Miss Appleby's Academy (28 page)

Connie stood for a moment and then she kissed Emma suddenly on the cheek and ran upstairs and no more was heard that night except that Emma thought she could
discern Connie’s calm voice through the ceiling a couple of times when the children went to bed. She hoped George didn’t feel out of it and when she went up she looked in on him. He was still awake. She kissed him. ‘It’s getting very female around here. Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Can Hector stay here with me?’

She said he could and Hector lay by George’s bed, but later, when George had gone to sleep, Hector padded across the landing and lay down by her bed just as he always did. She was not afraid with Hector there, but she did spend some time regretting Mick Castle before she went to sleep. She was glad that she had been given an excuse not to move on.

Isabel lay with her face turned to the wall in the spare room in Sam’s house. It was the smallest of the bedrooms, the double bed in it took up most of the space and Mick wished he could be anywhere but here.

He remembered her running from room to room when he had shown her the house they could have when they were married, the house he would buy if she liked it. She had loved the garden, the way the house stood apart from the village. He had been so much in love with her that he had not noticed there was anything amiss.

And when she had become pregnant he had thought his world complete.

She was still sleeping. She would awaken and demand gin soon. He stood by the window and worried about what to do. It was mid afternoon. He heard Marjorie softly open the door.

She glanced around, at the bed first, no doubt to check on the patient – she was a doctor’s wife before anything else – and then at him by the window.

‘You have a visitor.’ No wonder she looked surprised. ‘Mr Atkinson.’

Mick stood for a few seconds and then he said, ‘Could
you ask him to come up?’

Isabel stirred just as Henry Atkinson came into the room. He flashed Mick a grateful and apologetic look and sat down on the bed so that when she opened her eyes he was the first thing she saw. He looked at her with such joy, Mick thought. She smiled back as he had not seen her smile in years and her eyes shone brilliantly, he couldn’t tell whether it was with joy or tears.

‘What have you been doing?’ he said.

‘I missed you.’

It still hurt to see the way that she looked at Henry, she loved him so obviously, touched him delicately as though he were about to disappear and she would never see him again. She was not aware that Mick was in the room, she could have been anywhere at any time, there was only Henry for her.

‘You have got to stop doing this to yourself, my dearest, or we won’t see one another again this side of the grave.’

‘I don’t care any more.’

‘What are you punishing yourself for?’

She gazed at him. ‘I want to be with you. I want to be your wife.’

Henry Atkinson didn’t say anything at first and when he did his voice wobbled. ‘I cannot give you more children. If you had been going to have any you would have done so by now.’

‘I want your babies, I want to be fat with them.’

She turned away from him. Henry sat there for a very long time and she went back to sleep. Henry got up like
a man of eighty; it wasn’t age, it was disappointment, disillusionment, frustration. Mick felt as though Henry had not the right to such feelings as these. Henry did not raise his eyes.

And stupidly, somehow he wanted to reassure the man. He stood, horrified at himself, and then Henry Atkinson looked at him and the eyes which held his were glassy with tears.

‘I’m sorry, I know I look like a fool and a lot of worse things, but you see I didn’t intend this. I thought she had grown to love you. You can’t imagine how many nights I lay awake and envied you when you were first married, especially after there was a child. You must believe that I did try to keep away. My wife loves nobody except our children, and sometimes I even wonder about that. She seems to have no capacity for love. I could have loved her, at first I thought there might be a chance for us, she was so beautiful, still is.

‘The children were packed off to school the moment they were independent. I missed them so much. I own a great deal and am seen in business as a warm and clever man, but in my house I have always been a nuisance, you see. The marriage was arranged by our parents and she never wanted me except when she wanted a child. I had no other use but making money and I was allowed near her no longer after she was pregnant. My children have grown away from me, my wife wants us to give up the business and move to London.’

He glanced at Isabel before wandering out of the room
as though he wasn’t certain where he was going and it was not until Mick heard his feet on the stairs, the brass rods clinking, that he let go of his breath.

