Miss Appleby's Academy (24 page)

It took all the strength he had not to run out of the room and out of the house and over the village to the place where he had been born. Being with Emma somehow was the completion of all that. And he felt now that he came third. What a strange place to be. First there was Isabel and then there was Connie and even to himself he was third. What was he to other people? Nobody took any notice and why should they, though he wanted to run
about and shout and say, ‘What about me? Don’t I matter?’ but he couldn’t do it.

Men were supposed to take what they could get and be grateful for it, he thought. They had to be strong, so he sat there and stupidly all he wanted was whisky and there wasn’t any.

Connie didn’t want to go to bed, even when it grew late, and after a day such as this he was so tired. He didn’t think he could stand any more. She stayed up and stayed up and Isabel let her and they sat so close together and talked and from time to time Isabel looked at him with love.

Finally he carried his child to bed, she was almost asleep and she was so happy, the smile on her face should have made him glad too, but he was not. He laid her down in her bed and Isabel covered her up and it was better than it had ever been before. Sleeping, their child looked angelic, she was safe here.

He made the excuse of taking the dog out, though normally he would just let Ulysses out, since Isabel had been so ill he had not liked to leave her even for a second and now the dog waited at the back door, surprised when Mick went with him. Mick thought of Emma across town, what was she doing? He wanted her very much.

He stayed outside for so long that the dog was circling, wondering what in hell he was doing out there. So he went inside and settled Ulysses by the dying sitting-room fire and he thought how odd it was that Isabel no longer lay there as she had for months, the smell of gin everywhere,
and the awful thing was that he didn’t care. That wasn’t true, he just wished things differently. He wanted to be with Emma.

He went upstairs and into the bedroom and there his wife was, no different than she had been before everything went wrong. She was beautiful again, young, she held out her arms to him. He tried to think how it would affect her if he refused to sleep with her, if he seemed not to want to be there, but he couldn’t do that to her because she was so needy, he had done everything, he had brought her back to this, he could not desert her now.

She was ready for bed. She was wearing a nightdress that he had long since assumed had been thrown out. It was one she had worn years before. It didn’t hide her body. It gave a shimmer to her skin and he had loved the way that he could see the slender curves. She looked at him from beneath her lashes and he went cold. He didn’t want this any more. She was not as she had been. She had been ill, that was what Sam would tell him, but it didn’t matter. He had no place but this to go and he didn’t want to be here.

His wife was beautiful, but he could not help comparing her with the schoolteacher across town. She smelled of chalk and pastry and lavender water and he wanted to smile at how attractive that had become. He remembered her smiling but mostly he thought of how she had achieved so much from so little. It was her determination that he loved and then admitted that it was also to do with her body which fitted so perfectly against him and the hunger
on her which was so very desirable and her hands which touched him and were like fire.

His wife smelled of the perfume he had bought for her when he had loved her. My God, it was gone, every feeling he had had for her except pity, but they were married and she was moving towards him and he knew what he must do next. He had to. If he didn’t then all the work he had done to bring her back to her life had been in vain and so he smiled and picked her up in his arms.

She was so light, she weighed nothing, as women wanted to, how stupid and yet it also made him think of Emma, the way that her breasts almost filled his hands, that had been a surprise, they were small but perfectly round and he remembered the catch of her breath because it was all new, the wondrous way she looked at him because she thought it might be love and in any case she needed him.

When a woman needed you like that, her lips apart, her body yielded, and you had seen her in McConichie’s ordering furniture, somehow it was wonderful. He loved her for her independence and the memories of her demanding warmth for other people and knowledge for the children and trying to do so much for others. He had never seen it before like that in anybody.

She risked things which were not for her financial gain. How strange that was and new except that when he gave himself credit for anything he was aware that he had chosen to try and do the same, even in a small way, it made him feel so good, to help other people.

