A Kind Man (2 page)

Eve wore the blue satin with a small hat pinned perilously to the side of her head.

John Bullard’s suit was shiny and his hair shone too, flattened well down, which emphasised his nose and the boniness of his face. His hands were huge, Eve noticed, as he held her sister’s to fit the ring.

They left at three, driven to the station by John Bullard’s uncle, and by five people had left and the church hall was a mess of cake crumbs and empty cups. A streamer which had hung across the room had come unpinned and was dangling down and her
footsteps made a hollow tapping sound on the boards as she helped to clear up.

Her mother had drunk three glasses of sherry and her eyes were too bright. Eve felt odd and dispirited.

So that was a wedding, she thought.

A week later, she met Tommy Carr, and afterwards, she had felt as if everything was falling out as easily as the cards can fall out suddenly, in a game of patience, one after another after another into place. It had been quite straightforward. She had to take a skirt her mother had altered to a woman who lived on the east side of the town and she went by the canal path and was walking towards the footbridge when a stray dog came racing towards her and stopped, to whirl barking and barking round her feet. The skirt was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string and in her efforts to be free of the barking dog she had slipped. She had righted herself at once but the parcel had flown from her hand into the canal and the dog had leaped into the water after it, still barking, swimming as it had jumped, round and round in an ecstasy of excitement.

The dog’s owner had reached her at the same moment as a man had run down the steps of the footbridge and together, while Eve watched, they had hooked the parcel with an overhanging tree branch
they had snapped off. After the parcel, swung dripping with water onto the path, had come the dog, hauled by its collar. Eve had seen its legs paddling furiously and then its open mouth as it had scrambled out of the canal. The dog had seemed to be laughing, its bark interrupted by an abrupt cough as it spat out a mouthful of water.

And then it was over and calm and the dog was gone and Eve was left looking in dismay at the soaking wet brown-paper parcel on the path.

A couple of years before, Nelly Holmes, her mother’s oldest friend, had thought of remarrying. It had been a long time since she had lost her husband and hard bringing up three boys alone. He had asked. She had hesitated. Come to their house.

They had all been in, sitting round the table after tea, with scarves laid out for fringing and a sheet to hem. But Miriam had been delaying, wanting her game of patience to come out and it would not.

‘No, no, don’t send them off,’ Nelly Holmes had said, sitting down and catching her breath, stout woman that she was. ‘It isn’t private.’ Though it was, they could tell straight away, and their mother had kept glancing at them uneasily for fear of them catching a phrase they shouldn’t hear.

Miriam had gone on trying to get the patience out,
not interested. Eve had fiddled with the scarf, wishing she could leave, not quite knowing how, not wanting to hear the talk, embarrassed, though that precise word was not known to her then.

But after a moment, she had begun to listen and to think about Nelly Holmes, with her three growing boys in the tiny terrace house, toilet at the far end of the narrow garden, precious little money.

‘It might make such a difference,’ she was saying, ‘such a difference. They need a man about the place and it would be a wage. Besides, I’d like some company.’

And there was more, this good reason and that. Vera Gooch had listened in silence, looking at her friend’s face now and then but letting her come to the end like a thread running out and the shuttle gradually slowing to a halt.

The room had subsided into quiet. Miriam’s cards made a soft pat as she set them down one by one.

At last, Vera had got up. The old cat was at the window waiting to be let in.

Vera had looked round at Nelly Holmes. ‘Only the one thing I’d ask,’ she had said. ‘Which you maybe haven’t thought of or can even answer and you should.’

Not only Nelly, but Eve and Miriam too waited now, looking at her, Miriam’s hand frozen on the cards.

‘Is he a kind man?’

Somehow, it took them all by surprise. It was not what they had been expecting, which had perhaps been a thought of money or work or an existing family, where they might live, Nelly Holmes’s old father. Any of that.

Is he a kind man?

Yet Eve had seen at once that it was the only question that mattered and contained everything else within itself and Nelly’s reply.

Is he a kind man?

The rest would follow. Or it would not.

T
OMMY
C
ARR
was a kind man, she had been able to tell that after half an hour of knowing him – kind to help her unpack the parcel and see that the skirt inside was not even damp, kind to suggest that she fold it carefully and take it as it was, not so much as mentioning the paper and string. Kind to come with her in case the woman whose skirt it was might chastise or blame her, and then he could help Eve explain. Kind to walk home with her just to the end of the street but no further, so as to spare her any looks and questions.

Kind.

And so it had been, she thought, looking at the sprays of plum blossom he had left ready for her in the jug, as always, and knowing what he felt without a word needing to be said. There had never been a
day when he had not shown her some small kindness or spoken a kind word. It was what he was and not only to her, it was his nature, everyone said so. People spoke of him as kind Tommy Carr. He had been a kind boy, they said, his mother and aunt and neighbours and friends and workpeople who had known him all his life, kind to smaller children, to creatures, to someone hurt or shy or who caught the wrong end of the teacher’s tongue or the flat blade of the ruler.

There was nothing else memorable about him. He was neither good- nor bad-looking. He had short straight brown hair and a pleasant face you forgot the moment you turned your back. If you wanted to point out anything it would be the pale scar across his upper lip where he had been bitten by a ferret. He was neither tall nor short, he was thin but not awkwardly so. There was nothing in the way he moved to distinguish him. But his voice was quiet and he never wasted words. Words, he said, could be dangerous and too little respected.

