Shelter from the Storm (16 page)

‘We thought she might be here.’

‘I cannot imagine why you thought so.’

‘Because she must be somewhere. She hasn’t been well since the baby died.’

There was silence at that, as though the baby had not existed for them, as though Esther Margaret had meant nothing, as though what she had done was unforgivable.

‘I must get ready for church,’ Mrs Hunter said, and left the room.

Mr Hunter looked apologetically at Vinia.

‘My wife hasn’t been the same since everything went wrong. We thought we had brought her up properly, you see. I have my position in the village to think of and …’ He smiled, almost against himself, she thought. ‘We had plans. We had a nice young man for her and …’

‘You do know what they say. Make a plan and see God laugh.’

He didn’t appreciate that, she could tell. His God obviously didn’t do much laughing of any kind that Mr Hunter could see. Esther Margaret had done no worse than many a village lass, but they obviously considered themselves far too fine for such goings-on. Mr Hunter offered no help, and it seemed pointless to stay and expect anything. Vinia could not understand such behaviour, but if this was how they had gone on with Esther Margaret then it was hardly surprising she had done wrong.

The two men were nowhere to be seen. She went back to the house in the vain hope that Esther Margaret would be there, and then she went to the neighbours, including Tom’s mother, who had the dinner on the go and said that it was nonsense for them to worry. She was, Vinia thought in disgust, more bothered about Tom coming back in time for his Christmas dinner than by the disappearance of a girl who was not in her right mind as far as she could tell.

Tom did not come back. Vinia went to everybody she could think of who might have seen something, she searched the back streets and the shop doorways and every old building where a person in distress might hide or might think of as a haven, and as the cold dark day wore on she began to lose her grip on the idea that Esther Margaret was all right and would come back. She began to cry from time to time, making herself stop but unable to hang on to any positive thought. She returned home at the end of the day to find Mary Cameron standing outside, saying agitatedly, ‘Where’s our Tom? This is disgraceful. It’s Christmas Day. The dinner is spoiled.’

She had disappeared into her house, however, by the time Tom and Dryden came back when it was late and dark. Vinia offered them food and tea. Tom ate heartily but Dryden refused with a shake of the head. He stood by the front-room fire, but Tom followed her into the kitchen.

‘Do you think she’s lost her mind, Tom?’ Vinia asked, looking anxiously up into his face.

‘I think it’s possible.’

‘Why didn’t the doctor know that?’

‘I don’t think doctors know anywhere near as much as they think they do. I’d better go round and make it up to my mother.’

‘Don’t be long.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t be.’

Even so she clutched at his coat lapel.

‘You don’t think something awful’s happened?’

Tom hesitated.

‘She’s done herself in? Maybe.’

‘Oh, God—’

‘Look, we’ve got no reason to think that yet so don’t go thinking it, and she’s hardly likely to perish in this. It’s warm,’ Tom said flatly, and off he went.

When he had gone she went into the front room. Dryden hadn’t moved. He hadn’t even sat down, though he must have been tired after the kind of day he had had.

‘Shall I make you some tea, Dryden?’ she offered for perhaps the third time.

‘No, thanks.’

Vinia looked at him, and she thought it was no wonder that people wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Even standing there in the front room of a pitman’s cottage he looked like the kind of traveller people turned away from their doors in fear and loathing, and yet in Durham she had seen them, dressed in bright colours, wearing gold, selling goods on Framwellgate Bridge. How strange, how different. The unknown. Yet Dryden was not like that at all when she looked at him the second time. Wearing dark clothes, his face hidden from her, turned towards the fire, he was just like any other pitlad except for that unruly hair, a black tangle, and something else, she wasn’t quite sure what, as though he might cast a spell, make a curse, have some power that ordinary people did not possess. If he had, she thought sensibly,
surely he would have used it in the search for Esther Margaret. He had no vision of the future, only his memories of the past, and from what she could judge they were not worth recalling.

