The Night Following Page 11

  Eventually, as I watched, poor Arthur would leave the bedroom window and wander downstairs, through the kitchen and into the conservatory. Once or twice early on he watered the plants there, stroking their leaves and inclining his head to them as if he were petting small living creatures. For a while after that he took to just sitting on a wicker chair, staring, and soon he was bringing papers in with him and would sit reading for hours at a time. I had the impression he read the same things over and over again. Sometimes he wrote.

  He ate and drank, although very little. He would swallow milk straight from the carton, and then leave it half-full on the conservatory ledge where the sun would beat down on it all the following day. The next night or two nights later he might stir from his reading, wander across, and down whatever was left. I saw him bring in food and stand there eating with both hands. He seldom used a plate, but if he did he’d leave it behind. If he was forking something into his mouth out of a can, he would drop both can and fork on the floor when he had finished, as if he’d forgotten he was holding them. It mattered to me to know if he was eating canned food cold that should have been heated up, such as baked beans or soup, or if he was not neglecting himself quite so badly and was gorging on something like tuna or sweet corn. Once I saw him, in silhouette, digging with his fingers into something very small and oblong; it must have been a can of sardines. When he’d sucked each finger one by one he lifted the can to his lips and tipped his head back. My stomach heaved at the thought of his tongue questing into the corners. Those edges are lethal. I started to my feet and moaned, feeling the metal slice into his tongue, seeing bright red marbling appear across its coating of thick yellow oil, and run down and stain his lips. I could taste the tinny little plumes of blood mixing with his mouth juices all cloudy with fish scales and crumbs of bone as soft as pumice. I waited to hear him cry out. But all he did was drop the can and calmly wipe his mouth on his sleeve.

  I felt a rush of triumph, as if my watching had averted disaster. And I liked the thought that it might have; perhaps something as supposedly intense as the power of prayer was at work in my willing him to keep himself safe.

  So I aspired that my watching would be more than watching, and I resolved to surrender myself to it. It was no less than a debt owing to Arthur and Ruth for Ruth’s fatal invisibility to me on the road that day, and no less a pact with Arthur for all that he was unaware of it. And I could not hope to repay the debt, or honour the pact, by mere observation; it would call for observance, the keeping of a vigil both devout and penitential.

  Dear Ruth

  She’s a tartar, Stan’s mother, that Mrs. Ashworth. Did you base her on somebody we know?

  Mrs. M turned up with her son, The Great Tony. He’s just as bad. Going on about the grass again, while she’s going on about the curtains-the thing is to get the first cut early then stay on top of it- such a shame these nice sunny days to keep them closed blah blah.

  Kept them on the doorstep, but then The Great Tony takes it upon himself to have a poke on the pebbledash, says it’s cracking where the name’s screwed on, insists I have a look. Well, talk about pernickety. Where the L of OVERDALE is attached, yes there’s a hairline crack, yes there’s a bit of rust stain going down the wall. What business is it of his? I’ve got it on my list.

  What are they up to, the pair of them, do they think I’ve got money, is that it?

  Tony jumps right in, offering his services to fix the wall-I said I thought he’d have enough concerns of his own to keep him busy but apparently not. I told him I’d see to it in my own good time, ditto the grass.

  Mrs. M says, Now if I remember rightly you and Ruth came up with the name yourselves, didn’t you? It’s nice to give a house a name. So much more personal than a number.

  I could hardly believe the cheek of the woman. What Overdale means to Ruth and myself, I said to her, is NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS BUT OURS.

  That got rid of them.

  Still waving and smiling at the end of the drive though, they are shameless.

  Bye for now

  A.

  As the nights grew warmer, I drew closer to the house and tracked him from the terrace. I could see into all the downstairs back windows, and I saw him moving slowly to and fro in the kitchen and in and out of the conservatory and dining room. If I didn’t see him from the back, I went round to the front of the house and watched from under the tree in the garden. On clear nights, his outline was bright in a wash of quicksilver from the moon and he stumbled through rooms and between objects that shone back upon him the same luminous white.

