Shelter from the Storm (29 page)

‘Dryden,’ she said.

He looked at Vinia and then at her and Esther Margaret thought of how she had remembered him when they were first lovers, and she could not imagine being in the arms of this man. He had the coldest eyes in the world. How could she have wanted somebody without humour or forgiveness, somebody who stood there and condemned her without opening his mouth? And then after a lifetime or two he said in a very low voice, ‘And just where in the bloody hell have you been?’

Esther Margaret stood trembling. Vinia looked as though she might be about to say something to him but he silenced her with narrowed eyes, and that was when Esther Margaret realised she had been wrong. He had changed. He was older and, more than that, he filled the room just as though he had been Tom. She hadn’t been near men in a long time and she had forgotten that they could make the world seem small and unfriendly. If there had been anywhere else to go she would have gone. If she could have imagined her parents welcoming her she would have left, but there was nowhere except this room, and she was tied to it and to him just as surely as ever. The life that she had tried so hard to cast off had been here all that time, waiting for her.

Vinia squared up to him as she would not have done to Tom.

‘Give her a chance,’ she said. ‘Here, Esther Margaret.’ She came across and took Esther Margaret by the hand. ‘Sit yourself down again and don’t take any notice of him. It’s just shock.’ She
stroked the back of Esther Margaret’s hands with her thumbs. It was oddly reassuring.

Esther Margaret tried to think of something normal.

‘I could take my things upstairs.’

‘You could, yes. Would you like a hand?’

‘No. No, thank you.’ Something occurred to her. ‘Where am I going?’

‘It’s the back room,’ Vinia said calmly.

Esther Margaret picked up her bag and went slowly upstairs. She opened the bedroom door and all the unwelcome feelings piled on top of one another in their rush to assault her brain. In the semi-darkness there was the pithead from the window, the view that she had looked at day after day when the baby had died. She had watched the road out of here as though she could go somewhere, and now it felt as though she could not, had not, that nothing made any difference. She lit the lamp. Clearly somehow it was Dryden’s bedroom though there was little evidence of him there. The room next to where they had lain clear of one another in the darkness, where her baby had been born and died, where she had felt the hope leave her just as the baby had. This was the house where he had breathed drunken breath in her direction, and where she had denied him her body, where they had never yet been man and wife, where she had cried herself to sleep more times than she wanted to think about, and where she had grown bigger and bigger with his child.

*

Vinia listened to Esther Margaret’s feet as she trod reluctantly, slowly up the stairs, and then she looked at him. He looked more like Tom at that moment than she thought he ever had before, as though if he didn’t smash something he would die of frustrated temper. ‘It’s hardly her fault,’ she said. ‘When you lose your mind—’ ‘I know.’ He cut in swiftly but said nothing more, so Vinia left him to get washed and changed while she attended to the dinner. It was always the same when he came in — a routine, and
routine was sometimes all you had left. It took care of the great big spaces where other things should have been. She had not realised that. When the dinner was on the table she called up the stairs to Esther Margaret to come down and have something to eat, and they sat around the table. Vinia was always concerned when Dryden didn’t eat. He had lost a lot of weight since Tom had died. So had she. To have a third person at the table playing the same game was even worse. Esther Margaret sat with downcast eyes, silent. Vinia couldn’t think of a thing to say.

When the meal was over Dryden pushed back his chair and looked at his wife. She was his wife, Vinia thought, having to remind herself.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you were sane enough to pretend to kill yourself but not to let us know that you were alive and well.’

‘I wasn’t alive and well,’ she retorted.

‘What were you, then?’

‘I don’t know!’ Esther Margaret almost shouted.

Vinia looked doubtfully at him.

‘All I could think about was the baby.’ Esther Margaret had lowered her voice but the impact of the words was bigger than their sound. ‘I wanted my baby.’

‘And in all this time you didn’t think it would have been kind to let us know you were still alive, or was it just that I didn’t deserve to know?’ Dryden said.

‘I thought you were dead!’

