Remember Me... (24 page)

When the train pulled into the metropolis of steam called Crewe Station, he said,

‘We are now entering Another World. The North.'

They were lucky, he thought, to be sharing their second-class compartment with just two others, respectable middle-aged women travelling together but mercifully, Joe thought, as absorbed in their books as Natasha and himself. One of them was reading
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and the only semblance of a conversation they had had was when she passed the book over to her friend with her index finger on what was probably a particularly felicitous paragraph. This was read silently; a smile was enough to convey appreciation and approval. Joe was determined to finish
Catch-22
before Carlisle. He had bought it for his father.

When the train stopped in Wigan and overlooked the town, Joe said, fiercely, ‘That is as fine a townscape as I've seen. Not just the look of it. What it's been through.'

This time Natasha looked with interest. She saw from the height of the train a forest floor of chimney pots, every one streaming with smoke; she saw what seemed to be miles of identical terraces, small brick houses with small back yards and small front doors opening directly onto ugly narrow streets. The late winter light was already waning and she saw it through gloom and greyness. She saw no one on the streets. It was poor, uniform, dull and, she thought, beyond all aesthetic redemption. What did he mean by ‘fine'? But when she glanced at him she observed that he was as wrapped up in it as she had been and there was no irony in him. His voice had been fierce; his look was affectionate. Natasha kept her reservations to herself and plunged back into the more familiar world of Iris Murdoch.

As the train left Carnforth after a brief stop, Joe put aside Joseph Heller's novel, unable to resist the landscape. It was near dark but the big skies and the bare-pelted hills held onto the light and to Joe the slow chug of the train, as it went up the mountain which fortified his home county against the South, was like the overture to a magnificent performance. Seeing how absorbed he was, Natasha tried to see it through Joe's expression which was rapt, as if he were at a film. The hills were smooth, shapely, she thought, but very bare. Now and then a fast-running silver stream slashed through a slender ghyll. There were only a handful of farms, down in the valleys. The sky was cloud-steely, taking no colour from the masked setting sun, but adding, she could see, to the wholeness of this scene, the sense of sombre grandeur, of outpost. He looked at her, and broke into a grin and reached for her thigh, touching it only for a moment so as not to offend the two ladies travelling together to Glasgow.

At the top of Shap Fell, Joe said,

‘Cumberland ahoy. Sit back!'

The tons of steel were pointed due north and went steeply down at over a hundred miles an hour as the engine swooped to the plain, swerved on the curved lines through Penrith and full speed across the flatlands to Carlisle.

‘I was born here,' Joe said as they stepped onto the platform.

‘Home.'

‘No. Wigton's home.'

They had less than an hour to wait for the country train to complete the last ten miles of the weary three-hundred-mile journey. From Wigton Station they walked up into the town, in the dusk, passing muffled figures, every one of whom greeted them without breaking step.

Natasha's first impressions of Wigton were polarised.

‘You are like a hunting dog, Joseph,' she said, ‘one who has picked up a scent and becomes more frenzied the stronger the scent grows.'

True. He was alight.

On Station Road they were passed by a small marching band singing ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah' as they returned to the Salvation Rooms after their Saturday night missionary work at the end of Water Street. The main street was poorly lit and all the shops were shut. When they finally heaved their luggage through the door of the as yet unbusy pub, Natasha was met by a flurry of embarrassment, over-attention and offers of provision. They went into the kitchen where an early customer was drinking a pint of bitter. Joseph went into the bar to talk arrangements with Sam. The kitchen, the stranger later explained to Natasha, was the best room in the house; beer a penny dearer, but more of a homely room than a pub. There was also a darts room and a singing room.

‘Just for singing?' she asked.

‘That's the idea.'

And then a bar – men only. The stranger asked her if she would like a drink but she refused and then felt she had been impolite but could find no words to retrieve the situation.

