The Yorkshire Pudding Club (17 page)

‘I’ll leave it here. If you really don’t want it, ring me and I’ll pick it up and take it back by the end of the week,’ he said, wounded but riding it. Then he went, trying not to slam the door behind him, but he was a big bloke and how it shut was a definite statement on how he felt about her at that time.

It had been the police who came to inform her that they had found her father dead at home; he had lain there for four days. The pub landlady at the Miner’s Rest had rung them to find out why he had not turned up as usual, knowing that the February snow would never have been enough to keep Grahame Collier away from his tipple and the camaraderie, and they had broken the door down and found him upstairs in the bathroom. The cause of death was a heart-attack apparently, but cirrhosis of the liver was also written on the death certificate. He must have been in considerable pain, a fact that neither upset nor pleased Elizabeth. She had thought she might feel relief if she should ever see this day, but there was only numbness and disbelief, and she rang John for help when the police had gone, even though she couldn’t remember doing it.

It had been he who had arranged the undertaker and the vicar. Later, he would talk to the solicitor and sort out the clearance of the house and the sale of it for Elizabeth too. And when the undertaker needed a suit in which to dress the late Mr Collier, John said he would get one from the house for him, but then Elizabeth announced he had done enough for her and she would go for it. She was adamant,
but there was no way he would let her go alone and so they went together. She didn’t know why she felt the compulsion to confront her fears after all those years, but the feeling was so strong that she knew she had to go with it. After all, it was just a house, an empty house, bricks and mortar, there was nothing there to frighten her, but she was shaking when her foot landed over the threshold and straight into the front room, in the absence of a hallway in those houses.

It was so much smaller than she remembered, but other than that, it was almost exactly as it had been on the day she had run from it, down the road to her Auntie Elsie’s in her stockinged feet. It even smelled the same–a mix of cigarettes and dank air–a smell that made his presence feel very strong in the room. There was a thick layer of grime on the windows and the skirting boards were furry with dust; the nicotine had stained the wallpaper over the years and stencilled lighter squares where pictures had once been hung, then removed. The nets at the window were filthy and torn, and the tops of the big heavy brown velour curtains were grey with cobwebs. A print of an Indian woman with her hair over one shoulder was aslant, and Elizabeth remembered that it had always been that way. It added to the feel that time had not moved on and nothing had changed. Except it had–because she was a grown woman and no longer a scared and confused little girl. So why did she feel like one inside?

She wandered through to the kitchen. The walls behind the oven were thick with splashed grease, and the sink was piled high with mugs and plates. The bin in the corner was overflowing, and bottles and beer cans were defying gravity at the angle they were hanging out. There was a smell of
something rotting, sour like milk but with a faint sweetness that made her want to retch.

‘Come on,’ said John, pulling her by the hand up stairs that had not seen a vacuum in years, by the look of it. They passed the bathroom door; thankfully it was shut. They had found him in there, hanging over the toilet bowl; a suitably undignified end to his undignified life. She hesitated in the doorway of her mam and dad’s room. It was the same bed he had rolled her onto that day and most likely the same sheets too, judging from the stink of the place. She stood and stared at it, not knowing why she was mentally putting herself back there, letting him stroke her hair all over again and telling her what a big girl she was getting now and that she had to cuddle her dad and let him kiss her and show him that she loved him. She could still conjure up the feel of his tongue, hard and slimy as it wormed into her mouth, his hands moving up her leg…until she shook her head and sent the thoughts back to that dark place in the corner of her head again. She shivered, partly from the freezing temperature but mostly from the chill of stagnant memories trapped within these walls.

The big walnut wardrobe door opened with a creak behind her. There was not much in there to search through.

‘This’ll do,’ said John, wanting to get her out of there as soon as possible.

‘Do they want socks and shoes as well?’ said Elizabeth flatly, her eyes still on the bed where Bev had suffered things she couldn’t bear to think about.

‘We’ll get some just to make sure,’ said John, hunting through drawers and looking around, although the best pair of shoes he could find were battered and scuffed.

‘I’ll polish them up,’ he said. Elizabeth nodded and he took her arm and steered her out of the house. He locked the patched-up door, but the stench of the place followed her.