He liked that she could do so much, that she had come
here in search of some bloody stupid dream, that she had failed and not cared and gone forward so many times and that he had been a part of it. He remembered when he had first seen her and how she had crept upstairs with George. He had the feeling now that he had known what she was doing.

Hector had padded softly into the hall and Mick thought he could remember how he had waited to see what she would do with a growling dog. He didn’t hear what she said or even what she did, just that Hector had come padding back to him, tail wagging, and Hector rarely made mistakes with people, or perhaps it was only with hindsight that he knew this.

Even then he had been fascinated, finding her soaked, her clothes stuck to her slender body, washing the kitchen floor. He was astonished at her determination and wanted to know more about her, to be a part of her life, because he had suspected that she was going to do something different, and unpredictability in women was not something he had ever seen before.

But yes, he thought now, his mother had been like that. She didn’t care that people would castigate her for her behaviour, she had gone ahead and done what she thought she should, and Emma was so like that.

He made love to his wife because she expected it, required it, had come back to him and he should do it, but all the time he was aware that she was not Emma, that it was not fun, that she did not giggle afterwards, that she did not tell him that she loved him. She didn’t.
Had she ever? He had always been, he thought now, the lover and not the beloved. With Emma it was equal. How many women could offer that? And then he thought of Henry Atkinson and decided that perhaps they all could with the right man.

He and Emma Appleby were equals. And it was the first time he had known anything like that except that his parents had been like that too. How had they managed it? Was it luck? Was it just that they happened upon earth to meet one another and marry and there was nothing more to it? How was that and why had it not happened to everyone? Why were some people so lucky? Why did some people have that and some people have nobody?

There were those like Ed who lost everything in a single day when his wife and child had died of influenza, and they never found anything more other than work to help them. And there were women who had no man for years and years and yet had to endure. Where was the balance, where was the justice in it? There was none.

Some people had the nights with nothing to comfort them other than bedclothes and the darkness. You got through it if you were lucky and that was all.

That was what he did now. How awful, how presumptuous, how superior and patronizing, and he hoped Isabel did not know that this was his lot when he was in bed with her. He no longer loved her. He could not love two women at once and she had been too much trouble. That made him feel awful, guilty. His duty towards her was because of Connie and he even had to remind himself of that.

She had never put him first, even when he had met her before they married. Nobody but Emma Appleby ever had. He had come first with her and she was first with him and always would be, but he couldn’t tell her. She was not his whore. My God, what was that? Was a whore just the desperation of a man who couldn’t stand his life? If so, then whores were the best of women in a sense because they needed the money, they did it for no other reason and men needed the sex. It was nothing but a transaction and maybe that was how it should be.

No broken hearts, no broken heads. Nothing lost. It was so stupid. Emma was his whole life now and he could not have her. Did she think of him? Perhaps she did not. And that was good, that was how it must be, but he remembered the silk of her skin and the joy of her and how she had laughed. She had never had a man before and yet she was sophisticated enough to enjoy it.

Isabel slept. It was a normal sleep and he lay there, holding her and thinking of Emma in her bed in the house where he had thought anything and everything was possible. Now nothing seemed possible. Everything was turned to dust. He didn’t even care as much as he had for Connie and that really was bad. He lay awake all night, he watched how the shadows changed in the room and he heard the owls calling to one another in the garden. It should have been wonderful, but it wasn’t.

Sometimes George could not help thinking back to what his life had been like before he came to England. He shuddered when he thought of his uncle and aunt and their two children, though he felt sorry for the boys being treated in such a way, but he was not altogether happy with his new life here in England.

He knew that it was stupid to think so, he had escaped from so many things, but he missed the company of other boys, the way that he had been friends with them when he was younger, before his father died and everything had gone wrong. He was ashamed to admit to himself that he wanted more, he thought after all his Aunt Emma had done it seemed churlish to ask for more, but as often as he tried to dismiss the idea the more often it surfaced in his mind.

