Shelter from the Storm (4 page)

Mary Cameron had spent the last eighteen years trying to make up for the biggest scandal in the village, that she had let some passing gypsy put her down and force her, resulting in a child. Vinia could not imagine any woman getting herself into such a stupid situation. Having been assaulted in the church, Mary had not been near it since, but that was not a problem in terms of the wedding. Vinia was a Methodist and they would be married in the chapel. That was another reason she didn’t like Tom drinking, but since he didn’t do it often she could not complain. Most of the young men got drunk a lot more often than Tom did, and although she had tried to look favourably upon the young men who went to chapel the fact was that she found them rather dull.

Alf, Tom’s father, didn’t drink, but he was no asset to the conversation since he had fallen asleep by the fire and it was left to Mary to go over for perhaps the hundredth time what Saturday would be like. Vinia wasn’t listening. She wished Tom was sober enough to come downstairs.

‘Our Tommy won’t want you to go on working you know, Vinia, after you’re wed.’

Tom had in fact said nothing to her about her job, but Vinia was in no doubt that his mother thought it beneath her dignity to work at Miss Applegate’s women’s clothing shop. In fact she hated it, but she was not about to give in to Tom’s mother over anything. She put up with the work because what she wanted more
than anything in the world after Tom was her own shop, and she had learned through being there what to do and what not to do. She had no money and you could not start up a shop without it, but she dreamed of her name above the door. On bad days she dreamed of Miss Applegate dying and leaving her the shop.

‘Looking after a pitman is a full-time job,’ his mother was saying, sitting back in her chair. Vinia wished she could get up and walk out. She didn’t argue; she had no intention of doing so, she had won every battle so far and she was not going to give in. They would keep on living in her little house with all her possessions and she would go on working at least until they had a child. She could not imagine what that would be like, and lately had taken to watching women with small children and feeling that it was something she would very much like. She could see herself and Tom and a baby; it would be perfect.

She heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs and soon Tom came down looking very much as she imagined he would look in the early mornings. It did things to her inside, his hair all over and his eyes narrowed from sleep, and then she remembered that she was not pleased with him.

‘I was telling Vinia, Tommy, that you’ll not want her to go on working at that shop after next week.’

‘Vinny knows that.’ When he called her Vinny — he was the only person in the world who did — Vinia usually felt all soft and squashy inside, but today she didn’t. They had not discussed her work at the shop, he had no right to take for granted what she would do, but Vinia did not want to argue with him in front of his mother. He sat down and his mother ran about after him. That was something else which would change. Tom did nothing at home other than tip up his money. To give Mary Cameron her due she had not mentioned that she was losing his wage.

‘I’ll be able to provide everything we need.’

Vinia smiled at him where he sat at the tea table and Tom looked back at her, making her think of what was to come. Tom’s kisses could drive her out of her mind. When he had eaten he
walked her back to her house, along Dan’s Castle and down the bank and up the main street until they came to the Variety, and in through the small dark passage and then out into her yard.

‘Will you come in?’ she said.

‘I’d better not.’ He looked at her for a few seconds and then he got hold of her and kissed her hard. Vinia broke off.

‘Tom …

‘What?’

‘Do you really mind about the shop?’

‘What?’ Tom’s mind was not on the shop, it was on her completely; she could tell.

‘The shop.’

‘Who cares about the bloody shop?’ Tom kissed her again. Swearing was another thing she wished he didn’t do, but at least he controlled himself in front of his precious mother.

‘Don’t you care?’

‘No, I don’t.’ He kissed her harder and then made himself draw away. It was one of the things she liked best about him; Tom had restraint, he would not touch her until they were married. ‘I’m going,’ he said, and she watched him turn and walk away down the passage back to the main street. She went into her house, and it was then that it occurred to her it would be the last time she ever did so alone. This time next week she would be Mrs Tom Cameron. What a fine sound it had. She would no longer be alone by her fire or at her table or in her bed. In her bed. The thought made her face go warm and she took off her coat and began to attend to the fire.

