They Do the Same Things Different There (33 page)

Mrs. Gallagher asked me my name. I hesitated, and she saw I hesitated—but then I told her my name anyway, the real one, not the one George liked me to use.

“Mine is Nathalie,” she said.

“Natalie?”

“Nathalie. It’s French.” She didn’t look very French. Her arms were big and thick, her face rough like sand; in years to come I’d think that sand must have blown off the beach and got stuck deep in her skin and she hadn’t been able to scrub it out. Not my idea of French at all; George’s mother had shown me some fashion magazine, back in the days we were allowed to visit, and there were French women inside, and Nathalie Gallagher was nothing like them. “You’re in trouble,” Nathalie Gallagher said.

“No, I’m all right.”

“You’re in trouble. I could help you. You could stay here with me. I can run this place alone if I have to do, but I could use an extra pair of hands. I couldn’t pay much, but you’d get bed and board.”

“And George?” I said.

She didn’t say anything to that.

“George wouldn’t like it,” I said. I knew all he wanted to do was get his own job and be able to look after me.

“I had a disappointing husband too,” said Mrs. Gallagher. She told me that her husband had brought her back to England after the war. She didn’t say which war, and I presumed it was the last one, but it was so hard to tell how old she might be. I didn’t like to ask. “He said he had some property, I thought he must be a duke or something. Turned out he owned a hotel. I had to spend my days learning how to make full English breakfasts. Yes, he was a disappointment.”

“Where is your husband?” I asked. “Is he dead?” The words seemed so blunt, I could have bitten my tongue.

Mrs. Gallagher didn’t seem offended though. Indeed, she gave my question some thought. “No, I don’t think so,” she said at last. “He’s probably still alive.”

I kept the job offer in my head, turned it over and gave it a good prod whenever things were bad. Things were bad a lot that week. I thought I would tell George when he was in a good mood, maybe he’d see the value in it, even if it were just short term, even if it could just tide us over awhile and give us some sort of
home
—but George was never in a good mood, there was no work out there, and the mood just got worse and worse, so I decided I’d just have to tell him quickly and get it over with and trust to luck.

He didn’t shout, that was good. He turned from me, and lit a cigarette, and stared out of the window down upon the cliffs and the sea, as if in deep thought, as if giving it actual consideration.

“It’s time we left,” he said.

“So soon?”

“There’s nothing for us here. We’ll go tonight.”

We packed our stuff, waited until it was dark. Past midnight I said to George that we should get going, but he shook his head impatiently, it wasn’t time yet, he had a feeling for these things. We sat there on the bed, side by side, in silence, and George listened for noise. At last he took my hand, and squeezed it, and that was the signal, and I think it was done in affection too.

It was pitch black. George carried the bags, he told me to walk ahead of him. I clung to the bannister rail. I counted the steps downwards, one, two, three, four, and at five the staircase curled around toward the final descent to the front door. Now, we both knew about the extra step that was waiting down there, and neither of us mentioned it, and I dare say we’d both factored it into our calculations, sixteen stops until we reached the bottom. But now I was in the dark I thought of it only with dread—and I mean that, a hard, heavy dread—I didn’t want my feet to touch that step—I didn’t want any part of my body to come into contact with something so cold and so inexplicable—and here I was, inching farther toward it, another step down, then another, then another, as if I were falling somehow, as if I were falling and there was no way to climb back up, I couldn’t change my mind, I couldn’t turn around, my husband was behind me blocking my way and he would never let me free. And another step, and another—and I wondered if I’d miscounted already, were there two steps to go, or three? Three before . . . ? I didn’t want to reach that step but I didn’t want to get past it either—and it sounds silly but it suddenly seemed to me that step was a dividing line between all of my sorry past and all the future before me—and if I got past the step, then that was it, the future waiting there in the darkness was just more of the same, just more of the same. Two steps. One. I
had
miscounted, but there was no delaying it now, that step in front of me had to be the extra one. And then there was light from up above, and the darkness was spoiled, so there was no extra step at all, and the relief I felt was so overwhelming that it took me a moment to realize we must have been discovered.

The candle didn’t give much light, but it was enough. Mrs. Gallagher stared down at us.

George said, “We’re leaving. We don’t want any trouble.”

Mrs. Gallagher said nothing.

George said, “We’re not going to give you any trouble. We’ll just leave, and be on our way.”

Still nothing.

He said, “When I get a job, I’ll come back. I’ll pay you then. I’m not thieving.”

