A Kind Man (3 page)

She walked slowly because she needed to feel herself getting nearer a little at a time, making the journey as people made a pilgrimage and because, in spite of her usual prayer for grey skies, once she was out here she savoured the spring air and the sun and the smell of the new earth and the growing things, loved to hear the larks. As she rounded the peak, she looked up and ahead to the far slope where the sheep were with their lambs, dozens of them scattered about the hillside like scraps of paper thrown up in the air and allowed to settle anywhere. If there was a wind it usually blew their bleating towards her but today it was quite still. She only heard the soft sound of her footsteps on the track.

The slope was gentle and after a half-mile, at the point where an old plough had been abandoned and lay knotted over with bindweed and grass, she could
see the church tower. It had four flying angels on each corner and they caught the sun and shone gold. But today, just as she looked up to them, skeins of cloud were drawn across and the angels were dulled.

Centuries before there had been a large village up here, but it had been deserted after a plague and reestablished further down on the far side, and the church had been left stranded by itself among ruins which had gradually fallen away and disappeared. But the church was never abandoned and services were even held in it half a dozen times each summer. People valued it. Guidebooks referred to what had become known as ‘St Paul-Alone’ or ‘St Paul-in-the Meadow’. Once or twice a visitor had been there when Eve had arrived and perhaps smiled or exchanged a word. The first time she had thought that she might mind, but she had not, there was a friendliness about having others here and she welcomed it, always looked out to see if people might be there.

She walked more slowly still up the last few yards. There was no stone wall, though perhaps it had once been there, no gate or entrance, no shady trees. The church stood alone with its tower rising up strongly and the angels flying freely in the wind, and for a path there was simply a worn track up to the door. And on two sides the churchyard, which was part of the hillside, part of the whole wide landscape, not
penned in or confined, and the ancient gravestones set out anyhow, like the sheep on the opposite hill. Ancient but for a handful. The village was all but gone save for three or four cottages. Now and then a person died but few were buried here.

The first time she had ever come, quite by chance and years ago, Eve had felt a strange surge of rightness and belonging, something she had never known before. They went to church as a family for Christmas and Easter, she and her sister had been baptised and confirmed in the parish church in the centre of the town, a great, granite place with a chill in its bones. She had always felt a formal reverence and respect but never any closeness.

So that when the time had come, she had unhesitatingly picked St Paul-Alone for the burial. There had never been a doubt, and Tommy had gone along with her wishes, knowing how she felt. He had a deep sense of what was good and even holy but no connection with any church or chapel.

No one else was here. The sheeps’ cries and the bleating of the lambs came to her now on the wind. Another lark sang high out of sight.

No one had understood why she had chosen this place and she had not felt able to explain, just insisted
over and over again that it must be, and Tommy had agreed and stood by her even if he too had not fully understood. It was others who murmured together and felt resentful. She had ignored them and never for one moment regretted what she had done. Her feelings had been absolute and could not have been gainsaid.

The path was grassy and dry. They had not had heavy rain for weeks. Her footsteps made a soft brushing sound as she stepped over the old, leaning gravestones, patched with yellow and grey sponge moss and lichen. Some had lettering too worn to be read, others had whole words obscured. Some she now knew by heart.

Joseph Garnett. Born 1802. Died 1870
.

And his wife Adeline
.

‘And he shall stand at the latter day.’

In loving memory of Samuel Pettifer
.

And of Mary Pettifer of this parish
.

And their children Maud, Archibald, Victoria
.

She stopped again to wonder as always who Mary Pettifer was, wife or mother or daughter, and why her dates of birth and death had not been carved.

Surgeon Captain Makin Lownes
,

a gallant officer and comrade
.

Born 1789. Died at sea, 1824
.

One by one she counted them, read them, set them aside, and so, slowly, made her way to the far end.

It was set a little apart from the old graves, but the stone no longer looked raw and smooth, the wind and rain that drove up the hill in winter had pitted and darkened it.

There was a shallow rectangle cut from the grass and edged with more cut stone laid flat.

Eve held her breath for a moment. Whenever she saw it again, at the moment she read the lettering, her heart seemed to stop in its beating. The first few times she had longed for it never to start up again.

Jeannie Eliza Carr

Aged 3 years

Beloved daughter

She knelt down and brushed a few leaves away, then laid the branches of white blossom carefully down on the grass.

AT FIRST
they had lived with Tommy’s mother in the terraces behind the works and Eve had dreaded it, being shy and not knowing how Rose Carr liked things and how she would fit into the household. But it was easy enough, though crowded. Tommy had a brother with whom he had used to share a room and Alan had had to move into the box room. He had not seemed to resent it, or even to notice, but Eve had felt uncomfortable and after a few months only they had moved out when one of the houses on the opposite side of the terrace came free. It was pleasant enough and she tried to make the best of it but it was dark morning, noon and night, because the works buildings loomed over it and, having a north aspect, no room was ever lightened by the sun.

She was happy with Tommy Carr. He was indeed
‘a kind man’, thoughtful, quiet, gentle, undemanding, eating anything that was put in front of him, tidy and clean, unwilling to put her to any trouble, and, unlike every other man she knew of or had known, glad to help her in the house. He would not only fetch in the coals and deal with the fires and the range but set the table and clear it, bring in the washing from the line and clean both his own shoes and hers. They liked one another. They were suited.

But from the beginning both had been clear that they wanted a child, ‘to make a family’ as he said, ‘out of the two of us’.

After seven months in the dark house no child had been conceived, and Eve had struggled with herself through the long autumn and winter of early dark and grey skies, low-spirited and lacking in interest for anything in the small rooms whose walls pressed in on her ‘like coffin sides’, she said one evening.

