Clementina was serving up – she could carve as good as any man. Elijah was at the head of the table, a bit morose as he often was when we got together. Bartholomew was seated at the far end and through the whole of this conversation, he was muttering to himself. I could see his lips moving restlessly as he stared straight ahead.
‘Why don’t we all move to Peterborough?’ Clementina said, as she speared a fat pink slice of ham and stuck it on the top plate of the pile in front of her. I picked the plate up and handed it to Fenella, who passed it down to Bartholomew at the far end. She put it down in front of him.
‘What do we want to do that for?’ said Elijah, frowning.
‘Well, why not?’ Clementina said, doling out more ham, ‘You’ve been saying for ages you’ve had enough of Sutton.’
‘Oh, has he?’ I murmured, but they took no notice of me. ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to be with Dan and Nelly,’ I added.
Fenella’s face lit up as she realised I was agreeing to her going.
‘And it wouldn’t be so far for the girls to come and visit,’ added Clementina, meaning Scarlet and Mehitable.
At that point, Bartholomew raised an arm, lowered it swiftly, and then rushed it backwards across the table in a great sweeping motion. His plate with its slice of ham went flying across the room and smashed against the wall. Fenella, who was closest to him, let out a shriek of surprise and pushed herself back from the table as her own plate skidded off and landed on the floor. The pots of relish in front of them toppled and Bartholomew’s mug of ale spewed its contents over the tablecloth.
We all froze. Bartholomew was on his feet and staring off into
the middle distance. He gave a strange chortle, as if he found something amusing but couldn’t quite catch his breath.
‘Conducts sales of furniture and effects!’ he shouted, before adding softly, ‘and valuations of the same.’
I looked at Elijah, but he was looking down at the table.
‘Conducts sales of live AND DEAD farming stock!’ Bartholomew called out, then simpered, ‘and valuations of the same.’
The rest of us stared at him.
‘Conducts sales of houses, lands, reversionary interest and life policies!’ Bartholomew stood up straight and proud, like a town mayor. He crouched down and brought his hands together, wiggling his fingers. He spoke in a squeaky little voice, like a mouse, ‘and valuations of the same.’
‘Elijah, do something,’ I said, but Elijah did not move.
Bartholomew’s voice took on a posh accent. ‘Conducts sales of growing crops including grass.’ He stood upright, lifted his finger up and clicked his heels together, then shouted, ‘AND VALUATIONS OF THE SAME!’
There was a dead silence. We all waited to see what Bartholomew would do next. He looked around, then scratched his head. He looked down at the table and reached out a hand to pick up his mug of ale, then seemed surprised to see it on its side on the table. He turned, nonchalantly, stuck his hands in his pockets, bent his knees once, then strolled out of the room.
When he had gone, Fenella stretched out a hand and gently righted the two pots of relish. Daniel rose to his feet and retrieved Fenella’s plate, then went and picked up the pieces of Bartholomew’s broken one. They made small chinking sounds in the silence as he gathered them up.
In all this time, Elijah had not moved. Clementina and I were still standing.
‘He’s your
son
…’ I said to Elijah, and I heard the tremble in my own voice and realised my eyes were brimming with tears.
Elijah did not respond.
‘Elijah!’ I said, more sharply, ‘I said he’s …’ I could not finish.
Clementina put down the carving knife and spike and came round to my side of the table. She placed a hand gently on my arm. ‘Go into the kitchen and get yourself a drink of water,’ she said. ‘I’ll clear up a bit, and serve up.’
*
He disappeared the following spring, did Bartholomew. Fenella’s cloak and gown job had fallen through and she was terrible disappointed, but that summer she got another offer, and I let her take it. Daniel had already moved to Peterborough with Slaker & Son. Scarlet joined Mehitable. So that was it. My children were gone, and the house that had always seemed too small was suddenly as cavernous as a grain store.
We stayed on in Sutton another two years. I suppose a small part of me was wondering if Bartholomew might come back. Elijah even went down to London for a few weeks and made enquiries about him – Bartholomew had talked of London, apparently. He said there were some rum old areas there now and a lot of fellas sleeping rough in the parks. When he told me that I got a bit upset. He didn’t go into the details. We even wrote to some of the hospitals where they put the tommies who had gone wrong in the head, but there was no trace of Bartholomew under either of the names we had. Elijah was worried he’d do time in prison if we found him, on account of his desertion, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to know where he was.
