‘How are things?’ she said.
‘You should know. You’re there most of the time,’ he said, sitting down some way off. She saw him often at Western Isle but they barely spoke any more.
‘You should leave home,’ she said.
‘What’s the use? It isn’t that I hate Western Isle and I can see my father’s point. My family have worked hard to have such a farm. It isn’t that I don’t want it, it’s just that I know it isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing, and when I can’t do the work I want to do I feel so useless and dissatisfied.’
Annie was quite surprised. Alistair was not given to explaining his feelings.
‘Why don’t we go to the dance up at Alston?’ she said.
He looked surprised. He had stopped asking her out, having been turned down twice by Annie, she had been so embarrassed at her own behaviour.
‘I didn’t think you wanted to go anywhere. Paul’s practically gone into a decline. You never see anybody. It’s because of David Blake, isn’t it?’
‘He’s been gone forever. How could it be because of him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wanted him to go away.’
‘Did you, why?’
‘He could never be anything here.’
‘And now he’s a clerk in a shipping office. Dizzy heights,’ Alistair said.
‘At least he’s got a job which is more than a lot of people.’
‘I hope it’s a job he likes,’ Alistair said, getting up.
* * *
It was a perfect June evening. For once they were alone. Tommy and Clara had gone off somewhere else and Madge was meeting Frank. They didn’t see anyone they knew and it was rather pleasant just to dance. Alistair didn’t talk much, the one long speech seemed to have exhausted his verbal capacity but Annie didn’t want speech, she was content to dance and listen to the music and be in his arms.
When it was late they came out. It was a lovely night, not dark, quite still. The sheep were crying in the fields below, the houses were grey dots on the hillside, the fields were shadowed squares in the quiet and the sky was clear and pale and graced with a star or two.
‘I don’t know how you could ever bear to leave this,’ she said.
‘I probably wouldn’t want to leave it if I knew that I could. Just now it’s like a prison with a pleasant view.’ Annie smiled over that and turned to him and she caught a look or an angle that was familiar. She waited and nothing happened.
‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’
‘You never want me to kiss you. You’ve kept well away from me for weeks.’
‘I do now.’
So he did, very slowly and carefully as though she was about to change her mind. Annie’s body went into shock. There was something about it that was all Blake. She broke away, shaking and stared at him.
‘See?’ he said.
‘Alistair—’
‘Oh, let’s go home, I’m tired of playing games.’
‘It isn’t a game. I wasn’t, it’s just that . . .’ but he was already in the car, slamming the door. He didn’t speak all the way back, pulled up sharply at her gate, ‘Get out.’
‘Alistair—’
‘Just get out, will you?’
Annie did so. She ran into the house. She could hear the car as it tore away. She said a hasty goodnight to her parents and went to bed. The other two girls were asleep. She lay there and thought. Frank had been right, Blake’s mother had gone with a married man. She had gone with Charles Vane but Alistair didn’t know. She thought about the kiss and how sweet it was. She turned in towards the pillow, trying not to think.
* * *
Alistair didn’t spare the car. He threw it around the tiny roads, not caring if anything should get in the way, not minding if there should be an accident.
When he got home to Western Isle there were cars in the yard, sleek expensive cars. His father and mother were having a dinner party. He had forgotten. He hated their social life, the way that they mixed with the best people in the area, the best being the people who had professions or money.
He didn’t go straight in, he wished that he could stay outside until everyone had gone. He went around for a while to the duckpond and walked around there and through the rose gardens and over the bridge which led into a big orchard where plum and pear and apple trees grew in profusion. To one side was a kitchen garden. From the front he could see the light in the middle of the house on the landing where there was a big round window like a bicycle wheel. Inside, he thought in disgust, the house had everything, a sumptuous drawing-room, a dining-room which could seat twenty people, big kitchen and dairy and various small rooms leading off, a music room and a billiard room and a library and a study and bedrooms and bathrooms and long halls. It had seemed to him when he was a child that his parents should have had other children to fill the house but his mother couldn’t have any more after him. That was why he felt the responsibility so much, why he couldn’t walk out even when his father had told him that he was to stay there. He felt somehow that it was his fault there was no one else to bear the name and ease the burden. He would have to stay here and carry on as though he didn’t hate the place now.
From the drawing-room were the sounds of laughter. His father’s friends drinking brandy, his mother’s friends drinking coffee and bragging about their children. Of late his mother had begun inviting various families who had girls of about his own age or a little younger. People whom she thought were suitable. She did not think Annie suitable because she had no money and was their dairymaid. That was why he had stopped talking to Annie when she was at Western Isle. He didn’t want his parents to find out how much he cared about her. He wasn’t sure now whether he wanted her to know either. He had watched her with Blake. She cared more for a penniless farm boy than she cared for anyone else but Blake was not here. He had thought for a while that she would fall in love with Paul Monmouth but she had not done so.
