The Night Following Page 10

  Because what they don’t grasp, all these people who troop through this place asking how I am-is how on earth should I know, since you’re not telling me anymore?

  Arthur

  PS Egg sandwiches do NOT freeze. Or they do but they’re not egg sandwiches when they come out again. They mashed up all right though. I managed to eat them.

  THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK

  1932

  Chapter 6: The Ashworths at Bank Street

  Evelyn took her coat off quietly and paused in the passage outside the kitchen. She could hear Stan’s complaining voice clearly and it was she, as she fully expected, who was the subject of his complaint.

  “She’s switched off. Half the time she don’t even know when I’ve come in the room,” he said. His mother said something Evelyn couldn’t hear.

  “And she’s that bad-tempered,” he went on. “Told me she didn’t care for my friends and I wasn’t to go to any more meetings.”

  Stan’s mother gave a short snort.“Hasn’t wasted her time, has she? Six weeks wed and laying down the law. I never liked them Leighs.You have to stand up to her, Stan.”

  “I did! I says to her I’m not having that, I’ll do what I like when I like with who I like. I says to her, what’s the ruddy point of sticking round here, anyway? I says, you’re as switched off as your ruddy lightbulbs, you. I told her.”

  Evelyn heard a sharp laugh from her mother-in-law. “Fact is, Stan, you’re too soft. Aye, and you’re a daft beggar an’ all. You let her lead you on, didn’t yer? Don’t tell me that baby’s an accident, she’s made a fool out of you. Got you just where she wanted you, up the ruddy aisle. You’ve only yourself to blame, Stanley Ashworth.”

  Evelyn set down her parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, her eyes stinging with tears. She smoothed her hands over her stomach and tried to breathe evenly. She wouldn’t raise her voice in this house, she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. But she couldn’t just walk in now and cook Stan’s tea as if nothing had happened. His mother had probably given him his tea, anyway. She always did if Evelyn’s shift hours meant Evelyn didn’t get back until after him. A man’s tea should be on the table as soon as he got home, according to Mrs. Ashworth. The same rule didn’t apply to her tea, of course, so once Stan was off for the evening and Mrs. Ashworth was listening to the wireless, Evelyn would get herself something to eat alone, a cheese and pickle sandwich, maybe an egg. More often than not she would eat her lonely tea standing in the kitchen, and then wash up and go to bed.

  She tiptoed away upstairs. She had to get herself under a blanket to cry so they wouldn’t hear.

  Later, lying curled in bed, she reflected that she probably did seem to be what Stan had called switched off. She either had too much on her mind or she was thinking of nothing at all, and whichever it was, she was just keeping quiet so she could concentrate. If she’d been a big talker he’d have been the first to complain, wouldn’t he? If she talked all the time she’d miss all the little noises that kept her in the picture. Her eyes were so tired from the bulb testing work these days, she relied on sounds, and on smells, too, to keep herself from making mistakes. She hadn’t noticed it so much at home at Roper Street, it being so familiar to her, how fuzzy things had got. But here in a different house, even though it was just a mile away and practically the same layout as her Mam’s, it was taking a bit of time to get the hang of things. She already knew when the kettle was ready or the fire needed coal. She knew who’d come in, Stan or his Mam, before she heard a voice; it was all in the feet. She had also worked out their different smells. Lucky Strikes and Brilliantine was Stan, a sweetness like very old jam mixed with mothballs, Mrs. Ashworth. Even without those signs, their breath was enough to go on. Most days, Stan’s was beery. Mrs. Ashworth had taken the pledge years ago and never touched a drop, but she was wheezy and dyspeptic. Evelyn could track her whereabouts easily from the traces of her frequent peppermint belches.

  Evelyn reckoned she could even smell the weather, too. She could tell when it was going to rain without so much as a glance at the sky, though Stan said she was talking rubbish because round here it was always going to rain if it wasn’t already. She smiled, thinking of that. He could be that dry. He was all right, was Stan, if you touched his good side.

