Shelter from the Storm (9 page)

‘Did you want something else?’ she said.

‘No, I … thank you very much.’

She looked surprised.

‘It was only a dinner,’ she said.

‘It was wonderful. It was very kind of you. Thank you.’

He thought she might have given him a smile but she didn’t and there was nothing else to be said, so Dryden left Tom snoring on the settee and went out into the afternoon.

He could not bring to mind anything about the evening that followed other than Tom’s presence. It was frustrating in a way, because all he ended up with was a rosy glow in his mind. He couldn’t remember what the conversation had been or what the beer had tasted like or even what Tom’s face looked like. The good part was that he didn’t have to remember it because Tom talked to him at work the next day and they went drinking together the next evening and the one after that and the one after that.

Other people began to talk to him in the pub and at work. Dryden had never felt happiness before and it was a surprise to him. He didn’t take it for granted. Each day he woke up and told himself that it might be the last day that Tom would ever speak to him, but the days went on, they ran one into another. Even Wes talked to him. Ed and Tom played him at dominoes and the world was quite suddenly a wonderful place.

‘Eh, lad, I think your face has cracked,’ Mrs Clancy teased him.

Sundays were the best. Sundays had once been a day to be dreaded because there was nothing to do but hang about and wait for Monday, but Sundays had turned into the kind of day that made you smile the minute you woke up. He would have a late breakfast and then sleep until the pubs opened and then he would meet Tom and the others on the doorstep. They would drink until halfway through the afternoon and then go back to have some dinner and a sleep and then they would get together in the evenings and drink until late if they were on the late shift.

The following Sunday afternoon he went back to Mrs Clancy’s for his lie-down and he had just taken his boots and his jacket off when there was a knocking on the door. When he opened it there stood Esther Margaret.

Dryden didn’t know what to say. Had she no more sense than to come to him here? People would see her. Mrs Clancy would make sure it was all over the village by tomorrow. She didn’t look pleased.

‘You were supposed to meet me.’

‘Was I?’ Dryden couldn’t remember.

‘At the Cutting Bridge. I waited. I waited all last Sunday afternoon and I waited all this afternoon.’

Dryden drew her into the landing. He didn’t want her there and he didn’t want her standing in the landing and neither did he want Ma coming up the stairs telling him how as she didn’t like females in her establishment, it only caused trouble. Dryden didn’t doubt she was right, if Esther Margaret’s sour face was anything to go by.

‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘Forgot?’ She stared on him. ‘How could you forget?’

‘I just did.’

‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘Aye, I’ve been to the pub with Tom.’ How proud he was to say that. ‘And then I went to his house for my dinner.’ That was
another milestone. ‘Look, you mustn’t come here. Folk will know.’

‘Then where?’

‘I don’t know right now.’ Dryden was tired. He wanted to sleep before spending the evening with his friends.

She started to cry. Dryden hated this bit, when they cried. Women were like that, they couldn’t accept that you’d had enough, that you were tired of them. She was so serious.

‘You’re going to have to go.’

She cried harder. She clung. She kissed him.

‘Look, it was nice, all right.’

‘No. No. Please.’

He rather liked the way she begged but he pushed her gently along the landing and walked her down the stairs. He could still hear her crying even when he had put her outside and closed the door. He took off most of his clothes and lay down on the bed and was very soon fast asleep.

Esther Margaret went to Vinia’s house when she began to feel unwell and to think that something was the matter. She had nobody else to talk to and she felt that Vinia was the one person who would understand. She had cried a great deal in the weeks after Dryden had stopped seeing her. Pride prevented her from going to him again. She was surprised that her parents noticed nothing, that she couldn’t eat, that she was tired, that she took no pleasure in anything and finally that she was sick, more tired, stopped bleeding, started worrying. She walked the streets with her head down so that nobody would notice her, and then she dived down the passage and into the yard. The door of the little house was standing open as usual and from there she could see the big fire which burned at the far side of the room even in good weather because it was used for all the hot water and cooking. She knocked and Vinia came to the door. Esther Margaret was shocked. She had not seen Vinia for some time, since she had become absorbed with Dryden and then with her misery. Vinia had lost a lot of weight. The dress she wore was big on her.

