Road to Berry Edge, The (3 page)

‘You have to,' he said, ‘you can't let him go back there among the barbarian hordes alone.'

‘I see no reason why either of you should go,' Vincent said, looking to where his son-in-law stood, turned slightly away, towards the fire. They had had several arguments before now about this and Rob gave no indication that he was listening.

They were in the library, a wood-panelled room which Vincent was very fond of, Harry knew, not because he ever did any work in there nor because he ever read any of the books, simply because he had always wanted a large library. It was one of the many reasons he had wanted to buy this house five years earlier. The original part was a twelfth century abbey, the gardens were huge, the drive was long and lined with lime trees, the rooms were big
and wide and many. It was the most magnificent house that he had ever seen.

‘You'd love it if you were ill and we ignored you,' Harry said, ‘the man is his father.'

‘What has his father done for him these past ten years, that's what I'd like to know? Bugger all, I've had to do it.' When this produced no reaction from Rob, Vincent added, ‘We all come to death and failure in the end. What are you going to do, save him?' Still nothing happened. ‘Are you taking part in this conversation, Robert, or are you merely providing decoration for the otherwise boring room? And where did you get that suit?'

Rob turned, finally looked up, his eyes just a fraction darker than the grey suit that he wore. He regarded Vincent's yellow checked clothes with slight amusement.

‘I went to a tailor,' he said.

‘Your clothes must cost you a bloody fortune,' Vincent said.

‘It's more than could be said of you,' Harry put in.

‘London,' Vincent said, ‘all the way to bloody Savile Row for clothes.'

‘Why go all that way when you could go to the corner shop like Father does?' Harry said, and won a grin from Rob.

‘You're not going to Durham, either of you,' Vincent said. ‘I can't manage without you.'

‘I'll go alone, then you'll have Harry,' Rob said.

‘You call that help?'

‘Vince—' Harry protested.

‘And don't call me “Vince”, you arrogant young bastard, I'm your father. I'll flay you to within an inch of your life.'

‘I wish I had ten shillings for every time you've said that to me over the past fifteen years,' Harry said. ‘You're not really going to let him go alone?'

‘A lot of use you'd be up there in the wilds,' his father said, and left the room.

Harry sighed.

‘You could have told him you wanted me to go with you.'

‘I don't.'

‘If you don't, you know, you'll only wish you had.'

‘When I do I'll let you know.'

‘Did you tell my mother?'

‘She went off to see about packing my thick underwear. If the world was to end tomorrow it would be her first concern.'

‘There you are,' Ida Shaw announced as she came in. His mother, Harry reflected, was in a way as odd as his father. He was tall and thin and wore brightly coloured clothes and long flowing coats, and she was short and fat and rather untidy. She did a lot of gardening in the summer, and even though at this time of year there was little to do outside she always looked as though she had been outdoors, her hair slightly ruffled and her cheeks tinged pink. Their daughter, Sarah, Harry's sister, had been beautiful. Harry couldn't think where Sarah's beauty had come from; neither of their parents was physically beautiful.

Ida always looked at them as though she thought they could be doing something illicit, drinking to excess, playing billiards for money or even making free with one of the maids. They never did but she always looked as though she expected them to. She tried to look severely at Harry and it was a huge effort for her. Sarah had died two years ago and Harry was now her only child.

‘Do you have to make your father swear?' she said.

‘Nobody makes him swear, Mother, he was born foul-mouthed.'

‘You could hardly have expected him to let you go to Durham. He thinks it's bad enough that Rob should go.'

‘Yes, we know. Half a dozen times we've had the same lecture.'

Ida went to Rob and smoothed her fingers down the lapels
of his jacket. It was almost, Harry thought, as though she was gaining and giving comfort to both Rob and herself for the loss of Sarah. She touched Rob and Harry a lot, as though to reassure herself that they were both still there, and Harry knew very well that his parents were upset about Rob leaving. He hadn't yet told his mother that he was going too. His father was blustering about the business, but it was their actual leaving that he minded.

