The Tide of Life
Page 19
‘Oh, aye.’ Lucy looked shyly at the lanky figure of the young man who was leaning over her knees, his hand still under Emily’s. And Con gazed at her and said, ‘Do you…know something? You haven’t…coughed since you had the…the brandy.’
‘No; she hasn’t.’ Emily was nodding now towards Lucy. ‘You haven’t, our Lucy. Brandy or wine, or whatever, you’ll have to take it as a medicine. If it’s goin’ to do your cough good, I’ll get a bottle of it for you.’
They all turned their attention swiftly to the chair now where Larry was sitting doubled up, his elbows on his knees, his hands covering his face, and his words were splintered with laughter as they came through his spread fingers, saying, ‘Cheese at wholesale prices, cherry brandy as a cough mixture, and love all round. There’s never been a night like this, not in this room…not in this house…love all round.’
Slowly now his hands slipped from his face and he straightened up and, looking towards Emily, where she sat blinking at him from the couch, he said quietly, ‘There may be many things I’ll be sorry for in the future but I’ll never be sorry for the day I picked you up from Fellburn Market Square.’
For a moment they were all silent, until a log slipped off the iron basket and fell onto the hearth, when Emily who was feeling very hot and quite speechless at the moment because, as she said to herself, now what could anybody say to that, it was so nice, sprang from the couch and, dropping onto her knees, picked up the unburnt end of the log and flung it back into the heart of the fire. Then still on her knees, she looked back at them and said, ‘It must be nearly time. Will we go and stand outside?…No, not you, our Lucy; you can look through the kitchen window. Anyway, I forgot, only the first foot has to go out.’
Larry got to his feet now, then looked down on her and laughed as he said, ‘What odds? We’ll all go out, dark and fair.’ He doubled his fist and punched it towards Con. ‘Luck is what you make it, eh?’
‘Yes…Larry. Yes, luck is what…you make it.’ Con now held out his hand towards Lucy, and they went out of the room like two gay children. But in the hall Larry checked their laughter by pointing towards the stairs.
The library was situated under the spare bedrooms and when the door was closed the sounds from inside were muted by the thick walls, but the mistress’s bedroom was situated above the kitchen and back quarters. Moreover, the first landing led directly from the gallery and all sounds in the hall were drawn upwards to it, which was another reason why he didn’t open the front door but led the way quietly into the kitchen. Even there he cautioned silence, with an upward glance towards the ceiling. Then taking his farm coat from a rack near the kitchen door, he put it on, picked up a lantern from the dresser and lit the candle, and with a backward glance at Emily said, ‘Wrap up well, it’s biting.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m as hardy as a horse.’
She had given him no title whatsoever tonight, and she didn’t reckon she was forgetting herself, for everything seemed so natural and ordinary like, he most of all.
With a careless uplifting gesture of her hand she swung a grey woollen shawl down from a hook behind the door. It was her mistress’s Christmas gift, and the fact that she had hung it on the back of the door spoke of what value she put on it.
On Christmas morning her mistress said she had a gift for her and told her to open the bottom drawer of the tallboy and there she would find a shawl. ‘It’s cashmere,’ she had said. Well, cashmere or not, the moths had riddled most of it, but she didn’t find that out until unfolding it in the kitchen here. But now she put the shawl over her head and pulled the ends round her waist and tied them at the back. Then saying to Lucy, ‘Go on, and stand by the window and watch the lantern, we’ll just go to the arch,’ she followed Larry and Con out into the courtyard.
The night was black, and the cold was a damp cold, the kind that seeped through your clothes and chilled your skin. When she shivered audibly Larry said quietly, ‘You haven’t got enough clothes on, I told you to wrap up,’ and she answered as quietly back, ‘I’m all right.’ But she didn’t feel all right; her legs seemed wobbly, and she felt dizzy in the head, more so than when she had first drunk the second glass of wine. Eeh, was she tight?
No, of course she wasn’t; nobody could get tight on two glasses of treacly wine. Her da could down ten pints and still stand straight as a rock. He always said, don’t mix your drinks and your legs won’t cross.
Two minutes to go. Larry was holding his watch under the light of the lantern.
‘Will we hear the ships’ hooters all this way from Fellburn?’
‘Oh yes, it isn’t all that far as the crow flies; and if the wind’s in the right direction, and I think it is, you’ll hear the church bells an’ all.’
She stood between them, their arms touching hers. She felt strange, slightly unreal. She looked up into the sky but could see nothing but blackness. Where would she be this time next year? Only God knew that and He wouldn’t split. She shouldn’t joke when she was thinking about God. No, she didn’t think she’d take any more of that wine when she got inside; her mind had been playing tricks with her over the past hour or so, and she didn’t know what she would think next. Why, back there in the library she had thought about lifting her petticoats up and taking the watch off her shift and showing it to them. Would you believe it? Thinking a thing like that. And in the library an’ all. Now that was an amazing thing, wasn’t it, her sitting in the library of this house as if she were a lady …
‘There they go! There they go! Do you hear them?’