He walked through the hall and was about to climb the stairs when his mother opened the door of the drawing-room and came into the hall.
‘So there you are,’ she said, looking quellingly at him.
‘Well, I think it’s me,’ he said.
‘You aren’t funny. Where have you been?’
‘Out.’
‘I know that. Where?’
‘Nowhere in particular.’
‘I asked you to stay here. I invited particular people here tonight and I asked you to stay in.’
‘I forgot.’
‘How could you possibly forget?’
‘Probably because I wanted to,’ Alistair said. ‘Mother, I wish that you would stop inviting girls here for me to meet. I’m not interested in them.’
His mother came to the foot of the stairs.
‘You’d better get interested in them,’ she said, ‘because if we have any more nonsense about Annie Lowe she’ll be looking for another job. Really, Alistair, I thought you had more sense than to pay attention to one of the servants,’ and his mother turned around and went back into the drawing-room.
He climbed the stairs. It was quiet up there. The old walls were so thick that you couldn’t hear any noise from the drawing-room. The windows were open to the sweet smell of the roses in the garden. In the distance was the river and way over to the side, though you couldn’t see it from there, was Grayswell. He didn’t understand the way that Annie was behaving.
* * *
He sought her out the next morning when she was alone in the dairy.
‘Are you still angry with me?’
‘I wasn’t angry with you.’ She looked anxiously at him. ‘You were the one who was angry.’
‘But you pushed me away.’
‘Alistair!’ his father roared from the house.
‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.
* * *
‘What were you doing in the dairy?’ his father demanded when he reached the study.
‘Talking to Annie.’
‘She isn’t here to talk, she gets paid to work. We have the accounts to do.’ His father threw him a glance. ‘You look tired. Must you go out drinking every night?’
‘I wasn’t drinking.’
‘That Lowe boy is a bad influence on you. Why can’t you choose people like yourself to mix with?’ and his father, grumbling, got down to work.
Alistair stopped listening. It wasn’t difficult, he did it all the time now.
Twelve
It seemed to Blake a long time before he realised that the design and creation of a ship was something that he might understand. At first it was so far outside of his experience that even just to be there under the shadow of such mighty goings on unnerved him and then gradually everything began to take on a different shape in his mind. The rise and fall of the shipbuilding world became all his concern. Simon laughed at him, he hated business and did everything he could to get Blake away from the office. This wasn’t easy. Long before the others came in and after they went home Blake was there. He had no other interest. He stopped travelling to Ralph and Mary Ann’s house and found a room in a respectable house where he could walk to and from work. All he did was eat and sleep there. He didn’t know anybody except his landlady, he didn’t want to know anyone. Blake had decided what he wanted. If he could become properly established here at the shipyard, if he could become an engineer then in time he could go back to the dale and ask Annie to marry him. He would be a man with a profession then, with some kind of a future and she could come here to Sunderland and they would rent a nice house with a garden out the front and a yard at the back and they would marry and settle down and have children.
The dream was so real to him that he worked harder and harder and saved every penny. He began to go often to the Richmond household for his Sunday lunch and he became fond of Sylvester Richmond who treated him almost as he treated Simon.
‘You can stop calling me “sir”,’ Sylvester said. ‘We’re not at the office, and not “Mr Richmond” either. It sounds so stuffy. I think you might be an engineer given time.’
‘I consider myself lucky to have the chance.’
‘You are very lucky, my boy.’
Irene always seemed pleased to see Blake, though she grumbled that he and her father talked of nothing but the shipyard.
A young man called Robert Denham came over sometimes too, more often in the afternoons because Sylvester did not want Robert there for meals, he said.
‘Huh. Young Denham. Haunts the place. A solicitor. I hate lawyers and everything to do with the law. His father’s a solicitor too. Couldn’t they think of anything better for him to do? Solicitors are like leeches, they live off other people’s blood, sometimes literally, I think, and he talks too much about the law.’
‘Not half as much as you and David go on about ships,’ Irene said.
‘It’s a dead bore,’ Simon said.
‘It’s a pity you don’t take a leaf out of David’s book,’ his father said and Simon pulled a face at Blake across the table.
That summer on Sunday afternoons it was pleasant to sit in the garden and drink tea with Sylvester – Sylvester always put brandy in his tea, a habit which made his daughter shudder. They would sit under the trees in the garden and Blake would listen to Sylvester on his favourite subject, Richmond and Dixon, its origins, its growth, its problems, the men, the ships, the future. And Robert would ask Irene to walk around the garden which she did, listening to him as they went with her head slightly inclined towards him.
