The Valley (61 page)

He begins to weave and wobble climbing the stairs, so John and Karl place a bed in the front room. Some nights, when he has lowered Harry into slumber, or helped him so that he can look out of the window, John stands looking at him, his face a mixture of anger and sad vexation at Harry's weakness.

‘John's an angel,' says Winnie, after John has left. ‘He's an angel to you, Harry.'

He murmurs in agreement and dozes to the low sound of the television, and the late-night traffic on the Barnsley Road.

*

Sometimes Pauline brings Harry up to the farm to allow Winnie, Lynda and John some respite. She finds old records that he gave her when she was a girl, and asks her children, teenagers now, to record them onto cassettes so that she and her dad can sit at the kitchen table listening to them on a portable cassette player. ‘
Because'
, ‘
Tiger Rag'
, ‘
Underneath the Arches'
, ‘
Play a Simple Melody'
. To some he remembers the words, to others his hands paw and paddle at the table, trying to find the beat on the snare and cymbal. When ‘
Til We Meet Again'
ends, he asks Pauline to rewind the tape and play it again, and when it stops, he asks her again, and again.

‘I love that song, Pauline. I used to sing it with your Aunty Millie.'

‘I remember,' she says, thinking how small and distant his voice sounds. He stares silently out of the kitchen window to the garden.

‘Where are you, Dad?'

He doesn't answer.

One sunny afternoon in July, she takes him with Gordon and the children to the Driffield Agricultural Show. While the rest of the family go to look at livestock, Pauline shuffles with him across the green, tented and marqueed field. Passing the main ring Harry admires a set of dray horses, and tells Pauline about feeding his snap to the pit ponies. They stop and Pauline feeds two green apples to the horse as he watches. As they set off again they hear in the distance the sound of a brass band playing. ‘Come on, Dad, let's go and listen to t' band,' says Pauline. He smiles, and their ambling walk becomes a pilgrimage, passing through country crowds and trade stands, drawn by rich, piping music. After fifteen minutes of small, slow steps, they come to a white bandstand gleaming in the sunshine. Inside men and women in neat navy uniforms, their silver buttons winking in the sunshine, are playing popular hymns on brass instruments. Harry, leaning on his dark brown walking stick, gazes at them. When Pauline looks at her dad beside her, there are tears running down his pale cheeks and falling to make small dark spots on his Rocola shirt.

*

He develops pneumonia, and spends three weeks in Barnsley Hospital. Sometimes he is vacant, other times alert, asking questions and trying to work out the controls on the portable cassette player that Pauline has lent him. He says he'll be alright once he gets out of hospital, and repeatedly tells nurses and visitors alike that Roy will soon be coming to see him. Roy tells Winnie he will try to come, but never makes it.

Winnie stays beside him every evening at visiting time, as quiet as she had been sitting on the settee during the parties at 34 Highgate Lane. Under her thick ivory-white hair, behind the pebbly lenses of her gold-framed spectacles, she is moving beyond the sweet contented period of their marriage to the bitter twist at the end; the caring and the fear as he ebbs inexorably away from her. They both seem to cast off old modesty, and touch in public more than they have before. Winnie places her hand in his, tells him that she loves him and squeezes his thumb or fingers. If he is awake he squeezes back, and then she bows to gently kiss his head.

When he comes home, he spends much of the day in his bed in the front room. Although he has lost weight, he is still a large man, and becomes discomforted and sore where his body presses against the mattress. Only John can make him comfortable. ‘Tell John to come to me,' Harry says, even when the health visitor is there, and John, being called, lays down his garden tools, or his knife and fork, or his newspaper, and comes. He moves Harry's feet to take the weight off them, lifts his body so that he doesn't hurt his arms, and places pillows and cushions under his ankles, back and shoulders to ease the pain.

‘It's wonderful what John has done for you, Harry,' says the health visitor as John stands by the bed watching. ‘Not many people would do for you what he's done.'

