Crescendo (15 page)

At last he died. It was certainly a relief, and of course all the property being her own now was a satisfaction. There were two houses in Naseby Terrace, five up and down the main Ashworth to Hudley Road, six scattered about the lower parts of Ashworth near the railway station, a lock-up shop near Holmelea way, and High Royd, a sort of old farmstead without any land attached, up on Blackstalls Brow. Ethel, a buxom widow who looked very well in her black, settled down to a comfortable life alone. She was a good cook and always made nice meals for herself, she kept her house spotless; she went to chapel often enough to be respectable, and occasionally came out with a rather handsome donation to some charity to keep up her standing, but she did not engage herself deeply in any cause, social, religious, political or charitable, because in her
experience they cost more than they were worth. Nor did she bother herself overmuch with friends. She had plenty of acquaintances, and they were all she needed, really; friends were apt to be a trouble and an expense.

It was during this most prosperous period of Ethel's life that Charlie Martin died, and his widow, encumbered with debt and with four children to feed, none of them as yet earning, turned up one afternoon in Naseby Terrace and begged Ethel's help. This wife of Charlie's had been a pretty girl once, thought Ethel shrewdly, gazing in silence at the haggard, weeping, shabby woman. She had had to bring the two youngest children with her, having nobody to leave them with at home—if they had a home. They were ill-brought-up children, with grubby hands and running noses, whom their mother continually had to reprove and slap for climbing or kicking Ethel's well polished and thickly upholstered chairs.

“They don't take after Charlie in looks, do they?” said Ethel in her firm, sensible tones.

The children fixed dark inimical eyes on her, and Charlie's widow sobbed. It seemed that the dying Charlie had been terribly distressed to leave his wife and children in their unprovided state.

“Who will look after you? How will you manage?” he moaned. “I've been a bad husband to you, Gladys.” His wife denying this strenuously, he muttered, turning his head away: “Well—I did my best.” There was a long pause, then he said suddenly: “You'd best go to Ethel. Yes, tell Ethel,” he repeated: “She won't see you starve.”

“He was right, of course,” said Ethel, preening herself. “You can count on me, Mrs. Martin. Charlie and I were old flames, Mrs. Martin—it was long before he met you, of course. Don't give all that another thought, of course,” said Ethel, giving Charlie's widow a full account of how Charlie and she were engaged and then she met Mr. Eastwood and married him. “How Charlie did carry on, to be sure, when he came
back and found me married! But that's all water under the bridge now, Mrs. Martin. Don't give it another thought.”

“It's Charlie's children I'm thinking of, Mrs. Eastwood,” said Charlie's widow, not without dignity.

“Well, you've so many, haven't you?” said Ethel. “But let me see now. What can I do to help you, eh?”

She probed every detail of the unhappy widow's situation.

“You must excuse me asking all these questions, Mrs. Martin, but I'm a business woman, you see, and I like to know how I stand.”

Eventually, declining the i.o.u. which she herself was the first to mention, she lent the Martins five pounds, extracting the money from her handbag before their eyes and counting it over several times.

“Now if you need any more, be sure to come and tell me, Mrs. Martin,” she said cheerfully as she showed them all out of the front door.

She spoke in her usual loud tones—why not?—and one or two passers-by, who could not but overhear, turned an enquiring glance in her direction, while Mrs. Martin hung her head and seemed overpowered with shame.

This incident had occurred near Christmas—there was a mess of dirty melted snow on the ground—and when the following Christmas brought much the same weather, Ethel bethought herself of the Martin children (if indeed she had ever forgotten them) and wondered whether their shoes were good enough to keep out the snow-broth. She sent Gladys Martin five pound notes in a registered envelope. These were acknowledged in a grateful scrawl. She sent the same next Christmas, and again the next, but now the acknowledgment came in a much firmer handwriting and was signed by Charles M. Martin, who stated that, as his mother's eldest son, he hoped to repay Mrs. Eastwood's kind loans shortly. Ethel was vexed; she had enjoyed being generous to Charlie's widow and telling anyone who would listen about her generosity.

