Shelter from the Storm (20 page)

‘No.’ He clutched at Joe’s coat.

‘I think we should. You don’t want to die sober, do you?’

Randolph closed his eyes.

‘Do you think I am dying?’

‘No. I think with help you’ll be fine.’

‘I can look forward to a long, happy life, in fact,’

‘Oh, I think that would be going too far,’ Joe said.

He watched until his father went back to sleep and then he trudged downstairs. Mrs Ferguson put a perfectly good dinner in front of him with great ceremony in the dining room, but too much had already happened that day and Joe couldn’t eat it. She left. It was almost dark when the doctor arrived. He was upstairs for what seemed to Joe like a long time, and when he came down had little to say.

‘The drink’s killing him.’

‘If he stopped would it help?’

‘It’s too late for that. Only his will has kept him alive this long.’

When the doctor had gone Joe went back upstairs. His father was sleeping but he awoke when Joe approached the bed.

‘The doctor says you’ll be fine.’

‘I’ll be fine when I’m dead. There’s something I want to say to you.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather wait until tomorrow?’ Joe suggested.

Randolph Forster shook his head.

‘I have to say this. You couldn’t dislike me any more than you already do so the only difference it will make is to me. I’m not a religious man, I don’t care what you do with me after I’m gone.’

‘I assumed you’d want to be buried near Mother,’ Joe said with a touch of irony.

‘She isn’t there.’

Joe thought he had misheard.

‘Isn’t what?’

‘She’s not under that stone in the churchyard. She never came back.’

Joe tried to take this in. The alternative was to assume that this full day had been a kind of gigantic nightmare.

‘She never came back?’

‘There’s nothing in there but stones. She didn’t run off. She would have done, if I’d given her enough time, but I didn’t. She
wanted to take you and I wouldn’t let her. You were all I had to carry on the name and the house and the business so I wasn’t going to have her running off with you. She was weak and stupid. She wanted to go so I put her out. It was a very bad day, it was snowing. I don’t know what happened to her after that. I didn’t go after her and I didn’t let her back in. I never saw her again.’

There was a huge mountain trying to get past Joe’s throat to his eyes and an enormous sickness rolling up from his stomach. His ears had given up on him and the whole world shook. His father, after the huge effort of speaking, closed his eyes again and seemed to go to sleep, and Joe’s first instinct was to strangle him. Only the knowledge that he would then be no better than this man stopped him from doing so.

‘Then why did you pretend?’ he managed softly.

‘Because I didn’t want people to think that harlot could get away from me,’ Randolph said, and with that he fell asleep.

*

Vinia saw Joe leave and she hesitated, wondering whether Dryden had had enough for one day, and then she made up her mind and banged hard on the door until Mrs Clancy opened it. She wore the dirtiest dress that Vinia had ever seen. There was some kind of print on it but she could not tell whether or not it was flowers. Mrs Clancy’s hair had never seen a wash; it hung in great iron-grey hanks down past her shoulders.

‘And what can we do for you, miss?’ she said.

The smell from the house made Vinia want to put her fingers over her nose. She had to stop herself. It was of unwashed, sweaty bodies, stale tobacco and old beer, boiled cabbage, greasy meat and the unmistakable gritty dust that made her long to reach for mop, bucket, scrubbing brush and soap.

‘I’ve come to see Dryden Cameron.’

‘My, my, he is having a busy day,’ and Mrs Clancy ushered her in through the dank flagged passage and opened a door beyond. Vinia went inside. Dryden looked completely out of
place, she was glad to see, like a butterfly in a cobweb, all neat and clean and shiny from her washing and ironing and looking after. It was the dirtiest room imaginable and he was standing by a fire that was almost out, as though he had been standing there for hours.

‘Dryden, you can’t stay here, it’s awful,’ she said.

He moved, glanced around as though he were seeing the room for the first time.

‘Come back. Tom and me, we’ll look after you.’

Dryden turned and looked at her.

‘Haven’t you had enough yet?’ he said.

‘You can’t stay!’