Tommy laid down his knife and fork and looked across the tea table at her, his face troubled and full of concern.

‘That’s a strong thing to say.’

‘Yes.’

‘You feel it that badly then?’

She did. She had, she now knew, been ‘feeling it that badly’ for some time.

He said nothing more until he brought the stack of
dishes in and set them on the wooden draining board beside her. Then he put his hand on her shoulder.

‘You should have said.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing.’

‘That isn’t how it sounded.’

‘I don’t want to worry you, Tom. I’m just having a down day.’

He went out again and she finished the dishes, set them to drain, looked out of the window onto the gathering sky and saw rain spots dashing against the window.

He had stoked up the range to a blaze and set their chairs closer to it, put a cushion for Eve’s back, which she had hurt in turning round too sharply the previous week. She brought in fresh cups of tea.

The evening paper was beside him as usual, but after only a glance he set it quietly down.

‘It’s the house,’ he said, ‘the dark that gets you down.’

‘Oh, it’ll be better when the days lengthen, take no notice of me.’

‘Of course I take notice of you. Besides, winter or summer, the works is still there and you can’t turn a house around.’

She smiled. There were his work socks to darn in the basket at her feet but she went on drinking her tea and looking into the fire.

‘I know what I should do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Move us. Move you to where it’s light and open and you can breathe a bit. That’d be the best thing, and for a bairn when one wants to come to us as well. Maybe that’s why. It’s thinking it won’t put in an appearance to be brought up in a coal-hole.’

He had made little of the absence of a child, reassuring her that one would come when it was ready, though she could not be so easy in her mind now that Miriam had two boys and a third expected and was wondering how to stop.

She could hardly talk to her sister, hardly visit them because her envy spurted up like bile in her mouth.

She went sometimes to the great dark granite church to ask for the gift of a child and liked it better when she sat there alone rather than at the services which they occasionally went to. Miriam’s babies were christened there and each one had cried. ‘It’s cold,’ Eve had said, ‘that’s why they cry. It’s never been warm inside that place in all its history.’

Perhaps, she sometimes thought, God had deserted it Himself for that very reason.

‘I’ll find us somewhere,’ Tommy had said that evening, and being a man of his word, a week later, he had done so, though not telling her at first, just suggesting they walk out that Saturday afternoon. It had been a fine day,
blowy and chill, but as they had left the town streets and started off towards the first fields that hemmed it round she had felt her spirits lighten.

He had looked at her. ‘Your cheeks have got pink now,’ he had said, ‘in the fresher air.’

Though you could still smell the factory chimneys and taste the smoke faintly in your mouth.

‘Look.’

He had pointed to the terrace of six brick houses facing the field and the peak further away.

‘Look where?’

‘There.’

‘Houses.’

He laughed.

But he had led her to them and walked along to the last one, on the end and so with open fields on three sides. For a moment they had stood looking at it, a small, neat, plain house with a long ruler of garden running from the door, which was painted a dark red.

‘I thought it good,’ Tommy said.

‘Good.’

‘For us.’

‘It would be.’

‘So we’ll take it then? It’s for rent.’

They had moved in the following week, and from the first day, Eve had felt happy. The house was only a
little bigger than their old one in the town but it felt vast because of the light – light flooded in front and back and because there was nothing overshadowing them any more, nothing taller than their house apart from the peak and that you could see but at a distance.

She had stood looking and looking, at the fields and the track that led across them and the slope and the sky, and had felt a different person.

‘But you’d have a way to go to work,’ she had said that first afternoon.

‘I don’t mind a walk. I can do up the old bike as well if I find my own legs too slow.’

He did not mind. He got up forty minutes earlier and walked. Eve watched him set off across the track that led back to the town, his stride calm and steady, before beginning her work in the house, and then the minute she could, going outside to the garden. It had been dug over and made before but then left to weed and neglect, but day by day she shaped it and cleared it and then began to plan what to grow. The man next door had brought round things to start her off, cuttings and plants, bits of this and that. And advice. Bert Ankerby. His wife Mary grew fat red geraniums and tomatoes on all the window ledges and gave cuttings of those too. When Eve had spoken of chickens, Bert had told her where to go for a couple and he and Tommy had put together the henhouse and run.

Every day she woke up feeling happy in a way she had never known before. She loved her husband, her home, her life.

A couple of months after they had moved into what was known only as 6 The Cottages, Miriam had a third son, but in giving birth to him was gravely ill and both she and the baby had to be taken to hospital where they stayed for several weeks, Miriam lying between life and death. But the baby thrived and because of Miriam’s illness and an epidemic of scarlet fever in the hospital it was thought better for him to go home. John Bullard sent for Eve.

For five weeks she left Tommy to look after himself and 6 The Cottages and became mother to two boys and the baby, Arthur George, though the worst trouble was John Bullard, who did nothing, either for himself or his children, but came in at five and sat down, expecting the tea to be in front of him, his glass of beer at his side, went out to the working men’s club or the public house and came in at ten. Cocoa, bread and meat or cheese had to be waiting for him. He did not drink much ale, only went for the company of other men and because he hated sitting in the house that smelled of boiling and small boys. He was not mean. He handed Eve his wage packet as he always handed it to his wife, and told her what he expected back for himself. He was friendly towards her and
grateful to her, but he lifted no finger to help her and took little notice of the boys. The baby he left entirely to her. Arthur George might not have existed for all the times he so much as glanced at him. The boy grew and roared for food and slept deeply and his brothers absorbed him into their midst without comment.