Shelter from the Storm (14 page)

‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,’ she said. ‘I know. You ought to get back before your wife wakes up.’

‘I should be …’

‘Go on, then,’ she said. Her eyes were wicked. Dryden leaned over and kissed her and once he had kissed her he wanted to do it again and then he couldn’t stop himself. What did it matter? Esther Margaret didn’t care about him anyhow. He didn’t need to hurry. The rain was running down the window, banging itself off the pavement below, the skies were dark, the curtains on either side created shadows, and as the rain got heavier the room grew bigger shadows and the less he wanted to leave.

Dora was laughing. She had a lovely deep, throaty laugh. Dryden covered her in kisses.

It was not that late when he left, and since it was Sunday Esther Margaret, he thought, was probably still asleep, though she could hardly blame him for stopping out when she wouldn’t let him near her. The rain had stopped. It gave the town a clean, washed look which he approved of. He walked down the back lane and into the yard and then into his house by the back door. To his surprise Vinia was in the kitchen attending to an already brightly burning fire. As she saw him she turned around, poker in hand, and fixed him with a look of contempt.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you finally bothered to come home.’

Dryden asked nothing. He recognised disaster when he saw it.

‘The doctor is here and the midwife. Esther Margaret went into labour in the middle of the night.’

‘The baby isn’t due,’ Dryden said.

‘It may not be due but it’s definitely coming.’

‘It’s weeks away.’

‘It doesn’t seem to know that.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. By the time I got here she was unconscious and very cold. That’s how we knew she’d been there a long time.’ She spoke in clipped tones as though she were making a report.

The doctor was there all afternoon. Vinia stayed. She didn’t
speak to him any more; she went upstairs twice with various things and came back down again after a long time. There was a bit of noise from upstairs too, Esther Margaret crying, and the creaking of people’s feet as they moved around. In the early evening the doctor came downstairs and told them that the baby had been born too soon and was dead.

‘And my wife?’ Dryden said, getting up.

‘She will be better in time, with care. You can go up if you want to.’

They did. The room had been cleared and cleaned. Esther Margaret lay in bed as though there had been no child; there was no evidence. What had they done with it? The bed was so well made, so perfectly straight. Dryden didn’t dare go near, but he watched Vinia go to her and sit down on the bed and take her hand. Esther Margaret opened her eyes.

‘My baby,’ she said softly.

‘It was too soon,’ Vinia said.

‘I know. I knew it was. It went wrong.’

‘Dryden’s here.’

Esther Margaret closed her eyes and whispered loudly, ‘I don’t want to see him, not ever again. Make him go away.’

‘Esther Margaret—’

‘Make him go away.’ She turned her face towards the window.

Dryden left the room. He walked slowly down the stairs. After a long while Vinia came down. He was standing by the fire.

‘It wasn’t completely your fault,’ she said. ‘The baby probably wouldn’t have survived even if Esther Margaret hadn’t spent all those hours alone on the floor in pain. It was a boy. At least it’s spared having a Cameron for a father.’

‘I’m not a Cameron,’ was the only defence Dryden could think of.

‘It’s the only name you’ve got! You and Tom, you don’t make one decent man between you! You couldn’t take responsibility if it was going to kill you.’

‘I married her, didn’t I?’

‘Oh yes, you did that, and ever since then I dare say you’ve laid every bloody loose woman for miles! You useless miserable bastard!’ She started to cry. Dryden wished she wouldn’t; it was hard crying, as though she didn’t really want to let it out. ‘Why don’t you go back to the pub, it’s all you’re good for!’

‘Aren’t you going home?’

‘Just for once your brother has gone to his mother’s for his dinner. I’ll stay here, unless you have some particular objection. She has to be watched carefully for the next few hours. If you want to go to bed you can always use the other room.’ She turned away, went into the pantry and banged about, so Dryden left. Tom was waiting in the Golden Lion. He could pretend nothing was wrong there, though he couldn’t swallow any beer or the pie Tom had bought him. Dryden had thought Tom would say lots of helpful things like ‘She’ll be all right, it was only a bairn, she can have lots more’, but he didn’t. When Dryden told him the baby was dead Tom looked down and then away.

