Shelter from the Storm (22 page)

‘Don’t interfere.’

‘Just let go.’

Tom did. He got Dryden up against the nearest wall, both hands at his throat.

‘This is my house. You are the lodger. You are not my brother. You are just some bastard’s leavings. Do you understand?’

He pulled Dryden away from the wall and banged him up against it again and tightened the grip on his throat when Dryden didn’t answer.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

Dryden slid down the wall when Tom let go of him. Tom turned back to Vinia and got hold of her and he hit her so hard that she fell and it was as if the whole world had exploded. The impact of his hand was savage and the room going past was terrifying and she screamed and then fell and everything was dulled. From far off she could hear the sounds of them fighting and she knew that she must get up and stop them. This was nothing to do with Dryden, he shouldn’t have interfered, he shouldn’t have got in the way. If she had known what was going to happen she would have waited until he went out to tell Tom, though Tom was hardly ever there whereas Dryden was there a lot so she didn’t know when that would have happened. She tried to get up but the room was far off and even though she badly wanted to stop them because she could hear what was happening she couldn’t.

She heard the sound of breaking furniture and vaguely wondered what it was — the table, the chairs? They had belonged to her mother, she valued them. Tom was swearing, he always swore when he was angry, and she had never seen him more angry than this. She tried to shout at him to stop but the words wouldn’t come out, and the noise went on and on until she thought they must have demolished the whole house and by now somebody must be hurt. The din in her ears was horrible. And then Tom came over to her and he didn’t look as if he was hurt and he got hold of her and pulled her up and he said, ‘I’m going out now and when I come back I want this whole place tidied up
and put right and I want you in bed and I want that scum off my floor.’

She could stand when he was holding her but he didn’t go on holding her so that when he let go she slid back on to the rug. Things were clearer. Tom slammed the door when he went out and the room stilled after the shuddering had stopped.

There was very little left of the kitchen. Broken crockery was all over the floor because she had not cleared the table and the teapot had spilled its brown contents down the side of the table. The chairs were in pieces and there was glass out of the kitchen dresser, broken and littered everywhere, and the ornaments from the sideboard which stood along the back wall were all gone. But the worst thing was the way that Dryden was lying in the middle of the room, not moving. She was too afraid to go to him. She kept willing him to get up, she kept waiting for the clock to turn back because this was not his fight, it was nothing to do with him and he shouldn’t have interfered, but it didn’t matter how long she went on looking at him, he didn’t move, until she was afraid that he was dead, face down, all angles and torn clothes.

It took her a long time to get to her feet and cover the short distance to him, and then she got down beside him and said his name quietly for some reason.

‘Dryden?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Dryden, you can’t lie there. He’s coming back. If you’re still there when he comes in he’ll kill you. You’ve got to get up, you’ve just got to. Oh God, Dryden, I’m sorry.’ She started to cry from frustration. ‘Please get up. Please.’ She began to stroke his hair, and as she did so he started to come round. Vinia had never been as grateful for anything in her life as she was to discover that Tom had not murdered his brother.

*

‘Don’t cry over me,’ he said, ‘I’m not dead yet,’ and he sat up and shook himself like a dog.

It was too much for Vinia. She burst into fresh tears.

‘I don’t see why you had to interfere! You’re hurt.’

He was, bleeding profusely from his hands and face and looking accusingly at her from narrowed eyes.

‘You knew that was going to happen.’

‘I didn’t know it was going to happen to you. You could have stayed out of it.’

‘Hits you a lot, does he? Oh, Jesus.’ This because he had got to his feet.

‘He doesn’t,’ she said.

‘It’s happened before. Hasn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Yes it has.’ Dryden pulled her up and her head went dizzy. ‘At least once. More than that? How many more times?’

‘It’s happened twice,’ she said, trying to get away from him and failing because she was weak. ‘As long as I do exactly what he wants it doesn’t happen.’

Dryden looked hard at her.

‘Getting tired of doing what he wants, eh?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you!’ She pulled away. The tears seemingly were endless. ‘I love Tom.’