You get used to pain like that. It’s like backache. You don’t like it, but you forget what life was like without it.
We made our plans to move to Peterborough. Peterborough was the coming place, Elijah said. He went up there to visit and came back quite enthusiastic. It all looked big and new, he said. There were five different railway stations. There was a huge cathedral in the market square that made Ely marketplace look quite pokey. He
started to talk about getting a market stall together, selling kitchen goods. Maybe if Scarlet and Mehitable got tired of domestic service, they could help him out.
I began to pack up our things and work out what we could take and what we should leave for the local auctioneer to sell off. Elijah brought the leaflet home so I could look at it.
Mr
M
.
Beezley,
Auctioneer
and
Land
Agent,
it said at the top,
conducts
sales
of
furniture
and
effects,
and
valuations
of
the
same.
I
haven’t hated Elijah, whatever he may think. If I have hated anything, it is the gap between what he is and what I wanted him to be. When he and I first met, I thought he would make my whole life right. But, of course, it wasn’t his fault that my whole life was wrong in the first place.
Maybe that is all love is; a need, a wanting. Maybe you never love in the first place unless there is a hole in your life that needs filling. You meet someone, and you put on to them the ability to fill that hole, and you call it love – and when they only fill it a little bit, or not at all, you are angry with them. Then they get confused.
Men have to speak in code. Why did my mother never mention this to me? Maybe she meant to tell me when I was older, only she never got the chance. Men can’t say things outright. It’s not in them, Like Horace, on River Farm. Horace slapped me across the face and drove me to run off with Elijah, and I am quite certain that when I went, he thought me ungrateful. I am sure he believed that he cared for me and was offering me the world, in his own fashion, and how
could I not realise his feelings for me? Horace had never known a minute’s kindness in his whole life. All he had ever seen of men and women was the way that his father had treated his wives. It was probably Horace’s idea of courtship, to bully and threaten. When I ran off, I am sure he was wounded and bewildered.
But there is right and wrong, that’s what the men forget. They think that because they don’t
mean
the bad things they do, then those bad things shouldn’t hurt us. But a slap stings however it is meant.
*
A few days before our move to Peterborough, Clementina and I went to Ely market for the last time. Most of our furniture was sold – there was only the clothes to pack. Elijah had gone on ahead and was finding us a place to rent. He would come back for us with a cart, at the weekend.
We went to Ely market that day to sell rather than buy. Clementina had made a pile of things and put them in a crate: crockery and cooking pots we no longer wanted, and a few clothes. We would probably be in temporary lodgings when we first got to Peterborough, so there was no point in carting round a load of stuff. There was something satisfying about getting rid of things, even things which would have to be replaced once we found our new home.
We went early, so that Clementina could talk to the stall-holders as they were setting up. I was buying one or two things: eggs, as our laying hens had been sold the week before, and some green thread that I needed to finish off my last sewing job, the mending of a best suit for Mr Clifford, wheelwright.
I knew Clementina’s tasks would take longer than mine, so I lingered at the thread stall, chatting to the Misses Oakley who ran it. They had some new gold lace in, in a beautiful filigree design, which they said had been made in London by the same firm that supplied blouses to the ladies-in-waiting of Queen Mary herself. I
fingered it covetously, for I had been doing very ordinary jobs of late, and I thought of how it was high time one of my girls got engaged to be married so I could show them what I could do.
I had put down my basket – a large one Elijah had made for me. As I bent to pick it up, I winced. I had eaten porridge for breakfast and it always caused me digestive difficulties.
‘Are you quite well there, Mrs Smith?’ one of the Misses Oakley said to me, as she handed the green thread to me in a paper bag.
‘Why, yes,’ I said, surprised at the concern on her face. Odd she should say that, I thought, as only this morning, on the carrier-cart, a neighbour had told me I was losing weight and looking peaky with it. Well, if moving house makes me a little thinner then that’s no bad thing, I thought. There’s enough on me to spare a bit, after all. It was true, I had been off my food of late.
After I had bought the few other bits and bobs we needed, I still had time to spare, so I went round the back of the Corn Exchange. A fishmonger and his boy were skinning eels by the water-pump, throwing the skins against the cobbles to reveal the grey, jelly-flesh beneath. Just past them, another boy was leaning against the wall with one leg bent, playing a mouth organ.
