The Likes of Us (14 page)

‘Tommy!' Christie shouted, and the woman said, ‘Quiet, quiet,' and looked anxiously all about her.

‘It's Tommy,' Christie said, and the next instant he was free of her and bounding down the rough grass bank of the water's edge.

‘Come back,' the woman said. ‘Don't be a fool. Come back.'

‘I'm coming, Tommy,' Christie bawled.

For a few seconds the woman hesitated there on the bank then she turned and fled along the path, away from the bridge, stuffing banknotes into her bag as she went. Behind her she heard the deep splash as Christie plunged into the river, and she quickened her pace to a stumbling run.

 

Standing in the middle of the room, his shoulders hunched, Christie said, ‘I found him, Mam. I found Tommy Flynn, an' he's drowned, all wet an' drowned. I couldn't get to him…'

There was something of resignation in his mother's dismay. She looked past him to the police sergeant who had brought him home.

‘Where…?' she said, in a voice that was little more than a movement of the lips.

‘The river.'

‘He's dead,' Christie said. ‘All wet an' drowned.'

‘Well then, Christie lad, don't take on so. He's happy, I'm sure he is.'

But as she spoke Christie began to cry helplessly, collapsing against her. She held him for the second of time it took the sergeant to spring across the room and get his hands under Christie's armpits.

‘We'd best get him upstairs,' the mother said, and the sergeant nodded. He swung Christie up like a child into his arms, and Christie wept against his chest as he was carried up the stairs to his bedroom.

The sergeant laid Christie on the bed and stood aside in silence while the widow swiftly stripped her son and set to work on his cold body with a rough towel. There was admiration in the sergeant's eyes by the time the woman had pulled the sheets over Christie and tucked him firmly in. She struck a match then and lit a night-light standing in a saucer of water on the chest of drawers. Christie was weeping softly now.

‘He doesn't like the dark,' she explained as she picked up the wet clothes and ushered the sergeant out of the room. ‘I think he'll go to sleep now.'

In the living-room once more, the sergeant remembered to take off his helmet, and he mopped his brow at the same time.

‘Wet through,' the woman said, feeling her son's clothes. ‘Absolutely sodden. Whatever happened?'

‘He must have been in the river,' the sergeant said. ‘My constable said he'd run up to him, dripping wet, and shouting that this Tommy Flynn was in the water; but when Johnson went with him all he could see was a dead dog. Seems that was what your son had taken for his Tommy Flynn.'

The woman bowed her head and put her hand to her face.

‘Anyway, the constable didn't take much more notice of it. He said he'd often seen your son about the town, and he knew…' The sergeant stopped and grimaced.

‘He knew that Christie wasn't quite right in the head.' the widow said.

‘That's about it, Missis.' The sergeant shifted his weight from one foot to the other; then, as though he had only just thought of it, he took out his notebook.

‘I know it's upsetting,' he said, ‘but I shall have to put in a report. I wondered if you'd give me a bit of information on your son...'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Well, where this Tommy Flynn comes into it; and what makes your boy go off looking for him.'

‘During the war, it was, when he met him,' the widow said, raising her head and looking somewhere past the sergeant. ‘He was in the Merchant Navy. He was all right till then: as normal as anybody. This Tommy Flynn was his special pal. He used to write home about him. He hardly mentioned anything else. His letters were full of him. It was all Tommy Flynn had said this, or done that. And what they were going to do after the war. They were going to start a window-cleaning business. Tommy Flynn said there'd be a shortage of window cleaners, and all they needed was a couple of ladders and a cart and they could make money hand over fist. I don't know whether there was anything in it or not... Anyway, Christie had it all planned for Tommy Flynn to come and live here. He was an orphan. I didn't mind: he seemed a nice enough lad, and he looked after Christie, showing him the ropes…'

‘You never met him?' the sergeant asked.

The widow shook her head. ‘I never saw him, but Christie thought the world of him. He could hardly remember his father, y'know, and this Tommy was a bit older than him. He sort of took him in hand.

