Alfred and Emily Read online

  Daisy? But even thinking of her as something to grasp hold of, be with, as they once were, was barred now, because Daisy was doing so well, so solidly grounded in what she was and did that Emily felt she would be like a little probationer tugging at Daisy’s skirts. And, besides, Daisy had hinted that she was thinking of marrying herself. There was this surgeon at the hospital, and it seemed Daisy ‘would not mind’ – her words. She was thinking of it – well, not immediately, of course, but they were not youngsters.

  Emily had no one to hold fast to, no one even to consult. How could she talk about her state, after years of marriage, and such an encompassing marriage, with someone who said she ‘would not mind’ when thinking of a man to marry.

  She had no one. No one. And no child, nothing.

  But she had Mary Lane, and remembering her, it was like stumbling on a beam from a lighthouse.

  She would shut up this house, and go down to stay with Mary Lane. This was impulsive, impetuous, a decision made between going to bed one night and getting up in the morning.

  Of course, that was what she would do, must do.

  Emily ran up the path to Mary Lane. It was suppertime, twenty-four hours after she had made her decision.

  Her old friend stood at the stove, with a large pan. ‘I’m cooking you pancakes,’ she said, ‘because you like them so.’

  Emily dropped her case, flung herself into a chair at the old table, where Harold Lane already sat, and said, at Mary’s diagnostic look, ‘In every life some rain must fall.’ She had been using this to ward off emotions, her own too, since the death, but now she burst into tears. She sat and sobbed.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mary. ‘You have a good cry.’

  ‘The poor woman has lost her man,’ remarked Harold.

  This almost stopped Emily crying, but the words were fastened on by a disordered brain, and she thought, That’s right. It’s true. But she had not thought it before. The kindly remark, a simple message of the sort that always did relieve her of anxiety, was balm and solace, as if none had been offered her.

  She glanced at Harold Lane, whom she had not noticed much before, he being so dependent on Mary, and thought, Funny he should say something so right when I need it.

  Mary put pancakes and lemon on Emily’s plate, and some more on her husband’s, and sat down.

  Emily began staunching tears and trying to smile. She felt as sick and as sorry as she had ever done in her life. But here she was, where she so needed to be, with Mary, and she looked about her and felt as if this was a dream, where familiar things had undergone change. This was the old kitchen she had sat in so often, and here were Harold and Mary. Everything seemed so dim, so muted, and it was not because she looked through tears. She had come here from her bright, light, clean house, and it seemed that there was dust on what she looked at, or a dimness. The big room was all dull pinks and browns, and even the cat on the arm of a chair seemed dingy. She remembered a white cat.

  And Harold and Mary…how long was it since she was here? Months, surely, yes, more, many months, years…The two had grown large. They were ample, red-cheeked people with their fair strawy hair going grey.

  ‘I daren’t eat anything these days,’ mused Mary. ‘I am getting so fat.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Harold. ‘The more the merrier.’

  And now Emily began to laugh. It was strained, and hysterical, but better than crying.

  Emily sat there in her sharp London black and made the kitchen even dingier.

  ‘You’d better leave off that mourning,’ said Mary. ‘No one will expect it of you here.’

  Emily said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to wear.’ Her case was full of smart clothes.

  ‘And don’t you fret,’ said Mary. ‘So, it’s turned out lucky I’ve gained weight. I’ll find something for you after supper.’

  Harold said he was going to read his papers in his lair; Emily helped Mary wash up, and then Mary came from her room with armfuls of clothes, and some of them Emily thought she did remember.

  Emily slipped off her short black skirt, put on a longer brown one, dreadfully out of fashion, and a yellowish blouse. She looked pretty good, even then.

  ‘What a talent you have,’ sighed Mary. ‘You could always make a smart show out of any old skirt and blouse.’

  She lit the lamp and sat opposite Emily.

  ‘I feel so bad, Mary. I don’t know what to do with myself.’

  ‘But did you expect to feel anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected.’

