The Emerald Valley (3 page)

‘I'm sorry,' she said weakly. ‘I couldn't stop.'

‘That's bally obvious!' he bellowed. ‘You came down there like a steam engine – and right in the middle of the road, too. This hill's not suitable for lorries; you ought to know that.'

‘I thought it would be all right,' Amy said helplessly. She wished her teeth would stop chattering.

‘You've no business here anyway. Don't you know it's private?'

‘I didn't think …'

‘I don't suppose you
did.
And now …' He broke off, his eyes narrowing as if he was only just seeing her clearly enough to register her sex. ‘What's a woman doing driving a lorry anyway?' he demanded. ‘You ought to stay where you belong – in the kitchen!'

The remark struck at a raw chord in Amy's make-up and the first tongue of annoyance rippled razor-sharp through the minefield of embarrassment and shock.

‘Why should I?'

‘Why should you? I would have thought it was damned clear enough why you should. You're not capable of handling a motor vehicle, are you?'

His tone combined with the scorn and derision in his face to twist Amy's own anger a notch tighter. Why was she taking all the blame just because she was a woman?

‘It was your fault as well, you know!' she flared, ‘I couldn't help being in the middle of the road with a lorry. You weren't exactly in the side yourself!'

She saw a muscle work furiously at the side of his mouth and in spite of her anger felt another moment of sharp fear.

‘Dammit, woman, it's my hill! I shall drive up it any way I like!'

‘Then you must expect somebody to run into you,' Amy went on, determined not to be bullied. ‘I know you say it's private and if you own it I suppose you must be right. But people
do
use it, and if you don't want them to you ought to put up a notice saying so!'

‘Now there's so much traffic on the roads I probably will,' he snarled. ‘In the meantime, what do you intend to do about this?'

Amy's anger died as quickly as it had risen and she began to tremble again. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean my car. You caused this accident and you're going to have to pay for it. Who are you insured with?'

Through the rising tide of panic Amy tried desperately to think, but her thoughts were curdled like thick stale cream.

‘I don't know.'

‘You'll have to find out then, won't you? Who owns it?'

Her jaw felt unsteady now, as wobbly as her hands and legs. Almost inaudibly she whispered, ‘My husband.'

‘He's Llew Roberts, the haulier, is he?'

He made it sound menial, but Amy was too upset now to notice.

‘Yes.'

‘Now we're getting somewhere. Though what he's thinking of letting you loose on the roads, I can't imagine.' He opened his jacket, feeling in one of the inside pockets and drawing out a card, gold-embossed on glossy white. ‘This is where he can find me. And I shall be expecting to hear from him very shortly – this evening, perhaps!'

‘Not this evening. He's away and won't be back until late.'

One eyebrow registered disbelief and Amy went on quickly, ‘It's true!'

‘All right. Tomorrow, then. Otherwise he'll be hearing from my solicitor.'

Without waiting for her agreement he turned and strode back up the hill, leaving the door of the lorry cab swinging open. In the mirror on its long-angled arm she saw him go to his car and inspect the newly buckled mudguard, anger still showing in every taut line of his shoulders and back. Then, not wanting to see any more, she turned away. Tears were singing inside her head now and burning her throat and although ahead of her the lane still ran its sunlit course between the burgeoning hedges, it seemed she was seeing it through a haze.

‘Damn, damn, damn!' said Amy, spreading out her hands across the steering wheel and pounding in an effort to ease the tension bottled up inside her without giving way to her tears.
‘Damn!'

But it didn't help much. Even a word like ‘damn'which would certainly cause her mother if not her husband to raise a disapproving eyebrow if she was heard to use it, did nothing to numb the sense of shock or smooth the path back to the depot. Herbie would be the first person she would have to explain to and she was not looking forward to it.

He's an employee, I don't have to answer to him! she told herself, but that didn't help any more than saying ‘damn'. Perhaps she did not have to answer to Herbie, but that wouldn't stop him from making a few pretty caustic remarks or alter the way he would look at her … and it was all so embarrassing. Wilful she might be – and determined to get her own way – but Amy still liked people to approve of her.

