South Riding (17 page)

“Alfred,” said Bessy Warbuckle’s hoarse, unhappy voice. “I’ve been waiting for you all evening.”

Now, steady, steady. At any moment the bus might turn the corner and carry him off to safety. O God, Thou has been my refuge. . . .

“Good-evening, Bessy. Well. I saw you weren’t in chapel.”

“You’ve been preaching up there in chapel. You’ve been sucking up to Widow Barker. God’s good man, you are. But I know what you are. I know what you’ve made me.”

“Come now. Come now, Bessy. Run away now. I shall miss my bus.”

“It’s you who run away.” She clung to his arm, her heavy body against him. “But you won’t run far. I’ll write to your wife. I’ll tell Mrs. Barker. I’ll go to Alderman Snaith. He’s a magistrate and chairman of that home for poor girls in trouble. He’ll see right done by me. A dirty old man like you, and me not eighteen till Martinmas.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Is it? Wait till you’ve seen my birth certificate.”

“It’s not my responsibility.”

“Oh, yes, it is. And I can prove it. Reg Aythorne says he saw us coming together out of Back End Plantin’ night of harvest festival.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Nothing’s ever so bad—dear God—sweet Christ—nothing’s ever so bad. Don’t take away my chance of serving You. . . .

“Reg says he’ll marry me and father it if you’ll make it worth his while—Five hundred pounds down—It’ll buy that shop in Station Road we wanted.”

“You’re mad. I haven’t got it.”

“I was mad. I’m not now. I’ve learned a thing or two. Treated like a slut and you canoodling with fat widows! Beloved minister for you and the best chair by the fire— workhouse infirmary for me and a charge of soliciting. I
don’t
think! But I’m not having any. Five hundred to Reg and me and you’ll hear no more about it.”

“Bessy—I can’t . . .”

“Before new year—or I’ll tell Mr. Snaith. . . .”

The last bus came rattling round the corner—a lighted chariot. But it carried no safety to Councillor Huggins. No safety on earth, no rest, no peace, no hope. Oh, God! Oh, God! he cried as he jumped aboard.

But this time there was no sign from heaven. The worst had happened.

W
HEN
T
OM
S
AWDON
bought the Nag’s Head on the road between Maythorpe and Cold Harbour, he did not know that it would kill his wife. For several months Lily had seemed tired and out of sorts, but Police-Sergeant Burt, who knew all about these things, told him that middle-aged women were often like that. Look at his missus! Hadn’t enjoyed a bite of solids for three years back before he took her to Cleethorpes. Sea air and time. That was what women in their difficult age all wanted. Sea air and time.

After twenty-six years of marriage, Tom Sawdon was still in love with his wife. Burt used to say he’d never seen enough of her to find it too much. Well, there might be something in that. He’d never been long at home. Before the war he’d driven a motor van for the North Eastern Railway. Then he’d driven an R.T.O. Colonel’s car in France until he and his officer had got to know each other, and after demobilisation the colonel asked him if he’d like to keep on at the job. You bet. Who wouldn’t? So he’d driven in Turkey and Tangiers and Mexico for the colonel, who had a stiff arm and needed attention. He’d seen a bit of the world, had Tom, while Lily lived on quietly in the house at Weetwood. Then in 1932 the colonel got ’flu, and the lung that had been touched with gas went back on him, and he died, leaving to his chauffeur, a still young, handy, experienced, athletic fellow, with grown-up married daughters, a legacy of £750 and the big Sunbeam saloon.

It was only then that Tom noticed the change in Lily’s health, and learned that its cure lay in sea air. With him, to think was to act, a virtue in a chauffeur. He saw the advertisement of the Nag’s Head for sale in the
Yorkshire Record
, took his cap from the peg, told Lily to expect him when she saw him, and drove off in the Sunbeam to the South Riding.

