Road to Berry Edge, The (2 page)

Constant letters to Robert Berkeley had not brought him back, but now at last it seemed that his mother had persuaded him. Faith thought that only desperation would have done so. Their lives had been ruined by what Rob had done, and although as far as Faith knew they had never said he was to blame, they had not stopped grieving for John all that time. They had called it an accident, but that was not what the people of the area had called it, and Rob had gone. Their lives and Faith's life had been ruined. She made sure that there were always fresh flowers on John's grave rather as though his mother was in fact her mother-in-law and the attention was another form of housekeeping.

Faith sat by the fire with Margaret Berkeley and asked after Josiah. Margaret always said that he was a little better, and it was true; but he needed to be a lot better, and he was not. She gave Faith tea and they sat in the living room. From the window as they talked Faith could see the garden and she could imagine herself a child again, when only the present had mattered.

She had grown up with John Berkeley, she thought that she had always loved him. He had carried her over muddy patches in fields, sent her love letters when she was twelve, been big enough to make her feel small, and he had had the brightest, bluest eyes that she had ever seen.

In the autumn she thought of herself and their friends sitting around the bonfire after the first blaze had subsided, poking potatoes with a stick, wishing they were ready before they could be while Rob and his friends shouted and laughed and leaped over the bonfire. She remembered playing hide and seek in the darkness of the railway and the first warm kisses from John's cold lips, the two of them hidden away while the others searched. She thought of the scary games at Hallowe'en, but of never being scared because he was always there, and Christmas … She could
barely manage to think of Christmas, years and years of mysterious presents, the fear that there would be no snow, the parties, the music, the holly gathering, the carols and the village chapel and John there with her.

It seemed to her that Rob had always been breaking in or spoiling something, getting in the way, sneaking off so that he didn't have to go to chapel or to school, untidy and late for meals and doing dreadful things. As a child he flooded the back kitchen, set the carriage house on fire, broke into the parish church and drank the communion wine. He had the kind of restless energy which tired everybody and he would never do anything that anybody else wanted to do. He always had different ideas. He wouldn't go to school. They sent him to boarding school and he ran away three times, back to Berry Edge.

No matter what anybody did Rob went his own way and no amount of beatings, endless days of bread and water and bedroom, had made any difference.

In the end, as he got older and more difficult, his parents had given up, Faith thought. They had one son who was a credit to them. They let Rob go to work in the foundry and they concentrated on John. Rob had acted like a workman, Faith thought, he would go out with the other young men at the foundry, get drunk, run after women and spend his money freely. He never went to chapel, he stayed out all night, he had fights in Durham with his friends against rival workmen.

The past ten years had been an enormous vacuum, a time when Faith could not be happy because you couldn't be when you had to try, and she was always trying to be. Other young men didn't belong to her, couldn't. She had watched her friends marry and have children, she had seen the joy on their faces and the disappointment on her parents' when she had refused every opportunity. She was too old now, nobody asked her. There were no parties to meet people, everybody her age was married. There was
no future, nothing but the past, so clear in her mind, the memories which could not be touched or spoiled. She had wiped Robert Berkeley from those memories until now because every time she thought of him it hurt her. She needed her hatred of him to fill up the space in her head which reminded her of the things that she and John would have had: a home, a marriage, a family, all of those had been denied her because of Rob. She had comforted his parents, she had done a lot of good work, she had helped people in ways she would not have done if she had married and had children. Through the chapel she had helped out with babies, with food, with comfort, with the sick and dying. His mother poured more tea and Faith tried not to look out at the garden where they had had a swing and picnics and played games. She listened to what Margaret was talking about. It was the Christmas arrangements at the chapel. Did Faith know anything about them? Faith knew all about them and proceeded to explain.

‘Robert will be home well before then, at least we hope so,' Margaret said.

Christmas was only a few weeks away. Faith wished it was over and done with.

