Shelter from the Storm (28 page)

When he slept Dryden dreamed of Tom dying over and over again. Even when he was awake his mind carried the black images and heard the last breaths in the deep silence, but when he was asleep the nightmare began again and continued. It was worse when he was working during the day because he kept on waking up in the darkness and thinking he was back there. It was summer so the windows were open and all the small night sounds and the warm wind came in from the fell. Often he would get up and go to the window and take in great breaths and see the night sky and be glad, but he shuddered to think that Tom had not come back out of the pit alive. What a hard way to die. But Tom had not known it — at least he didn’t think so. Even the slightest doubt about Tom’s knowing would send Dryden downstairs to where the reassurance of the kitchen was all around him. He wished that the house was farther away from the pit. Tom’s death could not be set at a distance even after Dryden knew that his body was underground in an even more final way. He dreaded every minute of his own existence. Tom had died down there and a part of Dryden would always be there.

Joe had tried to stop him coming to work at first, called him into the office and told him that he didn’t have to.

‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Dryden said. ‘Besides, I have to do it some time. Do you think a week or two weeks will
make any difference? I’d just as soon keep working if it’s all the same to you.’

Even the window of Dryden’s bedroom overlooked the pithead. He came to hate the sight of it. He gave Vinia six weeks and then he said to her, ‘When are you going to the shop?’

She wasn’t eating, any more than he was. She looked down at her plate.

‘Soon,’ she said.

Another week went by. Dryden didn’t like to interfere. In a way he supposed that even being on their feet was good. She was seeing to the house and he was going to work and in a lot of ways it was as much as many people did, but every time he saw the empty shop with her name above the door he wished things otherwise.

The following Sunday, therefore, when she had come back from chapel and started fussing with the Sunday dinner, he said to her, ‘Do you fancy taking a look up the shop after dinner?’

She didn’t answer. The vegetables were all pretty with butter and the beef was neat and brown and moist and there was onion in salt, pepper and vinegar; the Yorkshire puddings were large golden clouds and the gravy was thick and dark and the potatoes were creamy. He couldn’t get the taste. Since being stuck down the pit everything was coal, thick and gritty. He hid the meat in the mashed potato, put carrots into a small heap to hide, and when they had both pretended to eat for long enough she got up from the table and began to clear away.

‘When are you going to the shop?’ Dryden persisted.

She ignored him.

‘When, Vinny?’

He stopped her as she tried to go past him between pantry and table. All those memories of himself and Tom on Sundays, the talk and the beer and the jokes, came back, and they were to him now as bitter as vinegar. She stayed because he made her stay.

‘Never,’ she said.

He waited. The summer was soon over and the nights began to draw in and in the house there was the kind of silence that seemed to deepen with each day that passed. Tom’s presence in the house was heavy. Dryden went to work and in a way it was as though Tom had never been — it became a gap which closed. Nobody spoke of him.

The other men were not inclined to be friendly as they had when Tom was there. The people he had drunk with, played darts and dominoes with night after night when Tom was alive, did not talk to him except for a perfunctory greeting when they met. He began to think that he might leave. The woman of his dreams had always been Tom’s and he was beginning to think that she always would be, that in spite of Tom’s opposition to everything she wanted that did not suit him, in spite of his violence, Vinia loved Tom and would go on loving him. Only Dryden’s regard for her kept him there. If he left where would she go? She would not be able to stay in a pit house and she could not live in any of the boarding houses which were full of workmen. He felt also that he was not entitled to any of her affection, having wanted her so much when he had loved Tom. Perhaps this was a kind of retribution, to be living in Tom’s house with Tom’s widow without even conversation to brighten the days.

She cried when he was at work and did not look at him for fear he might notice her red eyes. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, he suggested they should go for a walk, and when she agreed he walked her past the shop. He was certain that she had avoided going anywhere near it when she did the grocery shopping. He could see her footsteps slowing, though she looked determinedly ahead.

He thought it was a sorry sight, the empty windows and her name so neat above the door.

