Shelter from the Storm (32 page)

‘Come to me.’ She was so lovely and sweet and he could not let go of her. How had he stayed away from her? How had he not gone running to the house the day before and snatched her up in front of George’s eyes and proclaimed his love and claimed the child she was carrying as his in front of George and her parents?

‘You know I can’t. You can’t afford disgrace, not here. I want you to promise me that you won’t come to the house and cause a scene. George would have you murdered.’

‘You have my child in you,’ Joe reminded her.

She moved away.

‘As far as the law is concerned you have no rights, and George has told me that he would never let me take the child. If it is a boy …’ She looked straight at him.

‘If it is a boy it will inherit everything. Do you know what that means? Everything that George has. I want that for my son. All those things … high position, society, amusement, entertainment, education. Everywhere we go everything is of the best.’
She stopped there, slightly shamefaced, not quite meeting his eyes, moving her feet, laughing shortly.

‘I suppose you think that’s poor-spirited of me, the results of a shallow mind — it’s what my father has said. I find it strange. Most men are happy with women who don’t think too deeply. They presume their feelings match.’

Joe didn’t say anything.

‘I know that it seems incomprehensible but I do enjoy the life I lead. I’m used to the best, you see, the wittiest people, the cleverest men, the most beautiful women. I take great enjoyment from it. You couldn’t provide any of that for me. I have come to love that awful shabby house of yours, but I could never live there. I don’t think any woman could in all honesty enjoy living there, even with you. Let’s face it, Joe, it isn’t much of a life. Your mother couldn’t stand it and my mother hates it here. Look around you. There’s nothing. That’s why my mother wanted better for me. She wanted me to be able to leave. I could have chosen to come back but I didn’t, and neither would anyone who had the chance to get away. Haven’t you ever wanted to?’

‘Lots of times,’ Joe said, glad to be able to contribute something sensible to the conversation.

‘Then why haven’t you gone? I dare say my father would have bought your share of the business and then you could have gone.’

She said it so lightly, he thought. He almost suggested to her that if she came with him then he would leave, but when he tried to imagine such a thing he couldn’t. He had wanted to leave, it was true, but in fact in all the time that had elapsed since Esther Margaret had said to him that he could not run from things he had found it to be true. She was the one who had run in the end, not him. When he had been growing up, and his father had turned into a drunk, he had itched to improve things at the pit and the house and in the village, and that was what he was doing, it was what he was supposed to be doing. He couldn’t leave it. Thaddeus, no doubt, would do his best, but it was too difficult for one person. The image of Dryden Cameron saving his life
also came into his mind. You couldn’t have that happen, nor the accident to Tom and Dryden, and then leave. That was not how things were meant to work. To leave Thaddeus and Dryden and Vinia would be an act of cowardice. Thaddeus would soon become old doing the work of two men. He would lose heart when there was no one to follow him. What would become of the pit and the village then? There was no point in saying any of this to Luisa, she would not understand, just as he did not understand the kind of life she led, but to give up his child when he had always sworn to himself that he would do better than his father made him want to weep. At least his father had kept him. Strange how you thought you were going to do better than your parents until you knew how difficult it was. All he wanted was to have a wife and a child. It was what his father had wanted, and in that respect he was failing just as surely.

‘I can’t leave,’ he said.

Luisa smiled pityingly at him.

‘Then we must part. Goodbye, Joe.’

Joe didn’t watch her leave, but he heard her.

*

Esther Margaret had said very little since the previous evening, other than that she did not want to stay at home if Joe was going to be asleep upstairs, though Vinia couldn’t see what difference it made. When Luisa arrived at the shop Esther Margaret slipped out the front so that she didn’t have to meet her, but when Joe came and Luisa went into the back room to talk to him Vinia could see Esther Margaret across the street, taking a strangely interested view in the ironmonger’s window. Vinia called to Em to mind the shop and stepped outside. It was a cold December afternoon, near enough to Christmas for her to hope that business would keep them going from their modest start, close enough so that many of the shops had pretty things for sale. She could not think what Esther Margaret was doing there, standing motionless before the window, alone.