The words came from her almost strangled. Vinia stared. Esther Margaret’s hands twisted.

‘You thought I was dead?’ Dryden said.

‘I read the report about the accident in the newspaper. They got it wrong. It said you were dead and Tom …’

‘You came back here thinking I was dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what a dreadful disappointment for you.’

‘Dryden!’ Vinia had not known that she was going to shout at him.

‘What were you going to do back here without me?’ he said to Esther Margaret.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe you thought some other lad would marry you, keep you?’

‘Why not?’ she shot back at him.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’m still here and we’re still married.’ He got up and walked out. Vinia braced herself for the sound of the door and closed her eyes over the impact when he slammed it. Esther Margaret began to cry when the noise of it was over.

‘I didn’t know Tom was dead. I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, Esther Margaret, why didn’t you tell me? It must’ve been awful for you.’

‘The newspaper got it wrong. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

Vinia didn’t see the humour in it. All she knew was that there hadn’t been a slammed door in the house since Tom had died, and the echo of it went on inside her head long after the sound had died away and he had almost taken the yard gate off its hinges too and then disappeared into the back lane and the night. If Esther Margaret hadn’t been so upset Vinia would have gone after him. She had visions of him coming back drunk. He hadn’t done that since the day of Tom’s funeral, and she had got out of the habit of expecting it. It was a part of Tom, along with the violence, that she didn’t miss. Dryden worked hard, made good money and the faults that he had displayed appeared to have been buried with Tom. She wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the evening.

It was only now that she realised they had been on the brink of breaking past the grieving, so that maybe in time there would have been some kind of contentment, if not happiness, but it was now lost under the weight of Esther Margaret’s arrival. She was an unwelcome intrusion, and Vinia was ashamed of herself for thinking it.

Esther Margaret ran upstairs. Vinia cleared up and then she sat by the fire and waited for him to come back, dreading it. It
was late and dark and cold by then, but her vast experience of such matters told her even before he got as far as the back door that he hadn’t been to the pub. Where else he would have been — she dismissed the idea of another woman even as it formed in her mind — she couldn’t think. He came in and to the fire, not acknowledging her. It was only then that Vinia realised that in a way she had lost him as well as Tom. She had somehow counted on him.

‘You should be in bed,’ she advised him. ‘You have to get up early.’

‘Hell, yes,’ he said. ‘My wife’s in my bed. I should be there.’

Vinia was about to suggest that she might sleep with Esther Margaret for tonight and he could have her bed but she didn’t. It wasn’t a good idea. Or that he might sleep downstairs, but that wasn’t either, she thought.

‘Surely you don’t resent her being alive?’

Dryden looked at her.

‘Do you know what it was?’ he said. ‘It was twice. Once in her bed and one Sunday afternoon in a hay shed. Do you think people should forfeit their whole lives for that? I never cared about her and she never cared about me, and it’s a lot to have to pay for like this, over and over with a dead bairn in the middle. It was wrong but it wasn’t that wrong,’ and he went to bed and left her to bank down the fire.

*

Esther Margaret was not asleep. She had been waiting for him to come back. She could not believe that she had to sleep in the same bed as him. He didn’t even need a candle, he knew the room so well. He shed his clothes and got into bed and it was as though she had not been away. He didn’t touch her. The bed could have been as big as an ocean for all the contact. Esther Margaret listened to his breathing. She was not used to anyone else in the room. She thought longingly of her room at the cottage with the window open to the breeze and the sound of the
waves as they slid up the beach. She wished she had not left; there was nothing for her here, but she could not go back. She would have to stay and make do as best she could, although she could not imagine that it would be any better than it had ever been.

She did not wake up until halfway through the morning, and then for a while did not know where she was, and when she did she wished again that she had not come back. She wandered downstairs. Vinia was just coming in with shopping bags in her hands, and she made Esther Margaret some tea and tried to persuade her to eat something. After that she said, ‘Don’t you think you should go and see your parents? The minute you step out of the house people will know you’re back, and whatever you think of them they ought to know.’