*

When Esther Margaret got home in the dim light of early evening her mother came into the hall with a concerned look on her face, whispering, ‘Wherever have you been?’

‘Just outside.’

‘You’ve been gone ages. I had to give them their tea without you.’

Esther Margaret tried not to look too hard at the place where Billy Robson had got her into the dark corner and put his hands on her breasts. She thought about Dryden instead, the soft sweet taste of his lips. It seemed a very long time since that morning when she and Joe had talked outside the church. She had come a long way since then, and nothing that had happened, except those few minutes when Dryden had repaired what Billy had done, was pleasant to her mind.

‘I felt sick. I had to go outside.’

‘You could have said.’

Esther Margaret, for the first time ever, found herself wishing that her mother was a little less naive about men. She had learned more about life in the past few hours than in a great many months preceding them, and her mother had been no support at all. After Billy and his parents turned up the minute dinner was over she saw that her mother was trying to manoeuvre her and that her father was in on it too because he carefully avoided looking at her and greeted the Robsons with false joviality. Criticising her parents had not come naturally to Esther Margaret before, but now she even felt like boasting to her mother that she had let the worst young man in the village kiss her. It made her shiver just to think of it. It was undoubtedly the sweetest thing that had ever happened to her. It put her beyond Billy Robson and his nasty wandering hands and his supercilious smile, and as for Joe … She could never have Joe, she saw that. That was the hardest thing of all, because the day had taught her that she loved him and she felt bitter about it all, bitter enough to acknowledge that she had in fact encouraged Dryden Cameron to kiss her because her instincts had told her that he was not like Billy. How had she known that, not having been near him or even spoken to him before? Something had told her that Dryden was careful, adept, had learned a good many hard lessons such as those she had learned today. He knew things that other people didn’t and she wanted … yes, she wanted him to kiss her again. It was not love, but neither was it what Billy Robson had tried to
do. Dryden would not have done such a thing in a thousand years.

She went into the sitting room and was polite to Billy and his parents. She watched him, found in his smile a smirk, and she hardened her heart against him and hated him. It was a strange feeling. She had had no need to hate anyone before. He had destroyed something, spoiled her view of the world, and it could not be altered back into anything better. He looked to her so ordinary, so dull with his dark little face and his piggy little eyes and his awful wandering hands. He had not looked like that before. When she had gone to the shop where he was her father’s assistant he was always helpful and smiling, she had even liked him, but he had followed her out of the room and taken hold of her without her consent and in those few moments she had ceased to be a girl.

It was strange. It did not seem as though anything else had altered, but it was as though the beat of her own heart had taken on another rhythm unheard by her parents or their company, as if she had stepped outside her life or beyond them and would not feel in accord with them again. She smiled and said the right things and let her parents believe that all was as it had started out but it was not. When they had finally gone she sat by the fire with a book and pretended to read until it was time for bed, and when she could at last excuse herself she was relieved, glad to go upstairs and undress and wash and fall into bed. She was exhausted, and still had a faint hope that she would wake up in the morning and it would be Sunday again, that this had not happened and she had the day to look forward to. She would start it off at the end of the service when she was standing outside the church and Joe had come up to her and her spirits had lifted and she would keep it there, frozen in time like a painting, herself and Joe, making conversation and smiling at one another in an unconscious bond. She could begin again and this time it would be different.

Saturday was overcast. It did not rain but the sky was heavy all day and it looked as if it might. The sun failed to shine and Vinia was only glad that the chapel was on the street not far from Tom’s house and not all the way down a narrow little lane like the parish church. Esther Margaret was to be her bridesmaid. She was the only young woman Vinia knew well. She had no friends, she didn’t understand why; it was just that other women did not seem to be as she was or want the things she wanted, though that didn’t make sense because she was marrying Tom and had a home. Esther Margaret sometimes came into the shop and bought things, though Vinia wasn’t sure why because the Store had a more than adequate clothing department, better than Miss Applegate’s. She thought Esther Margaret came in for the company, and if Miss Applegate had gone upstairs, as she did often, or had gone out, as she didn’t often, Esther Margaret would stay and chat.