On the way back, after a couple of miles of trudging through the country when nobody spoke, he thought that if there had been another way she would have taken it. She might have
crossed the road, but Dryden kept on striding out. As they reached the shop for the second time she hurried so much that he thought she was going to run past, and then, opposite the door, she came to a halt. Dryden stopped too and turned around, pleased that his idea had borne results.

She stood there for so long that he became impatient, but he didn’t say anything. One awkward word or movement and they would be on their way down the street towards home. She went to the door and then the window and pressed face and hands up against it, the better to see inside beyond the sunshine. Dryden did the same. There wasn’t much to see, just the empty counter.

They stood for so long that Mr Samson came downstairs and into the shop and opened the door. Dryden could have hugged him. She was unable to resist the open door. He followed her inside. She lingered. The shop was clean and tidy.

‘I swept and polished only this morning,’ Mr Samson said. ‘I hoped that some day soon you would call by.’

In the back room Dryden could see the preparations she had made, the tables and chairs, the sewing machines, the material, and he realised then that until Tom had died, right from the beginning when she had received the letter about the inherited money, she had intended going through with this, and short of death nothing and nobody would have stopped her.

On one table was a pile of paper and pencils, and when he got closer he could see that they were sketches. She examined the room carefully until finally she came to where he was standing. She picked up the sketches one by one and looked at them. Then she said, ‘I think I’ll go home now. Thank you, Mr Samson.’

That evening Dryden made himself go out. He thought that if she was left alone she might think about what had happened that afternoon. He went for a long walk, even though they had had a walk already that day and he was not inclined, and then he went to the pub. He could see Wes and Ed and most of Tom’s friends, but he merely nodded at them. He hadn’t had a drink in
weeks, and the beer tasted good. Before he was halfway down the first pint Wes had sidled over.

‘Fancy a game of darts?’ he said.

Dryden had not thought to be accepted there without Tom but he agreed and played, and although he didn’t contribute much either to the conversation or to the darts they were not excluding him any longer. He had another two pints before he went home.

The lamps were burning in the kitchen, and when he let himself quietly into the house he could see her sitting at the kitchen table, sketching. She was so absorbed that it occurred to him that if there had been half a dozen people coming in screaming and shouting she wouldn’t have noticed. She didn’t stop or look up for several moments, and then suddenly she realised that he was in the room and, pencil raised, she turned her head. Guilt rushed into her face.

‘I was just …’ He could see that she was remembering what Tom thought about the shop and everything to do with it.

‘Can I have a look?’

She hadn’t been expecting that, he could see. Surprise registered. Dryden went over to the table before she had a chance to refuse and began asking questions. She smiled shyly and started to explain. Most of it was incomprehensible to him but he went on trying to ask what seemed to him sensible questions and she talked, rapidly and enthusiastically.

Then she seemed to realise what she was doing. She looked down at the sketches and she gathered them into a rough pile and got up from the table. At first he didn’t realise what she was going to do, and then in one movement she threw the whole lot on to the fire. Dryden stared in horrified fascination. She began to cry, hard, choking sobs, and then she ran out of the room and clattered her way up the stairs. He listened to the heaviness of her feet. It was not her body which weighed her down, it was her heart, he thought.

Up to now his mind had been filled with the past, but it had
seemed to him that afternoon that suddenly he had grabbed something from the ruins and run with it so that they were going forward again. Now he was not so sure. She had tried to do something that Tom had not wanted her to do, she was breaking some rule, hitting out at her dead husband, but she couldn’t do it. He heard her reach the top of the stairs and slam the bedroom door after her. He could hear her crying faintly through the floorboards.

*

In the end there was nothing for Esther Margaret to do but go back to Deerness Law. The money ran out in the late autumn, she had no reason to stay in Newcastle, she didn’t know anybody, had made no friends and had no references to gain any kind of work. Suddenly the world seemed against her, alien, nothing to do with her, so she took the train home. She did not know what to do when she got there. As she stepped down from the train the town looked so small and bleak. A cold wind blew in from the fell and everything was grey.

