For a Father's Pride (8 page)

‘You know I love you, Bob. My heart’s yours, but perhaps I’m not ready for children, not yet.’

Daisy cringed as Bob ran his hand over her buttocks and his grip tightened on her firmly laced waist. Her thoughts went back to Clifford, and the rape she had endured at his hands.

‘Listen to us arguing. Come here and sit on my knee, and make me a happy man. It’s time to stop talking. Come and do what a newly married couple are supposed to do. We’ve both
waited long enough; we’ve hidden our passions well, but our argument will be all the sweeter, if we make up by making love. Children will come, my love, and you may not want them now, but
you’ll grow to love them once they are in your arms.’ Bob pulled Daisy down to him and kissed her hard on the lips, while his free hand felt its way down the front of her bodice,
squeezing her pert breast.

‘No, Bob, I can’t do it this way. I’ll not have you treat me this way. We need to talk. I don’t want children. In fact I don’t want sex – never, ever! I hate
a man’s hand touching me. I’m sorry. I love you, but I can’t have children. I won’t have children, not with you or anyone.’

Daisy pulled herself away and stood defiantly in her undergarments, her face red and determined.

‘What sort of wife are you to me? You show me up, by wanting to work; you won’t lie with me; and now you are telling me you won’t bear me children? Perhaps we shouldn’t
have got married today. Perhaps I’ve been an old fool, and I should have listened to my mother. She told me I was too old to wed.’

‘Perhaps you should have listened to your mother. I don’t think we should have married, if all you want of me is sex, and for me to be tied down with a baby every year. That’s
not for me. And I’m away to my bed now, and you needn’t follow.’

Daisy gathered up her dress and decided to climb the stairs to their bedroom. There she changed into her nightdress and lay in the new marital bed. She waited, fretting about the tempestuous
Bob. So his mother had told him not to marry; perhaps she had been telling Bob what to expect from his new bride, and Daisy was not fitting into his mother’s expectations of a perfect wife.
She waited for Bob’s footsteps to mount the stairs. She didn’t want him to touch her, but with the temper he was in, she thought it better just to lie there and take whatever she was
given. She felt tears welling up to the surface again; this was not what a wedding night should be like. Although she had not been looking forward to this moment, she had hoped he’d be kind
and caring, if there was to be any lovemaking, but now she was alone.

She lay in the darkness, with the ticking of the clock passing the seconds, the minutes and then the hours. She couldn’t hear Bob. He wasn’t making a sound downstairs – he must
be sitting sulking. Well, let him sulk, she thought, as her fear turned to anger with the passing of the hours. He’d ruined her day and shown his true colours. The cloak of sleep eventually
got the better of her, although thoughts of a raging Bob clouded her dreams.

Dawn came quickly, and Daisy rose from her sleep to find the other side of her bed cold and empty. A late-summer mist hung around the house and trailed along the valley bottom,
following the course of the river. The windows were cold and covered with condensation from the difference in temperature inside and out. She wiped a clear round on the wet window and noted that,
once the mists cleared, it would be a fine day. She could tell that by the bit of blue sky that fleetingly made an appearance through the white cloud. She pulled her now long brown hair from behind
her shoulders to the side of her face and, after using the chamber pot, quietly made her way down the stairs to the kitchen and living room.

The clock’s constant tick was the only noise, until suddenly the clatter of an early-morning train rattled past the house, making Daisy jump as her unclad feet hit the cold stone-flagged
floor of the kitchen. The rocking chair was empty, and the grey embers of the fire were the only sign that someone had been in the kitchen the previous evening. Daisy pulled the green chenille
curtain back. It divided the kitchen from the living room. The week before she had lovingly sewn the tassels that now hung from it, as she’d looked forward to seeing it hanging in their new
home. She fastened it back with the hook that retained it, and shivered in the morning’s light.

‘Bob, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have listened to Jenny. You are right. I should never have worn that dress – it wasn’t me. And as for children, we can have as many as
you like, my love.’ Daisy spotted Bob’s hand overhanging the red padded sofa that had been placed in the living room in front of the marble fireplace.

There was no reply.

‘I’m sorry, really I am.’ She thought it better to submit to his feelings before approaching him.

There was still no reply, and his arm did not move or flinch.