Others came in over the next hour or so while she tried to eat a meal prepared in the scullery by Ellen. Natasha experienced a rather fearful shyness. The accents were warm, the expressions on the faces were tolerant and cheerful, there was nothing but kindness and yet she felt she was on shifting sands. The very kitchen became macabre, so many smiling faces, how could she judge them? So many kind questions, how could she answer them? So much food to be publicly consumed while others watched, how could she eat? How could she not eat? Joseph seemed oblivious to this public feeding. Natasha saw only certainties, a solidity, a deep foundation for Joseph, a good childhood, she thought,
one which was firm, one which she had never had. By contrast it sent her back to her own childhood uncertainties, the unsmiling faces, the lack of solidity. Who was she here, and why?

‘I feel awful about it.'

Ellen had ushered Joe upstairs. They stood on the landing.

‘Your dad and me thought of giving up our bed,' she said.

Joe was impatient. The Saturday evening hubbub was building up and Natasha was abandoned for the second time; he had seen the worry in her when he had been called out of the kitchen.

‘It's terrible.' Ellen's distressed tone commanded Joe's full attention. He looked closely at his mother. Her eyes were strained as if threatening tears. ‘Your own son comes to see you with his new wife and you can't put them up. What sort of life is that?'

‘It's fine. Honestly. Natasha doesn't mind.'

‘How could we put you in the two single rooms?'

‘You couldn't. We understand.'

‘But, Joe,' she said and reached out to touch his arm as if pleading with him, a gesture he had never before encountered, a gesture which moved him to stillness, to hope it would pass, ‘we ought to be able to put up you and your wife and maybe all four of us spend the evening together.'

‘You will. We will. We're here for a few days.'

‘I'm sorry.'

His eagerness to assuage her pain was the reassurance she had sought.

‘Of course we will.'

‘There's a lot to catch up on,' he said.

‘There is. I'll follow you down. You go back to Natasha.'

‘She's been looking forward to this.'

‘Yes. You go to her now. You go.'

And still obedient to the commands of childhood, he went down the stairs. Ellen took a few deep breaths. In the bathroom she splashed water on her face. In the mirror she told herself not to be a fool. In her heart she could not stop the burn – of shame? Of loss? It was too hard to distinguish.

Joe and Natasha set off soon afterwards, another journey, this time by car, driven by Joe's Uncle Leonard, now retired, a wise man who saw
they needed some peace and saw that they had it as he motored with exemplary caution out of the town, south, and into the hills, to the pitch-black village of Caldbeck in which they had rented a terraced cottage for the week. Joe's polite invitation to stay for a cup of tea was as politely refused and Leonard drove back even more slowly, wanting to draw every nuance possible from their meeting. She was, he thought, difficult to weigh up.

Though Joe lit the fire, already laid, and brought down a side light from the bedroom to replace the glare of the central bulb, though stores had been brought up earlier in the day from Wigton and half a dozen bottles of beer were part of the reception committee, though the radio played Chopin and the room was a haven, Natasha felt depressed. ‘I may have caught a cold,' she said, ‘what do you say? Nursing? I may be nursing a cold.'

She slept badly and was troubled by dreams and felt out of the reach of Joseph. She tried to find her bearings, with a husband becoming strange to her in this place.

Natasha awoke to the sounds of ducks. She stretched out her hands; his side of the bed was already cold. She felt heavy-limbed but the bustle of sounds coming up the stairs levered her out of bed. She parted the curtains and saw, across the little path which ran by a fast stream, the village duck pond and two small children dressed, she assumed, for church, a boy and a girl, carefully feeding morsels of bread to the strutting, quacking colony of Caldbeck ducks. The boy was nervous; the girl – it must have been his sister – far bolder, taking him by the hand, leading him towards the fat and noisy ducks. Natasha looked on until the father arrival in a dark coat and dark hat and called for the children who came, the boy running, the girl dragging, and went across to a further road which, Natasha guessed, would take them to the tinny peal of the church bell. She wove happy threads of domestic contentment around them. Soon the ducks ceased to quack. A lady sped down the last lap of the hill guiding her bicycle with one hand, the other holding onto her hat. Natasha's eyes pricked and she felt a rise of
enveloping unaccountable happiness as the darkness began to lift. Joseph called for her.