The little house was very clean even by village standards. The brasses shone, the fire surround was bright. It occurred to Esther Margaret that Tom Cameron might be at home.

‘When the pubs are open?’ Vinia said with a tight smile, and she urged Esther Margaret to sit down and to pour out her tale.
She listened with whitening cheeks and a dismayed face. Esther Margaret stumbled on about how she had been prevented from seeing Joe and how they had tried to make her see Billy and … The farther she went into the story the more stupid she sounded.

‘I’m so unhappy and so ill. There’s something wrong with me.’

Vinia didn’t respond straight away; she sat for several moments before she said, ‘Esther Margaret, you aren’t ill, you’re having a baby. Did you give yourself to Mr Forster?’

‘No. No, of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t do such a thing.’

‘Billy, then?’

‘No!’

Fallen women in the Bible and suchlike had illegitimate babies and wicked girls from bad backgrounds and those whose parents did not forgive them. She remembered seeing a picture of a painting where a girl in London had been cast out and was sheltering under a bridge in the winter weather.

It was not possible, it could not happen. She could not have gone from good to evil in a few short months. With her parents and her home and her church to support her she could not have let them or herself down. She sometimes thought that Dryden was a figment of her imagination — he had disappeared as completely from her life as though he did not exist. She did not even see him on the street any more, and she had made herself tired looking for him during the first few weeks after he told her that he did not want her any more. She could not believe that she had behaved so badly, so irresponsibly as to bring something like this down on herself.

‘Who did you go with?’

Esther Margaret told her.

‘You went with Dryden Cameron?’ Vinia said, and Esther Margaret understood why she said it like that.

She got up.

‘Why?’ Vinia said.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Did he make you do it?’

That offered an escape route, a solution; people would believe that he had. The trouble was that it had been the very opposite. If she had even for a second been doubtful he would not have done it, not out of any regard for himself or her but just because he was so very handsome and there were plenty of women who would bed with a good-looking boy. He did not have to take on an innocent girl, and she did not in honesty believe that he was so bad that he wanted to deflower a virgin. She had not for a second believed it of him. She knew now that Dryden only did it because he had nothing better to do on Sundays, and when he had found something better to do he had gone and done it, without dishonesty, without consideration. He was thoughtless, careless, but the one thing that he was not was what his father had been.

She shook her head.

‘What am I to do?’

‘There are only certain things you can do. First you have to tell your parents—’

‘I can’t!’

‘And then you have to tell him.’

‘Why do I have to do that?’

Vinia looked at her as if she were an idiot.

‘Because the only respectable thing left is for you to be married to him.’

‘I don’t want to marry him!’

‘If you can persuade him to do it you’ll be lucky. I doubt he had marriage with anybody in mind.’

‘I can’t marry him of all people.’ In her earnestness she sat down next to Vinia and took her hand.

‘There are alternatives,’ Vinia said. ‘You could be sent away to have the baby and then give it up, but everybody would find out and although you could come back here nobody would have you.’

‘Give it up? I couldn’t do that.’

‘You could blame another lad, somebody you like.’

Esther Margaret gazed into the fire.

‘But everybody would know when the child was born that it was his, wouldn’t they? I mean he isn’t ordinary looking.’

‘I think the best thing is to tell your mam and dad.’

*

Esther Margaret found a certain bitter satisfaction in telling them. They were sitting in the tiny garden which meant so much to them. Her mother was sewing beneath the lilac tree and her father was reading a book on the small square lawn.

She almost didn’t tell them. She nearly went inside. Her mother looked up as she came into the garden.

‘Where have you been?’

‘I went to see Vinia.’

‘Esther Margaret, you really must learn to choose your company better. Tom Cameron is a pitman who drinks and they live in a back street. Go and tidy yourself up. You and I are to be at Mrs Robson’s sewing circle later, or had you forgotten?’

‘I’m having a baby,’ Esther Margaret said, and her whole body shuddered with the horror and relief of having told them.

They didn’t believe her at first; the shock stopped them from doing so. Her mother got up and tried to go to her and then sat down again and her father tried to get her to tell him more but after Vinia’s reaction she felt that she could not announce the name of the worst boy in the village. Her tongue wouldn’t make its way around that.