  But as her Mam said, life was a sea of worries. There was the worry of where this baby was going to go when it arrived, since she and Stan had only the little room next to Stan’s Mam’s bedroom, small enough even for two and with no space for a cradle. Mrs. Ashworth-Evelyn simply could not call her “Mam”-wouldn’t hear of them changing a thing, so they were stuck with Stan’s grandfather’s big black iron bedstead and a mattress that seemed to have bricks in it, and only the one chest of drawers. Somehow Evelyn would have to make Stan face up to his mother and let them put in a few things for the baby. And they didn’t have so much as an inch to call their own outside the bedroom. Even Evelyn’s knitting couldn’t be left downstairs at the end of the evening.

  That wasn’t all. It wasn’t exactly a worry now, because with her in the family way Stan never laid a finger on her, but what about afterwards, with Mrs. Ashworth sleeping next door and the walls so thin? They should be looking to find a place of their own. But Stan wouldn’t face that, either. Soon they’d be able to manage the rent on a small place, she kept telling him, but he wouldn’t listen, or he’d start spouting rubbish picked up from his daft meetings. He’d showed her a pamphlet written by Alan O’Reilly and a few others. She hadn’t understood a word of it, so Stan had explained. All that wanting a house and a few sticks of furniture to call your own was being oppressed, apparently. As long as she allowed herself to be manipulated into aping bourgeois materialist values, especially notions of private ownership, all she was doing was colluding in her own subjugation. It was capitalist forces, whose sole purpose was to bolster the bosses’ and the landlords’ and the government’s profits, that were manipulating her into thinking she had to sell her labour in order to acquire personal goods and live according to repressive bourgeois norms, forever yoked to the system. It wasn’t what she really wanted.

  Well, she really had switched off when he’d come out with all that, but not before saying that in her opinion it was a lot of nonsense, just a lot of big words trying to tell her she didn’t know her own mind, and if Stan was falling for all that he was a bigger fool than she’d taken him for. Not that she’d lost her temper. In a quiet voice, just before he had stormed off to the pub, she had added that she didn’t recall agreeing to join any ruddy class struggle, least of all on Alan O’Reilly’s side of it, and that was her last word on the subject.

  She was roused suddenly from her thoughts by noise and shouting, and rushed downstairs.

  Mrs. Ashworth was a heavy woman. When her foot had landed on the parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, she’d skidded and fallen and twisted her ankle. Evelyn helped Stan get her up and seated in the front room, trying to close her ears to the tirade of complaints flowing between the pair of them. Stan went off to get Mrs. Flint four doors down, who worked at the Infirmary, to come and have a look at the injury, while Evelyn, with a sinking heart, went to scrape the squashed raw sausages off the linoleum in the hallway.

  I made the shed mine. I brought blankets and cushions, enough to keep me quite comfortable, though not so comfortable that I might fall asleep. I liked the walls of the place, the hard beads of pine amber and the scorched gashes and knots in the wood, and I liked Ruth’s damp floral folding chairs hung on hooks and her spidery gardening gloves discarded and hardened into casts of her tired, curved hands. But the resiny smell of the timbers and the candle-smoky damp that made its way into the peppery blankets felt like mine. There was an outside tap nearby, so I considered getting a little spirit stove and a kettle, and perhaps one of those camping heaters, but then I realized that these would make the place too bright. Sometimes I lit a tea light or two but, like Arthur, I was happiest sitting in the dark.

 
He never drew a curtain at the back of the house, nor pulled a blind nor closed doors between rooms. He spent a lot of time upstairs, moving clothes and books and bundles of paper around. Then he started going up and down to the attic, too, via a folding ladder hauled down from the ceiling onto the landing. I could see the bottom of it slanting across the doorway of the bedroom that was full of luggage and clothes. That was a worry to me. Whenever I saw his feet, one splayed on the ladder and the other swimming in midair trying to make the next rung, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. My heart would pound while I counted the seconds; sometimes it would take him four minutes to manage the first three steps. It was worse when he got higher and disappeared altogether. All I could do then was watch the foot of the ladder, dreading that the next thing I would see would be a flailing bundle of limbs tumbling down into a broken heap. Even if I could have heard him call out I wouldn’t have been in time to prevent that.