‘You have to go,' Ida was saying now to Rob as she gently caressed the soft material of his jacket. ‘Your mother has written again and again, so I know that you must, and she wouldn't have asked if they hadn't needed you badly.'

‘They've managed without him for ten years,' Harry said.

His mother threw him a look that would have iced ponds.

‘Kindly leave the room, young man,' she said.

Harry went. He was thirty, but for the past twenty years as far as his mother was concerned he had not aged at all. His valet was just passing in the hall.

‘Pack my things, will you, I'm going with him,' Harry said.

It wasn't until they got back from the funeral that the thought occurred to Nancy. They wouldn't have to put up with the bastard any more. She couldn't think why it had taken her so long to realise, but then of course there were set ways to see these things. People expected you to be shocked and you were, people expected you to cry and you did that too. What people didn't expect was that you were relieved and she was. She was so relieved that her husband, Sean, was dead that she couldn't think beyond that.

It wasn't until Alice and Michael and all the other people had gone that she sat down by her kitchen fire and smiled into it, and thought that she would never again have to put up with the way that he behaved. Nobody would ever come drunk and singing through that door. Nobody would complain about the meals or how she looked or what she did. He would not call her fat and ugly. She would not have to put up with his table manners, his belching and breaking wind and the fact that he had so little respect for her that, however tired she was, or however dirty he was, he would force himself on her in the darkness. He was dead.

Nancy leaned forward into the warmth of the fire and thanked God for her freedom, for her stupid feckless husband who had been killed by a spillage of molten steel from a huge ladle lifted by a crane. Sean, everybody knew, was often drunk at work and had increasingly been sent
home for being a danger to other people's lives. He was not supposed to be anywhere near. He had been laughing and singing and carrying on. Even his friends had not been able to defend his behaviour to the manager so that Nancy would be due any money for the accident. In fact the foreman had given her money and the men had each given some and she would be allowed to keep her house, but Nancy doubted whether there would be any more. The manager had told her gravely that both Sean and one of his friends should not have been there. They had behaved stupidly. The other man had been dismissed and Sean was dead. It was, Nancy thought, another instance of the works not being as it should, but she was not going to argue. She couldn't help being glad about Sean, she would manage somehow.

Later she went upstairs and tiptoed into the bedroom. William and the baby, Clarrie, only a few months old, were both asleep. The funeral had taken almost everything she had. She didn't know what she would do now. She tried not to worry. She climbed into bed and thought again of the luxury of having all that room to herself. He was not snoring there beside her, or worse still pinning her down. You would have thought, Nancy decided, that men would get tired of doing something which women took no pleasure in and which was always the same, but he didn't. That and drink were all he had ever thought about. Nancy fell asleep thinking that she would talk to Vera about it. Vera did cleaning at the top end of the town where the terraced houses stood beside the park. She might be able to help with some work.

The next day people dropped in to see that she was all right. Nancy was just glad there was enough baking left to provide a bit of something for each of them to have with the endless tea she provided.

At last in the evening there was only Vera and herself sitting by the fire. Nancy couldn't get used to the peace. She didn't have to keep listening for his footsteps in the
yard, because if he had found her sitting over the fire like that, Vera would have scuttled out and Nancy would have kept well out of the way of his hands. It was worse when he was not drunk, for some reason, but then he was nearly always drunk. She had come to be glad of that. Now there was no longer any reason to listen, she and Vera could sit there as long as they liked because Vera's husband, Shane, was the kind of man who didn't mind what his wife did as long as he got his meals and a clean shirt.

‘I need some work, Vera.'

‘I know, but what, with bairns that small? Will his mother take them?'

‘She didn't offer and I didn't ask. How did you get your work?'

‘I just went to the door. Mind you, if you could think of something better you'd be as well off. Scrubbing other folks' steps is less entertaining than scrubbing your own and that's not saying much.'