Robert didn’t talk much to Blake, just general polite conversation. Blake could talk freely to Sylvester. It was his greatest pleasure to know that a man so far above him would treat him as if he knew something when in fact he did not, but he could ask the stupidest questions and Sylvester answered him patiently because shipbuilding was his passion and he told Blake that to find someone who would talk endlessly about it was better than a gold mine.
‘We’ve gone through a long depression, lad, it’s made the twenties look like a bloody picnic,’ he said, one summer afternoon, ‘but I think we’re almost through it now.’
‘Are you going to talk ships with Daddy all afternoon?’ Irene protested. ‘The sun is shining and I want to go for a walk.’
Robert was not there that Sunday. He had gone away with his family.
‘Nobody’s stopping you,’ Simon said.
‘David, please,’ she coaxed and in the end he left her father to coffee and a cigar and walked.
‘I am not going anywhere near the harbour. You’ll bore me to death with detail,’ she said, as they left down the front steps of the house.
‘Where then, Mowbray Park?’
‘Yes.’ She put her hand through his arm and they walked slowly. ‘I’m glad Daddy has somebody to talk to.’
Blake laughed.
‘He’s just being polite. He has people to talk to about ships every day at work, he doesn’t need me. I’m the newest humblest engineer he’s got. I know nothing.’
‘I think he just likes you,’ she said.
‘Probably because I don’t know enough to argue with him.’
‘You don’t give yourself any credit but then he does get tired of the way that Simon goes on.’
‘Simon won’t be happy until he’s allowed to go into the army.’
‘That won’t ever happen.’
‘It will if there’s a war.’
‘He’ll be needed here more than ever if there is. Daddy would never let him go.’
‘Irene, he has no natural ability. Not even as much as I have and that’s not saying a great deal.’
‘You love it,’ she said. ‘That’s the difference.’
Blake did not understand his continuing relationship with the Richmond family. He could not see what they got out of it. He knew nothing, though after the first few times he made sure that he had a better idea of politics and world news because Sylvester was the kind of man who grilled you on these things if he thought that you had not seen a newspaper all week. Luckily there were newspapers in the office or Blake would have remained in ignorance. Also he asked Blake’s opinion on books and loaned him them and expected him to read them swiftly and with understanding. It was rather like school as school had never been because Sylvester’s mind was more alive than any Blake had ever met before.
Simon was always trying to persuade Blake to go out drinking and with girls. He stopped even trying to pretend that he was doing any work. He was the only person Blake knew who was praying for war. Because his father would not hear of the army he went out nightly and got drunk, knowing how much Sylvester hated stupid idle people.
‘Why don’t you ever go out?’ Simon asked, one evening that autumn.
‘Because I need the money.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘There’s a girl—’
‘Oh, I knew it would be that. Don’t tell me. You want enough money to go back and marry her. She’s probably a milkmaid. Pardon me while I’m sick.’
‘I love her, Simon. I’m going to marry her but I have to be something first.’
He thought that in another year or so he would be making enough so that Annie could come to him. He even wrote to her, just a light letter, telling her what Sunderland was like, about her grandparents whom he still saw sometimes, about the occasional visit to the cinema.
She would be able to work too, at least at first until there was a child and that might take a year or two. They wouldn’t need much. He wanted to see her so badly that he lay with his eyes closed at night and conjured her face. He tried not to think of what the farm was like without him, it hurt too much but gradually he grew used to being away, the bustle and activity, the people, the shops and the sea and he came to know the area and to be at home there. He thought that perhaps for his sake Annie might be persuaded to leave her beloved country and her horse and come to him there and marry him. He pictured them in a room neat and cosy with a fire and a bed and some books. He thought of her sweet face and her laughter.
She didn’t write back. He thought that perhaps the letter had been lost in the post. He did get a letter from her mother with scarcely any mention of Annie.
