Shelter from the Storm (13 page)

There was a vacant shop in the main street. Every day when she went out Vinia saw it. Sometimes she went past it more than once, and one day in the rain, when there was nobody about, she stopped and pressed her face against the wet window and imagined what it would be like to have a shop, to be able to design and make clothes for it. She had no money to buy anything, not even second-hand things from the market to remake as she had done before she was married, and when she sat down one day and made some drawings on paper she was still absorbed when Tom came home. She had not noticed the passing of time; she had been enjoying herself, enthralled with what she was doing.

‘No tea ready?’ Tom said

Vinia scrambled up, gathering the papers.

‘In a minute,’ she said.

‘What’s this?’ Tom said, and as she tried to get past him he barred the way. She held the papers from him but Tom took her wrist and forced them from her fingers.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

He moved closer to the table and put the papers down, spreading them out so that he could see them, and they looked stupid and trivial as she saw them through his eyes and her face burned.

‘You’ve got time to draw daft pictures, have you? What are they?’ Tom shot her the kind of look that made her turn away.

‘Nothing.’

‘It doesn’t look like owt I’ve ever seen.’

‘It’s a design, a dress.’

‘A dress?’ Tom opened his eyes wide. ‘Oh, well, in that case we won’t worry about it, eh? We’ll just sit about all day drawing frocks.’

Even as he spoke she could imagine the shop with her name above the door and people inside, in the back, making up the designs she had thought of, and she in the front in a plain black dress and all the posh folk of the neighbourhood coming to the shop and ordering dresses and hats, wonderful hats made from soft material with exotic birds’ feathers and wide brims. She would make things people could not get in Newcastle or even in London, so good were they, so different and so exciting. It was her favourite daydream.

Tom picked up the papers and dragged her over to the fire and there he fed them one by one into the depths of the flames. For some reason she couldn’t stand it, began to cry and tried to stop him. Tom went on putting the papers to burn and very soon they were gone. She shouldn’t have let him know how much it meant to her but she couldn’t help it. The fire died down as though they had never been, and still she stared into the dead embers.

‘They were for my shop.’

‘What shop?’

‘The shop I’m going to have.’

‘You’re not going to have owt,’ Tom said, and hit her so hard that she banged into the kitchen table and fell. He pulled her up off the floor and shoved her in the direction of the pantry. She made a meal in spite of the fact that she was in pain, and while Tom ate she sat at the table with him.

‘If you’d wanted summat else you shouldn’t have married me,’ he said, and then he left and went off to the pub.

She sat down at the kitchen table and cried for the shop and for herself and for Tom and for the baby she did not seem able to produce, and then she realised that she was not alone and when she looked up Dryden was standing in the open doorway, watching her with dismayed eyes. He didn’t say anything and she turned away and then got up to attend to a fire that didn’t need any attention. She cleared her throat.

‘Tom’s long gone,’ she said.

Dryden’s silence perturbed her. She couldn’t think why but she wanted to say something to him that would absolve Tom of responsibility for her distress, she didn’t want him to look bad to Dryden. She no longer cared about Tom and she had never cared for Dryden but her honesty compelled her to admit to herself that Tom was the only person in the whole world whom Dryden loved. He adored Tom, she could tell when they were together from the shine in his eyes, and because it was all he had she could not destroy it.

Dryden moved into the house and stood with his head down for what seemed to her like a very long time. He had beautiful hair, thick and black and shiny, not wavy and not curly and not straight, like black pennies, a sort of black storm, the kind of thing that women loved to put their fingers into.

‘Tom hit you?’ he said finally, and to her astonishment she lied.

‘He … no, he … it was just …’

The illusion went from his eyes until they were dulled.

‘It was nothing, he didn’t mean to. He never did it before and … we want different things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well …’ She smiled at him. ‘Tom wants a baby and I want a shop and we don’t seem to be able to agree or have either and … it makes things difficult. He didn’t mean to do it.’