“Repay, indeed! I'd like to see them repay a farthing. I shall believe it when I see it. There's not much chance of Charlie Martin's widow ever being able to repay anything, I can tell you,” said Ethel.

However, in the following autumn, who should turn up in Naseby Terrace but Charles M. Martin, dressed in khaki if you please, a young man of nearly nineteen, enlisted for this Hitler's war which had just begun. He resembled his father now quite closely, having sparkling dark eyes just like those Charlie had turned on Ethel before he went off to world war one. Taller than his father, though, and more of a man than Ethel remembered Charlie to have been. For a moment Ethel's heart quite turned over, and she invited the lad into the house in quite a flutter. But he would not come in further than the hall. Standing there stiffly, with his heels together, and speaking with a kind of anger in his tone which was really
quite
uncalled for in the circumstances, thought Ethel, he offered her first four five-pound notes to repay the debt, and then two pounds twelve shillings and fivepence in small change by way of compound interest. Ethel was quite taken aback as he stood there counting pennies into her hand. She accepted the five-pound notes, naturally, but suggested the lad should retain the rest for himself, as he was going off to the war and everything. He refused, very sharply as Ethel thought.

“He'll change his mind if he comes back only half a man, like his father,” she said on a grumbling note to Mrs. Clapham.

(Mrs. Clapham, her next-door neighbour and tenant, being the wife of a man who for health reasons had been demoted to a part-time job, could be patronised, and thus was a useful listener.)

However, none of the Martin children were killed or maimed in Hitler's war. The two boys came home safely and got good jobs, one in engineering and the other in textiles, and the two girls both married quite well and rather young, and they all had lots of children. It was really disgusting, as Ethel
said, how many children those Martins had. Showed you what kind of people they were at bottom. But what did it matter to Ethel Eastwood? She had her property; she prospered.

It was after the war was over that things began to go not quite so well with Ethel.

Fred Eastwood's property was old. One or two of the houses stood in slum property scheduled for clearance—they had been scheduled thus for so many years that Ethel had come to view the likelihood of anything happening to them with derisive disbelief; but now they were duly requisitioned and pulled down. Ethel received compensation, of course, and obtained good advice on how to reinvest the money; but it was not the same. Meagre dividend cheques with enormous income tax sums deducted, were not the same to Ethel as the solid cash she had taken week by week from tenants' hands. Income Tax you could fiddle a bit under those conditions, but when it was taken off before you started, as you might say, where were you? And living expenses going up and up, all the time. Because of some stupid law she could not put up her tenants' rents; yet all the time they were asking for outside paint, and roof repairs, and new sinks, and pipes repaired, and pointing. Pointing! Her own house, the house she lived in, stood at the end of Naseby Terrace. At one time she had been proud of the extra size and distinction which this position conferred, but now she was maddened by the area of that exposed side wall. It was horribly beaten upon by the wind and rain which came sweeping from the west across Ashworth Municipal Park. Yes, that wall would need to be pointed soon, as sure as fate. And its size! And the amount workpeople charged nowadays! Outrageous! It wasn't as if they worked hard, either; their working day was nothing but talk and tea. Taking one thing with another, she was quite glad to take the Dean girl as lodger—it was a kind act, as she explained to Mrs. Clapham, and the girl was well-behaved if a little hoity-toity, and punctual on the dot with her rent. Of course Ethel wouldn't have kept her a week
if she hadn't been punctual with her rent—“not a week,” she told Mrs. Clapham emphatically. Mrs. Clapham believed her.

Of course Ethel saw at once what was up when Dot Dean began going out with that Mr. Cressey.

“She's head over heels for him,” she said to Mrs. Clapham with relish, laughing her coarse loud laugh. “Yes, head over heels. Though I'm sure I can't tell you why. I don't think much to him myself, and that's a fact. He's nothing much to look at, and these schoolmasters don't get much pay.”

Mrs. Clapham opined that Mr. Cressey was always very kind and polite.