Her mother had let out a soft little whimper when she had taken Tommy Carr home the first time. Eve knew what the whimper signified. ‘Not you. Not you as well. First Miriam, now …’

But the whole truth was not just that she did not want to be left alone, it was as much that she had never liked John Bullard and made it clear as clear.
He was, variously ‘lazy’ and ‘overcareful’ and he paid her too little attention. The best she had ever been heard to say was that he was ‘nothing special’. But from the first moment he had stepped through the front door, Tommy Carr had become everything John Bullard was not. He was raised to ridiculous heights of virtue and importance from which he could surely only topple.

It had been alarming because Eve herself was not as sure about Tommy as her mother appeared to be, for all that she had recognised him at once as ‘a kind man’. But kindness was only one of many desirable qualities, at the age of twenty, she thought necessary in a young man, let alone in a husband, and she had searched for those each time they met.

She could not have said what it was that she wanted but sometimes pinned it down to the word ‘spark’. He had no spark. He was steady, quiet, calm, reliable, loyal, thoughtful, gentle. A kind man then. But for a long time she resisted those things in favour of something he lacked and which she felt there must surely be.

‘Spark,’ she had said once to Miriam. Her sister, pregnant by then and tired and shocked by how much work there was to be done in a day looking after a house and a man, had snorted in derision.

‘You marry him when he asks,’ their mother said
over and again, ‘you see sense. Men like Tommy Carr don’t grow on trees.’

‘He maybe won’t ask and even if he did …’

But he asked soon enough, as Eve had known that he would, known, she realised, from the moment he had helped her unwrap the waterlogged parcel on the canal bank. To see so clearly and without possibility of choice into her own future was terrifying.

It had been the last time, it occurred to her now, that she was seriously afraid of anything, anything at all, for when she married Tommy Carr she moved into a protected circle. She had even thought that nothing could ever hurt her again, but that had not been true, nor should it have been. Pain and hurt were not his to prevent, or so it had seemed, but what he gave her was peace of mind and a reassurance about life, a steadiness. She could even face small things that had once terrified her – large spiders and lightning storms, stray dogs and things people did that she had been brought up to believe were unlucky. Now, if shoes were put on the table or lilac brought into the house, she simply removed the shoes because they belonged on the floor and found a jug for the blossom.

Living with Tommy affected everything about her, changed and strengthened and calmed her, and led her quietly out of childhood and girlhood into adult
life. Her mother had been right. The question of whether Eve loved him did not arise for a long time, simply because there were so many other benefits to her marriage. Miriam had talked about love endlessly, before John Bullard and after they met. Eve did not. Only one day, after they had been married for a year, she had unpegged his shirt from the line and suddenly put it to her face to smell the cleanness and been suffused with the sense that it was his shirt and therefore important because of love. She loved. It was as obvious as the blueness of the sky and her state of plain contentment had become one of happiness in a single moment.

SHE OPENED
the door and looked across to the peak. The early sun had risen higher and was bathing the garden. The hens clucked.

Why did she feel it would be any better if the sky turned curded grey and the rain came on? It had sometimes been like that, or else a bitter wind had cut round her head as she had walked, but it had made no difference, any more than the spring sun and warmth.

How could it? It scarcely mattered.

That day had been fine, with this lapis sky above the peak and the sun warm on her face.

That day.

She filled the kettle and left it on the back of the range for her return and then took the sprays of plum blossom out of the jug, shook the water off the stems
and wrapped them tightly in a couple of sheets of newspaper.

There was no one about. By this time in the morning those who went to work had gone and children to school, those who stayed at home were washing and cooking and scrubbing the floors, changing the beds, shaking out dusters, setting the bones and the veg in a pan for stock. Later, they would be out, pegging washing, taking a moment to sit at the open back door in the sun. You always took the moment.

There were six in a row, called cottages but really just small brick houses like the brick houses in the town, the brick houses she and Tommy had been born and brought up in. But someone had thought to set a row out here on the edge of the fields and looking towards the peak. From the back, you could see the smoke from the factory chimneys, and if the wind was this way, hear the faint roar of the furnaces and the thump of the machines. But from the front it was the field and the track across it to the peak. Beyond the peak was another world to which they went sometimes on Sundays, walking over the soft mounded hills. None of them was like the peak, which stood alone as an outcrop, jagged and steep. The peak, marked the change between the two worlds.

* * *

She did not lock the door. No one ever did. A locked door was an insult to a visitor who, if there was no reply, might try the handle and put a head round, call out, but leave again at once if there was no answer. If a door was locked it was like a slap in the face. Only if you went away you might lock and leave a key with a neighbour. But who went away?

She shut the gate and set off, across the wide empty field, the plum blossom in her hand pointing down-wards to the ground. The sky seemed huge and to grow wider as she reached the middle. From here, there was only a thin haze in the distance and a faint rising plume of smoke to mark the town. It was a walk of two miles and she took it three times every year, at Christmas, in August and on this day, which was the one that counted. Once, she had had pneumonia at Christmas, one August Tommy’s mother had died and she had been forced to miss, but somehow it had not mattered greatly. It was understood. She had never missed this April day and never would as long as her legs could bear her.

The track reached the foot of the peak and then forked into two, narrower paths, one going straight ahead up the steep slope and the other around the base of it to the far side. Eve paused. A lark, so high that she could not see it, was streaming out a song that came spiralling down to her through empty space.
Far above the peak, two buzzards soared silently, flat wings outstretched like windmill sails. Tommy had never been with her and never spoken to her about it either, but she knew well that it was not for any want of feeling but for an excess of it, overflowing but somehow damned up inside him. She did not lay any blame. If he had ever forgotten and not gone out to cut the branch of blossom for her to bring, perhaps that would be the time for blame. But he would never forget, she could be sure of that.