  The cat jumped from her armchair to Mary’s lap.

  ‘If I had a child…but it never happened.’

  Mary stroked the cat, which purred steadily.

  Emily watched that large, strong hand. ‘What am I fit for now, Mary? I didn’t think like that when I was doing it, but for ten years now all I’ve done is lunches and dinners and suppers, and looked after William.’

  ‘If I were you I shouldn’t think at all about it,’ said Mary. ‘Just let yourself have a bit of a rest.’

  ‘A rest?’ said Emily. ‘I don’t think I’ve rested in my life.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mary. Soon, she dislodged the cat, handing it to Emily, and brought out a big cardboard box full of coloured papers.

  ‘I have a new occupation,’ she said. ‘There’s a child here most days. I don’t know if you ever noticed Bert? His wife, Phyllis, is having her second and I’m looking after their first for a little.’

  This was what had happened.

  Betsy harried and chivvied Bert until he promised to give up the drink for good.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ said she. ‘And didn’t the doctor tell you the same?’

  Bert stopped drinking, or nearly, until there was a bad night when he fell down and was concussed.

  ‘And now that’s it, Bert,’ said Betsy.

  Alfred did help, as well as he could, but it was Betsy who cured Bert.

  Two years passed and then there was this conversation. It was in Alfred and Betsy’s sitting-room, in their new house.

  ‘Bert, who is this girl you go about with?’

  She knew, of course.

  ‘That is Phyllis Merton and she wants to marry me.’

  ‘Yes, but do you want to marry her, Bert?’

  ‘Now that is the question. You know who I want to marry. I want to marry you.’

  ‘Oh, Bert, you are so silly sometimes.’

  Bert, sober, had kept some of his bumbling, foolish-old-dog ways, partly because he was rather like that, but also because when he was drinking it had been hard always to tell when he was drunk and when not.

  Did that mean he planned to return to drink one of these days? Betsy did wonder, and then asked him. ‘Bert, you put on all these foolish ways, and they are funny. I’m not saying they aren’t, but sometimes I wonder if you are serious about never drinking again.’

  ‘Clever Betsy. Sometimes I wonder myself. To give up for ever – have you thought of that? Longer than a lifetime.’

  ‘But when you marry, Bert, you mustn’t ever drink, not ever.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, you see, Betsy.’

  ‘Do you like her, Bert?’

  ‘But do you like her? I’d never marry a girl you didn’t approve of.’

  ‘I hope she is a real little termagant, like me,’ said Betsy.

  That was what Alfred sometimes called her.

  ‘Well, then, Alfred. Have I stopped him drinking or haven’t I?

  ‘Because you see, Bert, being married, sometimes things are quite difficult. And you’ll be tempted to start off again.’

  ‘I’ll marry her if you approve,’ said Bert.

  Phyllis was a farmer’s daughter from Ipswich way, and she had been thoroughly looked over by everyone concerned. It was generally agreed that she was after not just Bert, a nice enough chap now he was sober, but the Redway farm. Now, that was not something to be turned down.

  On the whole people approved. She wa
s a thin, dark, clever girl, always on the watch, observing, noticing. It was these last qualities that Betsy approved.

  ‘She’ll be good for you, Bert. She’ll keep you on the straight. And I must say I’ll be so pleased to have her take over. You’ve sometimes worn me out, Bert. Many a time I’ve gone to bed crying because of you, worrying so much over you.’

  ‘Then to please you I’ll marry Phyllis,’ said Bert, in his foolish-old-dog mode.

  The Redways approved. Rather, Mr. Redway did. Mrs. Redway did not find much in life to agree with her these days. There was a big wedding. Betsy was matron of honour. There were bridesmaids, ten of them, and the little church at Longerfield was full. Alfred’s father played the organ.

  Alfred was best man.

  It went on well enough until Phyllis got pregnant, and there were difficulties. Bert came often to Betsy for counsel and advice.