‘Bob, you are just being stupid and stubborn now.’ Daisy could feel her temper rising as she walked towards him. ‘It was only a dress!’ She stood opposite him. He
wasn’t moving. His mouth was open and his head was on one side, his body lifeless and still. He looked ashen and his hair was grey, and Daisy suddenly realized how old he looked, before she
let out a scream like a banshee. Her groom was dead. He was dead in his chair. He’d never made it to bed because he was cold like the grave, leaving her alone in the world again!

Her scream echoed around the small settlement of Blea Moor, making Bert abandon the signal box and the womenfolk from the Iveson and Sunter households knock on the door and shout their concerns.
Hearing Daisy weeping, they entered the clean, new marital home to find her on her knees, holding the dead man’s hand, constantly muttering that she was sorry, between her sobs.

‘Aye, lass, sit over there. Let me see if I can get a pulse.’ Bert urged Sally Sunter to sit Daisy down in a chair, while he ran his fingers down Bob’s neck, and felt his
wrist, looking for a pulse. He shook his head, as Sally consoled Daisy. Betsy Iveson shooed her children out of the kitchen, their curiosity having got the better of them, as she did the only thing
she could to help: lighting the fire and putting the kettle on to boil.

‘So you came down and found him here? Did he never come to bed last night?’ Bert scratched his head, with his cap in his hand, and looked at the heartbroken Daisy.

Daisy shook her head between sobs. ‘We had a row, and I went to bed without him. I was so upset I cried myself to sleep. And the next thing I knew it was morning, and he’d never come
to bed,’ she wailed, as Sally put her arm around her.

‘He was an ill man. He were taking pills for his heart, but bloody hell – I didn’t think he was that poorly. Betsy, can you go to Gearstones Lodge and tell them what’s
happened and that we need the doctor from Ingleton. I’ll have to get back in the box, else we will have more than one death on our hands.’

Bert hit his cap on the side of his leg, in defeat of death, and let out a long sigh.

‘By, it’s a hard one on thee, lass; you’ve not been married twenty-four hours. Sometimes you wonder if there is a God up there. He’s a bloody joker, if there is.
I’ll miss Bob, he was a good man; always the same, no matter what his worries. Look after her, Sally. I’ll come back across – I’ll send word to Horton and Dent on
what’s happened, and get someone to relieve me of my shift.’ Bert patted Daisy’s shoulder as he left the grieving house. He’d always known that Bob wasn’t that strong,
but fate was cruel. That poor young lass: bride-to-be one day, and widow the next.

‘Oh, Daisy, my love, what are we to do?’ Jenny put her arm around the small frame of her good friend and employee, as the undertaker placed Bob in his coffin.
‘You’ll come back and stop with us tonight? You can’t stay here, with a corpse in the house, on your own.’

‘No, I can’t face the lodge tonight. I’m his wife – I belong here with him. I let him down, with my pride and my stubborn ways. I’ll not leave him now.’ Daisy
dabbed her eyes with her hankie. ‘Besides, I’ll have to write and tell his mother. She needs to know – give her a chance to be at his funeral, if not at his wedding.’ Daisy
breathed in deeply, thinking of the woman whom she now knew had partly ruled Bob’s life and had refused to see her son wed.

‘Don’t let her upset you. She sounds like an old dragon to me. She’s the one to blame for his death, if anyone – telling her son that he wouldn’t be happy wed. I
think you are well out of it, my lass, and the sooner you get back to working for me, the better. Put all this behind you and get on with your life.’

Daisy looked at Jenny. Sometimes she was so uncaring it was unbelievable – her business being the only thing that mattered in her life.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do. I need time.’ Daisy looked at Bob laid out in his coffin. He’d raised his voice in life, but never his hand, and he definitely
wouldn’t be doing so in death. She’d stay with him; the Sunters and the Ivesons were next door and they were good folk, just as Bob had said.

‘Well, no doubt you’ll suit yourself.’ Jenny pulled her hat on and stood in the doorway, waiting for a reply.

‘I’m all right. I’ll be fine – stop worrying. I’ll be back with you once the funeral’s over; after all, I’ll need the money. Is my room still vacant?
The railway bosses will not want me to stop here, after I’ve buried Bob.’