‘Oh yes? What do you love best about him, his bloody fists?’

Dryden started to move towards the stairs and stopped and stood, leaning against the dresser.

‘Do you need a doctor?’

‘I’ve had hidings before. I’m all right.’

He went very slowly up the stairs. Vinia began to pick up the broken crockery, the smashed ornaments. She didn’t cry over any of it because she had no more tears. She put the surviving crockery in the sink in the pantry and then she took a bowl of warm water and a soft cloth and followed him upstairs into his bedroom. He was lying sideways on the bed and he didn’t object to her attempts to clean the blood from the broken skin on his hands. The bruises were beginning to darken on his face.

The window was open in the room; it was a mild early
summer evening and soundless for some reason except for some bird twittering somewhere near.

‘I wish you hadn’t done anything,’ she said.

‘Right. He wouldn’t have knocked you around any more.’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t let him treat me like …’ She couldn’t think like what — something she didn’t want to be, that was the only way to explain it.

‘Are you going to give up?’

‘I can’t’.

Dryden lay back down again as though he couldn’t face that. She put the bowl of water down beside the bed and lay down too and stared at the ceiling. Neither of them said anything for so long that she thought he had gone to sleep, and she was aching so much that she would have quite liked the idea of going to sleep herself, except that Tom was coming back. And then Dryden said out of nowhere, ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to have Tom and the shop.’

It was the one thing she could not accept.

‘He’ll get used to it,’ she said, and then, exhausted, she turned over and went to sleep.

She woke up suddenly when she heard the front door. Night had fallen; she had no idea what time it was. As she was about to get off the bed an arm came over and stopped her.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said.

Tom crashed about down below.

‘He won’t hurt me. He’s drunk.’

‘Just wait.’

She waited, heart beating, and the crashing about stopped.

‘He’s not coming upstairs,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t when he gets really drunk. He sleeps on the settee.’

Her words proved correct. Nobody attempted to climb the stairs. She got off the bed. Dryden sat up.

‘You’re not going down there, are you?’

‘No, I’m going to bed.’

She went, but it was miserable. The full impact of what had
happened hit her just as hard as Tom had done. She couldn’t bear to think what might happen next; she was only glad that Tom had drunk so much that he couldn’t do anything. She wished she hadn’t left Dryden, it was better with him there, she wasn’t quite sure how. It took her a very long time to get to sleep and she had to get up early because they were on shift in the morning. She tiptoed into Dryden’s room. Both his eyes had darkened and closed and his face was covered in bruises so she didn’t disturb him. She went downstairs and found Tom getting up off the settee.

‘Are you going to work?’ she said.

‘Of course I’m going. Where’s that bastard?’

‘He’s hurt.’

Neither of them said anything else. She put up his bait, made him a meal and saw him off from the door. Tom even kissed her. She couldn’t believe it. Before she had time to think about it any further she went up the street to Mr Samson’s and told him that she would take the shop. He stared at the marks on her face.

‘Are you sure, Mrs Cameron?’ he said.

‘Quite sure,’ she said.

On one of her infrequent trips away Daisy came back with an old
Durham Advertiser.
She showed it to Esther Margaret.

‘They think you’re dead,’ she said.

Esther Margaret said nothing but read the article about her body being found on the fell beyond Deerness Law. She had disappeared so successfully that she no longer existed.

‘Is this what you wanted them to think?’ Daisy said in her forthright way.

‘I left a note, certainly, but …’ She began to think about Dryden being told that her body had been discovered and how he would feel. Would he be glad that she was dead? Would he think that he was better off without her? It made her uncomfortable, thinking of those last days after the baby had died. She thought he had been as unhappy as she was, and he would feel responsible that she was apparently no more. She read the article several times and then went through into the kitchen where Daisy was making tea.

