A Kind Man Page 3

  ‘I thought it good,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘For us.’

  ‘It would be.’

  ‘So we’ll take it then? It’s for rent.’

  They had moved in the following week, and from the first day, Eve had felt happy. The house was only a little bigger than their old one in the town but it felt vast because of the light – light flooded in front and back and because there was nothing overshadowing them any more, nothing taller than their house apart from the peak and that you could see but at a distance.

  She had stood looking and looking, at the fields and the track that led across them and the slope and the sky, and had felt a different person.

  ‘But you’d have a way to go to work,’ she had said that first afternoon.

  ‘I don’t mind a walk. I can do up the old bike as well if I find my own legs too slow.’

  He did not mind. He got up forty minutes earlier and walked. Eve watched him set off across the track that led back to the town, his stride calm and steady, before beginning her work in the house, and then the minute she could, going outside to the garden. It had been dug over and made before but then left to weed and neglect, but day by day she shaped it and cleared it and then began to plan what to grow. The man next door had brought round things to start her off, cuttings and plants, bits of this and that. And advice. Bert Ankerby. His wife Mary grew fat red geraniums and tomatoes on all the window ledges and gave cuttings of those too. When Eve had spoken of chickens, Bert had told her where to go for a couple and he and Tommy had put together the henhouse and run.

  Every day she woke up feeling happy in a way she had never known before. She loved her husband, her home, her life.

  A couple of months after they had moved into what was known only as 6 The Cottages, Miriam had a third son, but in giving birth to him was gravely ill and both she and the baby had to be taken to hospital where they stayed for several weeks, Miriam lying between life and death. But the baby thrived and because of Miriam’s illness and an epidemic of scarlet fever in the hospital it was thought better for him to go home. John Bullard sent for Eve.

  For five weeks she left Tommy to look after himself and 6 The Cottages and became mother to two boys and the baby, Arthur George, though the worst trouble was John Bullard, who did nothing, either for himself or his children, but came in at five and sat down, expecting the tea to be in front of him, his glass of beer at his side, went out to the working men’s club or the public house and came in at ten. Cocoa, bread and meat or cheese had to be waiting for him. He did not drink much ale, only went for the company of other men and because he hated sitting in the house that smelled of boiling and small boys. He was not mean. He handed Eve his wage packet as he always handed it to his wife, and told her what he expected back for himself. He was friendly towards her and grateful to her, but he lifted no finger to help her and took little notice of the boys. The baby he left entirely to her. Arthur George might not have existed for all the times he so much as glanced at him. The boy grew and roared for food and slept deeply and his brothers absorbed him into their midst without comment.

  Eve was exhausted and felt her spirits dampened not only by the work and the tiredness but by the return to the closed-in town and the smell of the chimney stacks. Three or four times a week, Tommy came down to help her and took the boys out with him as well, walked them up to 6 The Cottages and let them loose, to race about the field, and taught them how to feed the chickens and collect the eggs, handle the rabbit and dig up the vegetables. He wore them out on those days and with only herself and the baby in the strangely quiet house, Eve felt calmer and sat with Arthur George in the crook of her arm or across her lap, stroking his thistledown hair and looking at the pink fingernails. His hands were large already, like those of his father, wide and stubby, not the hands of a baby at all. But the nails were delicate and almost translucent. She could see the flow of blood beneath the surface.

  It was a hard time but she had no choice in the matter of filling her sister’s place and did not resent it, and when Miriam finally came home, Eve stayed on another two weeks, because it was plain that Miriam had little strength or energy. She had been plump and now she was thin, ruddy and her skin was sallow.

  ‘You’ve done so well for him, Eve,’ she said over and again, looking at the baby in his crib but making no move to lift him up. ‘You’ve done so well for them all.’

  ‘I hope I have.’

  ‘What would they have done? John would have been lost.’

  Eve said nothing but thanked God silently for her own husband and his help and strength.

  She prayed too that Miriam did not have another child, not because she herself would resent it but because Miriam would surely never have the strength now to carry another and look after the rest. Eve wished she could say something, warn or at least show her concern. But they did not talk about such things together.

  6

  IT WAS a whole year more before she herself became pregnant, but now that she was happy in 6 The Cottages she did not fret about it or become low-spirited when month after month went by. It would come about in its own good time, she had no doubt now, though if anyone had asked her why and she had had to say that it was because of the house and the light she would have felt foolish.

  In the meantime, their lives went steadily on. The garden took shape. Everything grew well the first season and better the next, the chickens gave them too many eggs so she took a basket of them into the town every week, and after leaving some for Miriam and her mother, she sold the rest to the butcher in Salt Lane and got a good price. The money went partly into savings, which they had never before had, and partly for things she bought to make the house nice, fabric for curtains and cushions, some better pans, and occasionally some small piece of old china, a jug or a cup and saucer that she picked up on a market stall or in the bric-a-brac shop. She liked delicate pieces with roses on or dark blue bands with gilding and set them out on the dresser and the rougher pieces on the kitchen window ledge filled with flowers and bits of greenery. They caught the sun. Once a week she took them carefully down piece by piece and washed and dried them until they shone.