‘Thought you'd never get up,' he said and the sight of him blew away any remaining shadows. White shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbow, smuts of coal on his forearms from where he had re-laid and relit the fire, face smiling and ruddy from the fresh air in the handkerchief back garden, hair flopping over his brow, and accent, she noticed, rather broader and warmer. ‘Boiled eggs. Toast. Marmalade. You won't want cornflakes. Water on the go for tea. Would madam come this way?'

Still in her black dressing gown, Natasha edged her way around the cluttered furniture in what in daylight seemed an even smaller room than she remembered, and through to a yet smaller space, the kitchen, which with the recently added bathroom constituted the whole of the ground floor.

The table was laid. Joe held out a chair for her and then put a white paper napkin across her knees.

‘I do hope the eggs – farmyard fresh and brown to boot – are to madam's liking,' he said. ‘Perhaps a little harder on account of the wait while madam proceeded at her leisure down the grand staircase. Shall I butter your toast?'

‘There are ducks,' she said, ‘out there.'

‘I'm very pleased they turned up, madam. Quite expensive, ducks, especially Caldbeck ducks, and not always reliable, but I did want you to start your day with a Cumbrian duck. I owe them half a loaf of bread.'

‘It looks a very pretty village – from the window.'

‘Positioned for the purpose,' he said. ‘Caldbeck is, in my view, the gem of the Northern fells. Once a thriving town, with several grand houses, not least the vicarage, formerly a house for lepers. When we take the air – after madam has performed her toilet, or rather concluded her toilet – she will see the village set in a bowl of hills, an unpoetic soul would call it a pudding basin with Caldbeck happily settled in the bottom of the bowl.'

‘What else?' She could not resist his delight in showing and telling her of this place.

‘Cald-beck, you ask? Beck is a local word for stream. Cald must mean cold, the Scots, our deadly neighbours, pronounce cold as cald and so do we Cumbrians and moreover it is true, the water is cold, pure from the hills.'

‘Joseph!'

‘Did you call me?' He held his toast as if it were a baton, waiting to beat out the decisive chord. But Natasha just shook her head. She loved it when he played the fool.

‘I thought it would be like Wigan,' she said, ‘that smoke, those terraced houses.'

‘Knock not Wigan,' said Joe. ‘Wigan works for the world we live in.'

They strolled alongside the river which went past the east end of the church. There was sun, weak but sufficient to give Natasha a holiday feeling. She held his arm rather tightly and she could feel a physical uncoiling of tensions in her stomach on this placid early spring Sunday morning, buds just beginning to show, Joseph earthed.

‘It is not England here,' she said, ‘the mountains are like a fortress.'

‘That's what we all like to think,' he said, as he stopped to scoop a few smooth pebbles out of the shallow sparkling stream. ‘But it only works for some of the time.'

‘It's like Provence,' she said, ‘where the peasants never want to leave.'

‘You've caught it on a good day,' said Joseph, selecting the smoothest of the pebbles. ‘Our biggest export is people.'

‘I'll give you Jean Giono's novels,' she said. ‘You'll see. He is the great novelist of Provence.'

‘Of the peasants?'

‘Yes.'

‘Like us peasants?'

‘Yes.' She smiled and he acknowledged the tease.

He skimmed a stone across the surface of the water.

‘Two,' he said, ‘not much cop.' He tried again. The stone plopped. ‘You try.'

‘I can't throw stones.'

‘We used to fight with stones like these when we were kids,' Joe said. ‘One gang on one bank, another on the other. We would agree a time for a stone fight and turn up and just pelt each other.' He smiled.
‘That's where I got this.' He pointed to the small scar trace beside his left eye.

‘Fight with stones?'

For a moment Joe felt foolishly heroic. Natasha shook her head.

‘We used to bike here from Wigton and go up into these woods,' he waved towards the adjacent hillside, ‘the trees were so bushy and close together we could go from tree to tree.'

‘Like monkeys?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you had battles there as well?'

‘We built stockades, yes. You would use branches as lances and dig pits and put pointed sticks in them.'