It was dark so she didn’t have to face anyone. She went automatically to Prince Row. Lights burned in the house so somebody was there, and Esther Margaret was not altogether surprised when moments later the door opened and Vinia stood there. She looked blankly at her and then recognition followed disbelief and finally she said her name.

‘Esther Margaret?’

‘Yes.’

Vinia let her inside. It was quite a different place from the house that Esther Margaret had left. All Vinia’s furniture was there, and she thought it looked lovingly polished. The whole house was welcoming with a big fire in the kitchen. Esther Margaret held her hands out to the blaze. Vinia hovered behind her, saying nothing.

‘I should have let you know, shouldn’t I? Written or … I wasn’t myself for a long time.’

‘We thought you were dead.’

‘I wished I was, I wanted you … Dryden to think so, I wanted him paid out for what had happened. I wasn’t thinking properly.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘My mother has a cousin who lives on the coast in Northumberland. She looked after me, was kind. Do my parents think I’m dead?’

‘Everybody.’

‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t think about anything but the baby for so long.’

Vinia didn’t ask any more. Esther Margaret was tired. She sat down by the fire while Vinia made tea. They drank it, and all the time Vinia watched her as though she was some kind of ghost and could disappear at any moment. Esther Margaret didn’t know what to say, whether to talk about Dryden and the accident.

‘I read … in the newspaper … about the accident,’ she said.

‘Was that why you came back?’

‘No, not exactly. I was thinking that I must come back. I couldn’t stay there for ever and … in the end there was nowhere else. It must have been very difficult for you. Tom and Dryden had become close.’

‘For a while, yes. Tom and I moved in here after you … after you left. Dryden couldn’t stay here by himself.’

‘No, of course. It looks so nice with all your things in.’

Vinia said she must put the tea on and Esther Margaret thought of Tom coming off shift and wondered whether he would mind if she asked to stay. Vinia hadn’t said that she could, and since Tom was the pitman it was their house. She was glad in a way because she liked how different it looked, but she felt so homeless, so aimless, quite lost. Time went by.

‘He didn’t say he was going to the pub,’ Vinia said when Tom was late.

‘Doesn’t he always?’

‘No, not since … no. Hardly ever.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose, but it would have been nice. He keeps out of my way.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just so difficult.’

Vinia fussed with the vegetables as though she was glad of something to do. Esther Margaret would have liked to have done something but it didn’t seem right so she sat by the fire. It was about an hour or so after the time he should have come back that she heard him come down the yard and in by the back door. She was surprised. Tom had always been a big drinker and would not usually have been so prompt. He wasn’t the kind of man who could down two pints and go home to his dinner. He clashed the back door and came into the room, with a ‘Now, Vinny’, and then he saw Esther Margaret sitting by the fire and she stared at him.

Even through the coal dust she could see it was Dryden. He was more sparely built than Tom, not as tall. Esther Margaret felt very strange, as though the world had altered. She felt sick; she got to her feet and wobbled and her breath was doing odd things. She had only just grown used to the idea that her husband was dead. To see him there, and also to realise in that instant that it was Tom who was dead, made her think how dreadful and how funny it was. What must Vinia think of her that she had not said a word about him? There had been some horrible mistake. She wanted to burst out laughing, she wanted to run out of the door. She had been so wrong, firstly thinking that this man was dead and secondly thinking that she was free and that Joe would want her. Joe neither wanted her nor could marry her. She was married; her husband was standing in the kitchen of his own house. He had been there all along, thinking that she was dead. She had been the one who was dead and yet not, and it was Tom, it was poor Vinia’s husband, who was the one underground. She felt trapped, she felt that nothing had happened, nothing had
altered in her life. All the running away, all the heart-searching, the deliberating what to do next, the time spent in Newcastle, none of it mattered, none of it meant anything. Her situation was just as it had been before she ran away, and she realised, looking at him, why she had gone. There was no love in his face, there was no relief, no happiness; he was no more glad to see her than she was to see him. She wished she could faint, pass into blessed unconsciousness, but there was no release. They stood there, gazing at each other, until Esther Margaret wished she was unborn.