Visited on a warm August day, the inn attracted him. The heavy wagons creaked past in the slanting sunlight; on the stacks beyond the chestnut trees, labourers were forking. “That’ll put a thirst on a man,” observed Mr. Drew, who was acting for the late publican’s executors. There was only one pub at Maythorpe, a squalid little alehouse kept by a quarrelsome widow, ripe to lose her licence at any moment. Cold Harbour had none at all. It was obvious to Tom that the Nag’s Head stood in a grand position. Between a rural village and a colony of ex-servicemen smallholders, with cyclists swooping down like a flock of starlings and all the seaside traffic south of Kiplington, what more could he want? As for sea air, you had only to lift your nose—about a mile from the coast, said Drew—well, a mile and a half, then.

Tom was no fool, but he believed the evidence of his own eyes. Having seen so much of the world at large he did not realise how little he knew of the South Riding. He bought the inn on the nail, dashed back to Lily and was prepared to see her a strong woman and himself a rich man before a twelvemonth. He knew that he could make himself popular. He knew that Lily could cook and manage a house. He saw the Nag’s Head becoming as famous as the Catterick Bridge Hotel, or the Bell, Hendon.

It just happened that there were a few vital matters which he had not foreseen.

He did not know that the late licensee had drunk himself to death from loneliness and disappointment, that the Cold Harbour colonists could hardly make a living and had no extra cash for Bass and Guinness, that for nine months of the year the Maythorpe Road was practically deserted. Nor did he know that his wife was dying of cancer.

She knew.

When Tom went on his voyage of exploration to the South Riding, she visited a specialist in Leeds and received confirmation of her panel doctor’s diagnosis. The trouble, they said, was too deep-seated to be operable; but it might be arrested by treatment, if she visited the hospital twice a week as an outpatient. Otherwise . . . a year, they said, or two at the most, would finish her.

She was lying on the sofa, drinking a cup of tea, and wondering how she should tell Tom without disturbing him, when he burst in, pleased as a schoolboy with his purchase, and laid the Nag’s Head at her feet, his gift to her, a reward for her fidelity, a pledge that he had come home to settle down and confide his volatile person to her keeping.

Lily Sawdon had certain kinds of courage, but not the kind which would enable her to shatter that happy confidence. She said nothing.

Competent, except when crippled by pain, quiet and smiling, she packed her furniture, sent it ahead on a van, and followed with Tom to her new home in the Sunbeam.

Perhaps Tom was right. Perhaps sea air would cure her. Miracles sometimes happened. Mrs. Deane, their neighbour, was a Christian Scientist and said that illness was only error, mind conquered matter and everything was God. All the way to the Nag’s Head Lily Sawdon prayed that God would justify Mrs. Deane.

But when she saw her new home, God and her courage both momentarily failed her.

The weather had broken. The strong October rain beat down into the tawny stubble. The wagon wheels had churned the yard to treacly clay. The inn was lost in dirt, the tap-room filthy, the yard a morass, the storehouse a den of broken bottles, the bedrooms damp, the earth closets unspeakable.

For half an hour Lily sat among the packing-cases and wept—not so much for her present pain and her coming death, for Tom and his reckless, hot-headed, stubborn ways, for her lost strength and hopeless situation, as for the damage done to her rosewood cabinet on the lorry. But after a good cup of tea she pulled herself together. By the end of the month they had both worked miracles. The kitchen behind the tap-room shone with bright chocolate-coloured paint and polished brasses. Tom chose a sensible wallpaper, patterned with nice brown cherries. There was a green cloth on the table, there were plants in the window, the wireless on the chest of drawers, and arm-chairs by the fire. It was a kitchen in which you could offer teas to any one. (“Tenpence a head. Tea. Bread and butter and jam, as much as they like. Then they’ll tip twopence and we shall get a shilling,” said Tom.) The tap-room itself was lovely, painted bright green, with oilcloth on the floor and three spitoons and Tom’s Jerry shell-cases on the mantelpiece. There were petrol pumps in the yard, and a garage made out of the old stable, and a woman for an hour every morning to give Lily a hand.

Nothing was lacking now except the clients.

“Give us a month or two to work it up and it’ll be a little gold mine,” Tom promised Lily, as they lay awake in the room above the kitchen. And she would clutch to her side the hot water bottle which was now her only relief from dragging pain, and be grateful for the darkness which prevented the necessity for her careful smiles.