‘I lived here for eight years and what I had before and after it was much worse. This is the best that things have ever been,’ he said, sweeping a hand around as if it were a theatre, all gilt and velvet. Vinia could not imagine such an existence.

‘Mr Forster came and told us about Esther Margaret,’ she said, moving towards him. ‘Come back with me, please. Tom’s already rowed with his mother about it and it would all be wasted. I’ll make your bed up, clean and soft, and I’m going to make a dinner later. Tom’s got the front-room fire going.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ Dryden said flatly.

‘Understand what?’ She drew closer and stared into the impenetrable depths of his eyes.

‘I killed her. It was because of me. You can’t possibly want me there, not after what I’ve done. Leave it.’

Vinia began to cry. She had no idea that she was going to, and he was right, she didn’t want him in her house and she did blame him for what had happened, but she couldn’t leave him there. It was like putting a small child or an animal out into a snowstorm. She could see quite clearly that the only love Dryden had ever experienced was his affection for Tom, and if he stayed here he would lose it.

Even worse she had the impression that if she didn’t get Dryden out of here he would go completely to the bad, because
there was nothing left to hold him, she could see that. All she could do was appeal to what better instinct she thought he had.

‘You have to come back with me, for Tom’s sake, please.’

In the end that was what did it, though he took more persuading, but she just kept on in the same vein about how Tom had not wanted to come because he was so upset and how much Tom wanted him there and in the end Dryden gave in, though she could see it was not what he had intended at all.

Much to her relief, Tom managed to talk Dryden into the pub, got him drunk and brought him back to eat a huge dinner. When they had eaten Dryden collapsed on to the settee in the front room and fell asleep there. When he came round at teatime she had built up an enormous fire

‘You coming back to the Lion?’

‘No thanks.’

‘See you later, then.’

The back room was as comfortable as Vinia could make it, and she hoped that he didn’t associate it with Esther Margaret. It looked different because before it had had no furniture in it. There was a big bed, clean and warm with blankets, plenty of pillows, a rug beside the bed, thick curtains to keep out the draughts, a dresser with drawers and a wardrobe, all of which had been her mother’s, and a complete set of bedroom furniture, which she was very proud of and had polished to a high shine. She showed Dryden into it just as he was about to fall asleep on the settee. She had even put a hot brick in the bed.

No more was heard from Dryden that night. She had to waken him to go to work and that morning she marched up to Mrs Clancy’s and collected his things and brought them back and installed them in the drawers and wardrobe so that he should have no more excuse to leave. She smothered him with good food, warm fires, a soft bed and all the comforts that she could devise. She knew also that Dryden was tired, exhausted with everything that had happened. Every time he sat down he went to sleep. Tom couldn’t persuade him to the pub again after that first
time, and she was glad. Tom came rolling home every night, unable to bear himself, for having upset his mother so much. She could do without Dryden drunk as well.

‘You’re a disgrace!’ Alf shouted down the row at him as Tom came home from work.

Tom said nothing. He was breathing heavily by the time he got into the house but all he said was, ‘Well, at least my father’s speaking to me.’

Vinia had no intention of saying anything to him. Tom had made the biggest sacrifice of his life for his half-brother and she knew that he longed to make peace with his mother. He only slept well because he drank and he drank to destroy his thoughts. He went to work every day and that, she thought, was as much as anybody could ask.

Dryden, on the other hand, was completely and rather frighteningly sober. He was not the world’s easiest lodger. He made no conversation other than civilities. He ate what he was given without comment, he slept long (she always had to wake him), but she knew that he was aware all the time of what Tom suffered for him.

Mr and Mrs Hunter had arranged the funeral. Vinia didn’t want them to be left to do it but Dryden had nothing to say. He went to work every day that week just as usual. Tom tried to talk to him but in the end she stopped him because Dryden didn’t take any notice of anybody.