Vinia privately thought the shop was in the wrong place because the Store was almost next to it and the clothing department had a manageress and two assistants and she could not see what Miss Applegate wanted with help, though naturally she was grateful for the money. Her parents had been dead for years and she had to make her own way. One of the reasons she had wanted to marry Tom was so as not to have to make her own way in the future. There was something subdued about the shop.
Miss Applegate loomed from the shadows inside like a large grey mouse. Beneath the counter, out of sight, were ladies’ undergarments, and hanging up, doing their own advertising, were dresses and shawls. Shoes sat solitary in boxes and the shop was all grey and brown and the sunshine was not allowed in in case it damaged everything.

It seemed to her that Miss Applegate never got any older because she had always been that old. The shop had been her father’s, and her parents had lived as she did now above the shop. She led the kind of life which would have frightened anybody else into marrying the first lad who bothered to look in their direction. Miss Applegate boasted that no man had ever walked over the threshold of the shop. Vinia could believe it; there was something stagnant about the place. Miss Applegate didn’t pay much and the work was not hard but it was boring. Vinia longed for there to be exciting things to sell and to be asked to alter the windows so that they would attract attention but every time she made a suggestion Miss Applegate turned it down. Since she was small Vinia had made drawings of clothes she would have liked to have worn, clothes she began to make. She would go to the market and buy material and second-hand stuff and would fashion smart clothes for herself. She even made hats, and as time went on she designed clothes and hats for other people for special occasions, weddings and parties.

For her own wedding Vinia had made for herself a costume in grey with tiny white stitching and a hat to match. She was pleased when she saw her reflection in the mirror, and even more pleased when Esther Margaret called for her on the way to chapel. Esther Margaret’s father was to give Vinia away. She didn’t know him well but she had no one else. She was reassured by the sight of Tom waiting for her at the top of the aisle, and the minister, whom she knew quite well since she went there every Sunday, who was smiling. Many people were there whom she did not know; they liked to go to see any girl in the village married. Afterwards there was to be a gathering in the hall
behind the chapel. Mary Cameron cried profusely and said that things would never be the same again within Vinia’s hearing, which she didn’t think tactful, but then his mother couldn’t help it. Tom was the only son she had. You couldn’t count that dreadful boy everybody ignored. He had had a good home with the Harmers in Oaks Row, the best street in the village, and he had run away when he was twelve. When Mr Harmer had gone after him Dryden had turned and knocked him into the road. He had lived at Mrs Clancy’s ever since. Mrs Clancy was not the kind of woman respectable people bothered with. It was rumoured that she drank and was given to telling off-colour jokes to her lodgers when under the influence of gin.

Vinia had a smile and a word with everyone, including Joe Forster, who was automatically invited to everything that went on in the village. She liked him. He was as unlike his father as anybody could be, and the villagers were pleased at that, but he was also the very spit of his mother, and she had been the most useless woman in the area, apparently, so it was surprising that Joe was so nice. He had brought them a wedding gift, a gravy boat, silver, he assured them. He had undoubtedly taken it from some dark cupboard in his house because it could have done with a good polish, but it was nevertheless a handsome gift and Vinia was pleased with it. She couldn’t imagine Joe needing such things if gossip was anything to go by, with nobody but that horrible old man to look after them both.

*

As the afternoon went on the day brightened up a little and Esther Margaret ventured outside. There were so many people in the hall, and she had had a very confusing week. She hadn’t been able to think clearly about anything, even after almost six days. She stood outside in the cold wind and was not aware of Joe behind her until he said her name. She turned around, remembering Billy and backing off slightly and then conscious of doing so, colouring, wishing she could run away, almost in tears.