The weather grew worse and worse, the roads more desolate; but Mr. Drew, interviewed angrily in Kingsport, declared that it was only a matter of patience. “Wait till the spring. You’ll never know the place. Anglers, motorists, cyclists. . . .”

They were prepared to wait until the spring.

Meanwhile the little tap-room was not empty.

Every morning Chrissie Beachall turned up to earn her ten-pence, scrubbing floors, washing clothes, cleaning bedrooms. Every evening her husband came, as regularly, to spend it.

Mr. Topper Beachall was a roadman, employed by the county council, and earning £1 7s. 8d. a week. He had living with him his wife Chrissie, his five children, and his wife’s father, an old-age pensioner, a very clean, gentle and kind old man who asked for nothing better than to be able to work in his garden all day, and to drink his half-pint in peace at the pub in the evenings. What with the washing and baking, the babies’ nappies and Chrissie’s nagging, the cottage, two up, two down, held little peace for him. By November he had adopted the Nag’s Head as his second home.

Tom and Lily were worried about the Beachalls. When they knew how hard Chrissie worked, and what a pinch she had to make both ends meet, it did not seem right that Topper and Grandpa Sellars should come every night to the inn, spending their money. Tom didn’t quite know what they ought to do about it. He wished the colonel were still alive. He’d have known all right. Lily had to listen to Tom for hours going on about the ethical justification of selling drinks to a chap, when you know his kiddies are hungering. She soothed their conscience by giving broken scraps and half-worn clothes to Chrissie.

But Chrissie’s earnings were not the only ones that found their way through the till—though they might be put in at night and taken out in the morning. Tom had dreamed of his pub becoming a general club-house for the ex-servicemen of Cold Harbour Colony where they could count upon congenial company, and he was right there. The only difference was that, though they had plenty to say, they had little to spend. Half a pint of pale ale, some ginger beer or a packet of five Woodbines had to serve as excuse to sit through a long wet evening in front of the tap-room fire. There were darts; there were dominoes; there was talk about old times and new troubles, and best of all, there were the host and hostess, Tom so sanguine and talkative, Lily so quiet, but always bonny to look at, always a lady.

The Nag’s Head was a very pleasant place.

Thus one November evening Grandpa Sellars sat smoking by the fire and watching his son-in-law playing dominoes with George Hicks, whose arm was still in a sling from his broken collar-bone. It was not a profitable company, though Hicks paid for his drinks and was a good fellow. But the place looked like an inn. Tom felt like a landlord. He leaned against the bar, polishing glasses, and considered that a stranger entering could not fail to observe that the place at least seemed cosy and comfortable—a proper village pub. It satisfied Tom’s aesthetic sense.

The latch clinked and a new comer entered—a commercial traveller, post-war vintage, with sleeked hair, pretentious accent, noisy motor-cycle, and the expectation of impressing his companions. He dropped his case of art silk stockings and jumpers in the corner and asked for a pint of Bass and some bread and cheese.

His arrival, and his demands, seemed to bring a new atmosphere into the place, though until he had satisfied hunger and thirst he did not talk. The others kept quiet. Tom was the only person who appeared to have noticed him. Perhaps this piqued him, for, after draining his glass and flicking the crumbs from his plus-fours with a stylish if dirty purple handkerchief, he sat up and took patronising notice of the company.

“Cosy little spot you’ve got here,” he observed to Tom. “Have a gasper?”

“Thanks.” Tom accepted one from the ostentatious gilt case.

“A bit dead-and-alive, isn’t it? Other end of nowhere, eh? But I suppose if you’ve never seen anything different, you don’t know what you miss.”

“No,” said Tom.

“Been here long?”

“So-so.”

“I suppose when they run the new road through Minston out to Kiplington, you’ll get even less traffic this way.”

Roads were Topper’s speciality. He looked up from his dominoes.

“Roads?” he asked. “Who’s talking of a new road?”

“I am.” The stranger flicked cigarette ash with a finicking finger. “Haven’t you heard? They’re going to open up South Riding north of the railway line—run a big road straight to Kiplington from Skerrow and Minston.”