Their good opinion mattered a great deal to her, though she would have died rather than admit it. And as for looking a fool, that was a prospect she could not abide.

I shan't admit to anyone that it might have been my fault! she decided. I shall tell them he came up the hill in that racing car of his so fast I had no chance to avoid him.

Already she found herself almost believing it.

There was still a more immediate problem, though. The lorry engine had cut out when she hit the bank and Amy was not at all sure how to start it again.

Well, there was only one answer – walk back to the depot. It wouldn't look good, but short of asking Ralph Porter for assistance it was the only way.

Gathering all the shreds of her tattered self-esteem, Amy pushed open the cab door and climbed down onto the running-board. The cotton-reel shape of her heels almost unbalanced her as she landed in the road, but mercifully she managed to remain on her feet. She did not dare to look at the damage to Llew's new lorry. For the moment, she decided she would rather not know.

For just a second she stood holding on to the door handle, steadying herself, then she smoothed down the pleated skirt over her hips and without a backward glance at either lorry, car or Ralph Porter, she set out down over the hill.

Greenslade Terrace – ‘the Rank', as everyone who lived there knew it – basked sleepily in the warmth of the late April sunshine. Perched as it was across the south-facing side of the valley bowl, high above Hillsbridge, it was ideally placed to make the most of the warm weather that was so welcome after the long hard winter – the fronts of the houses saw little sunshine, it was true, but no one in Greenslade Terrace lived in the front of their houses. Front rooms were reserved for special occasions, for weddings, christenings and funerals – and for laying out the dead. The backs of the houses were where the living was done – the cooking and washing and ironing, the eating and gossiping and playing. And when the sun shone the doors and windows all along the Rank would open like the buds on the horse chestnut trees in the centre of Hillsbridge and stay open, letting fresh air into cramped sculleries and kitchens where coal fires burned winter and summer alike for cooking as well as heat.

This afternoon, the first really warm day of the year, the doors had opened and one by one inhabitants had emerged on one pretext or another to enjoy the sunshine.

At No. 19, Colwyn Yelling, wounded and shell-shocked in the Great War and now carrying on his new trade as a bootmaker in what had once been his mother's washhouse, sat on the back step to cut a piece of leather to shape. At No. 10, Charlie Durrant, henpecked husband of the temperate chapel-bumper Martha, scourge of the rank, made the excuse that he had to see to his seed potatoes in order to escape into the sunshine for a quiet half-hour away from his wife's constant nagging. And next door but one at No. 12, Molly Clements hung out yet another line of washing to billow in the breeze above the gardens which sloped away into the valley beyond the blocks of privies and washhouses.

The woman who stood in the doorway of No. 11, however, needed no excuse for being there. Her grandchildren were with her for the afternoon – two of them, at any rate – and when they were there it was reason enough to stop work for a few hours, sun or no sun.

Charlotte Hall hitched eleven-month-old Maureen higher on her hip and pointed across the yard to where a golden-haired, blue-eyed toddler was busily arranging a doll in a doll's pram, home-made from an orange box and a set of wheels.

‘Look, my love, what's Barbara doing? She's going to take her baby for a walk, is she? Going to shop for a pound of bacon and a ha'porth of suet.'

‘Da,' said Maureen loudly, pulling a strand of her grandmother's hair loose from her bun. ‘Da-da-da!'

Charlotte Hall let her do it and smiled. Why was it, she wondered, that it was so much easier to have patience with your grandchildren than with your own children? Because you knew at the end of the day you could hand them back, perhaps; because in the end all the problems of bringing them up, the discipline and the decisions, were someone else's responsibility.

Seven children of her own she had raised and she never remembered feeling about any of them in quite the way she felt about her grandchildren – except perhaps little Florrie who had caught the whooping-cough and died when she was not much older than Maureen was now. Death had enshrined her in a special place in Charlotte's heart, preserved her for ever as a sweet-natured toddler who had not lived long enough to display human failings. Yes, if anything, Florrie was the only one she could equate with her grandchildren. And occasionally in the dead of night when James, her husband, was snoring chestily beside her, Charlotte would lie awake and pray that none of them would be taken as Florrie had been.