  John Bullard acquired a car, which no one else in the family or even in the street had ever had, and twice drove Miriam and the children to 6 The Cottages, for the boys to let off steam in the field and Miriam to sit in the sun on the back step, watching Eve working at the garden until she too sat down and they felt like kids again, a bottle of lemonade between them and their sleeves rolled up to try and brown their arms.

  Once, looking sideways at her as she was speaking, Eve saw how much older her sister seemed. She was not so thin or so pale as before but her face had somehow changed, fallen in a little, and she had grey hairs and looked too much like their mother.

  ‘If I had another one I’d kill myself,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say. How can you bring yourself to speak like that?’

  ‘You could have it if you wanted then.’

  Eve was silent.

  ‘You looked after them fine. They were happy.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘All the same nothing. I mean it. The doctors said I’d probably die anyway.’

  Eve did not know whether to believe her or not. Miriam had been given to lying when they were girls.

  From the field they heard the boys whooping and shouting.

  ‘They love it up here,’ Miriam said.

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘Aren’t you lucky?’

  Eve had never before heard her sound bitter in that way.

  The day drifted down into a soft warm evening. The boys came back covered in what Eve thought of as clean dirt, dust from the track and the sandy burrows under the far hedge, and helped her feed and shut up the chickens and by the time John Bullard came for them it was dark and they were asleep and had to be lifted in to the back seat of the old car. Miriam sat in front, and did not so much as glance back.<
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  * * *

  Eve’s own pregnancy was without incident and she felt well after the first weeks, walked every day across the track towards the peak because the autumn was early and chill but bright and walking was easy. It was how she found the church, walking when she was not yet too heavy to do the two miles and back without discomfort. It was late November. She had never been to the other side of the peak but once she found the church, stranded alone like a ship at sea, she went several more times, wandering round the graveyard reading the stones that could be read, before going inside where it was dim and cold, and smelled of the earth. Once, she had brought Tommy and there had been a service, the church lit by candles and only one other person there besides the parson. It was the last time, he told them, when the winter came it was impossibly cold and if it snowed, no one could reach it. Eve thought of it often in January, trapped in whiteness and cold, waiting for the spring to bring it to life again.

  Tommy went steadily through the days, and though he was caring of her, did not fuss or cause her any anxiety. He looked forward as she did but he was a man to focus on the present and take the future as it came to him. But she could tell by the way he glanced at her, took over the lifting and hen feeding, made her tea before he left each morning, that he felt some small anxiety. What had happened to Miriam had shocked them both. Nothing could ever quite be taken for granted again.

  7

  HER LABOUR, beginning in the early hours of a Sunday morning, was short and fierce. There was no time for Tommy to run for the midwife, but hearing the sounds, Mary Ankerby came, in time to see the child, a small, dark-haired girl, lying next to Eve on the bed, mad as a wasp and still attached to the cord, which Mary cut deftly, having had seven of her own and all born at 5 The Cottages.

  ‘And what better place to start in life?’ she said, handing the girl to Eve, who lay dazed, the birth not having been expected for another week.

  ‘Jeannie,’ Tommy had said from the beginning. ‘Jeannie Eliza,’ though where the names had come from Eve did not know for there was no one called either in their families.

  Jeannie Eliza Carr lay tight-swaddled in the white flannel sheet like a small chrysalis, dark blue eyes looking out. Tommy drew the curtain against the first sun streaming in through the window onto them but Eve made him pull it back again, wanting their daughter to be touched by it and to have a sight of the wide sky.

  From the first, she was a quiet, watching child, only crying for her needs, and when they were satisfied, lying peacefully, not always sleeping, and as she grew, always looking for her father at the sound of his voice, following his movements. For years he had played the fiddle, though he did not know music. An Irishman who had worked for a while in the town had taught him, and when he had moved on, left Tommy his own violin, saying that when he got back home he could always pick up another. Tommy had played the dances and jigs and occasional slow sad tearful ballads he had heard and, getting gradually more tuneful and confident, taken to entertaining people outside in the street or the public house. He became in demand for wakes and weddings, though everyone knew what he would play, his repertoire being limited. But they waited for the next tune to come round in its turn and sang or danced to it cheerfully, so that if he had suddenly presented them with something new they would have felt uneasy.

  When he met Eve he had played less and at 6 The Cottages had only taken out his fiddle once or twice, there was so much to do at first and then he got out of the way of it. But on the day of his daughter’s birth he fetched it from the upstairs cupboard and tuned it carefully, before drawing his bow tentatively and softly across the strings. At once, Eve had seen that Jeannie listened intently, and after that, every time he played, sitting outside so as not to startle her, she had seemed barely to breathe. If she was restless or teething or sleepless his playing would always settle her.

  ‘I like to hear the music,’ Mary said, looking over. If Eve had to walk into the town, Mary would have the baby, who seemed to fit into the world of 5 as easily as of 6 The Cottages.