  So I would wait, counting, and there were times I was out of my chair ready to go to him-once I was even setting out across the grass-before I would see a pale blue flash from the attic skylight. Then at least I knew he had made it as far as the light switch. The strip of fluorescent light would tremble and blink and grow steady, and I would settle down to watch.

  But that he had got himself up there was all I knew. I had to carry on watching because what I couldn’t tell from the shadows as they moved across the skylight was whether he was clambering around on a solid floor or wobbling from joist to joist on those spindly legs of his. I was afraid if I let my attention falter his whole weight might land on some frail partition of gypsum and plaster and he would plunge to the floor below.

  I did wonder what was up there that could occupy him for two and three hours at a time. I imagined an Aladdin’s cave where he went to gloat every night, but it could hold only a hoarded treasure of sorts; I couldn’t believe that any attic of Ruth’s would harbour secrets, not of any priceless or desperate kind, anyway. Probably there was just the usual junk: broken furniture, pictures and ornaments out of favour, and the props of outgrown hobbies and earlier lives: books, busted rackets, albums, photographs. Whatever it was, he seemed to be going through it all, though he seemed only to bring down papers and books. Or to be more accurate, threw, from the top of the ladder onto the landing. I was relieved he didn’t try to climb down with his arms full.

  I would worry that in such a confined space he might have only something precarious to sit on, and what if he fell asleep and slid off his chair and hurt himself that way? Or I worried that he would fatigue himself and set off down the ladder too worn out to be careful, his joints stiff and his eyes dim after reading under that brash light. And what if he was sitting up there hour after hour, crying? What if he fell down the ladder and broke in pieces because his eyes were sore and blinded by tears?

  I was always relieved when I saw the attic light go out and his legs appearing at the base of the ladder. He would straighten and steady himself on the floor. Then he would move, shuffling and hesitating in one doorway or another, a silhouette of a man stranded on thresholds he no longer knew. Most often he would wander into the luggage room, lifting a hand to the switch as he entered and turning off the light so that he walked into blackness. Even though I would be expecting it, I always felt abruptly shut out when the house went dark like that. If I had a tea light burning I immediately blew it out so that my darkness was the same as his. I liked the paraffin smell of the first curls of smoke from the snuffed wick.

  And I would carry on watching the black window because I knew he would be standing there, looking out. Few sounds reached into the shed from outside, so I would hear my chair creak as I pulled a blanket around myself, and settled. Arthur would be listening, too, I was certain, to his own breathing. His house would be quietly alive with the noises all houses make, and maybe the place seemed to him bigger and emptier, and those distant, lapping sounds from walls and pipes and floors louder, because she was no longer there. Perhaps he talked to her while he stood at the window. I wondered if he sensed her still in the house, or beyond it, somewhere out in the darkness. It was possible, of course, that he considered that the burial of her body really was the end of it. But if she was simply perished, and nowhere at all, would that mean she was now free, or somehow exiled? I would have liked to know if he pictured her still as she used to be, or if he imagined a changed appearance for her in some new existence as a spirit; there’s all the difference in the world.

  Why is it easier to imagine that the dead might be waiting for us in darkness rather than in the light? For a while after my great-uncle died I cried every bedtime, terrified to go to sleep in case he was now a ghost and came visiting to take me to task for my part in his death. My grandmother told me that all you had to do to get rid of a ghost was to make a loud noise. She would make me cry “Away with you!” and clap my hands until I laughed. She had never been frightened of ghosts, she said, and I knew from the way she could smile in an empty room that that was true. But I also knew something she didn’t: that the dead never are quite away, never absolutely gone. They’re still there, caught in the very act of parting from us, betrayed by a swaying curtain of falling snow, by a movement behind a white sheet, by some trickery of sunlight and shadow. And imperfectly though their leave-taking may be enacted, yet it is quiet and quick and you could miss it in the taking of a breath, and then you wouldn’t know the road they took for they leave no clue where they are going; you would be left staring, hoping for a single last trace. But I clapped my hands and laughed just the same, and watched my grandmother smile.

