Shelter from the Storm (18 page)

Vinia stopped washing up and dried her hands swiftly on her pinny. She said, ‘You can have the spare bedroom and welcome.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You didn’t eat your tea again. Wasting good food like that. It isn’t right. Anyroad’ — she swept past him back to the table — ‘it would be a lot easier for me looking after one house than looking after two.’

‘And one man instead of two.’

‘I didn’t say that!’ Vinia found herself flustered, wanting to cry because everything had gone wrong and more was following, as if nobody had any control over anything that happened in their lives. ‘You can’t go back to that mucky woman’s house, not after …’

‘Not after what? The joy of being married, the benefits of living two doors away from my mother, the happiness of being a father? Believe me, I’ll be glad to go.’

‘So you can pretend that none of it happened? Sweep it away like Mrs Clancy does with muck under the carpets, if she has any carpets, which I doubt.’

‘She hasn’t,’ Dryden affirmed, ‘but it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t sweep up,’ and he left the house and banged the door.

Vinia hadn’t cried all the way through the death of the baby, Esther Margaret’s moods and disappearance and the note, but she did now. She sat down at the table and howled. She did not want Dryden in her house, God knew what more trouble he would cause before he was through, but neither did she want to send him back to that awful boarding house. There were better boarding houses, of course, but none of them would have had him even before all this had happened, and certainly not since. She had heard talk in the shops that day, that Dryden had driven his wife to her death, he had caused it; some said that he had even killed the child and disposed of Esther Margaret himself. If she took him in she believed that the talk would stop. If she didn’t Dryden might end up farther in the earth than the wife who had killed herself, though how she had done it no one had any idea since there was no evidence.

People have died before, she told herself, sitting down at the kitchen table and finding a handkerchief in the pocket of her skirt, but it didn’t feel like that. Esther Margaret’s death had made such a huge difference to everything. If the baby had lived things would have been so much better. It would have been the making of their marriage.

She heard footsteps through the passage and knew them only too well for Tom’s mother, so she hastily dried her eyes and got on with her clearing up. Mary Cameron was smiling when she came in. She accepted a cup of tea from Vinia and seemed happier than usual, sitting by the fire and looking around the room and talking about the people she had seen that day.

‘You’ve always lived in this house, haven’t you?’

‘I was born here,’ Vinia said.

‘And you like it?’

‘It’s the only home we ever had.’ Her dad had worked at the local foundry.

‘You’re entitled to a pit house, you know, you always were. Mr Forster’s like that, trying to get everybody cheap. He’s owed our Tommy a house ever since you were married. You’ll need a bigger house soon, I went up and told him. This place won’t be big enough once the bairns come along.’

Vinia’s face burned like good coal. Nowadays Mary was always going on about when the bairns came along. She was unconvinced that anything like that would ever happen. At first she had thought she would be pregnant soon. Tom liked taking her to him in bed, but she saw other women who had been married at around the same time and they were expecting and she was not. Mary Cameron could not know how much it grieved her, or perhaps Mary was desperate for a grandchild because as far as she was concerned all she had was Tom and it was not enough. All women had were their husbands, their children and their homes, and she was lonely because Tom was always at work, in his bed or in the pub. She felt as though she had so little. The idea of a business was nothing but a dream. It seemed that she was condemned to nothing more than what she had, and she wished that his mother would stop going on about it.

‘We have a spare room,’ she said.

‘Yes, but you have to say that the downstairs is cramped.’

Vinia supposed it was. She looked around the room. There was a curtain that came across under the stairs to hide the things
she did not need and had pushed in there, and on the far wall was a dresser. In the middle was a square table and four chairs, most of which were usually pushed in as far as they could be, and on the other side, under the window, was the settee and an armchair. It had never before seemed cramped to her, even with two big men in the room, and she had not envied Esther Margaret the space she had had in her house because there was very little furniture and too much misery. It was not the house which mattered, she decided, it was the people.

‘I think people should take what they’re entitled to and our Tommy works hard at that pit and you should have a pit house. Mr Forster must know that.’

Vinia wondered what Mary would think if she knew that Tom had invited Dryden to move in with them. It made her want to laugh. Mary would have been hurt and horrified and would probably never darken their doors again. On the other hand to upset his mother like that was unthinkable. Tom obviously hadn’t thought about it, just about Dryden. Dryden was the only person in the world that Tom really loved.

The house on the seashore swiftly became Esther Margaret’s delight. She had not seen anything like it before. It was a cottage not as pitmen’s houses were so termed, but a cottage in its small neatness, in its cosiness with its fires and hugged-to rooms and its wonderful view of the North Sea. Each day as she looked out of the windows at the back beyond the tiny garden there was nothing but the beach and the waves and the seabirds which came and sat above the bobbing waves when the tide was full. Did they come to feed, she wondered? It was like a party, the gulls and the ducks and the curlews with their long bills and the tiny little birds whose names she did not know who swept gracefully low above the sea and came to run along the sand as though each day were a new delight to them.

She soon discovered why her mother did not see her cousin. No two people, she thought, could have been less alike. Daisy lived alone in her house by the sea; there was no husband or children to care for and it did not seem to bother her. She was a very fat woman and ate a great deal and she cooked better than anyone Esther Margaret had ever met. She appeared to make her living from writing articles and books about the seashore, the creatures and the birds. There were few visitors, but those there were were taken into the back room where the sea rolled in and out beyond the window and the fire burned merrily. Daisy would
produce tea and cake for them and there would be long intricate discussions about things that Esther Margaret knew nothing about. Daisy had no religion that she could see and appeared completely content.