Mrs. Gallagher said, “Just go. But don’t you ever come back.”

“Well then,” said George. “Well! Then I won’t. You bet I won’t.” And he actually grinned at her, and doffed his hat.

I wanted to say I was sorry. I couldn’t find the words, as easy as they were. I tried to smile at her, something, but she didn’t look at me, not the whole while. That’s what hurt.

George opened the front door, and we stepped out into the wind, the night, our future together.

I thought maybe he wouldn’t come looking, maybe he just wouldn’t care, and would let me be. I thought maybe he might even be relieved, one less mouth to feed, I wouldn’t slow him down anymore. But still I’d keep checking behind me as I walked on, still I’d keep off the main roads, hide sometimes in bushes—because whether he wanted me or not, of course he’d come looking. He had his pride. That’s all he had.

I didn’t even know which direction I was headed in. And so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I reached the coast, but I was. I thought we’d travelled so much farther than that, that the coast was weeks behind us. But there it was, the cliffs at my back, the sea in front, and I trudged my way along the beach squashed between the pair of them.

I certainly hadn’t expected to find Mrs. Gallagher again. If I had looked for her house I’m sure I wouldn’t have found it. But I gazed up, and there it was ahead of me, it was the only place in miles that seemed to give off any light, maybe, I fancied, the only place in the world.

I knocked at the door.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“You’re in trouble,” said Mrs. Gallagher. And at last I understood what she meant. Because I was in trouble, and I hadn’t quite dared believe it until then—but of course I’ve known, that’s why I’d run away, wasn’t it? Because it was all right, my being trapped with George for the rest of my life. Maybe that’s all I deserved. But not my child. Not my child. Never.

“You’d better come in,” Mrs. Gallagher said.

I arrived just before the holiday season, and there was a lot to learn.

I learned how to make beds, not in the ordinary way, but in the hotel way.

I learned how to clean a room quickly, so that you could give the impression everything was spick and span on the surface, and not draw attention to the real dirt underneath.

I learned how to make a proper cooked English breakfast. I got quite good at them, but Mrs. Gallagher was always better, so she stayed in charge of the kitchen. “My husband taught me, said he cooked the best fry-ups in Yorkshire,” she said. “His only promise that was worth a damn.”

I was given a room on the ground floor, and at first I was happy about that, it meant I didn’t have to use the staircase at night. But I was never very comfortable there. The little window looked out onto the street, you could hardly tell we were by the sea at all. And sometimes in the night, I could hear noises under the floorboards—like distant footsteps, shuffling about beneath the ground. I told Mrs. Gallagher about them, but she just shrugged, said she’d never heard of that before. But she moved me upstairs to the box room. There was that whispering sound in the box room, but it was just the wind and the ocean spray, and I liked it, and soon I found the strange echo it made in the darkness very comforting, like the elements were trying to send me to sleep.

When the hotel packed out, and it did most of July and August, even the box room had to be let. Then I would share a bed with Mrs. Gallagher. It was a large bed, and quite comfortable, and there was plenty of room—and I was a little afraid at first that a big woman like Mrs. Gallagher would snore, George snored something chronic and he wasn’t half her size. But she slept so still, sometimes it was though she was hardly beside me at all.

I want you to know nothing untoward ever happened between me and Mrs. Gallagher. And when August was over somehow I just didn’t move out from the room, and I just stayed with her. It meant there was one less bed to make.

And when the pregnancy was full on and I couldn’t do much work, Mrs. Gallagher never minded. She said I could stay in bed, or sit downstairs, whatever made me most comfortable, and she’d bring me cups of tea, and slices of cake, anything I wanted. “It’s nearly time,” she said to me one day, and I asked whether I should go to the hospital. “You don’t need a hospital,” she said, “I can do this. Do you trust me?” And I did trust her, and I was glad, I hadn’t wanted to leave.

She fetched hot water and towels, and you came out, and it was easy, I think your birth was the easiest thing I had ever done. You were the simplest, most natural thing in my entire life. “It’s a boy,” said Mrs. Gallagher, and she looked happy, but I think she may have been a little disappointed. She helped me name you. Did you know that? Do you like your name? It was Mrs. Gallagher who picked it.

She told me that I shouldn’t call her Mrs. Gallagher, I should call her Nathalie. And I did so, from time to time, just to make her smile. But I thought of her as Mrs. Gallagher, and I liked her that way—not formal, you understand, but protective, and strong, and better than me.