This afternoon, however, with the sun warming the grey stones of the houses and splintering into myriads of the spectrum wherever it collided with wide-open bedroom windows, death and its attendant griefs seemed very far away. Instead there was an expectancy in the air, the expectancy given off by the whole of nature as it bursts into new life. And Charlotte, with Maureen's plump little body warm in her arms, thought not of the past but relished the present.

Footsteps on the cobbled path that served the Rank made her look up and she saw a plump, faired-haired woman approaching with a shopping basket over her arm. It was Peggy Yelling, mother of Colwyn and Charlotte's best friend, who had brought almost every baby in the Rank into the world and laid out ‘the old ones' when they passed away.

‘Hello, Peg,' Charlotte greeted her. ‘Going off down to shop, are you?'

‘Yes, there's one or two things I want. And I hear they've got some more of that nice tasty cheese in down at the Co-op. Trouble is,' Peggy pulled a face, ‘it doesn't last five minutes in our house.'

‘No, I don't suppose it does. You've still got your boys to feed,' Charlotte said ruefully. She could remember the time when a pound of cheese hadn't lasted any time in her larder, either, when all the family were at home. But now it was only herself, James and Harry, the youngest boy – except of course when Ted, scallywag of the family, took it into his head to come home for a bit and settle down from his wanderings …

‘You've got Amy's two girls again, I see,' Peggy went on, smiling indulgently at Barbara and poking Maureen's plump cheek with a teasing finger. ‘Where's their Mam today?'

In spite of her friendship with Peggy, Charlotte sensed the unspoken criticism of Amy and bristled slightly. It was not for Peggy to judge and find wanting.

‘She had to go to Llew's yard. He's away on a long trip,' she said shortly.

Peggy nodded, taking no umbrage.

‘I see. Well, good luck to her. But she's fortunate to have you to have them, I must say. There's plenty that wouldn't.'

‘I'm always glad to see my grandchildren,' Charlotte returned. ‘I only wish the others were near enough to have so often. Well I do have Dolly's, of course, but …'

‘But your Dolly's more of a one for her home, isn't she?' Peggy said, referring to the elder of Charlotte's daughters, plump, pretty, imperturbable Dolly who to everyone's surprise had played the field so widely before she settled down that even Charlotte had begun to think she would finish up an old maid. ‘Proper little mother she is now, isn't she? And she keeps those boys of hers a treat.'

‘Yes, she does,' Charlotte agreed without rancour. She knew what a job Dolly had making ends meet. Her husband, Victor Coleman, was a gardener and handyman at Captain Fish's, the big house at the top of the hill, but like Colwyn Yelling he had been shell-shocked in the war and sometimes had to take time off work, unpaid of course. But as Peggy said, Dolly was a good manager and always seemed satisfied with her lot – unlike Amy, who was forever trying to improve hers.

How could two sisters have the same mother and father and be so different? Charlotte wondered, as she had so often over the years.

‘Well, I'd better be getting on down or they'll be shut before I get there,' Peggy said amicably, burying her finger once again in Maureen's plump chins. ‘Bye-bye, my love. Bye-bye, Barbara.'

‘Bye-bye, Auntie Peggy,' Barbara replied without looking up from her doll.

‘Barbara, I expect your Mammy'll be here soon,' Charlotte said as Peggy turned the corner of the Rank and disappeared from view. ‘We'd better go in and get you cleaned up ready for her.'

Barbara looked up, a small, mulish pout pursing her lips. How like Amy at her age! Charlotte thought. Looking at Barbara it was almost impossible to believe the passage of the years. Why, it seemed like only yesterday when it had been Amy who was playing along the Rank – though Amy had preferred riding in her brothers'trucks to playing with dolls – and if you let yourself dream for a moment you could almost think it
was
Amy. Those golden curls with the white ribbon tied in them, plump little legs bare above white socks – no, Amy had worn long stockings and petticoats and pinafores. Perhaps it was longer ago than it seemed. I'm getting old without realising it, Charlotte thought.