‘It doesn’t matter, though, what you mean, it’s what you do,’ Dryden said.

He moved nearer and she would have moved farther back
away from him but he put up one hand. Hands were associated with violence for her and a little noise of fear escaped her lips, but all he did was to close his fingers around her hair at one side of her face in reassurance. Nobody had ever done such a thing. Tom knew nothing of caresses. When he let go she moved away and Dryden left the house and all she could hear were his footsteps hurrying through the passage.

Esther Margaret went into the front room and cried when Joe had gone. He was like nobody else, so far above them all, and she could not but think that he might have been hers. Joe loved her, she could see that, even though he attempted to disguise his affection. His look had held dismay at her condition. She knew, though she had no mirror, that she was nothing more than a coarse pitman’s wife and that she would be tied for the rest of her life to a man everybody despised. No one except Vinia bothered with her any more. The neighbours nodded hello but, having no regard for Dryden, they had none for her either. He opened the door and stood there, not saying anything.

‘Is that right? You saved his life?’

Dryden didn’t reply and she turned around into the silence to find him not looking at her or at anything else very much.

‘Mr Carrington died,’ Esther Margaret persisted.

‘Forster wasn’t quick enough, that’s all,’ Dryden said. ‘I had to get him out of the way to get me out of the way.’

Esther Margaret looked at him and thought how strange it was, that the husband she didn’t love should have saved the man she did and that she could have the one and not the other. Dryden moved forward slightly and she moved back.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she said.

Dryden looked at her, right in the eyes.

‘This isn’t a marriage,’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s a marriage all right. Look at the state of me. Besides, you don’t need a marriage, you’ll go with anybody.’

‘I haven’t!’ he said.

‘Haven’t you? Well, you always did.’

‘So we’re going to go on like this for ever?’

‘As far as I’m concerned you can go to hell before you ever touch me again! You have cost me everything.’

‘You were keen enough.’

‘I was upset. The truth is that I love Joe. I always did and I always will!’

‘Joe?’ Dryden stared.

‘Isn’t that amazing? And if you had known it would Mr Carrington be walking about now and Joe be six foot under?’

‘You love Mr Forster? When did this happen?’

Esther Margaret followed his train of thought.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

‘I hope not because if this bairn has his colouring I’ll be out of here so fast you won’t have time to catch your breath.’

‘Nobody touched me but you,’ she said.

‘And Billy Robson? What a busy person you were.’

‘I didn’t let him near me.’

‘You let me, though. Why was that? You held off Mr Forster and Billy Robson but not me.’

‘You can’t think how much I wish I had.’

‘You certainly manage it very well these days.’

‘The damage is done,’ she said, and moved past him and up the stairs out of the way.

*

Dryden couldn’t wait to get out. He thought even if she had asked him to stay he would have found an excuse. Forster had spent weeks needling him, he didn’t know why, and now the situation had been made impossible. He hadn’t intended saving Joe, it was just instinct. If Carrington had been standing there he probably
would have pushed him. He didn’t like Joe and he knew that Joe hated him and he knew what it must have cost Joe to come to him and be grateful. Gratitude made Dryden want to throw up.

Esther Margaret was stifling him. She was always there and she was getting bigger and bigger until now she looked like a whale. She was always waiting with meals and with her hand out for money. And he resented it.

It was lovely to get out of the house and take deep lungfuls of air and walk away from the pit and the row and her. Tom would be waiting for him in the Black Horse at the very top of the street. It was a cold starry night and Dryden was pleased with it. He felt much better when he reached the pub. The beer always helped so much, the soft brown cushion of it against the warring of his mind and senses. In the beginning it was the anticipation. The first two pints were bliss to smell and taste, and the feel of it going down was as good as a woman’s fingertips soft on your skin. Not that he really remembered. After that it created a nice glow all around. The pub became merry like a Christmas which had yet to exist, and everything anybody said was interesting or funny. Tom and Wes and Ed would play darts or dominoes. It was like home, like home had never been, like it might be for some people, though he hadn’t met any yet, a narrow, comfortable, almost suffocating world where you were always welcome and everybody called you by your first name. He knew that without Tom he would not have been accepted, but he could stand inside the space that Tom’s shadow cast and be safe there.