She crossed the street. There was nobody about that she knew, nobody to stop her with enquiries about her health or the shop. She joined Esther Margaret in front of the dull shopfront, which had nothing in it to interest any woman who wanted anything more exciting than pots and pans.

‘Esther Margaret?’

She was not crying. You couldn’t cry in the street; it would draw attention to you.

‘She’s so beautiful, Vinia.’

‘She’s a whore.’

‘Vinia!’ Esther Margaret looked around to see if anyone had heard. ‘I have never heard you say such a thing before.’

‘Well, she is. Not content with having married the richest man in the whole blessed world, she had to take the nicest.’

Esther Margaret didn’t look at her.

‘Joe is very nice,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. And he’s very handsome.’ She sighed. ‘I hate her. How can she be having a baby? It’s not fair.’

She still didn’t cry. Vinia had the feeling that if they had been anywhere else she would have.

‘You could have a baby.’

‘Huh.’ A tear ran. Vinia looked around but there was nobody close.

‘Come inside.’

Esther Margaret shook her head, and they both studied the window for what felt to Vinia like a very long time as the odd tear ran down Esther Margaret’s face. Eventually Luisa came out of the shop and got into her carriage and drove away.

‘Come in now.’

‘He might still be there.’

Vinia walked back across the road, through the shop and into the back room. Joe was still there, silent, head down. He looked up as he heard her, a new hard look in his eyes, the same kind of look that Dryden had always had. Vinia was sorry for it.

‘I should get to work. Thanks.’ He went out, shutting the back door with a neat little click. She cursed Luisa McAndrew.

Mrs Morgan came to the shop just before teatime.

‘Did you know that my daughter is having a baby?’ she said. ‘I want you to make me a summer dress for the christening. Such wonderful parties we will have.’

Esther Margaret went out into the back yard, and when Mrs Morgan had gone Vinia went to her there and hugged her.

‘I don’t mean to cry over the idea of someone else’s baby. After all, Joe’s nothing to do with me.’

‘She wouldn’t mean anything,’ Vinia comforted her ‘She wouldn’t know anything about your baby.’

‘I miss my baby. I keep on thinking how old it would have been and the things it would have done and … I’ll never have a baby. He doesn’t forgive me for what I’ve done and he’s awful. We don’t touch each other. He doesn’t want me. What am I going to do?’

*

Thaddeus was at the office when Joe walked in. He had just got there, was taking off his overcoat and was all smiles.

‘I’m to be a grandfather at last,’ he confided when the office door was shut. ‘I didn’t know old George had it in him. If it’s a boy, won’t it be wonderful?’

It would be, Joe thought, his son inheriting everything that McAndrew had and half of everything Thaddeus had. How very odd. When he was forty he could be working alongside his son. He sat down. He could have laughed at himself for this vision. It wouldn’t be like that. He would have turned into his father by then and would probably have to be picked up off the floor every morning and the boy … the boy would be called McAndrew and would be brought up in that society which knew all about power and … He listened to Thaddeus going on about what a Christmas present this was, and as if the outside world had heard him it began to snow. All Joe wanted to do was crawl back into the bed he had got out of a couple of hours since.

He worked until mid-evening, glad when Thaddeus went home. He didn’t want to go, there seemed even less to go home to, and his mind was filled with Luisa and the child. It began to snow heavily and he was obliged to go home or he would not have reached it. Nobody was in the house but his dinner was just to one side of the stove to be heated and the fire was blazing in the study. Joe almost expected his father to shout from the empty room. When he had eaten he sat by the fire and watched the snow fall beyond the windows and thought of the evenings spent in hotels with Luisa. It was past, it was over, it was finished.