  Often in his wanderings upstairs he would come to the window, sometimes lit and sometimes not, but always uncurtained. He would be holding wads of paper and a pen, and sometimes he would lean on the windowsill to write something down. Sometimes he seemed agitated and sometimes he stood very still, but in either case I could tell he was distressed.

  On this particular night, the house looked the same. There were lights on upstairs and no curtains drawn. I crept out of the shed to watch until I had worked out his whereabouts. I waited close in by the shrubs bordering the side of the garden. It had been raining and the air smelled of torn leaves; a dampness lay on my skin and my breathing grew hard and noisy. Then the lights went off upstairs and I imagined him there at the window, peering through the glass trying to see what animal was out there, rasping in the dark. I did and I didn’t want him to know it was me.

  But suddenly a light snapped on in the kitchen and he appeared in the doorway. His hands, one in an oven glove and the other swathed in a cloth, were holding a covered dish. Smoke rolled out in soft waves above his head. He walked the length of the conservatory and came out onto the terrace, priest-like, bearing the dish before him. I heard a hiss as he set it down on the ground. He dropped the glove and cloth and stepped back. With his bare hand he lifted the lid, yelped, and hurled it hard across the garden. Then he picked up the pot itself and threw that, too. It landed somewhere on the edge of the grass and rolled away into darkness.

  Smoke was still pluming out from the kitchen. He stood for a while, sucking on his hand and chewing the insides of his cheeks. I watched, aghast, desperate to know how badly he was hurt. I wanted to call out; only his apparent calm and the realization that I would shatter it by emerging out of the dark and running to him kept me quiet and invisible. For he seemed to be considering the matter, trying to puzzle out the reasons for this, why certain things had gone wrong: why had this scorching hot object been in his hand, and what did it have to do with him that he had burned himself? He picked up the cloth from the ground and wrapped his hand in it. Then, by the light escaping from the house, I saw the line of his face as he tilted his head to the sky, his mouth open in a voiceless howl. If he had stood there another moment I would have had to go to his side and lead him back to the kitchen, draw his burning hand under cold water, talking to him all the while, soothing and reassuring him. I would have heard him whimper and I would have smelled burnt smoking meat mixed with his old man smell, both rank and dry, like rotten wood. I would have begged him to be comforted, and unafraid.

  But just then he cried out, in a yowling moan. It was a cry of defeat, as if the burning of his hand betrayed to him the futility of a simple attempt to heat up something for his supper. His head drooped. I couldn’t go to him yet. He wiped his face with his good hand, turned away, and shuffled into the house.

  The kitchen light went out. I watched the smoke disperse across the terrace in pale waving strings. Then I stepped out from the shelter of the shrubs, and feeling my way and still keeping an eye on the house, I began searching. I found the lid at once; it had rolled a track through the uncut grass that was easy to follow. It took longer to locate the dish, which had spun away and landed deep in the border at the other side of the garden.

  It was one of those expensive enamelled casserole dishes, and still warm to the touch. Whatever had been in it was now a bumpy carbonized heap fused to the base, a tiny burned-out pyre sitti
ng in a lake of tar. On the side of the lid there was a big, fresh-looking chip. I was a little careless; walking back to the house I set the lid back on the dish and there was a loud clang and scrape that echoed across the garden. I stopped dead, expecting the noise to bring Arthur back out, but it didn’t. I walked into the smoky kitchen clutching the dish tight against my chest.

  First, I switched off the oven. Next I found scouring pads under the sink and I got to work in the dark. I scraped and scrubbed and after a while I could feel my fingers gliding on the enamel as the burnt flakes loosened and liquefied. The surface was too far gone for a perfect result but the dish would be at least usable again. I left it out on the draining board with the lid next to it so he might see how well I had done. I would have given a lot to see a look of pleasure on his face, the corners of his mouth tipping upward into even the faintest smile.

