The Valley (41 page)

In the spring of 1970 they rent a one-bedroom flat, smart and clean with new Scandinavian-style furniture, above the dentist’s in Goldthorpe. Lynda gets a job as the dentist’s receptionist – her own desk at last. The dentist even allows her to reorganise the office. ‘I couldn’t ask for any more, really,’ she tells her mam.

On Wednesday afternoons, her half-day off, she tidies and cleans the flat. A few months after they have moved in, she is cleaning the windows and watching the pit buses come up Doncaster Road for the change­over of the shifts. The lights change, and as the traffic slows to a stop the top deck of one of the buses is almost level with her window, blocking her view of the Co-op opposite. Through a thin white film of Windolene she looks without really seeing into the bus, and notices John.

He must still be working at Highgate pit then, she thinks. He appears to be looking at the flat, not into the window but just staring at the upper floors of the building. She feels a pang, and allows herself the guilty indulgence of imagining a conversation with him. She knows he is married and that Susan is pregnant, but it would still be funnier and more intimate than most of her conversations with Geoff, even now, after three years of not speaking to each other. Geoff isn’t much interested in talking any more anyway. He goes out at night with his friends from home, and stopped asking her to come with him when they moved into the flat.

She stares at John, thinking he might not have seen her, willing him to smile or acknowledge her, but the bus pulls off, and he slides past her and away. She polishes the window hard.

The following Wednesday afternoon the bus goes by again. John is in the same seat. The bus doesn’t pull up this time, but she sees his head turned towards the flat, looking, looking, looking, but not acknowledging her. She smiles, and gives him a small, modest wave. He does not wave back.

It is the same the next week and the one after, and on most weeks after that, John always in the same seat, always looking over but never waving, like a memory come to life in front of her.

*

Geoff goes out by himself three times a week. One night Lynda looks down from the bedroom window and watches him getting out of a car with a woman in the driving seat. ‘She’s nobody,’ he says when Lynda asks who she was. ‘Just a lass who gave me a lift home, I can’t even remember what she’s called. Why are you asking?’

‘Because of the way you creep in after midnight and avoid talking about where you’ve been,’ she would like to say, but instead she just shrugs and tries to believe in his hurt innocence. She keeps believing when he takes up karate classes in Mexborough, and when he comes home and doesn’t make eye contact with her, but then one karate night in the autumn of 1971 she questions him and he admits he has been seeing his old girlfriend from home. There have been others. Lynda tells him to sort it out. He says he is going for a drink, and storms out of the house.

Alone in the flat Lynda realises that unless she decides she deserves better, no one else will decide it for her. She switches off the TV, and listens to the flat’s ticking quietness and the night-time whooshes of the cars on the road outside, thinking.

Then she goes to the bedroom, puts a few clothes in a suitcase, and walks back to her mam’s.

The following evening Geoff comes to beg her to come home. When she says no, he cries. She looks at him and feels nothing, as if she doesn’t know him. On her next half-day, she goes to see a solicitor about getting a divorce.

*

Lynda moves back in to her old room at Number 34, with its Cliff Richard and Elvis posters, and concentrates on work. A career rewards you reliably and fairly, she thinks; better to study for qualifications than to entertain deceitful men buying you drinks and giving you easy compliments. She reorganises the dentist’s office again and at lunchtimes scans the ads in the
Barnsley Chronicle
for secretarial courses.

Beryl Tasker, a friend from the sewing factory, is also looking for a course, and they meet up to talk about studying and career plans, and just to have a conversation without men butting in. She keeps her dealings with men to a minimum now, afraid that her bad judgement will lead to her being hurt again. Beryl tells her not to blame herself for John and Geoff’s actions, but then, Beryl is happily married.

‘You get a good marriage by making t’ right decisions about men, Beryl,’ says Lynda. ‘And I make t’ wrong ones.’

Beryl says it’s just bad luck. ‘Something’ll come along,’ she says. ‘Sometimes things are mapped out for you, you know.’