‘Some would,' says John.

‘Less and less, though.'

Beneath them Harry's breath labours like the slow, heavy breakers on Bridlington beach.

*

Another winter draws in. On the news, the Stock Exchange is computerised and British Gas shares are floated. The Coal Board announces that Cadeby colliery is to be closed, like Cortonwood and Yorkshire Main last year, and Mrs Thatcher gives Ian MacGregor a knighthood.

In Highgate, Winnie retires from working for Jane Seels. She has less energy, she says, and she is using much of it to care for Harry. When neither Lynda, John nor Karl can be there, she watches over him, leaning against the radiator for warmth, kept company by Sam the dog and the little gypsy girl. The gypsy girl reassures her. Yes, she says, Harry is very poorly, but they are all watching over him – his mam, his dad, old Juggler, Clara and Juggler Jane, watching him and sending him love. And I'm here to watch over you, Winnie.

One day in early December, Lynda comes round to see if her mam wants a hand with the Christmas decorations. She wheels herself through the hall and, hearing her voice in the front room, stops beside the door.

‘I always loved you, Harry,' Winnie is saying. ‘Whatever happened there was never anybody else I loved like I loved you. I loved you from the day I first set my eyes on you.'

‘– Mam?' Lynda knocks gently and pushes open the door. Harry is lying on the bed, awake but unspeaking, eyes yellow with jaundice. Waiting on him, Winnie stands making her final vows from her place by the radiator.

‘Are you all right, Mam?'

Winnie nods. ‘I was talking to your dad. He was looking at me when I was telling him. I think he was trying to say to me, “And I loved you,” but he couldn't get it out.'

*

As Christmas approaches, Harry's illness consumes the household. Olive comes to help with the nursing and John cares for him when he is not working. Every day when Winnie changes the sheets, John comes to lift Harry on to the sofa, laying him there with his thinly haired, weak-necked head resting on the white lace antimacassar. John hates his lightness. A man should weigh something, especially a man like Harry; death ought to make him heavier, not lighter. How could his life seem to weigh so little?

Sometimes when John returns home, he sits in the kitchen, staring, inwardly raging about Harry's condition. ‘They say life's cruel,' he says to Lynda one evening. ‘I never really knew what they meant until now.'

In the early evening of 28 December, Harry wakes from a long sleep, and shifts uncomfortably in the bed. He looks up at Winnie. ‘Will tha get John?' he says. ‘Ask him to come and make me comfortable?'

John arranges Harry's bedding, body and sheets to remove the pressure, as he has learned to do for Lynda. ‘All right, old lad?' he says when he is finished. ‘Can I get thee owt else?'

Harry reaches out a hand to stay him and, wheezing, beckons him closer. John comes close to the bed so that their two heads are almost touching.

‘What's up, Harry?'

He looks at him, locks him with his eyes, and says, ‘Thank you, John. Thank you for everything.'

Harry dies the following morning. Olive knocks at John and Lynda's back door with the news. The three of them walk along the backings in the cold, winter morning light to find Harry semi-upright in the bed, still and pale in the dimness of the curtained room. His wife is upstairs, sleeping.

After the doctor has briefly attended and Olive has gone upstairs to wake Winnie, and after Lynda has called the undertaker, it is John who lays out the body. In the silence he disconnects the catheter and lays the limbs out, straightening the arms and legs and drawing down the eyelids. Finally, he places a hand beneath the pale, whiskery jaw and gently closes Juggler's gap-toothed grin. ‘Goodnight, Harry.'