  The baby, a girl, was born, was healthy, but Bert had a relapse. Phyllis being busy with the baby, Betsy dealt with the relapse. ‘Never again, Bert. You promised, didn’t you?’

  After quite a time Phyllis got pregnant again and it was then Mary Lane had stepped in to help with the little girl. Phyllis had a mother, but she didn’t live only a short lane away, like Mary.

  Mary adored the little girl, who adored her.

  ‘It looks to me as if this is as near as I’ll get to being a grandmother,’ she mourned, ‘so I shall make the most of it.’

  Emily woke not knowing where she was or, indeed, who she was. Then, the lowing of cattle, not too far away, told her that this was not London. It was very quiet. Warm pressure on her legs absorbed her attention. It was the cat. Emily shifted her knees, and the cat woke and yawned.

  What Emily needed, she now knew, was to find Mary, and to hear from her words that would define her, her situation.

  She went to the kitchen in her wrap, and saw that any breakfast had been eaten long ago. It was already midmorning. Emily found water simmering in the kettle, made herself tea, and sat down. She decided she must be ill. She could not remember being ill. Her heart ached, but if that was a symptom, then…There were voices, one a child’s from outside. A window from the kitchen showed the two, Mary Lane and a little girl, engrossed in each other, in a small room like a conservatory that had windows on to a garden.

  The sight of Mary, bending forward to smile at the child, who was cutting out coloured paper with blunt scissors, made Emily’s heart go cold with misery. The child leaped on to Mary’s capacious knees, and Mary hugged and kissed Josie, Bert and Phyllis’s child. Still Emily did not realize that what she wanted was to be that child, rocked in Mary’s arms.

  Emily retreated to the table, and her tea, and stayed there, listening to the sounds of woman and child, from time to time going to the window to see how it all went on. What total absorption from Mary. If she, Emily, had had a child, was that how she would have been? In the ten or so years she had been a dedicated hostess, could she have spent her time as Mary was now?

  There would have been something to show for it, whereas now she kept thinking: But that wasn’t me, surely. Was it really me in that nice house that took up so much of my attention?

  At lunch-time Mary brought in the child, for some little mess or other, and Emily was offered plates of this and that. Mary hardly ate. ‘She will have a nap now,’ she said. ‘Well, a small child certainly does tell you your limitations.’

  The child went with Mary to her bedroom, and Emily, glancing in, saw that both were asleep.

  She went out into the lane, which had not changed, and she wandered along past clumps of daffodils and narcissi till she saw a big field, which she remembered. But it was full of noisy children running about, and then she saw a man she associated with cricket. Yes, that was Alfred Tayler and he was instructing what seemed like hundreds of children of various sizes, boys and girls, in the ways of cricket. Emily sat down, where she had before, under the oaks, to watch. It was all very noisy and energetic and when the cricket ball arrived near her feet, a much earlier Emily jumped up and threw the ball back towards the man, who caught it, with a laugh and little bow. Soon he came over, and said, ‘I am sure I know you. But I am confused. That skirt…’

  ‘I am wearing Mary Lane’s clothes,’ said Emily. ‘I came down on an impulse and didn’t bring the right things.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Alfred. ‘I see. I heard from Mary that you’ve had bad luck.’

  Well, that was a way of putting it.

  ‘Yes, my husband died.’

  ‘That is very sad. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve seen you playing cricket before, long ago.’

  ‘Not so long, surely,’ said Alfred, gallantly, as two boys came running up. ‘These are Tom and Michael,’ said Alfred. The two loud, excited boys were tugging their father away, back to the cricket pitch.

  Alfred ran, the boys chasing him.

  Could I have done that? wondered Emily. The boys were likeable lads, both dark and lean: like their father, she supposed.

  She sat on, watching until Alfred came running back to say that tomorrow, if she liked, he would be doing sports with the children over there. There, she could see, were two workmen pushing a heavy roller each.

  Alfred went running off, surrounded by the children.

  The cottages and houses of the Redway farm were full of children. Emily went back to the Lanes’ to find a heavily pregnant woman taking the child by the hand to lead her away from Mary.