Beryl’s next-door neighbour is a young divorcee called Tony Grainger. He calls one evening when Lynda is visiting to borrow a cup of sugar, and while Beryl makes him coffee he talks to Lynda in the sitting room. He is in his early thirties, dark and thick set. His manner is a little hesitant but his conversation is sophisticated and interesting: politics, books that he is reading, his job on the railways, his time studying at Ruskin College, Oxford. One subject flows into another, and he listens to her opinions and makes her feel intelligent. As he leaves he asks if she’d like to go out for a drink to carry on their discussion. His shyness and his age put her at ease.

‘Alright,’ she says. ‘Why not?’

In public Tony is more diffident. He and Lynda’s dates are in quiet pubs in Bolton-upon-Dearne or at Tony’s house, where they watch documentaries on TV. His main source of friends is the Fellowship of the Services, and at the local branch’s social evenings in the saloon bars of quiet pubs he introduces Lynda to men he met while on National Service, and to other ex-servicemen and their wives. These evenings out are not exciting, but in private Tony is all romance. His gifts of flowers and boxes of chocolates flatter her, and his age and physical bulk make her feel safe. The onerousness of making decisions falls away from her, because she gives up and leaves it all to him. She forgets about secretarial courses, and takes Tony up to meet her mam and dad. He is awkward around them, and makes an ugly joke about men keeping women in check by threatening to smash their faces in.

‘I’ll smash your face in if you talk to our Lynda like that,’ says Winnie. ‘And that’s not a threat, it’s a promise.’

When he leaves, Winnie is pessimistic. ‘I don’t know about him, Lynda. When he walked in this house, I had a feeling like cold water running down my back.’

‘Here she goes,’ says Harry. ‘Get t’ bloody ouija board out and see if he’s put a curse on us.’

‘Don’t joke about ouija boards. I’m just telling you what I felt.’

‘He’s fine, Mam,’ says Lynda. ‘We’re just enjoying ourselves for t’ time being. We’re all right.’

*

They are all right until May, when Lynda realises she is pregnant. When she tells Tony he just stares at her.

‘No,’ he says, ‘I am bloody well not happy. I think you should get yourself off and do summat about it.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I just can’t. It’s not as simple for me as it is for you.’

He bangs out of the house and returns fifteen minutes later with a bottle of gin. ‘Here.’ He holds it out to her. ‘Now get upstairs and run a hot bath.’

‘I’ll do no such thing. We’re having a baby, Tony. You’ll have to get used to it.’

He lays on the settee in the sitting room and sulks. Lynda thinks he will be happy once he accepts the news.

She moves into his house, a shabby semi whose atmosphere now seems dismal. A few years ago his mother died in one of the bedrooms, and before that his father had gassed himself in the kitchen. Tony expresses little discernible emotion when he tells these stories.

In July 1972, without telling anyone, they drive to Doncaster and marry at the register office where Winnie and Harry were married. No cake, no flowers, no photographs; when they remember they need witnesses, they ask two strangers off the street. In the afternoon they drive up the A1 to the Thorp Arch trading estate, just for somewhere to go. They wander around shops that sell Dralon suites, self-assembly furniture and Japanese music centres, and then have sausage rolls and coffee in the small self-service café.

‘Well!’ says Lynda, looking at the pale pastries on their plates and smiling. ‘Is this the wedding tea then, do you think?’

He meets her gaze, but does not reply.

Back at home, he complains about having to move furniture for the baby’s things. He can’t find his books, he says; his watch has been moved. Why can’t she leave well alone? She’s a stupid bag, buying the wrong food, watching rubbish on the television, putting too many blankets on their flaming bed. Every day he seems angrier. In the past, when he talked to her about politics, he had said that vulnerable people should fight for justice against their oppressors but, she notes, he doesn’t extend the principle to home and his pregnant wife. He had told her before that his mother, to whom he, the eldest of four children, had deferred, hated the idea of women working, and believed that they had a moral duty to stay at home to look after their husbands and children. Lynda, however, had not understood until now that he also took this as a model for marriage. After all, for men he demanded equality and freedom; it made no sense until you understood, as she now began to, how radical men could be so conservative about their homes and families. His mam had made sacrifices in the 1930s, so Lynda should make them too. To enforce this he denies her housekeeping money and tries to stop her friends coming to the house.