*

Nell’s daughters became almost as dear to Emma as if they had been her own. She did not favour them, that would have been unkind and unjust, but she thought that they even looked like her and she had not imagined that she would want a child to do so, and then she thought, yes, she had when she was younger and John Elstree had been a possibility.

She had seen a pretty house in a wide street with lots of trees, her husband coming home to her in the evenings, how they would sit in the garden when it was summer or over the fire in the winter and talk about the children when they were in bed. It would have been blissful, she thought – and most unlikely, her sensible self could not help adding.

She heard nothing from Nell, and the little girls did not talk of her or of their home, or show any signs of wanting to go back. They seemed to revel in good meals, clean beds, the company of Connie and George, and they especially liked Hector.

Emma was almost insulted for Nell that they appeared not to miss her, until one night a snivelling child appeared, and then another, and they cast themselves upon her calling loudly for their mam. She assured them that they would see Nell very early the next day and she took them back to bed and talked them to sleep.

Neither did she see Mick Castle. Jack came now that he was better. Nobody else came to call. She went out only for groceries, and after being stared at and whispered about in the shops she stopped going and asked Jack to drop in orders from the various shops who delivered. It was so much easier.

Nell turned up on the Monday morning after Emma had sent a note with Jack, and her daughters heard her and rushed through and they went straight into her arms. Emma had a sudden pang, but then she was just so glad because Nell was laughing and the girls were trying to tell her all at once what they had been doing and she was saying, ‘Don’t both talk at once, I can’t hear you,’ and they were able to tell her what had happened and George and Connie too related what they had done. Emma could tell by Connie’s voice that she had accepted Nell and all that Emma had said, and she felt that she might be doing some good there.

When the children went off for their mid-morning break to play in the yard, Nell’s gaze followed her daughters, and then she said, ‘I think I might be expecting.’

They were playing some kind of chanting game which she did not recognize. Emma felt her insides sink, the sickness of shock hit her. She looked at Nell, but her half-sister went on watching the children, almost as if she had said nothing

‘Are you sure?’

Nell smiled and shook her head.

‘Why don’t you come and stay with us?’ Emma said.

‘I’ve spent enough time here, you must sicken of me.’

‘Give up the house. I would love to have you here. I always wanted a sister and I’ve never had anybody other than a brother who didn’t care for me. Please, Nell, come here.’

‘It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Why not?’

Nell looked fondly at her with slight exasperation as people do when they are related, and Emma wished she could make a picture of that look. She had never seen it on anyone’s face before.

‘Who would send their children to you when you housed the local whore? It’s bad enough my children being here.’

‘They didn’t send them anyway,’ Emma said. ‘And I don’t care any more. I want a family and you and the girls, that’s what you are to me.’

Nell shook her head sadly. ‘There’s Laurence.’

How could she have forgotten him, Emma wondered, and yet she knew why she had dismissed him from her mind. He made her think of her own Laurence and of how much he despised her, how he had never wanted her around him. It was not fair, she knew.

‘He can come here,’ she said.

‘He cannot. It’s too much for him to work out. It would upset him to the point where he couldn’t bear himself and then—’ Nell stopped. ‘I can’t do that to him, I have to keep the house going.’ She looked bravely at Emma and then said she must be off and went out into the yard to see the girls before she left. She looked at Emma in the
pale evening light and she said, ‘I never thought to have anybody to help,’ and Emma watched her as she walked away, with her cheap clothes and her determined gait.

*

Emma had put the children to bed and was taking Hector out to splash his boots, when she heard someone running towards her. Hector had already stopped, but he was not growling so it must be somebody they knew. She had a few brief moments when her heart – damn it, didn’t she learn anything – lifted because she thought it must be Mick, but a younger, slighter figure emerged from the darkness. It was Jack.

‘Summat’s happened, Miss, to Nell Whittington like, and Mr Higgins, he said you must come to the Black Diamond. I’m to stay here and watch the bairns, that’s what he said, and you must take Hector with you to mind you on the way.’