*

Nancy went slowly down the hill towards her house in the rows at the bottom. She was reluctant to go back and there was no need to hurry. Sean had been drunk at dinnertime, come home, eaten his meal and spent the afternoon in bed. It had been his routine on Sundays for almost as long as they had been married. He would not be awake until teatime and after he had eaten his tea without a word or a backward glance he would be off to the pub for the evening session, to come rolling home at some advanced hour of the night when respectable people, and certainly Nancy and the children, were long gone to bed.

Nancy and Sean had been married for nearly five years now; it felt to Nancy like a lifetime. She could remember
quite clearly what her life had been like before, living with her father, looking after him and the house because her mother had died when Nancy was a little girl. It had been peaceful and quiet at home with her father. It was the worst day of her life when she met Sean at her friend Vera's wedding. She could remember how she had felt, the excitement.

She had thought he was the most impressive looking man she had ever seen. She remembered the McFaddens from church when they had all been children, two sons and four daughters; but only the mother, Alice, went now. Her family were grown and her husband was dead. Sean and his older brother, Michael, lived at home and neither of the two was ever seen inside St Mary's Catholic Church at Berry Edge.

By all accounts Sean could fight and drink with the best of them, but Nancy had seen his black Irish eyes shining with merriment, and his white even teeth, his handsome face and thick dark curls. He was a catch, a steel melter, he made good money. Vera had introduced them and Nancy thought that Sean McFadden had the warmest wickedest eyes she had ever seen.

He had asked her to go for a walk with him the following day, which was Sunday, and then he took her back for tea to his mother's house. Nancy wasn't expecting that. Their house was immaculate and the sandwiches were small and cut into diamond shapes. The teacups had roses on them. Nancy had been very afraid that she would spill her tea.

Michael was there. He looked so much like his brother that Nancy was taken aback at the resemblance. He had fine dark straight hair, but apart from that he could have been Sean. In the front room, wanting something to say, Nancy admired a carved wooden horse on the mantelpiece, one of several carved animals in the room. Sean said grudgingly, ‘Our Michael made it. They don't give him enough to do down the Diamond pit, he has time for such foolishness at home.'

‘It's lovely, Michael,' Nancy said, wanting to touch but not doing so under Mrs McFadden's hawklike gaze.

That summer when Sean was free they went out together. They spent time walking when it was fine, having picnics on the riverbanks in Durham or going around the shops where he bought her small presents which Nancy tried to refuse.

One day in September, when she was alone and her father was at work, there was a knock on the back door. When she opened it, Michael stood there.

‘I brought you a present,' he said, offering the package in his hands.

‘A present for me? You'd better come in,' Nancy said.

He followed her into the kitchen. Nancy glanced hastily around, wondering if it was nearly as clean as his mother's kitchen would be. She took the package and thanked him, and asked him to sit down. She unwrapped the package. It was a wooden horse, beautifully carved and polished.

‘Oh, Michael, it's lovely. You did this for me?'

‘You liked them, nobody ever said anything before.'

Nancy made tea.

‘Are you thinking of marrying our Sean, Nancy?' he asked after they had talked generally.

‘He hasn't asked me but I hope he will. Why?'

‘Nothing, I just wondered.'

‘You don't like each other, do you?' Nancy said, realising the truth.

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

He looked directly at her. His eyes were not wicked like Sean's; they were hard and dark and clear.

‘I'm not going to call our Sean to you, Nancy. We're brothers, we fight.'

‘I know that. I know he has bad points, he goes to the pub too often and he - he swears. But I care about him.'

Nancy saw Sean that Sunday. He lay on the rug in her front room and went to sleep, but when she came back in
from washing up he opened his eyes and said, ‘Where did you get that carved horse?'

‘Your Michael gave it to me.'

Sean opened his eyes wide.

‘Our Michael did? I thought … When?'

‘Tuesday, he came over.'

‘Nobody told me. So that's it.' Sean sat up. ‘It's our Michael you want really, not me,' and he laughed and pulled her into his arms. ‘I think he fancies you, I really do think so.'