An old school mate called Lucy McGrevy lives nearby, and is also pregnant. When she calls round to compare experiences with Lynda, Tony is cross. ‘You want to tell her to keep away,’ he advises, when Lucy leaves. ‘That woman fills your head full of rubbish. She’s evil.’

‘But she’s only telling me what’s happened to women she knows. What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s all lies,’ he says, and then recounts stories that his mother told him which contradict Lucy and expose her as a deceitful scaremonger.

The baby is due in February, so at Christmas, Lynda gives up work, which makes Tony happy. When she waddles in with her box of stationery, pens and dentist-surgery-scented mementoes, he says, ‘I’m relieved you’re out of that place. You should be at home.’ At home looking after him, is what he means. Within a week he is demanding that his tea is served more punctually, and that she improves her cleaning of the house.

When she goes into labour in the early hours of 22 February, Tony stays in bed because he has work the following day, and Beryl sits up with her until Lynda calls an ambulance. Just after midnight she gives birth to a baby boy with a mop of blond hair and, says the midwife, the loudest cry in the hospital.

At visiting time Tony hardly speaks; he is even silent on the subject of names, leaving it to Winnie to propose Lynda’s eventual choice, Karl. Back at home he is uninterested in caring for the baby, and as these milky, anxious and raw-eyed newborn days wear on, his sullenness curdles to disgruntled, unpredictable aggression towards his wife. He becomes petulant about the cold, slapdash meals and untidied shelves and the keys he cannot find in the sideboard. He wants to know why she needs to take Karl out so often. Why do her friends spend half their lives in their house, eating the food he pays for? What does she want to be going out with friends for, leaving Karl with him? A proper mother wouldn’t even want to do that. If Beryl or Lucy visits, he picks an argument with Lynda afterwards, and when Lynda goes to visit anyone, he starts on her when she gets home. If she argues back he bangs on tables, or stalks out of the house slamming doors shut behind him. Soon he is knocking over chairs and punching ornaments from the mantelpiece.

*

A year passes. Karl learns to walk, and Lynda learns to avoid the subjects that inflame Tony. In October 1974, Clara, who had been an ally and a comfort to her in Bolton-upon-Dearne, dies after a short illness, leaving Lynda a little more isolated; Tony hardly acknowledges the death or his wife’s upset. She hears that John Burton has left Highgate pit and moved his family to Coventry, where he works as a chef at a Forte hotel. She thinks of him often, but hopes he is happy with his wife and children.

Lucy McGrevy still inspires Tony’s most violent loathing – simply, it appears, for being Lynda’s friend. To reduce his rages Lynda stops seeing her, and for two months Tony is calmer. Thinking his antipathy has mellowed, Lynda invites Lucy to visit one Saturday afternoon and ushers her into the sitting room where Tony is reading
The Times
and Karl is playing on the carpet. When he sees Lucy, Tony stands up and shouts, ‘Don’t you come in here! I don’t want you here, causing alarm and despondency. She doesn’t want to see you.’

‘But I’m her friend, Tony,’ says Lucy.

‘She doesn’t need friends,’ he says. ‘Go.’

Lucy glances at Lynda. Lynda looks at the door, and with guilty eyes says: best go, he might throw something.

She goes. Lynda watches her friend walk out of the house, and feels as if someone is squeezing the air and blood from her body. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘Because these so-called friends just make you anxious and unhappy.’ He talks to her as if she is a naughty child.

‘And can’t you let me decide that for myself?’

‘No. Because you can’t see it.’

She laughs out loud at this. ‘Who taught you how to read women’s minds then? Your mam?’

Suddenly she feels her head jerk sideways, and her cheek is smarting. He has slapped her, hard. He curses and pushes her into the kitchen, back against the cooker so that it rocks off the floor and bangs the wall. He pushes her again and walks out of the house.