Why
Was
I
Born?
I think it was, but he was playing it so badly it was hard to tell.
Behind the Corn Exchange was a little tea shop. Come late morning, it got hectic as lots of folk would pile in there for tea and a bun after the shopping was done, but as it was still early I managed to get a seat in the window and enjoy the feeling that my errands were achieved. Clementina would be a little while yet, so I could take as long as I wanted. I watched the folk going past – all that hurrying – and listened to the boy with his tuneless mouth organ and felt the sweet ache of time going by. It’s a symptom of getting on in years, I thought, allowing yourself to enjoy small moments of nothing in particular. My bun was fresh that morning and had candied peel inside but it was too big and I couldn’t finish it.
I hefted my basket and left the tea shop. I thought I might as well
take a wander down the High Street and back before I went up Bray Lane. I still had plenty of time. Although my basket was half empty, the size of it was awkward and as the pavement was busy, I kept having to lift it in front of me so folk could get past. I didn’t want it bumped when I had eggs in it. A light rain began falling. My shoes were hurting as well. I had got no more than halfway down the street when I decided to turn back.
If I had done so one second sooner, I would not have seen him.
Just before I turned back, I looked ahead, up the street, and there he was. He was standing on the pavement, facing me, holding a fob and key and staring in my direction. He was wearing a new suit of dark grey wool. His shirt collar stood up stiff and white above the lapels, and he had a satin cravat at his throat, golden coloured like the lace I had been fingering. Very smart he looked, but aged, though.
As I approached, weaving through the people between us, he took his hat off and bowed to me. I saw that his hair was very thin on top, and what little of it remained was pure snow white.
‘Hello, William,’ I said.
He straightened and looked at me. ‘Rose …’ he said.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to stare, to take him in. He was both changed beyond all recognition and not changed – so smart, so much older, but still the same thin figure, the pale features. It was nearly thirty years since we had last set eyes upon one another.
I knew that if I did not speak, the situation would become awkward. ‘William,’ I said, ‘what brings you to Ely?’
He gestured at the door before him. I saw, etched on the glass,
Childer & Watson, Chartered Accountants
.
I opened my mouth in surprise. ‘Why, William
At this, he gave a half-smile. ‘Yes, it would appear I was never quite cut from the right cloth to be a farmer.’
Oh, I wanted to know everything. How had all this come about?
How had he got away from the farm and become an accountant, of all things? I would never have thought it of him in a million years. I wanted to sit him down in a coffee house and hold his hands and get him to tell me everything. What of Horace, and Henry? His father must be long dead by now … Had Horace ever managed to persuade anyone to marry him?
I had noticed the gold wedding ring on his finger. ‘And you have a family?’
His half-smile became rigid. ‘Yes. I married while I was still training. We had three sons. My youngest will be joining me in the office, soon. The eldest two were killed in France.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, William.’ Now I knew what had aged him, what had balded and whitened him and given him that strained look.
There was a brief silence, which I felt obliged to fill. ‘I have five now, all grown up, of course.’ What could I tell him about my children? That Daniel was doing well for himself and talking of setting up his own little business in Peterborough; that Mehitable and I no longer spoke to each other since she broke off her engagement with the chimney sweep and I told her she was getting on a bit and should have grabbed him while she got the chance; that Bartholomew had disappeared to London and broken my heart; that Fenella was the handsomest girl alive and everybody’s favourite – and Scarlet, so much her own person, despite being the youngest – the strongest of them all, perhaps …
Instead I said, stupidly, ‘My husband and my two boys served in France but they came back safe and sound, thank the Lord.’ I suppose I wanted him to know that our family had done their bit too, but it came out all wrong. It sounded as though I was bragging that
mine
had survived.
‘And how is Mr Smith?’ The question sounded so absurdly formal, that I could not help giving a small laugh. How was Elijah? Same as ever – how else would he be?
William smiled back. We held each other’s gazes and our stares were full, brimming.
He dropped his gaze and turned back to his door. ‘My clerk will be waiting,’ he murmured, unconvincingly.
‘Of course,’ I said, looking down and brushing at my skirt with my free hand, suddenly aware of what a smart, upstanding gentleman William was these days, and how I was no more than an ageing village housewife with a basket over her arm.
