The Hills and the Valley (11 page)

‘Oh – goodnight,' Alec said.

For a moment there was no reply but a soft sobbing breath. Alec peered more closely, curious in spite of himself. The figure moved slightly as if uncertain whether to stay in the shadows or move away and Alec saw that it was a woman.

‘Goodnight,' she said, but her voice was shaky.

‘Hey – are you all right?' It came out before he could stop it though he was instantly embarrassed by his own boldness. This must be Eric Latcham's wife, he guessed, though in all the times he had been to the cottage he could never recall having seen her. And it was she, not Eric, who had gone out when the door had slammed.

‘Yes, I'm fine,' she said in the same shaky voice. She moved awkwardly away from the outhouses and in the light of the moon he saw a tall but slightly built girl wearing a cardigan over a floral print dress. Her hair was short and dark but he could see little of her face as it was in shadow and half of it was obscured by her hand.

‘That's all right then. I've – I've just been doing some decorating. I'm the new owner here …' Alec crossed towards his bicycle.

‘Oh good.' She made to attempt to move and on impulse said:

‘I'm Alec Hall, by the way. I don't think we've met.'

‘No. I'm Bryda. Bryda Latcham.'

‘Well, I expect we'll get to know one another better before long.' He bent to put on his cycle clips and still she stood uncertainly. Then she blurted out:

‘I'm sorry if we disturbed you tonight.'

‘No, no – you didn't …' He was embarrassed again.

‘It's Eric,' she said all of a rush. ‘He gets in a temper sometimes. But he doesn't mean any harm. You mustn't take any notice of him. He – well, you know what it's like when you have a drink.'

Alec looked up at her quickly, overbalanced and knocked into his bicycle. It rolled on its handlebar against the wall almost falling over and the girl made an instinctive grab to save it. As she did so she removed her hand from her face and in the light of the moon Alec clearly saw the angry weal and the swollen cheekbone which she had been trying to hide.

‘Oh – your bike – I thought it was going to fall …' She half-laughed, quickly covering her face again.

‘Thanks. It's all right.' He took it himself.

She shivered and pulled her cardigan around her with her free hand.

‘It's going cold, isn't it?'

‘Yes, nights and mornings …' Oh, the strain of conversing normally when he had seen and she knew that he had seen …

‘I'd best be going then,' Alec said. He picked up his bicycle and swung his leg over the crossbar. ‘Goodnight then.'

‘Goodnight.'

She was still standing there as he rode away. Afraid to go back in, he thought. It was hardly surprising if Eric had been hitting her about. The thought shocked and angered him – that a big bloke like Eric should take his ill temper out on his wife. But still it was none of his business.

The Miners Arms was blacked out but Alec guessed that some of his mates would still be there enjoying a pint. He propped his bicycle up against the wall and climbed the three broad stone steps to the door, which had also been blackout trapped.

As he had expected the usual group of regulars were gathered around the tables – Ewart Brixey, Tommy and Reg Clements and their father Walter, and Colwyn Yelling, though Stanley Bristow had already left. ‘At my age I don't want to be out in this blackout!' he had explained. As Alec went in they greeted him cheerfully and when he had bought himself a half of bitter at the bar he took it over to their table and pulled an extra chair into the circle.

‘Thee'm a bit late bain't'ee, Alec?' Ewart was always the first to come out with what everyone else was thinking. ‘You bin courtin' I s'pose.'

‘Working, more like,' Alec said amiably.

‘Oh ah – tell us another! Look, he's got white on his coat! You've been round the outhouses with Joan!'

‘Fat chance. I've been painting.'

‘Painting! That's a new name for it. Painting! I like that!'

‘So does Joan,' Reg Clements said and there was a roar of ribald laughter.

Alec laughed with them and took a pull of his beer.

‘Straight up, I've been decorating the cottage we're buying. Doing up the kitchen.'

‘She didn't take long to get you in harness, Alec!' Tommy joked. ‘If she's got you decorating now, what'll she be like when she's got a ring on her finger?'