‘Then towards the end of the war their ship was hit by one o' them Japanese suicide planes and got on fire. Christie was on a raft by himself for ages and ages. He was near out of his mind by the time they found him, and all he could talk about was Tommy Flynn. They reckoned Tommy must have gone down with the ship, but Christie wouldn't have that. He raved at them and called them liars.'

‘But they'd treat him?'

‘Oh aye, they treated him. They said he'd never be quite the same again; but of course you can't hardly tell unless he's in one of his do's, and he didn't start with them till he'd been home a while.'

‘How often does he have these... er – attacks?' the sergeant asked.

‘Oh, not often. He's all right for months on end. Anybody 'ud just take him as being a bit slow, y'know. An' he was such a bright lad…'

‘Why don't you try and get some more advice?' the sergeant suggested. ‘Y'know he might do himself some damage one of these times.'

‘I did ask the doctor,' the widow said; ‘and I mentioned it to Christie – when he was his usual self, I mean. He begged and prayed of me not to let them take him away. He broke down and cried. He said he'd die if they shut him up anywhere... It wouldn't be so bad, y'see, if he was one way or the other; then I'd know what to do…'

She swallowed and her lips quivered, then stilled again as she compressed them before looking straight it the sergeant.

‘You'll look out for him if you see him about, Sergeant, won't you?' she said.

‘I'll look out for him,' he assured her, frowning a little. ‘But I'd get some more treatment for him, if I were you, Missis.'

‘I'll see,' she said. ‘I'll have to think about it again now.

The sergeant picked up his helmet.

‘It'll be all right about tonight?' she asked. ‘There'll be no trouble?'

‘I shouldn't think so. I shall have to report it, o' course; but it'll be all right. He hasn't broken the law.'

Not yet, he thought, and put his hand into his tunic pocket. ‘By the way, you'd better have this. It came out of his pocket.' He put the wet notes on the table. ‘Four quid.'

He caught the startled look fleetingly in her eyes before she hid it.

‘Do you let him have as much money as he likes?' he asked, watching him.

‘Well, not as a rule... I like him to have a bit in his pocket, though, and then he's all right... If anything happens I mean.'

The sergeant nodded, his eyes remaining on her face a moment longer before he reached for the latch.

‘Well. I'll get along.'

The widow seemed to stir from thought. ‘Yes, yes... all right. And thanks for taking so much trouble.'

‘Just doing me job, Missis.' The sergeant bade her good night as he opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement.

When the door had closed behind him the widow looked at the money on the table. She picked up the notes and fingered them, the thoughts tumbling over in her mind, before going to the dresser and taking her purse from the drawer. She examined its contents and then put it away, closing the drawer, and went quietly upstairs to her room.

She took a chair and stood on it to reach into the cupboard over the built-in wardrobe for the shoe-box in which she kept all her and Christie's savings. She knew almost at once by its lightness that it was empty, but she removed the lid just the same. Her heart hammered and she swayed on the chair. Nearly a hundred pounds had been in the box, and it was gone. All the money they had in the world.

She put the box back in the cupboard and stepped down, replacing the chair by the bed. She put her hand to her brow and thought furiously, pointlessly. Christie was quiet in his room. She went out and stood for a few moments outside his door. Then she went downstairs and felt in every pocket of the wet clothing on the hearth. Nothing. She sank into a chair and put her head in her hands and began to sob silently.

When Christie woke next morning she was at his bedside.

‘What did you do with the money you took out of the box, Christie?' she said. ‘Where is it?'

‘He's drowned,' Christie said. ‘Tommy's drowned. All wet and dead.'

She could get no other response from him and in a little while she went away. He showed no sign of wanting to get up and at intervals during the day she returned, hoping he had recovered from the shock of last evening, and asked him, speaking slowly and carefully, as to a child, enunciating the words with urgent clarity, ‘The money, Christie, remember? What did you do with the money?'

But he stared at the ceiling with dark haunted eyes and told her nothing.