‘I thought having bairns was going to be easy,’ he said finally.

‘The McMortons have ten.’

‘Mr McMorton must have summat we haven’t,’ Tom said in a vain attempt at humour.

Dryden never wanted to go home again but he had to get some sleep before his shift in the early morning so he went in the end. Tom was staying at his mother’s. Dryden wished he could have gone somewhere else to stay.

‘My mother’s pleased,’ Tom said. ‘She likes having me there.’

Vinia didn’t even come out of the bedroom when he got home. Dryden didn’t go upstairs. Vinia might not know it but there was no bed in the back room. He slept on the settee, in as much as he did sleep. She came down in the morning and told him that Esther Margaret was feeling better. She gave him his bait.

‘Is the doctor coming?’

‘Do you really care?’

Dryden didn’t say anything to that. He hated the way she was looking at him. It was like being showered with needles.

‘She could have died,’ Vinia said flatly.

Dryden went to work. Nobody could keep up. He worked until he could have dropped and then he hardly dared go home for fear there would be a termagant waiting for him. The fire was on, the meal was ready, the water was hot. Vinia banged about for a while and then she went upstairs and let Dryden wash in peace. He couldn’t eat. The smell made him feel sick. She took it off him and threw it away.

‘Aren’t you going to the pub?’ she said.

‘No, I thought I’d stop here and listen to you shouting at me all night. It obviously makes you feel better.’

‘It does not make me feel better.’

‘Well, it doesn’t make me feel any better either, so I don’t know what you’re doing it for.’

Vinia glared at him. She made him feel worse than anybody had ever made him feel before. When he had been little and the Harmers had punished him and told him regularly that he was evil and who his father was and what he had done to Mary Cameron, Dryden had always thought there was a small part of him that wasn’t really all bad and he had maintained that idea all through his life, but it was as if that part of him had given up. When she looked at him like that he felt there was nothing left, and at the same time that a woman like her would never do anything other than despise him.

‘Don’t you realise what you’ve done?’ she said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you Esther Margaret could have married a nice lad and had a decent life. She’s heartbroken about her baby. The fall brought on the child—’

‘But you said—’

‘I was trying to spare you. Why was I? You don’t care about her. You don’t care about anybody.’

The trouble was, Dryden realised suddenly and miserably, that she was wrong. He did care about somebody. It was a very strange realisation and totally alien, and it had crept up on him from nowhere. He denied it to himself half a dozen times while she ranted on about what a dreadful person he was and then he told
himself that it would pass and then he realised that he didn’t mind her shouting at him, all he cared about was that she was there in the room, not as pretty as lots of women in the village and nowhere near as bonny as Esther Margaret and more precious than the sun and the moon and the stars. Everywhere she wasn’t there was total darkness like the pit with nobody to light it. She was horribly right too — he felt guilty about Esther Margaret and sorry about the baby but it was nothing compared to the great mountain of feeling that he had for her. He felt as if there were sunshine all around her and it was stupid and ridiculous.

‘Is what I’m saying funny?’

Dryden came back to her voice.

‘What?’

‘Am I amusing you?’ She came nearer, almost threatening, which was either very brave of her or particularly foolhardy considering how small she was, how big he was, and the fact that she was a woman in a pit village. But he could see that she wasn’t thinking about that, she was so upset about Esther Margaret and the baby.

‘Can I see her?’

‘She doesn’t want you to. I thought I would sleep down here tonight so that she has some rest. You can sleep in the back bedroom.’

‘There’s no furniture in the back bedroom,’ Dryden said, ‘and besides, she’s my wife.’

Vinia’s eyes wavered.

‘You mustn’t … The doctor said that … you mustn’t touch her.’

Dryden held her reluctant gaze.

‘I haven’t been anywhere near her since the day we were married,’ he said. ‘For my sins I’m not allowed.’

Vinia didn’t say anything. Dryden took some satisfaction in having silenced her. ‘I have a day’s work to do tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I need to sleep.’