Somehow, before she had told them, it had seemed unreal. Now the nightmare was following her into reality. She cried and stuttered incoherent sentences and her mother insisted on going into the house for fear that the neighbours might notice something.

‘I think you must have got this quite wrong,’ her mother announced when they were safely in the sitting room. To Esther Margaret the house had not been safe since Dryden Cameron
had been there upstairs in her bedroom, doing to her what men did to women. It had been an invasion of the most basic kind. There was no use her mother trying to put up barricades now. The enemy had been and gone and there was nothing to be saved.

‘Boys … some boy kissing you …’ Her mother stopped again and glanced across the room at her father, who looked away in embarrassment. ‘You know nothing of such things. Has Billy tried to kiss you? Is that it? He is naughty upon occasion, I know, but if it’s that then there is nothing for you to worry about. It’s natural but it isn’t really wrong.’

Esther Margaret wanted to laugh but was afraid that if she did so she might never be able to stop. Was this really how they saw her, as a child so ignorant and dependent? Was this how parents saw their daughters, as some kind of attachment to them, not separate with a mind or body which might want something else? Had they never considered that she might choose to live some other way? Not that she had chosen this. The whole idea of bearing Dryden Cameron’s child made her shudder with horror and disbelief.

‘I went with a man. Billy Robson is not a man,’ she said.

*

It was early in the evening when Joe saw Esther Margaret’s father arrive at their house. It seemed most unusual. If it was business he would come to the pit, surely. What else could it possibly be? It was the kind of summer evening that made you want to go out walking, to admire what the countryside looked like. Even the fell looked good, though he preferred August when the bell-heather was out and it was nothing but a purple sea, but this evening the sky was clear and cloudless and he had come back from work feeling better than usual. It was only a short while before he heard his father’s voice bellowing his name from the hall, so he left his room and walked downstairs and as he did so he saw the inside of the house with Mr Hunter’s eyes and was
ashamed. The evening sun fell on the surfaces, showing up the dust and the shabbiness of the furnishings more than ever.

His father had gone back into the room. Joe followed him. Randolph Forster was very often angry. Joe had learned not to care, but the expression on his father’s face made him pause as he walked into the room. Joe was used to being blamed for things. At work his father blamed him for everything that went wrong and the pitmen, afraid of his father, complained to him and he would have to try to approach his father with the problem. Randolph looked carefully at him.

‘So,’ he said softly, ‘not content with denying a lovely girl from your own social level you went and ploughed the shopkeeper’s daughter.’

Joe stared first at his father and then at Mr Hunter. He was about to deny it and then changed his mind. His father’s gaze was unfocused and drunken as always, but the look Mr Hunter gave him was severe, unforgiving, accusing and shocked. Mr Hunter looked like somebody who had shrunk — old, unhappy and wizened. Joe couldn’t remember him having looked like that before. If they were accusing him of having seduced Esther Margaret then she must be pregnant, otherwise there could be no evidence. He thought of her when they had last met, how scornful she had been of his wanting to run away, how good and dutiful. She couldn’t have done such a thing in a thousand years.

‘Tell us that you didn’t,’ his father urged him. ‘Make us laugh! Don’t think about Luisa Morgan and her beauty and her father’s money and her social appeal. Don’t give a thought to all those miners you say are important to you, not so important of course that you would marry to help them or us. We don’t mind the disgrace and the inevitable squalling brat!’

Joe had stopped listening. He tried to imagine Esther Margaret having a child, having encouraged anybody when she was so proud, so pious. What had driven her to do such a thing? Why and who? Joe couldn’t think. He was sure that it wasn’t true, that something awful had happened, that somebody
had forced Esther Margaret. He was angry too that Mr Hunter and his father thought he was the kind of person who would sneak away and seduce the girl he loved. They could not recognise the good qualities of an honest person, they could not tell the difference between good and evil. And he wanted to question Mr Hunter, to find out what awful thing had befallen his daughter. In the meanwhile, if she had said that it was his there would be a good reason, and while he did not want anyone to think he might have done such a thing he tried to think of circumstances that would make him admit to it. It was also one way of getting her to marry him. But with another man’s child in her?