The beer went down, the laughter rose and the woman behind the bar, Dora Sims, looked enticing. She smiled at him a lot but then she smiled at everybody a lot, so he did not quite understand why, when the night was dark and old and the pavements were empty, she was there, walking on her own as the landlord shut and locked the doors, and he was there too.

He walked her home, back to Baring Street beyond the main street. There was no conversation, no invitation; he had no idea where her husband, Hart, was, just that he followed her into the
cool darkness beyond her front door and once the door had shut with what sounded to his ears like a distant echo he was kissing her and to his surprise she didn’t stop him. It had been a long time since Dryden had kissed anybody, and then it had been Esther Margaret. The stupid part about it was that Esther Margaret had not been his wife then. It had been in a barn the last time they had touched. He remembered it more and more clearly because as each day went by his body hungered more. She would not let him near and Dryden had been so angry with himself for getting her pregnant in the first place that he had determined to have nothing more to do with other women. It had not occurred to him at the time that Esther Margaret could hold him off always. He kept telling himself that she would give in, that it would get better, that there would come a day when they would be glad to be married to one another, it would be easier, they could laugh and talk and they would get together.

The landing gave way to the bedroom. Outside, the sky was blue and the street was black shadows. The bed creaked as they met it and Dryden concentrated on her mouth. It was a nice mouth, in fact the same kind of mouth as on most of the women he had bedded in his life, not like Esther Margaret’s, which was all cool hesitation. He liked that it was wise, that she knew what he knew, that she knew everything, that he was not asking for anything to which he was not entitled. Dora Sims would not be turning up on his doorstep, pregnant, wanting him to do something about it. He reached for her body, his hands found her breasts. He closed his eyes gratefully at the warmth, the roundness, the soft feel of her skin against his face. He wanted to stay there for ever in the darkness, in the bedroom, in the silence, safe.

*

After she heard him leave the house Esther Margaret sat upstairs on the bed, etching in her mind exactly how Joe had looked, the way his fair hair would fall forward and his eyes so dark green and full of love, and how well he wore his suit and how gracious
he was, whereas Dryden said little. Joe was clever and polite and she would never have him.

The pain caught her by surprise It went away almost immediately and she breathed quickly for a moment or two. Then her body eased. It came back after a few seconds and her breathing stopped against it until it ceased. She sat waiting, clutching at the huge bump that the baby had become, waiting for it to happen again. It didn’t. She lay down on the bed, suddenly very tired. The pain didn’t come back so she dismissed it. Everybody got twinges. She slept.

When she awoke it was dark. She had been dreaming that she was hurt but it was not a dream. The pain was there. It went again and then it came back. If it was important she must get help. She slid off the bed with no idea of what time it was. For the first time ever she wished that Dryden was at home. She lit a candle and began to walk slowly down the stairs. A draught from under the front door blew the candle out when she was halfway down and somehow she missed her footing and fell the remaining steps. Within seconds she was lying in the darkness at the bottom and the pain had started up again insistently. She concentrated on breathing until it went away and then she got to her feet carefully and then it struck again and this time it was like a dagger inside and Esther Margaret came to her knees and then doubled up over it.

When it stopped she willed herself to crawl as far as the door, and then she pulled herself up and opened the door and when the night air came rushing inside she began to shout. She shouted and shouted. Was it so late that everybody was in bed? If it was that late Dryden would soon be home. He would come back, the pain would go away. Somebody would hear her.

*

When Dryden awoke the first thing he heard was the rain. He opened his eyes and there beside him was Dora Sims. She looked so old. She was not young and beautiful like Esther Margaret, but she was smiling at him.