On fine days she went for walks along the beach and along the road towards the ruined castle in the distance which stood out on the very edge of the headland. It was a very long way so she never got that far, but the cold air and the idea of going back to the house made her feel much better and she began to remember what she had given her mind to forget — that the baby had died, that she had not, that she could have done better, that she had possibly been wrong to pretend to have killed herself. This conviction grew on her as Daisy continued to ask no questions. Esther Margaret had never come across anybody less curious. She had always thought that a person living alone must be lonely and crave company, but Daisy spent her days with pen and paper sketching and writing or in the kitchen, or reading or taking walks when it was fine or watching the birds beyond the window, and each morning she would go outside and give the birds great pieces of cake or hang a whole loaf on the washing line at the back, and the birds flocked into the garden.

The more Esther Margaret thought about it the more she realised that she had been wrong in pretending to have died. At the time she thought it was no more than Dryden deserved. Away from him and beyond the situation she saw that it was not so, and that however bad things got she had no right to expect him to take on such a burden. But she did not want to go back. Each day she told herself that she must do something about it and each day was so comfortable and interesting at the little house that she refused to face the problems. In her mind the idea of going back soon became so big that she could no longer face it. This was another world. It occurred to her that Daisy did not live in the real world, that her comfort and her work were in a way as much of a hideaway as Esther Margaret’s own escape. She lived inside her head, and the day that Esther Margaret saw
pictures through the open door of Daisy’s bedroom and ventured inside, she began to understand. Sunlight fell upon the rug by the bed and on the bedside table was a likeness of a young man in soldier’s uniform and a beautiful young woman. As she stood there, the sunlight warm through the window, she heard Daisy behind her and turned around, apologising.

‘No need to worry,’ Daisy said in her bluff way. ‘I haven’t any secrets. That’s Chester. It wasn’t his real name. Major John Chesterfield. He was a soldier, he was killed. His parents thought I wasn’t good enough for him. ‘We were married for ten years.’ She laughed her hearty laugh.

‘But you aren’t called Chesterfield,’ was all Esther Margaret could think of to say.

‘I don’t use it but it is my name. After John died all I wanted to do was run away so I came here. He left me comfortable and I have my work.’

Esther Margaret didn’t think the situation very comfortable at all; it was as bad as her own problems. She sat down on the bed and proceeded to tell Daisy everything that had happened, stumbling over the parts of the story which were making her ashamed. The sun had gone from the room by the time she finished and Daisy, never one to stand when she could sit down, was propped up against the pillows, saying nothing and frowning from time to time, not in a way that made Esther Margaret want to stop but just as though she were mulling over in her mind the tale she was being told. When it was over Esther Margaret looked at her, waiting for wisdom. Daisy pressed her lips together for a second and then she said, ‘I had no idea that your mother was such an incredible fool. No, that’s not true, I did and that’s why we never visit. It seems to me that you have two choices. You can either stay here, which you’re quite welcome to, or you can go back to your husband and make the best of it.’

‘I don’t think I can go back to him.’

‘Well, then, it isn’t a problem,’ and Daisy got up and
wandered back to the kitchen and was soon heard singing and making tea. Esther Margaret listened to the waves breaking on the beach and shivered. She could never go back.

*

Joe kept himself busy so he wouldn’t think too much about Esther Margaret. His father was never sober now and Joe had got him to sign the appropriate papers so that they became partners in Thaddeus’s business and he did in theirs. Joe started to go about the country with Thaddeus to gain orders for the foundry. They undercut other people in the selling of the coal and things began to get better. Joe tried to make some changes at home but his father became so upset about it that it was too difficult. More and more often he went back to Thaddeus’s house for dinner, and at weekends and when the weather was bad he stayed. If his father noticed he was not there he did not say so. Joe found the state of the house and his father’s worsening drunkenness and Jacob’s presence harder to bear since he had seen the way that other people lived.

Thaddeus introduced Joe to his friends and the friends had daughters but he could find little of interest in any of them, even though some were beautiful and some were interesting and charming. They came to Thaddeus’s house for parties. Luisa, married, came back with her husband sometimes, but Joe liked her less and less. She ignored her mother, and Joe had become fond of the woman who had been his mother’s best friend.

As for the house in Prince Row that Mrs Cameron had asked him to give Tom and Vinia, Joe was less inclined to do so. But somehow, just at that time, he had several free houses and was able to accommodate all the families he needed, so other than for sheer vindictiveness there was no reason why he should not give Tom and Vinia the house. Their place was tiny, she was his favourite woman in the village, and Tom was one of his best hewers. Joe had some conscience about Dryden but he could not
let Dryden stay there or other single men would be coming to him thinking they had the right to a house. He therefore called Tom into the office after his shift one late afternoon during the first week in March and told him that he could have the house two doors down from his mother’s if he should want it. Tom listened in silence. He took up a lot of room in the office. His dark eyes looking out of his blacker face were almost as disconcerting in their cold inscrutability as Dryden’s own, and Joe was not feeling very comfortable as he told him. He knew that the brothers went drinking together but he had not expected that Tom’s stare would turn into a glare.

‘I see,’ he said finally. ‘So you’re turning our Dryden out to make room for us when we already have a house. Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit daft, Mr Forster?’

‘I can’t let him have the house, you know that.’

‘Why me?’

‘Well, your house isn’t a pit house, it’s smaller so I believe, and …’

‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I don’t need the house.’

‘Our Dryden needs it. He’s going to have to go back to Ma Clancy’s. A nice state of affairs, Mr Forster.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Can’t you? Well, I can. Thanks for the offer but no.’

‘Cameron, if you don’t take the house I still have to turn Dryden out. It can stand empty but I still have to do it. That’s the way it works. Single men have to lodge with other people. There aren’t enough houses to go round usually.’

Tom looked carefully at him.

‘So that means that if I take the house our Dryden can stay there.’

Joe was more than surprised; he hadn’t realised Dryden and Tom were such good friends.