He never told her anything again. The search for Tommy Flynn was ended; and shortly after she let them come and take him away.

The Little Palace

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We both knew at once when the removal van arrived, at ten o'clock, on the Saturday morning because there were no curtains at the windows and it was so big that it shut out almost all the light as it stopped on the damp cobbles outside the house. I said, ‘Here they are, Tom,' and got up from my knees beside the tea-chest into which I'd been carefully packing the most fragile of our crockery.

Tom looked down from where, standing on a chair, he was dismantling the cupboards over the sink: the cupboards he had intended leaving behind had the new tenants not turned out to be the sort of people they were. The first thing anyone noticed about Tom, I suppose, was his size. He wore his fair hair cut short and he had blue eyes in a guileless, pug-nosed face. The numerous mishaps, small, thank God, sustained in his work as a coal miner were recorded in the faint blue scars on the backs of his hands: hands that were big and calloused and rough to the touch: hands that could be so unbelievably gentle and tender when touching me.

‘I reckon everything else is ready, Janie,' he said now.

‘I'll be done here in a jiffy.'

I often wondered when people glanced at us when we were out together what they made of Tom and me. Tom so big and so obviously a man of toil and sweat, and me so petite, with looks that Tom thought so pretty and lady-like and I'd always considered insipid; Tom with his voice heavy with the West Riding, and mine from which my mother and the elocution teacher she had sent me to had coaxed all trace of locality in my childhood. I'd heard one of Tom's sisters refer to me as ‘The Duchess' when I wasn't supposed to hear, but I'd learned to hold my own with them, and Tom, when I told him about it, said it was a compliment, and if I wasn't proud of it, he was.

I opened the door as one of the men knocked.

‘Manage it in one trip easy,' Tom said as the two men stepped over the threshold and looked around with experienced eyes. There wasn't a lot. We had been married only a year, and the house was very small: one room up, one down.

As the men started to carry out the furniture I slipped on a coat and went outside; partly to be out of their way, and partly to watch that they did not mishandle anything as they packed it into the gaping interior of the van. And as I stood out there on the pavement I felt a hidden audience watching from the cover of lace curtains. I knew I had disappointed and antagonised some of our neighbours by not encouraging them to run in and out of my house as they did one another's; and now the more inquisitive would be snatching a last look at what they had merely glimpsed as it came into the house a year ago. Mrs Wilde from the next house below came out onto the step. Her face was unwashed; her hair uncombed. She stood with her arms folded across her grubby pinafore, her bare toes poking out of worn felt slippers. When I thought about it I could not remember ever having seen her in a pair of shoes.

‘Well, off you go to leave us, Mrs Green,' she said amiably.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘off we go, Mrs Wilde.' She had been into the house several times, and there was little strange for her to see.

‘Don't seem hardly two minutes sin' ye got here,' she said, relaxing into her favourite stance against the door jamb.

‘No, time flies.'

‘It does that,' she said. ‘It does that! You'll know a bit more about that when you get to my age... Aye. Thirty year I've lived in Bridge Street. Sort o' settled down, y'know. Nivver wanted to go nowhere else, somehow. Brought six kids up in this house an' all, little as it is. Course, young fowk nowadays wants summat better. Got bigger ideas na we hid in our young days... Bought your own place over t'new part o' town, so I hear?'

‘Yes, that's right, Mrs Wilde. A semi-detached on Laburnum Rise.'

She nodded. ‘Aye, aye. I reckon that'll be more your quarter like than over here. I mean, this is nowt new to yer husband. I've known his fam'ly for years, an' they've allus been collier-fowk. But I knew straightaway 'at you were used to summat better. You can tell fowk 'at's had good bringins up. Leastways, I allus can.'

I made no reply to this. I didn't know what to say. For what Mrs Wilde said was true: I hadn't been used to this kind of neighbourhood until my marriage; but I'd become accustomed by now to at least one small part of it – the house Tom and I called home. The first home we had ever had.

