. They’ve never stopped since we came here, have they? And look at this morning when I answered him back. Eeh!’—she shook her head at herself—‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of speaking to Sep like that, would I?’

  ‘No, Emily.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what’s come over me. Oh, come on, let’s get out of this…’

  Some minutes later they left the house and grounds and walked along the road until they came to a stile. Having crossed this, they went over an open space, entered a copse, and when they came out at the other side, there before them was a broken-down bridge with a burn running past it. They stood and looked at the water until Lucy shivered, and Emily said, ‘Come on, let’s get moving. Look, yonder’s the first of the hills we can see from our bedroom window.’

  Ten minutes later when they reached the top of the hill, Lucy’s scarf was no longer around her neck, nor was Emily’s coat buttoned up.

  ‘By! that was a slope, wasn’t it?’ They looked back over the way they had come down the side of the hill and across the field to the broken-down bridge; then they turned and looked ahead to where the land running downhill was covered in parts with dead rust-coloured bracken.

  They stood panting and gaping, for they couldn’t see any town or habitation on any side of them, only another rise in front of them, and this was across a widish valley.

  ‘Well, I never! I thought we’d see the town from here.’ Emily wiped the sweat from her face.

  ‘It’s bare, isn’t it, Emily? No houses, nothin’, nothin’ to see anywhere.’

  ‘You’ve missed something, our Lucy. Look over there, top of the next hill, that’s a cottage.’

  ‘Aye, so it is. Do you think we’d get a drink of water if we asked? I’m as dry as a fish.’

  ‘I see no harm in tryin’. Perhaps if there’s a cow, they’d give us a sup milk.’ She pushed Lucy, and Lucy pushed back at her, and now they laughed together as they ran stumbling between the bracken down the hill to the valley below.

  Again the distance was deceptive for it took them a good five minutes after crossing the valley to breast the slope to the cottage. And then their approach to it became slow because, full of disappointment, they could se
e from a distance that it was a deserted and tumbledown place. A drystone wall surrounded it, but it was almost obliterated by grass and bracken, and the wooden gate that had once been set in the wall was now lying buried in grass to the side of it.

  ‘Eeh! It’s empty…But isn’t it tiny, small?’

  ‘Yes’—Emily laughed—‘like a doll’s house compared with that down there.’

  There was a distance of more than fifty feet from the gate to the cottage door and Lucy stopped halfway, saying, ‘Eeh! Our Emily, you’re not goin’ in, are you?’

  Emily had her foot on the slate step and she turned her head and laughed as she said, ‘No harm in havin’ a look. But I bet it’s locked.’

  She put out her hand towards the latch of the door and noted as she did so that it was a sturdy door, likely made to match the stone in strength when it was first built, and when she felt her fingers lifting the latch and the door swinging inwards she jumped back off the step and giggled as she looked over her shoulder at Lucy, who had now retreated to the gateless aperture in the wall, crying, ‘Eeh! Don’t go in, our Emily.’

  But Emily went on. Tentatively now, she placed her foot over the threshold and found she was standing in a little room, little compared to those she had become used to working in of late, but she gauged it was about the size of the kitchen in Pilot Place. There was no furniture in the room, but there was a stone fireplace with a rusty iron oven to the side of it. She went back to the door now, calling and beckoning to Lucy, ‘Come on, come on! It’s canny. Come an’ see.’

  When Lucy also tentatively put her foot over the threshold she stood still for a moment looking round in the dimness before smiling at Emily and nodding as if to confirm her statement.

  ‘There’s another room through there.’

  They now went through into what was the bedroom and there, on the floor in the corner, was a large wooden plank bed with an old flock mattress still on it.

  ‘It’s old-fashioned, isn’t it, Emily?’

  ‘Aye, it is that. I bet that was like bricks to sleep on.’ She bent down and pressed the mattress against the boards with her hand. Then looking at the little window at the foot of the bed, she said, ‘They could have let more light in.’

  In the kitchen again, she went towards a door opposite that by which they had entered, and opening it, she exclaimed, ‘Oh look! It’s a scullery,’ then added, ‘of sorts. It’s got no water in. This must lead out on to the back.’ She now opened the door facing her; then, turning to Lucy, she cried, ‘Come an’ see. It’s a little yard with cattle shippons.’

  She was about to step down into the yard when she noticed something, and pointing, she said to Lucy, ‘Look, the grass is trampled flat from that gate there; somebody comes here.’

  ‘Eeh! We’d better get away then.’

  ‘What for? It’s empty. It’s likely a tramp’s hide. You know, they leave messages on gates and things tellin’ other tramps if the woman is good for a penny or just bread, because me ma used to say many a time she’s given beggars bread and she’s seen it thrown in the back lane…Come on.’

  They took a few steps along the side of the stone wall and entered the first shippon. This one had definitely been meant for a horse, for it had a manger stuck to the wall. But the second had evidently been for the cows, but only two at most. The third building must have been a storeroom, and at one time held a boiler, for part of an old iron flue still protruded through the wall. Pointing to it, she said, ‘They must have had pigs and boiled the stuff in here.’

  ‘Like Abbie does?’

  ‘Yes. But Abbie’s boiler house is a sight different from this.’

  ‘Oh yes. Aye, it is. I wouldn’t fancy livin’ up here, Emily.’