‘Aye, yes. By, they’re clear, all the hooters! Oh, I wish I was in Shields…’ She shouldn’t have said that, it sounded ungrateful somehow. She added hastily, ‘You can hear them clear there, that’s what I mean. I lived alongside the river an’ the ships’ hooters would blow you off your feet.’
‘Well, here we are, the beginning of a New Year, nineteen hundred and three.’
‘Yes, a New Year.’ She peered at him through the lantern light, and he looked steadily back at her; then she said, ‘You’ll have to go in first and say Happy New Year to Lucy, an’ then we’ll come in, me and Con, and it’ll be all right then, I mean about the luck.’
He was laughing as he said, ‘All right, we’ll keep your luck.’
He turned from them and, going to the back door, knocked gently on it, opened it, then went inside. She next saw him standing by the window looking down on Lucy, and when he bent and kissed her on the cheek she exclaimed in a whisper, ‘Now isn’t that nice of him! Aye, that is nice, kissing our Lucy a happy New Year.’
‘Emily.’
She swung round to Con, her face bright.
‘Yes, Con?’
‘A…happy…New…Year, Emily.’
‘And the same to you, Con.’ She groped for his hand, and he gripped it and shook it up and down as he said, ‘Oh, Emily…I’m glad you’re here and…and Lucy…It’s lovely with you here, Emily.’
‘Thanks, Con. Come on now. Come on.’ She pulled him at a run towards the back door and as her hand went out to it, it opened and Larry stood looking at her for a moment before saying solemnly, ‘A happy New Year, Emily.’
She stared back at him, the smile seeping from her face and not until he held out his hand to her did she answer him, and as solemnly, ‘An’ the same to you, sir.’ His title seemed to be called for in this present situation when the laughter for some unknown reason had died.
When he left hold of her hand she gave a slight start for it was as if he were throwing it back at her. Then turning quickly about, he said in an undertone, but with a trace of laughter in his voice now, ‘Come on, let jollification begin…’
They were standing before the library fire, with glasses in their hands, and all the glasses were touching, and all said one to the other, their heads nodding, ‘A happy New Year. A happy New Year.’ Then Emily was drinking the sticky wine again.
When the glasses were drained, Emily, like the mistress of the household migh
t have done, went to the table and, taking plates from it, began pressing food on to the others.
It was as she was about to sit down that she looked at Larry and asked, ‘Do…do you think the mistress might…might like a piece of cake and a glass of wine?’
He had a mouthful of food, and he chewed on it and swallowed before he said, ‘I doubt it, Emily; not when her door was barred the day. No’—he shook his head—‘I doubt it.’
Her head wasn’t as muzzy as all that, she now told herself, for she had noticed that he had said the day, like she did, not today, like the educated people did.
‘Would I try?’ she asked.
‘No, no; leave things as they are.’
She sat down with a heaped plate on her knee, but she did not begin to eat immediately. It did seem a shame that she was up there alone; yet, as he said, her door had been barred the day and that meant she was in one of her bad moods. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for her to bar the door at nights, but when she barred it during the day, it nearly always signified temper.
Emily had found the business of her mistress barring the door hard to get used to. You’d go with a tray or some such, then push at the handle expecting the door to open, and what happened? The tray bumped into the door and you nearly upset the lot. Once, when the door was barred, she had stood outside and listened expecting to hear some sound like a moan or her crying, or even the faint sound of her scratching the silk of the eiderdown with her forefinger. This was a habit of hers and the sound although slight was of the kind that could put your teeth on edge. But there had been no sound, none whatever, and she imagined her mistress sitting staring at her reflection in the big mirror on the dressing table against the side wall.
Aw well, she wasn’t going to let the thought of her mistress or anybody else mar the jollification of this particular night…or morning. Wagging her finger towards Con now, she said, ‘As soon as you’ve finished that plate you’re goin’ to start on your whistle. Do you hear me?’ and Con, almost choking, bounced his head at her, then muttered, ‘Yes, Emily. Yes…I’ll…get…on…me…whistle.’
And Con got on his whistle, and with no small skill he played the tunes native to the Tyne and district, some that both Emily and Lucy knew and others they had never heard before.
It was when Con changed to a tune that Emily knew but hadn’t heard for years that she cried at him, ‘Eeh! Me ma used to sing that one; it’s called “The Mother’s Lament”.’
She now nodded her head to the beat and began:
‘Oh, me canny lad, me canny lad,
Where are ye the day?
Yesterda’ ye were down the pit,
But the day, who can say?
Are ye in one of His many mansions,
With yer face washed, clean as snow?
Or are ye still lying broken, there down below?’
She stopped now and, her mouth wide and laughing, she said, ’Aye, it’s years since I heard that one.’
‘Go on. Go on, finish it.’ Larry leaned forward in his chair and nodding at her clapped his hands together gently and said again, ‘Go on…finish it.’
Her eyes were large, bright and twinkling; she hunched up her shoulders and laughed; then she began to sing again:
‘Oh me canny lad, me canny lad,
Me heart’s fair torn in two.
There’s another nine still left to me,
But there’ll ne’er be one like you.