‘You certainly made t'best on it, though,' Mrs Wilde was saying. ‘I wouldn't ha' recognised t'place if I hadn't lived right next-door. A proper little palace you made on it – a proper little palace. That's just what I said ‘to my husband when I first saw inside. Such a shame an' all 'at you've to leave it in one way: after all t'work you put into it. All them lovely decorations. Must break your heart to leave it all to some'dy else.' She paused and cocked an inquisitive eye at me. ‘Course, anybody fair like 'ud be only too willin' to make it right with you I mean, it's only proper an' decent, in't it?'

I did not respond to her probing, but merely remarked, ‘Yes, you can usually come to some agreement.' I did not feel inclined to summon up her rather dubious sympathy by telling her that the new tenants, a cold-faced elderly couple, had refused even to consider the question of compensation. And of course there was nothing to be done about it: we had no legal claim for improvements done to someone else's property. It had made Tom very angry and he had almost quarrelled with the elderly man.

‘Perhaps they aren't very well off,' I'd said afterwards. ‘Or why should they want a poky little place like this at their age?'

‘Oh, you're too soft by half, Janie,' Tom had said. ‘You'd let anybody put on you... No, it's meanness, that's what it is. I could see it in the way their faces sort o' closed up the minute I mentioned the valuation. You can bet your life they're not short o' brass. They're not sort to spend any ‘'less they're forced to.' He had stopped speaking then to consider the situation. ‘Well, we can take the cupboards an' shelves I put up, I suppose. A bit o' timber allus comes in handy. But we can't take the wallpaper an' paint. They'll have the benefit of that, damn their stingy souls!'

‘Yes, it's only right an' proper,' Mrs Wilde said.

We had arranged that I should go with the van and direct the unloading of the furniture, then come back for Tom, who had one or two last jobs to do, when we would go on for lunch with his family. When the loading was finished, then, I gave the driver the address of our new house and climbed up into the cab, where they made room for me between them. It was only a ten-minute drive across town, but it was to me like a journey into another world: my own world of neat houses along tree-lined backwaters and the Sunday-afternoon quiet of sheltered gardens. It was the sort of district that people in books and plays scoffed at as dull and suburban. But people like that, I thought, had never lived in a place like Bridge Street. But though it was my own world, and the thought of living there again was very pleasant, there was yet no place in it I could call home: not as I regarded the Little Palace (as we called the house, after Mrs Wilde) as home. I thought as the men begin to unload at the end of the short drive, of how that once strange and dirty place had become almost like a part of me, so that ever since waking that morning, and before, there had been in me a vague melancholy at the prospect of leaving it. I had chided myself for my foolish fancies, but it was almost as though I felt that the house was a part of our luck, and that in leaving it we might also leave something of our happiness within its walls.

For we had been happy there – gloriously happy. And not much more than a year ago I had not even seen the house. A little over two years ago there had been nothing – not even Tom. And what was there in life now without him? Tom, who had appeared and shattered the cocoon which my parents' genteel, middle-class way of life had spun about me and taught me to live as I never had before. It seemed to me that I had hardly been alive at all until that strange, disturbing afternoon when I first noticed him from the office window as, tired and dirty, he crossed the yard from the pit-hill at the end of the shift...

I tipped the two men when they had finished, and then walked through the house from room to room, seeing how lost our furniture looked in it, and noting with my woman's eye all the things that needed to be done. And then I left the house and walked to the bus stop at the end of the avenue. It was well past noon now, and the sky, overcast all morning, had cleared and showed great patches of blue behind the big pillows of cloud. As we ran into town by a stream which flowed into the river I looked out of the bus at the black water and saw the breeze-ruffled surface shimmer, as though someone had thrown handfuls of sunlight onto it from behind the willows which, just there, seemed to me to crouch like big green shaggy dogs by the water's edge. But despite the sunlight and the blue sky there was a sneaking chill in the air and I felt in its touch the end of the glorious but all-too-short summer.