  ‘No, nor me. But I wouldn’t mind the cottage if it was in a village…but’—they both looked at each other quickly as Emily finished—‘not that one down there. They’re a right sticky lot, them down in that village. Even Abbie says some of them wouldn’t give you daylight if they could shut it out. And he should know, seeing as Mr Atkins who keeps the inn is his cousin…Well, come on; we’d better be gettin’ back. But I must close the doors and leave the place as we found it…’

  Some time later they were standing once again on the top of the hill looking back over the way they had come from the cottage, and they were about to turn and resume their journey when Lucy, pointing to the right of her, said, ‘Look, there’s a man goin’ towards that place.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’ll see him in a minute, the bracken’s hidin’ him now. Yes, there he is!’

  Emily screwed up her eyes and concentrated her gaze on the figure in the distance below them. Something about his walk was familiar. But long before he had neared the cottage and turned off to the right and made his way by the side of the stone wall and round towards the back she knew who it was. That place, that cottage, was the but an’ ben Abbie had talked about; it must have been there that Mr Birch had lived, the place where he had come from to work on the farm. She couldn’t believe it. It was such a lowly place…But one thing now she could understand, and that was the villagers’ attitude towards him; of course he could be classed as an upstart because the jump from that two-bedroomed little place with its shambling rotting shippons to Croft Dene House was too enormous to imagine.

  Although they were supposed to have a half-day off a week it appeared to Emily that as soon as they should come back to the house he expected them to take up their duties again, and she herself had done this without questioning, until today. Returning from their walk, she passed immediately through the kitchen and was making for the back stairs just as Con entered the hall from the main stairway. He was carrying a tea tray and he stopped and smiled at them, saying, ‘You got…back then?’

  ‘Yes, Con.’

  ‘I’ve…I’ve made…some tea.’

  ‘We don’t want any yet; we’ll be down presently, Con.’

  ‘All right…Emily…Rona’s in a bad temper…She’s asking for Larry, but Larry…went out. I told her he said he had to go over to…to Wrekenton.’

  Wrekenton? She repeated the word to herself while her eyebrows moved slightly upwards. When she had seen him he was going in the opposite direction to Wrekenton.

  ‘She’s upset. Her…her bed…is dirty, but she wouldn’t let me…change it. I could have…changed the sheets, couldn’t I?’

  ‘She’s dirtied the bed?’

  ‘Yes, Emily.’

  She sighed. She didn’t like her mistress, in fact she disliked her intensely, but she told herself she wouldn’t let a mangy dog lie in a dirty bed if she could help it, and so with a sigh she whipped off her coat and hat and thrusting them into Lucy’s arms, said, ‘Bring me down an apron, not one of me good ones, a brown holland one.’

  She now followed Con back into the kitchen, saying, ‘I’ll have that cup of tea first,’ and he answered brightly, ‘Yes. Yes, Emily, I’ll get it.’

  As she stood drinking the tea she said, more to herself than to him, ‘She should have a nurse; that’s what she should have.’

  ‘She did…Emily…three. But they…all left. She doesn’t like…like nurses.’

  Was there anybody she did like?

  With a feeling now of exasperation, Emily put the unfinished cup of tea down on the table and went hastily from the room, across the hall and up the main staircase. She tapped once on her mistress’s door, and not waiting for the command to enter she went in.

  The two lamps were already lit, one at each side of the bed—she was very extravagant with oil. The room was very hot, the fire was blazing high—it was a duty shared between Lucy and Con to see that this was always kept built up—and now the heat was emphasising the smell of human excrement.

  Rona Birch had been leaning forward in the bed, her arms stretched towards her useless knees. Emily took it to be a sign of desperation and she said quietly, ‘I’ll change your sheets, madam.’

  Rona Birch’s head slowly turned towards her and when
she took in Emily’s overall appearance, which seemed to be transformed by the elegance yet simplicity of the pink woollen dress, her upper body shot backwards and the jerk must have been painful, for she gasped and pressed her hand tightly between her breasts for a moment before she demanded, ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘The dress, madam?’ Emily touched one of the two buttons at her waist, then said, ‘I bought it, madam.’

  ‘You bought that!’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  They stared at each other before Emily turned away and went into the linen room.

  As she returned with two sheets and an under blanket over one arm, and towels and a nightdress over the other, there was another tap on the door, and Lucy came in, still in her outdoor things, and silently she handed the apron to Emily, who first unbuttoned the cuffs of her dress and rolled up the sleeves as far as they would go, then put on the apron.

  Now the mistress’s eyes were on Lucy. Her hand moved up and down a number of times before she said, ‘Those aren’t her usual clothes, I suppose you bought those too?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ With a lift of her hand Emily now flung back the top coverlet, then the blankets, and her nose wrinkled with distaste when she came to the sheets. Turning now to Lucy who was still in the room, she said, ‘Take your things off and bring me some hot water, quick now!’

  ‘Where did you get the money to buy such clothes?’ Rona Birch was lying back, her voice quiet as if she were relaxed.

  ‘I had money saved up.’

  The answer acted like an injection, for Rona Birch was now shouting, ‘Who do you think you’re talking to, girl! You never in your life would have enough money to buy a dress like you’re wearing now, nor that outfit you’ve decked your sister in. Who gave you the money?’ Once again she was sitting upright.