  ‘No, it does me good to walk,’ she said, though she was scarlet and perspiring and full of discomfort, Emily could see.

  A dark woman, but it was not possible to see what she would look like when not pregnant.

  ‘I’m glad it’s not long to go for her,’ said Mary. ‘Being in the family way isn’t poor Phyllis’s line at all.’

  And now, until suppertime, Mary told Emily about how ‘everyone’ was concerned that any troubles Phyllis might have would start Bert off drinking again. ‘That is the problem, you see.’

  What interested Emily was the ‘everyone’. And when Harold came back from the bank he too joined in, with how Alfred’s wife was wonderful with Bert, no one knew what could have happened if Betsy hadn’t been so good with Bert, because there was a time when everyone thought he was going straight towards the DTs.

  Again Harold went off to the room he called his lair, and Mary said she was at her wit’s end, there were mice again in the storeroom and really she thought that Mrs. Mew – the cat – wasn’t earning her keep.

  This house had been a farmhouse once, before it was absorbed by others, which collectively now wanted to be called a village. At the back there was a pantry, with marble shelves, where stood bowls of cream and milk, cheeses, ranks of eggs, slabs of yellow butter. Off that was the storeroom, with sacks of oats, flour, sugar, and on the floor piles of potatoes and onions, covered from the light.

  Here, Mary mourned, a family of mice left their droppings on the floor and even in the pantry.

  The provisions of the storeroom, the pantry, were attractive to Emily, contrasting them with the tight, orderly shelves in her house in London where food arrived, delivered every day.

  Mary said, ‘Oh, Emily, I’m sorry. I’m off to bed. I know you must be feeling neglected.’

  ‘It’s enough to be here,’ said Emily, thinking that with Mary just there, a yard or so away, it was indeed enough. But she would have liked very much to go with Mary to the kitchen for a good old-fashioned unhurried chat.

  ‘You’re not one to be knocked off course so easily,’ said Mary, after a close look at Emily’s forlorn face. ‘You’re all right.’ And she went off to bed.

  With that Emily had to be satisfied, but she lingered a while in the storeroom. Mrs. Mew wandered in, like a visitor, just as if she did not know more was expected of her, and sat staring indifferently at a little hole in the corner, which Emily supposed must be a mousehole.

  She drank cocoa. Now, when had she last done that? Yes, it was at Daisy’s: they
had been drinking cocoa last thing at night all through their training, and when Emily went to visit her.

  Emily went to bed and thought that she had been here not two full days and was already feeling promptings of remorse about her listless state. She was not one to be knocked off course, had said Mary. Well, she had been, knocked down, knocked to pieces. And what was her course?

  The next day the little girl came again to be with Mary, and Emily went off in the afternoon to watch the children with two men, one the energetic, always-on-the-move Alfred, and a tall, lazy, shambling fellow she supposed was the famous Bert. She sat away a little distance, hiding from the chilly spring airs in Mary’s fur coat, which she suspected was rabbit, nothing like the sleek black moleskin of her own town coat.

  There would be a big sports day tomorrow for the children of the area, and Emily planned to be there, but next day Phyllis called for Mary, saying she felt some pains but did not know if these were real birth pains but please would kind Mary…

  Emily was left with Josie in the little conservatory, or semi-outdoors room. Josie showed she was well used to liking all kinds of different adults by liking Emily, at once climbing on her lap and expecting to be rocked and held.

  Emily was thinking, amazed, But I’ve done all this, it’s not true that I am useless at it. Of course, she had loved doing her stint during training in the children’s wards. Sister Emily McVeagh had loved children – so it had gone – and Josie was being held in practised arms.

  But then there was the day ahead, and Emily had to entertain the child, who expected it.

  The cat wandered in. Josie knew and liked it. The cat wandered out.

  ‘Where is she going?’ asked Josie, and this casual enquiry began it all: everything in Emily’s new life began just then.