 

The sun was shining, the sky blue, the day I had met Tom. Two days after my first noticing him he came into the big new building, with its many area control offices, to see the manager and blundered into the wrong office, and so into my life. It was like nothing I had ever known before, that feeling which possessed me from then on; it flushed my cheeks at the thought of him, brought tremors to my hands and knees, and filled me with a breathless, delightful excitement. And from that first brief contact, when I came into the corridor to show him the door he wanted, grew Tom's awareness of me. His eyes began to seek me out as he crossed the yard at the end of the day shift, and soon we were openly exchanging smiles. Even though we did not speak to each other again for some time a kind of intimacy seemed to grow between us through the medium of those daily smiles; so that one day when I had occasion to leave the office early, not long after the change of shifts, it seemed very natural when he came roaring up the yard behind me on his motor cycle that he should offer me a lift into town, and that I should at once accept. That was the day he asked me, with almost painful diffidence, to go out with him one evening, and the day I became hopelessly lost. Three months later, to his open astonishment, I accepted his halting proposal of marriage.

And all this was what the Little Palace had come to mean to me. More, much more, than cleanliness and shining paint had emerged from the squalor of flaking plaster and peeling wallpaper that had been the house when first we took it. A marriage had been made there, had come through its first vital year; a marriage that had received little but discouragement because of the differences between Tom and me. I was too good for him, they had said. I was throwing myself away on a boy from the back streets whose rough-shod nature and way of living would sooner or later break my heart. But they had been wrong; only the walls of the Little Palace knew how wrong. Those walls had held our year of hope and happiness, our little failures, and, above all, our success. It was because of this that I knew I should remember it for the rest of my life.

I alighted from the bus in the station into a swarm of shoppers and home-going workers and decided it would be quicker to walk the rest of the way. I was soon out of the teeming shopping centre and plunging deep into the back streets on the old side of town: the district in which Tom had lived all his life, and which I had not been in more than twice before meeting him. I walked along the cobbled river of Gilderdale Road, with its noisome tributaries, each with its twin banks of terraced houses, ceasing abruptly by the blackened upright sleepers of the railway fence, and, turning the corner by the little newsagent's, came into Bridge Street. A year of it had not changed my sense of being alien and conspicuous and now, walking along its uneven pavement for what, for all I knew, might be one of the last times in my life, I felt even more acutely self-conscious than usual – as though in every house along the way the occupants had put aside what they were doing to watch me pass – and I was glad when I reached the cover of the entry which broke the terrace and gave onto the communal backyard behind the houses. As I came through, my heels echoing on the brick paving, I could hear Tom whistling inside the house. He was happy today. He had never reconciled himself to my living here. It had been I who insisted on our taking the house when Tom's mother heard of it, rather than wait in the hope of something better turning up. We could not afford to buy at that time. My father's offer of help would have solved the problem, but only at the expense of Tom's pride; and I had seen the Little Palace as a challenge to me, to be faced boldly, without fear. We had won through, and now it made Tom happy to be able, after only a year, to take me out of it and across the town.

Absorbed in these thoughts, I had walked right into the living-room before I saw what awaited me there. And then I stood and gaped in staggered disbelief. The room was as though emblazoned with warnings of a terrible plague; for on each of the walls, stretching diagonally from ceiling to floor across the pale blue wallpaper, and on each of the doors, Tom had painted a huge scarlet cross. And now, brush in hand, he spoke to me over his shoulder as he heard me come in.

‘Janie? Little surprise for you. An' a damn big 'un for them two stingy old codgers when they turn up again.'

I turned without answering and ran out of the room and up the uncarpeted stairs into the bedroom. He had done that room first. I came slowly down again. My heart hurt as though a great hand was kneading it brutally, and I couldn't speak.

‘Thought of it yesterday,' Tom said. He was putting on his jacket now and he wore a grin which slowly faded as he saw the expression on my face. ‘Well, I mean, damn it, we couldn't let 'em get away with it altogether, could we?'