  The day after Jeannie was born, John Bullard had brought Miriam in the car, the boys pouring out of the back of it and straight into the field, like caged birds set free. It was a fine day and Eve sat propped on pillows in the bed, the window open a little, Jeannie asleep in the crib beside her. As her sister came into the room Eve saw the look on her face, of bitterness and weariness, and she put out her hand to her, feeling ashamed for a moment of her own contentment, and of having the daughter she knew Miriam longed for, though she had never spoken a word of it. Miriam glanced into the crib and glanced away.

  Every time she came she seemed older, as if she were a soft stone that was being worn down, its surface thinning and giving way. Her face was the colour of dirty paper, her hands red and roughened, the nails cracked. But she had put a slide in her hair and a brooch on her frock.

  ‘Jeannie Eliza,’ she said, standing at the window. ‘Where’s that from?’

  ‘Tommy. He named her. It just came to him – because he liked it.’

  ‘You were all over quick.’

  ‘I was. I suppose it’s one way or the other and you have no say in the matter.’

  Miriam said nothing.

  ‘They’ll come to no harm,’ Eve said, thinking she was anxious for the boys romping out. Tommy and John Bullard were both there, and the boys could be heard shouting with laughter.

  Miriam turned to face her, ‘What if they did.’

  ‘Miriam!’

  ‘And you so smug with yourself.’

  Eve bit her lip. Jeannie stirred slightly like a leaf in the breeze, and then was still. Her eyelids were streaked pale violet-blue.

  ‘You wait till you’ve four like me.’

  ‘You’ve only three.’

  But she saw it on Miriam’s face and did not know what to say.

  ‘You try and put a stop to it,’ Miriam said.

  ‘But you were so ill with Arthur George.’

  Her sister shrugged.

  Tommy made tea and bread and butter and jam and there were rock buns brought round warm by Mary. The boys tumbled in and took what they wanted in their hands and went out again. Miriam brought Eve tea and a plate of food. When she came in, Eve had the baby to her breast.

  ‘It wears you down,’ she said.

  Eve could not say that she would have sat like this for the rest of her life, with the baby’s soft mouth gripping round her like a sea anemone and the small hands there too, the fingers splayed out on her flesh.

  ‘I’d give them away.’

  Eve stared at her. She had never liked it when people said such teasing things too easily. ‘Words,’ Tommy would say. But from Miriam’s face she saw that it was not a tease, not something said lightly when she was down.

  ‘That’s terrible. You shouldn’t say any such thing. You love them.’

  Miriam sighed. ‘Oh yes. But how does that change matters?’

  Jeannie Eliza made a tiny sound.

  ‘You cherish her.’

  ‘Miriam, you shouldn’t –’

  ‘Don’t you tell me what I should and should not do,’ she blazed up. ‘You were always good at that. Don’t you dare. What do you know?’

  Eve looked down at the soft spot on the top of the baby’s head, the pale membrane stretched across like the skin on top of an egg.

  ‘Oh, her. You’ve got her so you think you know it all.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll learn, you and that mother’s boy Tommy.’

  Perhaps she should have felt anger and shouted at Miriam, sent her packing, defended Tommy for his being a kind man and quiet. But what good would that have done? She felt Miriam’s own rage, and the hurt and jealousy coming from her like hot breath, and knew that enough had been said and that she herself must simply absorb it all and not strike back.

  The chink of dishes came from the kitchen below. Tommy would be clearing away and washing up, John Bullard sitting back. The boys’ shouts came from far across
the field.

  The baby had gone to sleep, her mouth letting the nipple droop.

  ‘Would you like to hold her now?’

  Miriam turned away. ‘Why would I want to do that? I’ve had plenty of it and more to come.’

  But from the doorway she said, ‘She’s very bonny, Eve.’

  They left soon after, the boys wailing in protest. Miriam did not come back upstairs.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tommy said, taking her teacup away. He touched his daughter’s soft hair wonderingly with the back of his finger as he passed.

  Eve did not tell him. Miriam would do nothing, it had been a sudden despairing moment, but she surely would not do anything. Yet she had barely said one pleasant word, not admired the baby, nor given her sister a word of praise, which seemed to Eve a sad, bitter thing.

  8

  LATER THAT year they started laying off men, first in the coach and next in the brickworks and after that the closures spread to the mills. A dozen went, then fifty, then half. John Bullard was one of the early ones to go and by then he and Miriam had four boys and no money coming in. Vera Gooch had a little set by and helped them. Tommy, whose wages were still good, called in and left a shilling every time in the teacup on the sideboard, not wanting to be discovered or to put them to shame. The whole town seemed to be sliding into a pit of despair, though people tried to put on brave faces and talk one another round, the women at their doors, the men on the street corners or, if they had a few pence, in the public houses and their own clubs. It was no worse here than in most places.

  ‘When is it coming to us?’ Eve asked. Jeannie Eliza was pulling herself along the rug to try and reach the little stray cat which had come in one night from a hailstorm and never left. ‘We can’t always be in luck.’

  Though the printworks had plenty on still and Tommy even did extra hours because he was one of the most skilled men, he knew how the machines ran and could save a fortune because in his hands they never broke down.