‘Buried Bob’ – the words seemed unreal to Daisy, yet they were coming out of her mouth, just as the words ‘I do’ had done the previous day.

‘Aye, it’s all yours, lass, for as long as you want it. I’ll welcome an extra pair of hands again.’ Jenny fumbled with her gloves, quickly reminding herself how lucky she
was to have a husband – unlike Daisy.

Daisy closed the door behind Jenny. At last she was on her own. The evening’s shadows were beginning to close in, and she lit the paraffin lamps for light and comfort and stoked the
fire’s embers into life. She walked into the living room and peered into the open coffin where Bob lay. His face looked more relaxed, and some of his age seemed to have disappeared with his
death. The doctor had confirmed it was a massive heart-attack that had taken him and that Bob had, as Bert said, been taking pills for his heart for years. Why hadn’t Bob told her? But then,
would it have made any difference? She’d still have married him.

She kissed him gently on the brow and a tear trickled down her cheek. It had been stupid to argue over a dress. She hadn’t even liked it, but Jenny had insisted that she wore it. And, as
Bob had said, children would have come, with the love of a good marriage. She should not have been so stupid, and should have driven thoughts of the callous Clifford from her head. She stood
transfixed at the side of the cheap coffin, before turning to the small desk, which held paper and envelopes along with a new wedding certificate and a death certificate. She’d write to
Bob’s mother – a woman she had never met, but had grown to hate in the last few hours. What she would write she didn’t quite know. How did you tell someone her son was dead, the
day after his wedding? Whatever she wrote, this woman was going to hate her, because it would be her – Daisy – whom she would forever blame for her son’s death.

Daisy wrote a few words, trying to convey her sympathies, but at the same time relay in her correspondence her own heartbroken feelings. She knew the blame would be laid at her door, and that
her own feelings would be overlooked by Bob’s mother. She sealed the envelope. Tomorrow it would be delivered, and by Wednesday his mother would be arriving for the funeral. It would be then
that she would face the wrath of the mother-in-law she had never met.

She lifted her flickering candle and went into the kitchen, because her stomach was complaining from a lack of food. She’d not eaten all day, and her legs felt weak. She snatched a piece
of bread and cheese from the larder and dutifully chewed at them. The bread went round and round in her mouth, finally being washed down by a glass of milk. So this was her lot: a widow and not yet
twenty, left with not a penny to her name and no roof over her head, after the funeral; reliant on Jenny’s generosity, and stuck cooking and cleaning at Gearstones. She’d had all she
had wanted the previous day, but hadn’t had the sense to realize it.

She walked to the back door and opened it wide. Standing in the doorway, she smelled the moorland air. It was a mixture of dark, boggy peat and sweet moorland herbs, sharp with the threat of the
coming autumn nights. She heard one of the Sunter bairns crying and watched the lamplight in the signal box – the relief signalman’s shadow playing on the wall. It seemed like a
lifetime since the wild night when she had knocked on the door of Gearstones Lodge. Perhaps it was time to move on. People would only show her pity now: the lass with no family; the lass who had
lost her husband. She wanted to escape – have a new life somewhere nobody knew her or cared about her. She’d done it before, and now she’d do it again. She closed the door on the
outside world and quietly mounted the stairs. Tomorrow was another day; time enough to think then. Now, exhausted, she was away to her bed.

The little dark-haired woman climbed down from the train. She was as round as she was tall and struggled with the step, as the stationmaster offered her assistance.

‘Out of my way – I can manage without your help.’ She walked along the platform, leaning heavily on an ebony stick, dressed in black from ankle to neckline and with a mood to
match.

Daisy watched the woman struggling to walk, before she plucked up the courage to introduce herself. She walked over and offered her assistance. ‘I’m Daisy, Bob’s wife.
I’m sorry it’s been due to bad news that we have had to meet this way.’ She offered the woman the use of her arm to lean on.

‘Don’t you touch me, you trollop! You’ve killed my Bob. My boy – he was well and happy until he met and married you. Now I’m burying him in this godforsaken hole
away from his father’s grave and mine, which I’ll soon be in, because of you.’ Her grey eyes were full of malice as she pulled her arm away from Daisy and walked, with the aid of
her stick, through the station gates.

‘But, Mrs Lambert . . .’ Daisy pulled on her arm, tears in her eyes.