She went immediately to her home, not meeting the stares of people in the street. Peggy answered the door, stared, stuttered. Esther Margaret made her way past her and was astonished at the appearance of the house. Not even a chair had been moved, nothing had changed. Her mother was sitting at her writing desk in the sitting room with a pen in her hand as though she had important correspondence to deal with. It made Esther Margaret want to laugh. The pen dropped as she walked in and her mother looked up. She got to her feet and there was no gladness in her face to find that her daughter was alive. She started, the tears came into her eyes, and she said, ‘Wherever have you been?’

‘I went to see Daisy.’

Her mother stared.

‘You were there all this time and she didn’t let us know? You wicked, wicked girl, How could you do such a thing as to let us think that you were dead?’

‘My baby had died. My mind wasn’t working properly,’ Esther Margaret said, but she could see that her mother was unaffected by this.

‘Does your father know that you have come back?’

‘I haven’t seen him yet.’

‘I suppose you will have to go back to that dreadful man?’

‘He is my husband.’

‘His brother died in that accident. It’s a pity it wasn’t the other way round,’ her mother said.

She didn’t even offer tea. Esther Margaret’s father came in while she was there and he was equally unforgiving, as though her appearance was going to cause them more bother than it was worth. They talked about how much the funeral and the headstone had cost, they questioned her closely about where she had been and what she had done, and her mother talked at length about Daisy’s betrayal, as though it had been Daisy’s fault. There was no word of thanks that her cousin had taken in her daughter and looked after her all this time.

‘She wanted to contact you but I wouldn’t let her. For a long time I wasn’t like me,’ was all the explanation Esther Margaret could offer.

‘You cared nothing for us, for how we felt — that’s how you have been right from the day you met that dreadful boy,’ her mother accused her. ‘Letting us believe all that time that you were dead. We grieved over you.’

‘You hadn’t seen me since my marriage.’

‘You were still our daughter. I wish you hadn’t married that dreadful man. You could have had anybody. Billy has married, of course — a very nice girl. Do you remember Mary Patterson? She has made him such a good wife. Her house is very clean and she cooks a proper dinner every night when he gets in from work.’

Her mother went on about Vinia too.

‘It’s disgusting, living with a man she isn’t married to. It won’t do her reputation any good, I can tell you. It’s as well you’ve come home. Did you know that she started up a shop? As though she could possibly be any competition for the drapery department of the Store. She’s supposed to be mourning her husband, that no-good Tom Cameron. All he ever did was drink. He’ll be no loss to the pit. She should stay at home, but I suppose she’s out there bold as you like, caring nothing.’

Esther Margaret hadn’t seen the shop, so she walked up the
main street to have a look. She liked what she saw but it was shut. She walked back to the house. Vinia was busy cleaning brasses on the kitchen table. Esther Margaret helped her.

‘I saw the shop. Are you going to open it?’

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. Tom hated the very idea, but I wanted it so badly I thought I was prepared to do anything for it. I made us unhappy because of it and I can’t forgive myself. It doesn’t feel right to go on when Tom’s dead.’

‘What did he think was wrong with it?’

‘I don’t know. Just that I was a pitman’s wife and they should be at home.’

‘You’re not a pitman’s wife any more, though, are you?’ Esther Margaret pointed out. ‘You didn’t tell me that Mr Forster was married.’

Vinia stared at her.

‘Joe? He hasn’t married. Who told you such a thing?’

Esther Margaret’s heart turned a somersault. She resented Vinia’s use of his first name, as though she knew him better than Esther Margaret did.

Had her mind been more organised than the rest of her, she would have kept quiet or invented something quickly, but she couldn’t and didn’t.

‘What made you think Joe was married?’ Vinia said.

‘I saw him with a woman in Newcastle, walking down the steps of the Golden Crown Hotel.’

‘Walking down the …?’

‘She was very beautiful. She was wearing a wedding ring and a diamond and she took hold of his arm when they got to the pavement and they walked off down the street together.’

‘There must have been a good reason for it,’ Vinia said. ‘What did she look like?’