Four days before Christmas Dryden came back from work to find that there was nobody at home. Some welcome, he thought. The fire was banked down and the house was cold. There were no signs of festivity or of food, and he was hungry and tired and very dirty. It had been a long, hard shift. Esther Margaret came hurrying in after him. He knew they had been extra busy at the shop that week and he was pleased that things were going well. He just wished it didn’t preclude warm houses, hot water and meals being on the table when you got in.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s all right. I know you can’t be in two places at once.’

Dryden was a happier man when he was clean and fed and by a big fire, and it was then that his wife hovered in front of him.

‘I’ve got something to say to you.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘I want a baby.’

It sounded so stark Dryden was astonished.

‘That’s going to be a bit difficult. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. It’s the right time of year for an immaculate conception, of course—’

‘It’s not funny!’ She was trembling. ‘We’re married. We may not like it but we are. We’re stuck with each other until we die
and since we’re quite young that could be an awfully long time. Vinia may be happy in a shop but I’m not.’

Dryden considered escape — the pub, the warm place where the beer went down and women were not about. He wished he had gone earlier.

‘As far as I can see …’

She started up again. He couldn’t stand it.

‘As far as I can see you don’t go with other women and you don’t drink too much any more and since things are getting better—’

‘Better? You think this is better?’ He got up. If he could just make it as far as the door …

‘It is better.’ She placed herself in front of him. ‘I am not going to lie in that bed with you with your back turned for the next fifteen or twenty years and pretend to people that everything is all right when it isn’t.’

‘So you want me to go to bed with you when we don’t like each other?’

‘Plenty of women do it every night.’

‘Do they? Like prostitution.’

Esther Margaret looked straight at him.

‘If you’re honest and haven’t really slept with anybody in so long you must be desperate enough to do it with anybody, never mind that I’m your wife. I’m sure you can manage it. You used to go to bed with just about everybody.’

Dryden could see his coat hanging up beside the door. Wes and his friends would all be in the Golden Lion by now. The air would be thick with tobacco smoke and beer fumes and the smell from the coal fire. He imagined the thick hoppy taste of the beer. This was real marriage, women wanting things that you didn’t want to give them — money, time, your body, your thoughts. He felt as if he were suffocating. He imagined what it would be like when there was a child. It would cost more and babies screamed a lot and did disgusting things and small boys … small boys were evil and …

‘You used to like me.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘No, I didn’t, it was just something to do on Sundays, that’s all.’

‘But you fancied me?’

‘You were pretty.’

She was silenced. Dryden cursed himself. It had been a low blow and he had not intended to say anything like that. If he pushed now he would get out of here. He couldn’t do it. She had been unhappy since she came back. At first he defended himself with the knowledge that she had returned thinking and perhaps even pleased that he was dead, but she had not left again and her unhappiness had deepened.

‘Why don’t you go and see Joe Forster? You like him and he seems to be able to do it.’ Dryden had no idea where that came from, knew only that it completely humiliated his wife. She stood there for a moment and then she ran from the room, up the stairs, and after that there was no more sound. He could get out. He eyed the door, considered it and then listened. There were carol singers some way off, inappropriately singing ‘Away in a Manger’.

Very slowly he made his way upstairs and opened the bedroom door in the darkness. It was freezing up here and black. He found the lamp through the shadows and lit it, and then he closed the door. He put a match to the fire, which was always laid and never lit. It caught immediately. It was ridiculous, but in his mind he owed her a child because he had always blamed himself for the death of the other one. What a wonderful place the world was when you felt responsible for everything that went wrong. It must have been early religious teaching — all that sin, all that supposed wrongdoing. It was all right for the Catholics, they could confess and get let off, but the Protestant Church was just miserable, he thought, and when you were born in sin and of it there wasn’t a lot of hope for you.

She was sitting on the side of the bed like a visitor. He sat down beside her.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of that. I just … you know, it was … self-defence.’

‘It’s true, though,’ she said. ‘I’m not very pretty any more and I do care about Joe. Only I have to live with you and I can’t see you being pleased with another man’s child.’