She wanted to ask more, but the urgency in his tone forbade it, so all she did was pull her coat from a peg behind the door and run with Hector beside her. The dog didn’t seem surprised at all, as though he knew what was happening. How did Labradors know such things? Could he hear the alarm in Jack’s voice? Of course he could? She reasoned, and the dog’s presence made her feel better.

She ran as fast as she could, she didn’t know that she could run so fast. She saw how people’s heads turned as she went past them regardless, how she stepped into the road with the black dog keeping perfect step, though she knew he could have travelled much faster without her.

The wind, she only just noticed, was cold and screaming through the village, and soon there was nobody except herself on the street and she could hear the pounding of her feet on the buildings across the road.

Men were outside the pubs and they watched her and they shouted, she had no doubt it was rude remarks, but she didn’t care, she had long since stopped regarding them as anything important but a source of income to Mick and therefore for the school, so she hoped that they drank themselves senseless and smoked themselves hoarse.

It seemed such a very long way though it could have been but a few minutes. The crowd had cleared, men, some with pints in their hands, standing back in a big circle. They would not have seen her, they could not have noticed, she was so small by comparison, they were so big sideways, feet planted apart, giants of men across their chests from the kind of physical work they did every day, but she shouted at them and not in a ladylike way. Miss Emma Appleby of Mid Haven would scarcely have recognized the screaming banshee who shrieked, ‘Get out the way!’ in a strong carrying tone that brooked no defiance. She would make a schoolteacher yet, yelling like that.

Surprised, they moved, and it was like the Red Sea parting, so many of them and yet to her all alike, big boots moving aside, and when she got past them she realized why the space had cleared. There was not much light, but she could make out Nell, slumped on the ground. She got down beside her.

‘Nell? Nell. Are you all right?’

She knew it was the stupidest possible thing to say to a woman who so obviously wasn’t, but she couldn’t bear that Nell should be hurt or ill.

She thought at first that perhaps it was best to leave her there, perhaps it was best she were not moved, and then she realized that it was not a fall, not an accident. She got down further, kneeling on the ground. With awful timing it began to rain, cold hard drops like sleet and the wind behind it, but she didn’t care how her hair stuck to her face and how soaked her clothes became because it was immediately obvious to her that Nell was badly hurt. There was blood, a lot of it – the back of Nell’s skirt and the pavement beneath and around her sticky and thick with it. Hector hovered. One man moved, another said something jeering, and the big black dog turned with intent and the growl that came from the depths of his throat was sufficient to quell any movement, any noise. He crouched, low and dangerous, his jaws apart and his eyes glittering.

Emma turned. She wanted to shout at them, why had they not moved Nell? but then they knew nothing and perhaps they did not like to or maybe more likely they did not want to get involved, they only wanted to see and to be able to talk about it later over another pint.

‘You!’ Emma pointed at one young man, at least she thought he was, it was difficult to see, his cap was pulled low, ‘Pick her up and bring her inside.’

‘But—’

‘Do as I ask.’ Emma stood up and they all moved back slightly, and then the young man moved forward.

He picked Nell up. The men stood further back and Emma turned in the doorway and she took them in with one sweeping glance and said, in their language, ‘Have you buggers got nowt better to do than stand there, gawping? Get the hell away home,’ and she turned and followed him inside, Hector at her heels.

The pub was deserted. She had never seen it like this. She got the man to carry Nell into the bar and there he put her down on a long settle.

‘Has somebody gone for the doctor?’

‘Mr Higgins went straight away, Miss.’ He stood back a little way. ‘Is she going to be all right?’

Emma said nothing and he melted away into the night. By the bar lights she could see the cloth of Nell’s skirt and the blood making its way on to the seat. Emma had never felt quite so helpless, Nell looked so very small. She was not large herself, but this sister showed that she had not had enough to eat when she was a child, that she had not had the care that children needed and deserved. She had needed so much resistance to the things which had gone wrong in her life and it had been too much. She opened her eyes and saw Emma and smiled. ‘How are the bairns?’ she said.