Tom was a long time. She sat over the kitchen fire since Dryden was not inclined towards company. When Tom came back she gave him more tea.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

There’s nothing we can do before it gets light, and we covered a lot of ground today. I don’t know where else to look. We’ll have to tell the authorities tomorrow that she’s missing. Why don’t you go home? I’ll stay here with him. She might come back here or to our house.’

Vinia went home. Tom was right, the weather was unseasonally warm. There were a lot of men in the pubs judging by the noise and light coming from them, but many of the houses were in darkness, women and children having gone to bed early after such an important day. She had a faint hope that Esther Margaret would be waiting at the door, but she was not, or that at some time during the evening she would come back, but although after every sound she leaped up from her chair by the kitchen fire in false hope, nothing happened.

It was very late when Tom came home. He had to come back, he was at work the next day, but she could tell by his face that it had not been easy. Tom was sensible. Vinia was so glad to hear the voice of reason that she clung to it as if it were a person.

‘I think she’s left him. I think she’s lost her mind and gone off. I don’t think she’s dead.’

‘But where would she go, and the winter’s all to come?’

‘I’m going to go and talk to Mr Hunter tomorrow when I get back from work.’

‘He wasn’t much help today.’

‘We’ve got to do summat and I can’t think of owt else,’ Tom said, and they went to bed.

Vinia didn’t sleep. She lay there all night imagining what had happened, thinking of Esther Margaret lost up on the fell,
perhaps not even remembering that she had a home, a husband, a place to be. She imagined her dying and shuddered and turned over and breathed against Tom’s warm back. She thought about Dryden lying in bed by himself and probably thinking all the same things and possibly even more, and how he was responsible and what he had done. Maybe he didn’t feel like that — there were an awful lot of men in the village who would not have thought it was their fault no matter what happened, that Esther Margaret had nobody but herself to blame.

*

Sometimes Esther Margaret thought she could hear her baby crying. She would search and search but she could not find it. Sometimes she thought she could feel the child still inside her, as though it were alive and she could feel it moving, and there was a great emptiness where the child had been. She could not bear it. It was as though she had been enclosed in her own secret world where nothing could get to her, nothing could happen. There was herself and the child and the pain, but she would rather have that than anything else. Nobody’s voice must get inside, nobody much touch her, and they were fussing, their voices floated past her at the window when all she wanted to do was look outside at where the road went away beyond the village. Somewhere past it she would see her baby.

Vinia fussed. She was always there, talking and doing things and wanting Esther Margaret to do things, and she did not understand that the baby had absorbed and needed all her attention. She grew tired of Vinia and her fussing and of the tall dark man who said nothing much but who would sleep beside her, taking up a great deal of room. All she wanted was to sing to her baby, and they would not leave her alone to do so. The doctor who came was a fool who talked about things that she did not understand, which had nothing to do with her, and Esther Margaret became very tired of them all and she watched the road and then she understood. She did not have to stay there.
The road beckoned to her, leading away somewhere else. It occurred to her that they would try to stop her, she was not quite sure why, and the more she thought about it the more she convinced herself that they must think she had died. She spent a long time trying to compose a note but in the end all it said was ‘I can’t stand any more. I must end it. Forgive me. Esther Margaret’. After she was satisfied that it conveyed her meaning despite its brevity, she could not think where to put it. If she left it somewhere obvious they might find it too quickly and then they would do everything they could to bring her back. She wandered about the house trying to think of somewhere to leave it, and in the end she opted for the little box on the kitchen mantelshelf where the money was kept. That would give her some time to make her escape.

She took few clothes and little money so that it would not look as though she hoped for anything beyond death, and she hid this under the bed and in the very early winter’s morning when he was still asleep beside her she crept from the house in the quiet darkness and walked away from the village, following the road that she had watched in the days after her baby had left her alone there.