‘Work's hard to find.'

‘It is that,' Vera said, ‘but I could take the bairns sometimes and at least he won't be coming in drunk no more.'

Nancy couldn't help but smile.

‘Do you know, Vera,' she said, ‘I never thought I'd live to see the day when I was glad to watch anybody put underground, but I did.'

‘He was a bugger,' Vera agreed.

Nancy couldn't think how she would make money but she knew that she would have to do something soon. The neighbours were kind. Over the next few days they brought food. One brought a stew and another a cake and some bread, and Nancy, having paid for the funeral, was glad of what little she could get. She didn't quite know what she was going to do now.

In the evening two days later Michael turned up. It was quite frightening. Nancy had just put the children to bed when she heard the sound of his boots in the yard. He
knocked on the door, but even so Nancy jumped up from Sean's chair because it made her tremble. She clutched on to the chairback and then she went to the door and opened it. Her experience told her that Michael was not drunk, but Sean sober had still been a person to watch carefully. Michael waited in the doorway.

‘I just wondered if you were all right,' he said.

Nancy let go of her breath.

‘I'm fine, thank you.'

He pulled his cap off his head and became himself, the black silky straight hair and hard dark eyes.

‘I just wondered,' he said.

Nancy invited him in even though inwardly she cursed herself for doing it, offered him Sean's chair, but although he looked at it he took the hard chair that she usually sat on. Nancy gave him tea.

‘I didn't mean to put you to a lot of trouble,' he said and Nancy cursed herself again for offering. He was nobody in her house, he was not his brother. ‘I hope you won't be offended, Nancy, but I've got some money and I want you to have it.'

It should have been easy, she should have been able to take it. Like Sean, Michael made good money, hewing coal, even on short time he made enough. He put the money down on the table and a big pile it was, all winking and blinking in the lamplight. Nancy shook her head.

‘I couldn't,' she said.

‘I know what you think. I know you don't want to be beholden to any of us after the way our Sean treated you, but you've got two bairns to think about. Take it, Nancy, it would make me feel better.'

‘What have you got to feel bad about?' Nancy retorted. ‘You're not my husband. You're not bouncing me off the walls, keeping me short for drink, never coming home sober but once every blue moon. You're not bad tempered and going with other women and …' Nancy ran out of breath
and got up and turned her back on him. ‘Keep your money, Mick, I don't want it.'

‘If my Mam hears you calling me “Mick” you'll get trouble,' was all he said as Nancy recovered her breath, and her temper, and was ashamed at having gone on like that at him when it was nothing to do with him.

His mother was like that, she knew, they all had great long names except for Sean and his mother insisted there was no shortening of them. ‘I'm sorry, Michael, I know it's nothing to do with you but I don't want anything from you.'

‘Pride's all right when you can afford it, Nancy.'

‘It isn't pride. I don't want to give you or anybody else the right to walk into my house.'

‘Half the time when he came back here black and blue it was me,' he said. ‘If I could have done more I would have. I miss how things might have been, you know.'

Nancy did know. It ate your guts did what might have been, not just the big times when you could have changed the world, not just the middle sized times when you might have had the sense to keep your gob shut and think, but the little times, the fleeting chances that were lost, the kiss that was almost sweet, the picnic where it nearly didn't rain, the few times that she and Sean had begun to laugh at exactly the same moment. It was not just the past that was gone, it was somehow the future as well, the trying harder to make things right, the mellow way that older married people grew together, the corners rubbed off, the summers that were to come. It was the husband she had not had that she missed.

Michael didn't stay, and when he got up and didn't take the money he had put down on the oilclothed table, though Nancy didn't want to accept it, she made herself say nothing but thank you. When he had gone she sat back down in the easy chair and thought. Was that how Sean had been? Was that what had attracted her, that big, dark, capable look? Was he like Michael when they met, and had it only been the idea of having to keep her and the children that had
made him want to go to drink and men's conversation and other women?