He wished in some ways that he still lived at the pub. When he ventured back the first time he had the chance Mr Castle was off somewhere on business, Mr Higgins was busy behind the bar and Jack was away helping at one of the other pubs,

‘And you shouldn’t be here. Your Auntie Emma woulnd’t
like it,’ Mr Higgins admonished him before he got on with his work.

George ventured into the village. It was Saturday and he was bored and had needed to get away from the house. There he found some boys playing football, in the usual way, with jerseys to mark the edges of the goals at either side of the back lane. He watched them and the ball went through the jerseys more at one end than the other, mostly because that side was only three.

They ignored him. He hoped they might ask him to play but they didn’t so in the end he went nearer and offered,

‘You’re one down. Can I play?’

They stopped, they looked at him. Then they all moved slowly towards him. George tried not to panic, tried to read their faces but he wanted to run.

‘Wee’s he like?’ one bigger lad asked another.

‘A furriner. From the lasses school.’

‘It’s not a lasses school,’ George protested.

‘Are you a lass, like?’

George was already realizing that he had lost this game before he started.

‘I can play football,’ he said, ‘and cricket.’

‘Can yer now? You sound as though you cannot. You sound like a lass.’

George would have left at that point but that the biggest of them came forward and hit him. George shouldn’t have been astonished but he was. He tried to defend himself, he thought of Jack saying how to do so, he was sure Mr
Higgins would have known and he would have copied them but he didn’t remember anything but how he felt. Felt he was going to be sick, never eat again, be unable to come back to the village like this from the academy. It was a humiliation and a defeat. He was on the ground his lip was bleeding and he wanted to cry.

They jeered. George got up and seven of them stood there so there was nothing to do except go home.

He tried to get upstairs in order to wash his face before his Aunt Emma saw him but she was not easily deceived. She called his name, said,

‘Wait a minute. Turn around,’ and as he did so she looked severely at him.

‘Have you been fighting?’ she said. ‘Come into the kitchen and sit down.’

He was only glad that the kitchen was empty other than the two of them, he put up with the warm water on his face, he endured the lecture about how fighting solved nothing but afterwards he couldn’t wait to be away and the moment that she found something else to do he escaped.

It was the end of the afternoon by then. He went to the Black Diamond, there didn’t seem any place else to go. He found Mr Higgins in the kitchen and though he was certain that Mr Higgins didn’t want to hear it he blurted out the story, finishing lamely,

‘And my Aunt Emma says I mustn’t fight. She says it doesn’t solve anything.’

Mr Higgins poured out tea, gave George some bread
and jam, and they sat down at the table.

‘Women don’t like fighting. The trouble is it’s the only way men resolve their differences in the end,’ Mr Higgins said. ‘It doesn’t sound as if it was much of a fight.’

‘It wasn’t,’ George said miserably.

‘You can’t take on seven lads, George man, the only sound thing to do is run away. Remember that.’

George felt a bit better then. He drank his tea and ate his bread and jam and then Mr Higgins took him out into the yard and showed him what to do next time. It was, Mr Higgins said, ‘dirty fighting’, but as far as he was concerned you couldn’t afford to worry about things like that. He showed him how to kick the other lad between the legs and also how to knee him in the same place and how to duck in under the other boy’s chin and bring up your head hard and then how to dodge and how to weave, and most important of all how to beat your man before you started if you got a chance. No matter how tall he was you thought of yourself as the bigger and the better fighter. Two you might manage, especially if you could scare them. Sometimes, if you showed yourself very good, a number would run away. You had to judge it.

*

George found the whole of the next week very trying. He determined to go and confront the boys who had treated him badly but he was so afraid that he lay at night looking up at the ceiling and wondered what it would be like when all seven of them laid into him. He tried to tell himself that it was not cowardice not to go back, that
even Mr Higgins would think him stupid for doing such a thing, but he could not rid his mind of the humiliation of lying on the ground in the back lane and of how all the lads in the village would know.