Dryden went to the pit office that first day to report that his wife was missing and he was surprised to find Joe’s face pale and by the fact that he immediately offered to help. Several times during the meeting Joe began to say something, his face darkening with anger, and then he stopped himself and instead of that he organised men to help with the search. The weather became worse after that first day. It wasn’t snow, it was sleet, hard and wet, which went on day and night, finally freezing hard on the third night so that when Dryden came back in after searching all day he stood by the kitchen fire and wanted to cry.

Vinia was there so he couldn’t. She had been coming and going from his wretched house for so long now that she was like part of the furniture. The bare house shone from her labours. There was always hot water and hot food. Dryden was happy to have the hot water but he couldn’t eat.

‘You haven’t eaten in four days,’ she pointed out. ‘You can’t go on like this.’

‘It isn’t that I don’t want to, it’s just that I can’t. It won’t go down.’ He glanced at the window. ‘Nobody could survive in this.’

‘She probably isn’t out in this,’ Vinia said stoutly. ‘She’ll have got away somewhere and be safe, I’m sure she will. I hate to ask this but I need some money for things for the house—’

‘I told you, take it. It’s in there.’

She took the little box down from the mantelshelf and opened it and after that there was nothing but the crackling and moving of the fire.

‘Dryden …’ There was something funny about her voice, it wobbled and was much quieter than usual, and it made him turn away from the fire towards her and the piece of paper in her hands which she was staring at in horrified fascination. She seemed to read it several times before holding it out to him, and he took it from her and read it again and again, and he kept on hoping that it would disappear or that it could be those few moments before she had found it. He had thought that nothing could get any worse, but now he discovered that it could. Hope was gone. In the back of his mind there had existed a small picture of them finding her and of there being a reasonable explanation for what she had done, even that she would get her mind back and that in some way they would manage to do better. He had kept clutched to him this idea, that she would come home to him and that he would have learned from it all and would become a much better husband, that they could make a real home together, live as married people, gather around them precious things. He would not drink or mistreat her any more and she would be kind to him and they would have some sort of future that he could bear to think about and it would get better.

The note did away with any of those ideas. Esther Margaret was dead. She had killed herself and it was his doing. Somehow he felt as though the world had stopped, as though nobody had got any older since Vinia had picked the note out of the box. He couldn’t move. Esther Margaret was seventeen years old and she was dead. Vinia was looking anxiously at him as though he might drop down dead too. Tom came in; he had been seeing his mother, who was barely speaking to him because he had not been there for his dinner on Christmas Day and Tom kept going over every evening to mollify her. He looked from one to the other and Dryden handed him the note.

‘Well, that means we can call off the search, then, doesn’t it?’ Over the last few days Dryden had come to love Tom’s sensible tones. ‘I’ll go and see Mr Forster first thing in the morning and tell the police.’ He wished that Tom would tell him that it was not all his fault; he might try to believe him. Anything was better than this dreadful guilt which he could not get away from. It was like carrying a boulder on his back. He went to work day after day and was glad of it; working was so much easier than being at home. Tom tried to persuade him to the pub but Dryden wouldn’t go, and Vinia was busy looking after Tom so Dryden spent his free time sitting over the kitchen fire, wondering what his young wife had done to end her life, waiting for news of any kind, trying to get used to the idea that he would never see her again and reliving over and over the wrongs that he had done.

There was no news of any kind; the winter days pushed past one another and the weather worsened. Vinia came every day to look after him but there really was little to do. In his mind Dryden painted a picture of Esther Margaret not dead, entertained a faint hope that she would come back and relieve him of these dreadful feelings of responsibility, but nothing happened. On his free days he walked the fell, and when he was at home he took to sleeping a great deal, which distanced him from the problems. It seemed to him that Vinia was always coming in and finding him nodding over the fire, and he would hear the door and pretend that he had been awake all the time. She had taken to making food at her house and bringing it to him between two plates and then putting it into the oven to reheat, and he tried to eat it because she had gone to such a lot of trouble but it was always difficult.