She didn’t tell John until much later that she went to see her dad in the chapel of rest. He lay there looking death-bloated in a suit that was obviously too big for him with a made-up face looking more wax than flesh. His hands were placed together and they had done their best to get all the nicotine stains out but failed at the last. His nails were clipped, she had noticed that. Nice and neat like a daddy who took care of himself. She had not known why she’d come. She thought maybe she would say to his shell what had been in her heart all these years waiting to say to the man, but this was not a place for hate and he was dead and rotting before her eyes and could not answer her questions even if she had asked them. Then, when she saw the old shoes that John had polished and buffed up proud for him, a flood of unexpected and uncontrollable tears burst from her. She grieved for a dad that wasn’t hers; one who protected her and took an interest in her and loved her appropriately like Janey’s and Helen’s dads had loved them. She found herself missing a dad she had never had and the pain was terrible.

There were few mourners at the service and no one she recognized. She had sat with John in church, listening to the vicar’s eulogy about how Grahame Collier loved a pint and a bet on the horses and that he was a good worker and that he would be sorely missed by his friends at the Miner’s Rest. Then, what a shame it was that he had died so relatively young and alone, but he was in God’s arms now and in
eternal peace. There was no mention that he fiddled with his daughters.

The mourners lingered by the grave in the frosted churchyard, hovering for invites to any refreshments that were going until John, politely, put them straight that there would be none. They kept their comments to themselves but there were mutterings of disgust that his own daughter could not do right by him, and they went to rectify that at his local where they would hold their pints up to heaven and toast a sadly missed drinking companion.

Elizabeth was not there to hear them, she was still in the church, staring up at the great stained-glass window of Jesus on the Cross. ‘Why have You forsaken me?’ He said to God, didn’t He? Elizabeth knew what He meant. She sometimes felt God had forgotten her too.

Janey and Helen called in at Elizabeth’s for a Saturday-morning drink, bringing with them fresh cream cakes from the Lamb Street Bakery, which made the fattest éclairs in town. The first thing they saw when they walked into the front room was that big rocking chair and the stool, still wrapped in plastic, and Helen,
‘Ooooooooh-ed,’
knowingly. She explained for a confused Janey’s benefit that she had espied John Silkstone looking at this very same chair on Thursday, whilst she was out shopping.

‘Well, well, well, you
are
a dark horse, aren’t you, Miss Collier,’ Janey said and Elizabeth looked at her in that way she had, shrugging a bit as if she didn’t know quite what you meant, even though it was stark staringly obvious.

‘Are you seeing John again then?’ asked Helen hopefully, her big blue eyes wide with anticipation.

‘Am I heck,’ said Elizabeth, with a face that could have refrozen a cooked Christmas turkey. ‘I met him a few weeks back. He gave me a lift somewhere and he’s been round a couple of times when passing, that’s all.’

‘And he just happened to be passing with a chair that cost six hundred pounds?’ asked Helen.

‘How much?’
said Elizabeth, deciding it really was going back now. What was his game, spending all that money on a flaming chair? Was he barmy?

‘Well, thanks for telling us!’ said Janey, huffing and taking up residence in the big wing leather chair by the side of Elizabeth’s fire.

‘What’s to tell? He turned up with it, saying he’d got it cheap from someone. He thinks I’m a frigging charity case.’

‘I don’t think that’s it at all, Elizabeth,’ said Janey, who wasn’t in the habit of dressing things up in cottonwool to spare feelings. ‘He knows how flaming hard you are to give stuff to and it was probably his way of getting you to take it without you flinging it back at him and telling him that you aren’t a charity case.’

Elizabeth gulped.
His words coming out of her mouth.

‘I think it’s an incredibly thoughtful thing for him to do,’ said Helen in her soft voice, and christened it by sitting in it and starting to rock on it. ‘Oh, this is lovely. Haven’t you tried it, Elizabeth?’

‘No, I haven’t tried it and I’m not going to, either. It’s going back.’

‘God, you’re a hard cow,’ Janey said, suddenly impatient with her. ‘I thought you would have grown up by now. I wonder why he bothered at all, knowing what you’re like.’

‘I’d be taking it under false pretences,’ said Elizabeth with a sniff.

‘What do you mean, “false pretences”?’ said Janey.

‘Well, I’d be leading him on.’

‘How do you work that out?’ said Janey in a much-raised voice. ‘How do you know he’s the slightest bit interested in you other than as a friend? Has he said? Why can’t the bloke just be giving you a present?’

‘A six-hundred-quid present, Janey? Come on!’

‘He can afford it from the change in his arse pocket these days.’

Elizabeth dropped a big sarcastic, ‘Ha!’ which sent Janey’s blood to boiling point. If she had been a kettle, she would have been whistling by now.