  Then I went back to the conservatory. Litter had amassed all over the shelves and floor. Torn cartons and banana skins, discarded cups and bottles, newspaper cuttings, photographs and piles of papers, dirty dishes and cutlery were strewn among a crowd of indoor plants and clusters of rotting garden flowers. I shifted some dead geraniums along so that I could lean against the window ledge for a moment while I decided what to do first; they were desiccated in their plastic pots and top-heavy, and the movement tipped them straight onto the floor. I kicked at them. The pots rolled and scraped on the tiles, scattering mulch and fingery white plant roots among the litter and dry leaves. Clearing up the mess I had made myself seemed as good a place as any to start, and I went back to the kitchen to look for a dustpan and brush.

  Arthur, I felt, was aware of my presence and stayed away out of politeness. Yet as I worked, I was not entirely alone. In her conservatory, with her dustpan and brush in my hands, sweeping up the relics of plants she had tended and maybe even grown from seeds she had sown herself, I knew myself to be under an authoritative and assessing gaze that could only be Ruth’s. I lifted the broken stems and roots tenderly, feeling regretful and self-conscious. I murmured the words that would come from any clumsy and embarrassed visitor after such a mishap, putting off the moment when I would have to broach, somehow, the real matter that stood between us.

  And so I found myself in a rather one-sided conversation. Though she seemed to have nothing to ask me, I had questions for her, to which her replies came swift and unfiltered to my mind, and rather dismissive. I asked her several times if there really could be such a thing as dying without minding it. Of course there couldn’t. I wondered if there had been a second or two after she landed on the road when dying sooner rather than later seemed preferable, less dismaying than surviving long enough to find out in detail how irreversibly she was damaged. You tell me. What is it to you, anyway?

  I didn’t manage to apologize to her, quite. No expression of shame could be adequate, and all the words I tried to construct into an entreaty that she might forgive me seemed threaded together with a wholly unintentional defiance, even levity, as when a contrite child-a pupil of Ruth’s, say-trying genuinely to apologize realizes that the teacher will never believe her sorry enough, and so is unable to sound quite serious. Nor did I come even close to completing the tidying and cleaning. Long before I had finished I heard the first birds and saw the glowing of light low in the sky. I went quietly and quickly from the house.

  THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK

  1932

  Chapter 7: Evelyn Confides

  On a bright Saturday afternoon in April, Evelyn knocked on Daphne’s door in Chadderton Street. To her relief it opened almost immediately. The walk from Stan’s Mam’s round to Daphne’s was a long one. Her back ached and her ankles were swollen. Still nearly three months to go and already she was getting so tired. Daphne drew her into the chair nearest the fire.

  “The boys and my Dad have all gone off t’match,” she said, “and Mam’s round at Gran’s. So we can just be cosy, eh? Eh, but you’re looking tired, lass. You’re carrying heavy.”

  Evelyn sighed.“Aye, the Leighs all carry the first heavy,” she said. “I suppose that’s all there is to it.”

  “Aye, perhaps. I’ll get kettle on.”

  Evelyn smiled gratefully and leaned back in her chair. You didn’t have to spell things out to Daphne, she seemed to know. Now that Daphne had switched to the day shift they didn’t see so much of each other. A Saturday afternoon knitting by a nice fire and chatting with her friend was the one good thing to come out of Stan’s latest habit of staying away from home from Friday till Sunday. Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them away fiercely, staring into the glowing yellow of the flames.

  “I’ve not seen your Stan in a while,” Daphne said when they were sipping their tea, as if reading her mind.“Behaving, is he? How’s that mother of his?”

  Evelyn hesitated, considering. There could be no harm in telling Daphne. What else were friends for?

  “Oh, Daphne, I hardly see him myself. He stops over Fridays and Saturdays in Manchester these days. On Alan O’Reilly’s floor. Or so he says. O’Reilly’s only got the one room. On Reuben Street, over the pawnbroker’s.”

  “He does what?”