Blake knew by now that, in spite of what Sylvester said about Robert Denham, he would be very glad to have the young man marry Irene. He came from a good family. He lived in a big house. He had a father who was a solicitor and a mother whose family were doctors and he had a car and a profession and a brother and a sister. Most of all Blake envied him the brother and sister and had tried to be polite and not to ask too much but he imagined Robert Denham going home to his family on winter evenings, to fires and food and conversation, not to a tiny freezing bedroom, Mrs Southwark’s variable cooking and a cold bed in the dark silence. Blake was no better pleased to find that Irene did not ignore him for Robert, rather the other way round. He had tried to stop going so much. He was sometimes invited to Seaton Town to have Sunday dinner with Ralph and Mary Ann and he was relieved to go but he liked the Richmonds so much, not just their house and their fine dinners, he liked Simon as though he was a brother and Irene was as dear to him as Madge and Elsie and made a good substitute and most of all there was the tall broad kind man that his childhood had lacked. Sylvester Richmond meant more to Blake than anyone in the world save Annie and though his past was not spoken of he was at home among the dinnerplates with Sylvester talking about shipping and carving great lumps of beef and encouraging everybody to eat too much. He called Blake ‘my boy’ and ‘my lad’, clapping him on the back when they met and encouraging him to drink and scoffing at his political ideas even if a week before he had agreed with them just for the enjoyment of an argument. He wished that Irene would not look at him with those sparkling eyes. Her father, he knew, would have died rather than let her marry a nobody and Blake did not want to lose Sylvester in such a way. It had never occurred to Sylvester, he knew, that she might like Blake better than she should. Until lately it had not occurred to Blake either that she hated his going rather than Robert’s, that she liked his conversation better, that she would play silly games with him for hours and laugh across the table at him. There was no room in his life for Irene and no place in hers for him and he did not want to hurt her.
* * *
Annie got drunk at the party. Alistair watched her drinking great quantities of punch until she was pink-faced and giggling. The party was at Paul Monmouth’s home and Alistair had not expected to see her there after the way she had treated Paul. Now the evening was late and he was standing across the room from her with Tommy.
‘What is your sister doing?’
‘She’ll be to carry out,’ Tommy prophesied.
‘I’ve never seen her drink like this. Is she all right?’
Tommy had to think about it.
‘She’s been a bit fed up lately,’ he said. ‘And if Monmouth thinks he’s taking her home when she’s in that state he
can think again,’ and Tommy went over and took her by the arm.
‘I’ll take her home,’ Alistair said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. You look after Clara.’
It was a wet night. She slipped when she got out the door so it was lucky that he had hold of her arm. She sang all the way back. When he stopped the car outside the gate she turned to him and said, ‘I love you.’
‘No, you don’t. You’re just drunk.’
‘I’ve always loved you. It’s the way that you kiss.’ She leaned over. Alistair leaned back away from the alcohol.
‘Come on,’ he said and he got out and opened the door and helped her across the yard. Her father opened the door.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Alistair said instantly.
‘I didn’t suppose it was. Thank you for bringing her home.’
Alistair said goodnight and went off but her words went round and round in his head. Why had she said that she loved him? Oh yes, she was drunk, but why? And had she always loved him? And last time he had kissed her she had pushed him away abruptly and gone so it couldn’t be the kisses.
* * *
The next day she came to Western Isle and found him in the stables, stroking his horse and talking to it. He heard her come in but he didn’t turn around, thinking that it was probably his father but when she paused in the doorway he turned and she was standing in a pool of sunlight, looking more beautiful than ever before, and smiling at him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Do you have a hangover?’
‘I did have this morning. It was nothing compared to the ear ache I had when my father had finished shouting at me. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
She went across but Alistair turned back to the horse. He didn’t want to see her or talk to her.
‘Don’t be cross, Alistair.’
‘I’m not cross, it’s just that . . . I wish you wouldn’t pretend that you care about me when you don’t. It isn’t easy to take.’
‘I do care about you.’
‘No.’
‘I do.’
‘It’s Blake that you like, it always was.’ And then he realised, quite suddenly like when you saw the solution when you were doing a crossword, and he turned sharply and looked at her. ‘You thought I was him last night.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Annie said quickly. ‘Why should I think such a thing?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It was just that . . . I hadn’t been kissed in so long until that night when you stopped the car up on the top road and . . . I thought I was never going to want to again until you started kissing me. I got a shock, that’s all. I thought I . . .’
‘What?’
‘I thought I loved him but if I did then I wouldn’t feel how I feel about you.’
‘How do you feel about me?’
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. Alistair didn’t realise until then how often he had imagined them together like this. He tightened his hold on her and kissed and kissed her, thinking all the time that she would pull away but she didn’t and when he finally thought it was enough and would have let her go she put herself back into his arms and hid her face against him. He held her close to him like he had held no one before, nor ever been held. It was more than man and woman, more than family somehow. It was a special knowledge, secret and close.
‘I hate the way things are,’ she said finally without moving away far.
‘So do I.’
‘We could make it different.’ She moved back more now to look into his face.
‘I can’t leave Western Isle. I can’t ever.’
‘Because of your father?’
‘Not just because of him, because of all kinds of things. I can’t ever just walk out on it. I would feel as though I was betraying something important. It’ll be mine, you see, and I can’t let my father down no matter what. He’s still my father, he’ll always be that.’