He got himself out of the room and up the stairs. Luckily Esther Margaret was sleeping and turned the other way. All he did was peel off his clothes and fall into bed.

Joe came to visit Esther Margaret. It made Vinia’s eyebrows lift and Esther Margaret smile for the first time in days. They both knew that pit-owners did not visit the wives of their men after a child had died, and she in bed too. It was most improper. He seemed not to know. His voice wafted up the stairs.

‘But I must see her.’

‘Mrs Cameron is in bed. Mr Forster, really!’

Though she did not love Dryden, Esther Margaret felt the loss of his child dreadfully. She was desolate, inconsolable. She had not spoken a word to him in three days. They had slept in the same bed and not touched, but that was nothing new. She was finished with him for good. She could not look upon his face.

Joe got his way. He came upstairs, Vinia with him, and his arms were full of roses and apples, pears and plums.

‘It was all we had,’ he said as if to explain it.

Vinia took the fruit from him and left it by the bed, and the roses she took downstairs with her. She threw him one mildly disapproving look before going down. Without ceremony Joe sat down on the bed and grasped Esther Margaret’s hand and kissed it. For a moment she was deceived and saw him as he had been, the impetuous boy who had asked her to run away with him, and then she realised that he had changed. He was running the pit
almost single-handed which was, she knew, a great deal of responsibility for one so young.

‘I was so sorry to hear about your child. How awful for you.’

Esther Margaret could only nod and wonder that he was there and at his caring enough for her to come when talk of any kind would cause them both problems. He must have been seen. Joe was a conspicuous figure in the village. The impossibility of their situation made her long for her child. Only the idea of the baby had kept her there with Dryden. Her life was cheerless; her mother and father had not spoken to her since she had left their house to be married. The baby was dead and she could see the future without it and she was afraid.

Joe held her hand. She thought that with encouragement he might have kissed her fingers, but she must not encourage him, however longingly he looked at her, because it was unthinkable that he could take one of his workmen’s wives, most especially the man who had saved his life. He had the whole of the community to think about; they depended upon him for their livelihood. He could not be seen to make mistakes. It was much too late for him to have anything to do with her.

She asked him how his father was, just for something to say, and he replied suitably and all the while he held her hand. Esther Margaret dreaded his going but she knew also that he could not stay for long, he could not be seen to do so, and even sooner than she had thought he got up, muttering kind words and saying that he must go. When he had gone, when she heard Vinia seeing him to the front door, she began to cry. Vinia came upstairs and Esther Margaret tried to hide the tears but it was no good.

‘He asked me to run away with him once. You can’t think how much I wish that I had done so.’

Vinia sat down, her eyes wide with surprise.

‘Who would have run the pit and looked after the village?’

‘Joe shouldn’t have to do that!’

‘But he does have to,’ Vinia pointed out.

‘We were younger then.’

It had not been so very long ago but it felt like a long time, it felt like for ever. They were trapped, but then perhaps Vinia was right and even if she had consented to leave with him Joe could not have gone. It had been something she could never think about. She felt that the trap had closed around her and she could barely breathe.

‘His father isn’t doing it, is he?’ Vinia said reasonably. ‘And their family should. After all, they made the most money out of it.’

They don’t seem to have much to show.’

‘No, well, his father wouldn’t, would he?’

*

Thaddeus Morgan came often to the pit to do business with Joe. He came that week with the information that his daughter was to marry George McAndrew.

‘I have to tell you, Joe, that it isn’t what I wanted for her,’ he said, as Joe closed the office door and they were private together. ‘There was a time when I rather hoped you might take to one another, but there’s no accounting for tastes. She has a lot of spirit and … well, to be honest I think she’d be too much for you. She isn’t like her mother. Alice is biddable, Luisa is like me. She’s marrying a rich man so I’ve nothing against it, I’m proud of her, but she’s our only child and the Clyde is a long way off. She didn’t take to you when she saw you and I don’t think you took to her so you won’t mind me speaking so plainly. We make plans for our children and they don’t work out. I don’t know why we bother in the first place but that’s parents for you.’ He looked straight at Joe. ‘I had thought the businesses would go together well and I had thought …’ He stopped there.