‘It had to be done,' Alec said mildly, wiping the foam off his mouth. ‘We couldn't live in the place as it was.'

‘Where's the place you'm buying, Alec?' Walter enquired.

‘Down the bottom of Combers End. In Purldown really. Next door to Eric Latcham.'

‘Oh ah.'

‘Do you know the Latchams?' Alec asked.

‘I d'know Eric,' Walter said. ‘I knew his father. I can mind when he worked at Middle Pit.'

‘What are they like?'

‘You ought to know if you'm going to live next door to them.'

‘I've hardly seen them,' Alec admitted. ‘I do know Eric of course but …' He broke off, unwilling to relate his experience of the evening. ‘What about his wife? Who did he marry?'

‘Bryda Deacon,' Tommy said immediately. ‘We were at school with her weren't we, Reg? You remember her don't you, Alec? Pretty girl, dark. She'd be older than you, but surely you remember her?'

Alec thought. Bryda Deacon. Yes, now he came to think of it he could remember her. As Tommy said she had been a pretty girl with a mass of brown wavy hair and a pair of legs that had made the boys whistle. Now, however, he found it difficult to equate that girl with the wraith who had cowered in the shadows of the outhouses.

‘They had a little'un, didn't they?' Reg said. ‘About a year ago. Though she lost several before that, I heard.'

‘I seen her not so long ago,' Ewart said. ‘In the doctor's surgery it was, when I had that bit of an accident underground and did me ribs in. She were in there with the little'un waiting her turn. She had changed though – I'm not surprised Alec didn't know her. She'd got very thin and she were as white as a sheet. I put it down to whatever it was she'd done to her eye.'

Alec shifted in his chair. ‘Her eye? What had she done to it?'

‘I heard her telling the woman next to her she'd walked into the door. A real shiner it was though. Nasty.'

Alec said nothing, unwilling to put into words what was going through his mind. Rough and tough these miners might be, ready enough to join in a brawl or take the strap to a son who needed to be taught a lesson, but wife beating was not their way; and for the most part it would never enter their heads that someone they knew might indulge in it. Even with the evidence of the row he had overheard and Ewart's description of Bryda's black eye, he could scarcely believe it himself. But one thing was for very sure. Healthy young women didn't make a habit of walking into doors.

‘Have you heard about th'ick rook that brought down a power line?' Tommy asked, changing the subject. ‘T'were in the paper – Newhaven, it were. The bird perched on the wire and brought, the whole bloody lot down and the rook fell on a sheep in the field and set his wool on fire.'

‘Dead, were it?' Ewart asked.

‘Oh ah, the rook were, but the sheep were all right. The firemen had to put it out. But a lot of folk's Sunday dinners were spoiled when the electricity went.'

‘They should have gone out to the field – they could have had roast rook if not roast lamb!' Ewart chortled and the conversation turned away from the Latcham family. But when they had finished their pints and left the Miners Anns, Alec was still thinking about Bryda and seeing her face both pretty and happy as he vaguely remembered her and thin and marked as it had been tonight.

He didn't like it. There was not a thing he could do about it – it was none of his business if she had married a man who took his temper out on her in that way. But as he pedalled home along what the locals still referred to as ‘The New Road'it worried him all the same.

It was quite dark by the time Margaret left the school where she taught. There was no moon tonight and as the dark November air hit her she shivered, turned up the collar of her coat and pulled her woollen cap further down over her ears.

Not a night to be out and the prospect of having to walk the two miles home from Sanderley was far from inviting. But there was nothing for it. Since petrol rationing had been introduced Margaret had refused to allow Harry to come and fetch her as he sometimes used to do when she was late – the coupons were far too precious and their little supply might be needed for an emergency.