‘So, when George came around and gave you that cat-litter tray he got from work, he was after you, was he?’

‘No, but—’

‘And when my dad gave you that trout he’d caught—’

‘That’s different. This is six hundred quid, not a flaming fish or a cat bog, so please don’t be stupid.’

Janey erupted. ‘It’s no different at all in principle, and it’s not me that’s stupid. But I tell you this, Elizabeth Collier, I’d rather be stupid than hard. You’re lucky the bloke even wants to talk to you after how you treated him last time, have you thought about that?’

‘I’m not hard!’ Elizabeth cried indignantly, feeling that she was fighting
him
again as well as Janey. ‘I’m not hard,’ she said again, sounding anything but hard.

‘I wish someone would go to all that trouble for me,’ Janey went on. ‘Look at it, it’s absolutely gorgeous!’

‘You have it then!’

Janey groaned and threw her hands up in despair. ‘I could happily throttle you sometimes. You’re hard as granite and twice as thick!’

‘Do you think I’m hard?’ Elizabeth said to Helen, still rocking in the chair.

‘I’m afraid I do, Elizabeth, sometimes,’ said Helen, without any of her customary cushioning. ‘The guy has done a really sweet thing and you’ve spoiled it for him.’

‘So you’re all on
his
side then, are you?’ Elizabeth said, her voice spiralling.

‘Yes. In this, I think we are,’ Janey said firmly. ‘It’s about time you started letting people in before you twist up that baby inside you to be as bad as you are.’

‘Janey, for goodness’ sake!’ said Helen crossly.

‘Oh, so I’m twisted now, am I?’

‘Come on, Elizabeth, you’re not right as far as emotions go. You didn’t even cry at your auntie’s funeral, for God’s sake.’

Elizabeth gasped. ‘You think I wasn’t upset when my Auntie Elsie died?’ she said in disbelief.

‘Ladies…’ came Helen’s referee-like voice. She had stopped rocking and decided that this all needed to stop before it got out of hand.

‘Who can tell with you? Then when your dad passed away…huh!’ said Janey. ‘You never even told us until, what was it, three weeks after his funeral, and I’ve seen more emotion on our bloody goldfish. Your own dad an’ all!’

‘That’s because I didn’t give a toss about him!’ she screamed back.

‘See?’ Janey turned to Helen for support, who started
to say again that they needed to cool this now, but her voice was drowned out by Elizabeth’s.

‘Not everyone’s dad is like yours, Janey, so just leave it.’

‘Ten years he’s been dead and you haven’t once visited his grave.’

‘So?’

‘It’s not right. How can that be right?’

‘Okay,’ said Helen. ‘Enough is enough.’

‘Look, just because you idolize your dad, doesn’t mean to say—’

‘I could always understand you going to live at your auntie’s because he couldn’t cope.’

‘What?’

‘That must have hurt you, but surely he deserved a bit of respect when he died.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Elizabeth gasped.

‘Don’t I? How much easier can it be to understand? He was your bloody father, for God’s sake!’

‘A father that got his own daughter pregnant!’ screamed Elizabeth. ‘Is that the sort of father you’d miss, is it? That the sort of man you’d want to grieve for? That sound anything like
your
nice daddy, Janey, does it?’

A pin-drop silence followed in which the only sound was Elizabeth’s post-tirade heavy breathing. She slumped to the sofa, giving out three nuclear power stations’ worth of radiation vibes that no one should in any way approach her/touch her/attempt to hug her.

As she sat down, Helen stood up, as if they were on a seesaw. ‘You?’ she croaked. ‘Was it you?’

‘No, not me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Our Bev.’

Janey and Helen both breathed a sigh of relief, then realized the revelation was no less terrible.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell us before?’ Helen said in a voice one notch up from a whisper.

‘Because I didn’t want you ever looking at me like you’re doing now,’ she said. The compassion in their eyes was terrible, burning her with its purity.

‘Is that why you really lived with your Auntie Elsie?’ Helen asked, patting her chest as if to steady her heartbeat.

Elizabeth nodded but she couldn’t speak; the words could not have got past the hard ball of tears in her throat. At that moment, she looked so wee, so fragile to the others, and Janey came to sit beside her on the sofa and hugged her, and for the first time ever, Elizabeth let her without protest.

‘That why your Bev ran off then?’ said Janey, and felt her nod against her shoulder.