  “He says it’s the meetings,” Evelyn said quickly. “They’re going on later now, till after t’last bus on Friday night. Then they’re back at it all day Saturday an’ all, and Sundays. They’re up to something, I don’t know what.”

  “Getting drunk, like as not. Or worse. Stirring up trouble.”

  “Maybe. Wouldn’t be surprised, knowing O’Reilly.”

  “Knowing Stan,” Daphne said, not too unkindly.

  “Aye, I know.” Evelyn sighed and took up the little baby’s jacket she was knitting. “But at least he’s not coming home drunk. At least he’s not getting a name for himself round here. Oh, it is a difficult shade, this lemon. Fiddly.” She rubbed her eyes and went on to the end of the row.

  “Give it here,” Daphne said.“Three-ply’s always hard going.” She took the work from Evelyn’s lap and examined it thoughtfully, then handed it back. “Plain enough, though. You could do it with your eyes shut.”

  She took up her own work, bed socks for her gran in pale green. “I reckon I know what they’re up to, your Stan’s lot,” she said. “Our Paul’s been going on about it. You know Paul, can’t keep his mouth shut. Only it’s unofficial and he says I’m not to gab or they’ll put a stop to it. But there’s this big walk planned. They’re all going. It’s tomorrow.”

  “Big walk? What big walk, where to? What on earth for?”

  “Mind you, he’s not one of them agitators, Paul,” Daphne said quickly. “He’s not like some others. He’s harmless, just keen on his rambling. He’s going for the principle.”

  Evelyn was perplexed. As they knitted, Daphne explained everything she’d heard from her brother. Paul regularly went out on Sunday hikes with a group of other young people, taking the bus out of the town and into the surrounding countryside. The trouble was that strictly speaking there weren’t many places they were allowed to go, even though they did no harm. Some landowners turned a blind eye to the ramblers but others put up fences to stop them. Sometimes the innocent walkers were threatened or even attacked by gamekeepers when all they wanted to do was go across empty land that was no good for livestock or crops. The landlords were within their rights to prevent them, but there was a rising swell of people, according to Paul, calling for a change in the law. Now things had come to a head. Hundreds if not thousands of people would be converging to join in a big walk planned for the next day. It would be no less than a mass trespass over Derbyshire’s most famous peak, Kinder Scout. At present ordinary folk were turned away from there and only a few snooty walking clubs got the necessary “prior permission in writing” from the landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, to go to the summit. Paul told Daphne that a gesture by ordinary folk walking up there peacefully would help get the law changed. If that happened, you wouldn’t have to be in with the toffs to enjoy a country walk. Sure enough there we
re folk spouting political nonsense about the rights of the working man but all Paul wanted was to be able to go on a harmless walk without getting accosted by a gamekeeper.

  “He wants me to go as well,” Daphne said. “It’ll be a bit o’ fun, he says. We’re taking a picnic. There’ll be more folk up there tomorrow than you’ll ever see in your life.”

  “But it’s breaking the law!” Evelyn exclaimed.

  “That’s what I said,” Daphne replied. “But Paul says that’s the point. The point is there’ll be hundreds doing it, and it’s not the same as committing a crime when it’s the law that’s wrong and wants changing. I’m not bothered either way, it’s a day out. I reckon on going and I reckon you’re coming an’ all, Evelyn Ashworth. It’ll put the roses back in your cheeks.”

  “But there might be trouble. What if something happens?”

  “Don’t talk daft,” Daphne said.“We’ll be with Paul, and anyway it’s all to be peaceful. We’ll keep ourselves to ourselves and just have a nice day out.”

  “I shouldn’t,” Evelyn said, shaking her head. “It’ll be ruddy freezing for one thing. Anyway, I’ve been. I was out Kinder Scout way years ago, on the Chapel Whitsun outing. And anyway,” she went on, “I’m not going climbing mountains in my condition.”

  “No fear, no more am I!” laughed Daphne. “It’s only a hill, not a proper mountain. We’ll wrap up warm. It’s only for a walk. We’ll just go as far as we fancy, find a nice spot, and watch the fun.”