  Soon enough, anyway, I was burdened by other knowledge, on top of the shoplifting and the ghosts, that I couldn’t let my grandmother share. She knitted every afternoon for the Society for the Relief of Blind Orphans Overseas. I didn’t understand why the blind orphans overseas should find relief in socks and scarves and mittens particularly, though I worked out for myself that it must be for reasons to do with blindness or orphanhood that were more compelling than the overseas-ness; overseas meant a hot climate, surely too hot for hand-knitted woollies. I also wondered how she knew their sizes, and her telling me the things were sent off to Sales of Work never quite explained it.

  One day she finished another baby matinée set-jacket, bonnet, and bootees-in a rather upsetting brown flecked with green, a colour difficult to imagine on any baby but since the blind orphan one overseas couldn’t mind I supposed the people looking after him wouldn’t, either. On my way upstairs a day or two later, I passed my mother’s bedroom. The door was ajar; I glanced in and saw, facedown on the bed, a human head. I let out a shriek, but I couldn’t drag my eyes away. It couldn’t be a head! I stared, and after a moment I could see that it wasn’t. It was a wig, an ugly, dark, curly wig. But before I’d begun to ask myself why my mother would have such a thing, I took a step nearer and saw what it really was: a heap of brown wool flecked with green. A single strand snaked out of it and wiggled across the bed into what was left of a forlorn and tiny sleeve.

  Why hadn’t I noticed? I’d seen the colour before; the wool had been socks to begin with, at least twice. My mother was unravelling the orphans’ knitting and giving my grandmother the same yarn back to knit up again. I didn’t know why, and in the rush of sadness I felt for the orphans (and not for my grandmother, who seemed to blame, somehow) I didn’t really wonder. How long had they been going without? was all I could think. What would become of them now, orphaned, blind, overseas, and suddenly without their woollies?

  After that I would come home from school to find my grandmother knitting the same thing she had made the week before and the week before that. I said nothing. Not knowing the point of my mother’s trickery deprived me of a good reason for exposing it, and as time went on and my curiosity grew, so did my fear of asking for an explanation. At some point I must have concluded that my mother was simply saving herself the cost of new yarn, but by then it was too late. Her deception had become mine also, and I sustained it with fervent and
egotistical guilt.

  When my grandmother’s memory for complicated stitchwork abandoned her and she grew impatient with the intricacies of sleeves and heels and collars, she turned to knitting scarves. My mother would give her the “new” wool in two or three bags, telling her it was red and green and yellow or blue and yellow and pink. Good, everyone likes stripes, my grandmother would say. She would work twenty rows from each bag in turn, smiling as a monotone grey or brown scarf grew from her waggling needles. She would let me choose the colour for the fringe, and in a loud, formal voice I would pretend to consider the green, the yellow, or the pink, my heart lopsided with tenderness and shame.

  By the time I was nine I was concealing so much that keeping even direr truths from her was routine. I covered my mother’s increasingly prolonged absences by mentioning in passing that she was very tired again, just resting in bed. When she sobered up enough to put in bilious and remorseful appearances at mealtimes I unleashed irritating streams of talk to hide the fact that she was too hung-over to speak. Sitting between them, I looked from my mother’s pouchy, stupefied face to my grandmother’s, beaming sightlessly upon her golden girl, and I’d prattle on about nothing. When I came across empty bottles I got them past my grandmother and out to the bin quietly, without one ticking against another. Whatever the weather, every morning I opened windows all over the house hoping that enough new air would freeze out the pall of drink.

  After a time the reasons for trying to keep my mother’s condition secret didn’t cross my mind. Concealment of one kind or another was to me by then a form of good manners, a necessary protective kindness; it progressed from being second nature to becoming my very nature. Because of it, I never could have grown up to be anything other than watchful and cautious. I never could have done otherwise than keep the distance from other people that enabled me to see dangers that they, more engaged in events, might not, and to prevent scenes that would upset them. This was the person I was, or believed myself to be, until that day in April.