‘Don't you like him, Sean?'

‘He's always trying to tell me what to do, ever since my dad died. He's only a year older than me and he's got no right to come round here making up to you.'

‘He wasn't making up to me.'

‘What else do you call it when he gives you presents? If it was anybody else, that's what you would call it, the dirty sod,' and Sean got up and took the wooden horse from the dresser and threw it into the fire.

Nancy was horrified. She tried to save it but Sean wouldn't let her near, and when she fought with him he just laughed and pulled her down on to the sofa. Her father was out and Nancy was immediately conscious of being alone in the house with Sean. He held her there and kissed her. When she wouldn't let him have her mouth, he kissed her all over her face and neck and throat and put his hands on her. The touch of his fingers was a sweet shock.

The fire burned even more brightly with the aid of the wooden horse and Sean held Nancy in his arms and his hands and mouth did disgraceful, magical things inside her clothing. Only later when the evening drew in, when she and Sean were sitting demurely on the sofa and her father came home, did she become aware of how far the fire had gone down, how dark the shadows were in the corners without its brightness. The wooden horse had burned away completely and was lost among the ashes under the grate.

Nancy and Sean had been married the following spring.
They lived with Nancy's father and she looked after both men. At first it was easy but a few months later Nancy's father died and after that Sean showed Nancy no love or respect. Things weren't so bad until Nancy became pregnant, but she realised soon after William was born that Sean hated children, hated her getting fat, hated any kind of responsibility. It was all just a burden to him which he pushed from him with drink. Sean, Nancy thought savagely, was like a lot of the men she saw around her. He didn't want a wife. He wanted a whore, a cook and a cleaner, not somebody to share time and children with, not somebody to be beside him. He wanted her to be dirt under his feet, and like one of those statues of the Holy Mother in the church, very far above him and well beneath him; but not a real woman, not a real person.

The odd time that Nancy saw Michael in the street she was horrified and astonished to see how much like his brother he was. Michael was so big and goodlooking that the lasses threw themselves at him. Nancy heard the talk. Alice came to her sometimes crying because he might have got this lass or that lass into trouble. He became a union man and upset the bosses, and he drank and fought and swore. But he was never like that with Nancy. When they met he was polite and smiling, and he liked the bairns, she could tell that he did. He spoke softly to them and always gave William a shiny penny. He would have done more, much more, Nancy knew, if she had said but one word to him. But she didn't, she couldn't. She remembered when she had been a little lass and her father had been fond of saying, ‘You've made your bed Nancy, and now you must lie on it.' That was what her marriage was like. Marriage was for life, it was for good, it was forever, it stretched out before her like one of those Roman roads they had built around her so long since. There was no turning from it, there was nowhere to hide, no corners, no way out. She could not tell anyone that she had made a mistake, she
could not complain because no one wanted to hear. She was married to Sean McFadden for always now, she could not leave because there was nowhere to go and she had no money. She could not be rescued in a town like this where a man's word was law in his home. She had to endure the neglect, the beatings, the poverty, the pregnancies, the abuse and the humiliation of knowing that the money he made he spent on drink and other women. All Nancy had were her bairns, her house, her friend Vera, and the odd meal at Alice's when Alice would have them there, she worried so much about them upsetting her tidy house. There were no longer carved wooden animals in Alice's front room, and when she enquired about this Alice told her that Michael had stopped doing his carvings, that one night when drunk, out of temper he had thrown them all on the fire. It seemed the worst thing of all somehow to Nancy.

‘They were only to dust,' Alice said.

‘I can't spare you,' Vincent Shaw said.

Harry glanced across to where Rob was standing by the fire. He didn't blame him for standing there, the night was bitterly cold and a harsh wind blew across the Nottinghamshire countryside. The house was well protected by many acres of woodland but tonight it seemed that the wind howled under the doors. His father, he knew, would not be talked into letting him go to Durham with Rob, and he had already decided that he was going, so he tried to be tactful.