‘Do you think you should go back?’ Daisy said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to. He treated me badly but … I haven’t behaved very well either, and right from the beginning …’ Right from the beginning of their marriage she had been unfair to him, she thought. She had known that what Vinia said often was not true, that Dryden had not gone with other women
during their marriage, though people might have thought him entitled to if they had known that she would not let him near her, and he had not got drunk or kept her short of money. He had tried to make his marriage work even though he had not wanted it, but she would not allow it to work and in the end, having pushed him far enough, he had done the wrong thing at exactly the right time for her to condemn him. She could see it so much more clearly at a distance.

Daisy was fussing over the teacups. Esther Margaret watched her and suddenly saw her own situation too.

‘You don’t want me to go back, do you?’

‘I think you should,’ Daisy said stoutly, ‘but how could I want you to? I was lonely here until you came and I’ll be lonely after you’ve gone, but it doesn’t stop me from knowing what the right thing to do is. You’ve got a young husband grieving over you while you’re still alive. How can it be right?’

‘He’s not very nice.’

‘No, but he’s a man for all that and he’s yours. It’s a strange thing, is a marriage — you can run away from it but it’s still there.’

‘And you don’t think I’m right to let him think I’m dead?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Daisy said, and she poured out the tea.

After that Esther Margaret spent a great deal of time thinking while she went for walks to the ruined castle. She had started walking farther. It was easier to think while you were out here. The warm weather had arrived and in the mornings the gulls were silver-winged above the sea. She was forever finding things to do, working hard at the cottage and it was so tidy that Daisy complained, always washing and ironing, and making cakes and cooking and leaving Daisy nothing to do. They had little society, and Esther Margaret was beginning to miss the company of men and the sound of their voices. Her brief romance had not lasted, it had not matured into love as she now knew some relationships did, like Daisy’s with her major. Daisy had nobody, but she had known what it was like to have a man love her, to have someone to herself, not somebody pushed into a marriage that he did not
want. Dryden had never loved her, she knew, and there was no guarantee things would be any better if she went back. She had never loved him either, nor would she in the future, she could see that too, so perhaps it was just as well to stay away.

The trouble was that she remembered him more and more clearly, the way that his body felt close to hers, and many was the time she awoke in the night and thought of the day that Joe Forster had asked her to run away with him. She could not understand why she had not done so.

On the beach that summer she saw couples walking hand in hand and young married couples with small children, and she became restless. This life that Daisy had made for herself was an old person’s life, it had nothing to do with her. The days were suddenly too long and there was little to do which was interesting. Daisy could cut herself off for hours with her reading and writing and she was content, or had made herself content.

‘Haven’t you ever thought of marrying again?’ she asked one day when they were sitting out on the grass together in front of the house and the waves were hardly breaking upon the shore, so warm and still was the day.

Daisy laughed.

‘Who would have a fat, lazy old woman like me?’

‘He’s been dead a long time, though, the major.’

Daisy hesitated, and then she looked at Esther Margaret.

‘Not to me,’ she said.

Esther Margaret went for a walk after they had drunk their tea but she was bored, and when she thought she might make a cake on her return she came back to find Daisy in the kitchen undertaking that very task, and she had to admit when they ate it that Daisy’s cakes were much better than her own. That evening she prowled the house, which had suddenly become too small and nothing to do with her, finally going into the little sitting room, which was her favourite room in the house. Daisy was sitting in her usual armchair by the window, sipping sherry and looking out across a full tide.

‘I think I ought to go back, Daisy,’ she said.

Daisy smiled, struggled out of her armchair and came across to give Esther Margaret a kiss.

‘I knew you would. It’s the right thing,’ she said.

As the summer evening shadows lengthened, Esther Margaret stood in the garden watching the fat black-and-white ducks bobbing up and down on the water. In a way she didn’t want to leave the peace, the ease and the comfort, but it was no longer the right time in her life to be here. She was beginning to feel left out, as though the world were rushing past and she was standing behind a window not taking part. In a way Daisy had died when the major had and was not in the world any longer, but Esther Margaret could feel herself getting ready to return; she could feel the strength that would enable her to do difficult things.