For you came last, when I’d forgotten
That me body still could bear.
Now, me fifteen years of joy is buried
Away, away down there.’
When the song was ended she dropped her head half in shyness, half in pleasure, as they all clapped. But then her head jerked up as Larry fell back in the chair and began to laugh, but in such a way that she didn’t join in, for he wasn’t laughing like a happy man laughs or even a drunken one; she couldn’t put a name to the kind of laughter he was indulging in. Then he startled her and them all when he sprang up from the chair and almost dived to the table, and there filled the glasses so quickly that the wine spilled over the rims. Holding a glass in each hand now, his head back, he looked around the room and, as if he were addressing a company gathered about him, he swivelled on his heels as he cried, ‘Did you ever hear anything as natural as that in this room…eh, Colonel, eh? You had shares in the Beulah, hadn’t you? In fact she said you owned it at one time. But did you ever think to hear of a mother lamenting her canny lad who died behind a fall down there, and in your own particular domain, Colonel, and sung by a young lass, a wise young lass?’
At this he stopped in his turning, came round the couch, handed one of the glasses to Lucy, then bowing towards Emily, repeated again, ‘To a wise young lass.’
Emily’s expression had been slightly apprehensive during his performance but now she giggled a little as she took the glass from his hand, then said, ‘I shouldn’t you know, I shouldn’t, I’ve had enough. I’m dizzy, I think I’m drunk.’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Oh yes, it’s lovely, lovely an’ treacly.’
He was laughing again, and as he went back to the table he muttered, ‘Lovely and treacly. Oh, Colonel, I can hear you turning in your grave. The last bottles of your best liqueur being dubbed lovely and treacly. But let me tell you, Colonel, never before has it been drunk with such enjoyment…What? You would rather see it go down the sink? Yes, yes, you old swine, I know you would.’
Looking over her shoulder at him, Emily took in the gist of part of what he was saying and she laughed to herself as she thought, He’s goin’ at the colonel, he mustn’t have liked him.
But now her attention was brought back to Con for he had begun to play a jig. Her feet tapping in and out from under her skirt, she looked at Lucy; then, as if a message had passed between them, they put down their glasses, sprang up and, facing each other, they both held up their skirts and began to dance to the tune of ‘The Devil among the Tailors’ while Larry stood by Con’s side clapping in step.
With no thought in her mind now of keeping her place, Emily thrust out her hand and caught at Larry’s and tugged him, without much resistance on his part, onto the hearthrug to face her. And he went into the dance with an agility that matched her own, but with a knowledge of the steps that far outdid hers and Lucy’s.
When at last they stopped for want of breath, Lucy fell against him, and they were all encircled in gasping mirth for a moment, before Emily, extricating herself from the arm that held her, flopped onto the couch, thrust her feet out before her, leant her head back into the velvet padded wing, and cried, ‘Never afore in me life have I enjoyed meself like that…Eeh! That was marvellous. Wasn’t it, Lucy?’
Lucy began to cough and Emily chastised her, crying, ‘Now don’t start, ’cos you haven’t done it all night; you’re just out of puff, that’s all,’
Then of a sudden they were all brought to a stiff stillness by the sound of a crash, a jingling crash; it was in the distance, yet clear.
The next moment Larry was making for the door, swaying slightly as he went, and the others were no more steady as they followed him.
In the middle of the hall he stopped and looked upwards, then around him. The hall lamp showed that everything here was in place, no picture had dropped, the row of assorted pewter jugs standing on the brass-bound oak chest were still in their ordered line.
Again he looked upwards before making for the kitchen.
Emily had left the lamp lit in the middle of the table in the centre of the kitchen but the wick had gutted so that now its light was flickering. But it was still bright enough to show her the chaos in front of the delf rack. The top shelf had come away and all the dishes with it, and in their falling had crashed onto those on top of the cupboard that supported the racks.
Moving cautiously among the broken crockery, Larry looked up to where the shelf had been and muttered to himself, ‘How in the name of God could that have happened!’
Larry put his hand up and felt the pegs at each side of the delf rack. They were firm. The only way the shelf could have fallen was if it had been tipped from one end.
As he stood pondering his head slowly tilted back and he looked at the hole in the wall to the side of the delf rack through which at one time had passed the pipe of a speaking tube. When the room above the kitchen had been the colonel’s bedroom he’d had the tube put in. He had chosen to sleep in this particular room because of the window to the side which provided a clear view over the hills.
When he himself had first come into the house, the speaking tube was still in use, until one day towards the end of the second year of their marriage she had, in a fit of rage, torn the tube from the socket, and all because he hadn’t answered her when she spoke to him. She had known he was in the kitchen and she had stormed down and gone for him. The tube had never been replaced. And now he felt he knew the reason. With her ear to the hole in the floor she could hear more uninhibited talk than she ever would through the speaking tube, which in itself hadn’t been built into the wall, but merely attached to a hook at mouth level, then let drop through a hole in the floor.
But now what did she use it for? She couldn’t put her ear to it any longer, but she could lean over and poke her stick down it. The devil! The she devil!