Before I let him go, though, there was something I wanted to ask him, and the years of not seeing each other made me bold. This was the last time I would ever come to Ely market, after all. I knew I would never see him again and gathered all my courage.
‘William, I am sorry to ask you this …’
He looked back at me, his expression a little alarmed. He was frightened I was about to embarrass him.
I spoke hastily. ‘You will think me foolish after all these years, but did you ever receive my letter telling you I was to be wed? It’s just I’ve always wondered …’
‘Yes, Rose, I did. I am sorry …’ He looked down.
What was he sorry for? For not having had the courage to defy his father and come to the church to give me away? But he had paid for the church bells to be rung. That was enough for me, more than enough. Kind thoughts of William and his affection for me had cheered me many a time over the years, I realised. Even though his feelings for me had never come to anything, the thought that someone had regarded me softly at the most difficult time in my life had sustained me on many a black night. I wanted him to know how much his gesture had meant to me.
‘William,’ I said. ‘When I came out of the church on my wedding day and heard the bells ringing, it was the happiest moment of my life. I still cherish the sound of those bells in my head.’
He looked up at me, his face closed and tense. I could not decipher his thoughts. ‘I am glad to hear that, Rose,’ he said.
‘Now, if you will excuse me …’ He bowed to me again, and lifted the key.
‘Goodbye, William,’ I said. ‘Please give my regards to your wife. I wish you both well.’
‘Goodbye, Rose.’
*
I walked back down the High Street, my head full of thoughts. It was only as I reached the market place again that it came to me.
Oh
William,
I thought.
You
loved
me,
didn’t
you?
Loved
me
properly,
I
mean.
I thought back to the time on the farm – it seemed like such an age ago, and it was: another century, before the children, before the War that took so many of our children. Our generation has this great chasm in our lives, I thought, a chasm that has swallowed so much of what is dear to us. How can any of us clamber down and up its sides to get back to the past? But William had loved me. I was sure of that.
What if William had made his intentions clear to me at the time? Would I have loved him back? Married him, perhaps? Would I now be his wife, living in a smart town house somewhere in Ely, brushing fluff from the shoulders of my husband’s smart new suit before he set off for work each morning? Then, after I had kissed him and waved him off from the doorstep, would I return inside and close the door, check that the maid was clearing the breakfast table, then go upstairs to my room and sit at my dresser, to spend my morning as I always did, staring at pictures of my two lost sons …?
You can’t pick and choose, after all. If you want somebody else’s life, you’ve got to take the whole of it. It isn’t like plucking only the ripe cherries off a tree and leaving the ones you don’t like the look of.
As I passed the market, I glanced around to see if I could spot Clementina, but if she was there, she was lost in the crowds. I decided to go on up Bray Lane and wait for her at our usual place. There were benches by the roadside where the carrier-carts pulled
up and the rain had stopped. An omnibus service had started up on market days, but it was three times the cost of the carrier-cart and I couldn’t abide the horrid smell of it.
It wouldn’t have made any difference, I thought. Even if William had told me he loved me on the farm, I still would have run off with Elijah. At that time, I would have thought that marrying William would have tethered me to River Farm as surely as marrying Horace would have done.
The benches were all full when I got there and I had to stand, but pretty soon a carrier-cart going the other way rumbled into place and several women clambered up, so I was able to get a seat on the bench. A younger woman moved over for me as I sat down, and I thought how old I must seem to her.
There is no point in being wistful, I thought to myself. Yes, I would love to be married to William and live in a town house and have a maid – but would I swap my five healthy children for his dead two? He loved me, that’s all that matters. I can hold on to that thought. He loved me, all those years ago, and he paid for the church bells to be rung as I came out into the sun.
*
My digestive system really was bothering me that day – it was the first day I began to think there was maybe something that needed sorting out. I’d better brew myself some mint leaves in hot water when I get home, I thought.
I suppose if it hadn’t been for the move to Peterborough, I might have gone to the doctor sooner. As it was, it took us more than a year to settle – we had four different addresses in that time, due to Elijah taking a while to sort out a bit of regular income. Then there was the new house to establish – the new routine of just Elijah and me. Clementina had her own little place again. And there were the girls to be visited – and Fenella’s engagement to her Tom. Fenella was married not three months when Mehitable upped and did it too, and gave me my first grandchild all within the space of a year.