Mr Hunter, having seen his daughter dead, buried her with all the ceremony he could manage, as though it would make up for his having ignored her after she went wrong. Vinia thought she had never seen such hypocrisy. She went to the ceremony out of love for Esther Margaret and found Mrs Hunter wearing black and crying as though she had stood by her daughter and Mr Hunter pale and tight-lipped, and half the village there from curiosity.

Alf turned Tom from their door three times that week until Vinia went wearily there on his behalf when all the men were at work.

‘Tom’s heartbroken about this,’ she said.

‘Then he should have behaved better to his mother. I’m due respect from him.’

‘We’ve lost Esther Margaret this week.’

‘That dreadful girl,’ Mary said, ‘causing her parents grief like that. She’s better off dead than married to him, and while he stays in your house I’ll not be back.’

She would not listen, so Vinia went two doors away to what was now home and tried not to rejoice that she was being spared Mary’s constant presence in her house.

*

Joe had not slept after the conversation with his father. He got up early and went back to his father’s bedroom to find that Randolph had died during the night. Joe sat down and cried, but it wasn’t for his father — it was for the confusion and deception and the loss of his mother so long ago. It was the second funeral in a week, and Joe was only sorry that the off-duty pitmen had so little respect for his father that they stayed away. He wished in a way that they had cared for him, it would have meant he was a better man, but at least they weren’t afraid to stay away. He wished he could have done so. Even Jacob didn’t turn up. When Joe went round by the house later in the day it was empty and the door stood open.

Thaddeus and his wife came to the funeral and they tried to persuade Joe to go home with them, but he knew that the longer he stayed away from the house the less he would want to be there. He had thought he was used to the loneliness but it was strange how much movement and noise were lost.

While prowling the attics later he found a portrait of his mother hidden away in a corner and covered by dustsheets. There was also a great deal of furniture, some of it useful, much of it elegant, so he thought it must be her taste — good wood, nothing so dainty that it looked silly, but well made with clean lines. A big sofa had been eaten by mice or rats but much of it
was untouched. He paid a couple of men to help him out of the attic and into the house with it all, and after that he decided the house looked better. He had builders in to do repairs and he started to make plans about what he might do with the house. It stopped him thinking about his father and more especially about his mother and what had become of her. He walked the grounds looking and thinking, and he found small flowers in the grass, which must once have flourished before the fell took over what had previously been a garden. There were snowdrops by the back wall of the house and around the front crocus leaves and what might be the small beginnings of daffodils. Had his mother planted these? He hung her portrait above the drawing-room fire. She looked exactly like him except for her blue eyes. He could not bear to think of how she had been turned away. How could his father have hated her so much?

Once the house was furnished there was nothing more to be done and Joe spent more and more time at work, in the office and underground and making sure that everything was done as it should be, and he would go to the foundry and be there long hours. He felt as though there were nothing else left for him.

*

He awoke in the middle of the night with the growing conviction that the body found up on the fell was his mother. He knew that it was ridiculous, but once awake he could not explain to himself satisfactorily that such a notion was impossible. He got up at first light, and because that day he was going to the foundry in Wolsingham he called in to see one of the local policeman whom he had seen before at the house. Having been ushered into a small back room, he sounded foolish to his own ears and obviously the other man’s when he spoke of his mother and her disappearance.

‘How long ago do you say this was, sir?’

‘Twenty years.’

‘Twenty years.’ The man evidently had a lot of fools to deal
with. He tried to hide the sigh that followed but didn’t quite manage it. ‘A body deteriorates a lot in twenty years, sir.’

‘But you said … you said it had been in the water. If … I don’t know, if there had been ice …’

‘The ice age, sir?’

‘No! I meant … I just meant could there have been any mistake?’

‘There is always room for error and it is possible that the woman Mr Hunter identified as his daughter was someone else. People go missing all the time. She could have been anybody.’

‘But you’re satisfied that it was her.’

‘In this job you learn to be satisfied with very little. If you have a body it makes the family feel better when they have something to bury. The woman had fair hair and blue eyes and Mr Hunter seemed to think that it was his daughter. That’s good enough for me. It is unlikely that it was another woman unless they were from somewhere else — that is always possible.’