‘I heard so much in that house and I never knew then what was going on. Of course, now it all makes perfect sense,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I can hardly let myself think what our Bev must have had to put up with after our mam left. He were a dirty…
dirty
…bastard. I hated him when I realized what he’d done to her. I was so terrified my Auntie Elsie would die and I’d have to go back to him, I was sick every time she got a cough or a cold. She used to promise me that she wouldn’t die before I was eighteen and she didn’t, she cleared it by nine months.’ Then she laughed, but it was an empty sound without any mirth at all in it.

‘Has your Bev ever been in contact with you since?’ asked Helen, coming to sit at the other side of her friend.

‘Naw, and it’s twenty odd years now, so I don’t think she will be. My Auntie Elsie told the police she’d run off and they checked the hospitals but she never turned up at any of them.’

‘Why didn’t she tell them about your bloody dad an’ all?’ said Janey.

‘I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t know what to do for the best. It’s not as easy as you might think, holding the power to decide a man’s fate. Whatever he might have done.’

‘Looks easy enough from where I’m standing!’

‘Janey, for God’s sake, pipe down,’ said Helen.

‘Sorry,’ said Janey, biting her lip. ‘So, didn’t the police find anything at all?’

‘Not a dicky bird. I’ve tried to trace her through her National Insurance number, but it’s never been used. I can understand why she went and I never blamed her for it–she needed to get away and start afresh. She had to forget about all of us to be able to do that.’

‘Was she really…you know…when she left?’

‘Pregnant? Yes, I’m as sure as I can be that she was pregnant. She stopped going to school, she was so sick and her stomach was getting really big…and her chest…I used to tease her about that getting huge. I was rotten to her, calling her fat names all the time until one day, she stopped fighting and just sat down and cried in front of me, and I walked off and left her because I wanted a bag of crisps from downstairs. I can even remember the flavour–KP beef, can you believe
that? That was the night she left, two days before her sixteenth birthday. I was eating KP beef crisps and she was going through hell.’

‘You weren’t to know,’ said Helen. ‘You were a little girl. You can’t possibly feel guilty–how can any of this be your fault? You must never think it was!’

‘That, my friend, is so much easier said than done.’

‘I just can’t imagine…Did he ever…you, Elizabeth?’ said Janey, not able to say all the words.

‘It started, but I managed to run away,’ she replied, her voice increasingly trembling, ‘to my Auntie Elsie’s. I don’t know what would have happened to me, if I hadn’t had her. I still lie awake at night and think, What if she’d been out that day? Or, What if she’d not believed me?’

‘What ifs can drive you insane,’ said Helen, who knew. ‘She
was
in and she
did
believe you, that’s all you should remember.’

Elizabeth was crying now, great big round blobs that landed on her cardi and she couldn’t wipe them away with the back of her hand fast enough, then Janey handed her a tissue.

‘And I’m carrying a bairn with those rotten genes in it!’ wept Elizabeth.

‘I don’t know–you didn’t turn out so bad.’ Janey nudged her, smiling, but she needed a tissue herself.

‘That’s funny, ’cos you’ve just spent the last God-knows-how-long telling me I’m a hard cow,’ said Elizabeth.

‘You are!’ said Janey, who had no intention of letting her off with anything because she had spoken for her
own good. ‘But you’re also my best mate and I love you to bits even though you drive me crackers.’

Elizabeth half-laughed, half-cried and let her head stay on Janey’s shoulder.

‘Oh Elizabeth, you should have told us, love, you stupid daft mare,’ Janey sighed, wiping her own eyes.
Dear God, they’d never even suspected that’s why she was so mixed up.

‘Yes, I think I am stupid sometimes.’

‘Well, now it’s all out, you can stop being stupid, can’t you?’ said Janey.

‘Start by telling John you’ll take the chair,’ said Helen. ‘Stop punishing yourself and let people be nice to you, Elizabeth. Let him buy you this. I have one and I love mine. Course, it’s old now, it was my da—’ She stopped and cursed herself.

‘Don’t do that, please,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Don’t be doing stupid stuff like not mentioning the word “dad” in front of me. Alex and Bob–they were always both so lovely to me.’

For years she had watched both men for that look in their eyes–predatory, unsafe, unclean–but had never ever seen even a trace of it.

‘They were good blokes, both of them. You were lucky.’

‘Make it up with John,’ Janey said, passing her a fresh handful of tissues. ‘He’s another good bloke.’

Elizabeth shuffled and nodded and grumbled in her usual Elizabeth non-committing way.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’ said Helen, who could always be relied on for a good old British solution.