Not that she was late too often these days. Most out-of-school activities had ceased with the dark evenings and Margaret was usually able to leave soon after the children and get home in the greying dusk. Tonight, however, she had had no alternative but to stay late. There had been a staff meeting and with all the new wartime regulations there had been a great deal to discuss. Margaret had sat with the other two teachers huddled around the temperamental coke stove in the cramped little office which Tom Freke, the headmaster, rather grandly called his study, drinking mugs of tea and wondering how much longer it would take to get through the endless list of items Tom had drawn up on his agenda – a review of procedure in the event of a daytime air raid, how Christmas would be celebrated at the school this year, and a rundown on how the evacuee pupils were settling in.

This last item had made Margaret think again of her own two ‘vackies', Elaine and Marie. They were no longer at Sanderley school with her – the committee had deemed it unsuitable to expect two children, and ‘townies' at that, to walk the two miles each way and they had been found places at Hillsbridge Board School. Fair enough in many respects, except that it meant they were usually home before she was, but Margaret had devised a hiding place for the back door key beneath a flower pot in the coal shed, and they were able to let themselves in and have the kettle on the boil by the time she too arrived home.

It was on evenings like these that it was inconvenient, though, and as Tom Freke's voice droned on, detailing dates and times for the Christmas parties, Margaret's mind had wandered to the two girls who would, she knew, be in the house on their own unless Harry had been able to get off early. They could go on and have their tea, of course. Knowing she would be late this evening she had cut bread and butter this morning before she left home, sandwiching it together with a thick layer of her mother's homemade blackberry and apple jelly to hide the fact that the butter was no more than a scrape and wrapping it up in greaseproof paper before putting it in the breadbin to keep fresh. And there was seed cake too, also homemade, and they were perfectly capable of boiling the kettle to make a cup of tea. The fire worried her a bit. It was well banked up to last through the day while they were all out and she hoped they would not try to poke it to life. A coal rolling out onto the hearth rug could easily cause a fire. She had told them not to touch it, of course, but they were not the most obedient of girls, particularly Elaine.

Left to her own devices Margaret was fairly sure that Marie could be quite a lovable child. She was sunny natured and did as she was told – when Elaine was not there to incite her to do differently. But Elaine was altogether another kettle of fish. She was cheeky and ill-mannered and it sometimes seemed to Margaret that to ask her to do something was to make quite certain she would refuse to do it, either by deliberate disobedience or by sly evasion. She was, Margaret thought, one of the least likeable children she had ever encountered.

And that was not all. For Margaret was beginning to suspect that she might also be dishonest.

At first, she had been unwilling to believe such a thing was possible. When she had mislaid the moiré band which Harry had given her the first Christmas she had known him and it had turned up amongst Elaine's few pathetic bits and pieces in the girls'room, she had thought that Elaine had merely borrowed it to try it on because it was pretty and then been afraid to admit it. Then, the first time she found herself with ten shillings less in her purse than she had thought she had, she told herself that she must have changed the note to buy some item or other which she had forgotten about. But when a couple of shillings she had left on the mantlepiece went missing she had seriously begun to wonder. They had been there when she went to school in the morning she knew; she had taken them out of her purse purposely not to spend them. But that evening when she went to get them to feed them to the gas meter they were no longer there.

‘Did you take some change off the mantlepiece?' she had asked Harry.

‘No. Why?'

‘Oh nothing. I thought I left some there. I must have used it to pay the baker,' she said, but she knew she had not and the incident in the Co-op drapery shop when the woman had accused Elaine of trying to steal cakes from her bag had come back to Margaret. She had been willing to try and make excuses for the child then. Now she was not so sure.

It was a worrying thought that a girl living under her roof might be stealing from her and Margaret was not sure what to do about it. Should she set a trap for her so that at least she would know whether she was mistaken in her suspicions or not? She shrank from the idea. It seemed a thoroughly inhospitable thing to do on the basis of two missing shillings and a ten shilling note which she might or might not have spent herself. Besides, Margaret was not sure that she wanted to know if Elaine was a thief. With doubt removed she would have to do something about it and the flimsy relationship she was building with the girls would be damaged beyond repair. Not that there was much of a relationship with Elaine, if she was honest, but at confrontation time Marie would certainly take her sister's part and any hope of a bridge with the younger girl would be gone for good.