“Well, yes, though he was very sharp with me once when I asked Dot what film they were going to. There was a rather hot one on, I'd been told, and I gave her a hint not to go. ‘That is for Miss Dean to decide,' he said. Such airs and graces! And what is he, after all?
I
don't think much to him. He's lame, you know. He limps. Oh, not much, I grant you; it doesn't show much, I daresay he takes pains enough for that, he doesn't do it always, it's more a sort of a pause than a limp, but there it is.”

Mrs. Clapham thought that Mr. Cressey might be one of those who had been ill in childhood; they called them spastics.

“Spastics!” exclaimed Ethel scornfully. “Such fancy names! Why don't they call them cripples outright and be done with it? Cripples, that's what they are. I like to give things their proper names,” she concluded virtuously.

All the same, when there was this talk of Dot Dean's leaving Ashworth and going to her sister in Scarborough, Ethel was vexed, for the girl was well-behaved and punctual with her rent and always looked clean and smart, quite a credit to her landlady. Besides, who would Ethel get as a tenant, in her place? As things stood nowadays, she couldn't afford to be without a lodger in the house. It was really a very great relief when after the Easter holidays Dot seemed to change her mind and decide to remain in Ashworth.

“It's that Mr. Cressey,” said Ethel shrewdly. “Though what
she can see in him! And it'll never come to anything, you know. Mark my words, it'll never come to anything. It'll just go on and on, you know, without ever coming to anything. But why should I worry? She won't give up hope easily, Dot won't. She'll stay on, hoping against hope, as they say,” said Ethel, laughing heartily.

Mrs. Clapham said she thought there was a possibility that Dorothea and Mr. Cressey might get engaged.

“He's not the kind to do anything wrong,” she suggested.

“Oh, there'll be nothing
wrong
” said Ethel with crushing emphasis. “Not in my house, I can tell you. No, there'll be nothing wrong. But if they did by some strange chance get engaged, it'd be years before they could marry—schoolmasters don't get much pay, you know. Why should they? Their year's work is half holiday. But
I
don't think they'll get engaged. Still, they might. There's no telling what foolishness folks will get up to when they think they're in love. But I shall be surprised if it comes to anything.”

As the weeks went on, however, she somewhat modified this view.

“You might be right about our Dot and that Cressey,” she told Mrs. Clapham, nodding confidentially. “They're still going strong.”

“Well, I hope he does and I hope she's happy,” said Mrs. Clapham with an air of defiance.

Mrs. Eastwood snorted.

There came a sunny evening when Ethel, hearing steps on the stairs, heaved herself quickly out of her chair—she had grown bulky and heavy of late, though still a fresh-cheeked, well-looking woman—and hurried out to intercept her lodger. She returned to Mrs. Clapham, who was having a cuppa with her to pass the time till her husband came home, chuckling sardonically.

“Yes, I think you're going to be right,” she said. “Madam's just gone out dressed up to the nines, everything clean on her.
I will say that for Dot, she's always spruce and clean. But such a look on her face! She's right down besotted with him.” She chuckled. “I wished her luck,” she said.

“You shouldn't have done that, Ethel,” said Mrs. Clapham. “Young folk don't like having these things touched on.”

Mrs. Eastwood laughed.

“What will you do for a lodger if she gets engaged?” said Mrs. Clapham.

“I shall have plenty of time to find somebody else, before it comes to a wedding,” said Ethel with confidence.

“Well, I must be off and get my old man his tea,” said Mrs. Clapham, rising.

“It's awkward for you, him coming in at such awkward times,” said Ethel.

Her voice oozed sympathy, but under its cover she was really giving Mrs. Clapham a little dig about her husband's inferior job, in return for Mrs. Clapham's uncalled-for comment about her good wishes to Dot Dean. Ethel was skilful at thus planting a barb under the pretence of defending its recipient—she prided herself on giving, as she said, as good as she got, always. Mrs. Clapham, fully aware of her hostess's intention, coloured a little as she wished her cheeribye and slipped out by the back door, which stood open.

2

It was not much more than an hour later that Ethel to her surprise heard the front door latch turn. Who could it be? She heaved herself up quickly and hurried out into the hall, alert to defend her property. She had not been quite quick enough to intercept the intruder, however, for her lodger was already halfway up the stairs.