63 I've Got Somebody Here Who Wants to See You

Highgate, 1987

After the funeral, once the adjustable bed has been removed from the front room, the pale and flowery cards cleared from the sideboard, and Harry's LP records, cufflinks and tiepins distributed among his grandchildren, Winnie is left living alone for the first time in her life. Her aloneness, though, is chiefly a matter of household arrangements and what other people see. What she feels is not solitude but a companionable haunting: she senses Harry's presence in the shifting airs of the house, and hears him in floor creaks, waterpipe judders and latch rattles. Coming home with a quarter of tongue and a bread loaf, she sees him seated in the corner playing a trumpet to a stray Yorkshire terrier. In bed she is woken by him, Danny and Sonny at the back door, singing. From the kitchen window she sees him at the garden gate, joking with men on their way to the allotments. This is not his spirit, the little gypsy girl tells her, just her memories. Harry has passed over now, and if people don't believe in Spirit, they cannot come back to see you. He will come one day, to fetch her. Until then, she must make do with her unspeaking memories.

These memories are now edited and recast by Winnie into scenes of unbroken love and contentment. Old arguments and betrayals become challenges that were overcome by their unchanging mutual devotion, all irritations are forgotten, and Harry's knife-and-fork crockery percussion is recalled with the sighs of a lovelorn nineteen-year-old. It is as if she can now love him with the saved-up love she found unwanted when they first married, half a century of withheld words and tears now released and overwhelming her. Of all Winnie's loves, this widow's reverence may not be the most fierce, but it is the most ardent, impassioned and pure.

Pauline and Lynda are gobsmacked. Was their mam trying to make herself believe she and Harry had always loved each other in spite of their differences, or could it in some way be true? Winnie had once told Pauline that it was hard to change how you felt about things once you were past forty, but she seems to be achieving that now with respect to their dad. Not only that, as Lynda says; her new happy-families version of Hollingworth history wishes away all the hostility that preceded Winnie's conversion to the cause of John.

Sometimes after listening to hours of forlorn and fanciful nostalgia, Lynda has to check an impulse to reprove her mam for her stories.

‘I talk to him every night in my mind, you know,' Winnie tells her as they eat their teas with John and Karl.

‘I know, Mam. You will do, after all those years.'

‘I wish he'd come to fetch me.'

‘Don't be daft. Come on, there's no point talking like that .
.
.'

‘I do. There's nowt for me here now.'

‘Mam .
.
.' Lynda manages to damp down the exasperation in her voice and sound sympathetic, and privately she imagines, somewhere out in the spirit circles, Harry rolling his eyes, adjusting his tie in the mirror and going out for a pint to escape his wife's mithering.

*

Although Harry is not ready to come back and take her away, another once-awaited rescuer is. One Saturday afternoon, Lynda is at home tidying away the dinner pots when the phone rings. It is Maureen, one of her cousins on her dad's side of the family.

‘Ayup, Lynda,' says Maureen. She sounds hesitant. ‘I've got somebody here who wants to see you. Can he come up?'

Maureen's tone gives nothing away, but even so Lynda knows immediately who it is. She feels a light wave of nausea. ‘Yes,' she says. ‘Yes, alright. Bring him to my mam's.' Just when you're settled, she thinks: just when your mam's improving, your family's alright, and your work's going well. Last weekend they had a little party to cheer themselves up. Karl and his friends had raced up and down the garden paths in her wheelchair, and as she watched them she had felt they were all moving on nicely. And now out of nowhere this; the visitor who wants to see her.

She calls her mam, brushes her hair in the mirror, and wheels herself along the backings to Winnie's back garden gate, where she waits.

When she sees him walking down the backings in his light overcoat and grey suit, her first thought is that he looks younger than she expected. Her second is that he looks a bit like Harry. But then he is a Hollingworth, after all.

‘Hello,' she says.

‘Hello,' he replies. ‘I'm Alf, love. It's good to meet you.'

Over the years since she first told Lynda about Alf, Winnie has loosed enough fragments and details for her to put together the whole story. She knows about his leaving and his promise to return, and all about his character and feelings for her mam. She knows about the features and mannerisms, all fondly described by Winnie, that she has supposedly inherited from him, although on this point, she is unconvinced. Lynda believes that her mam sees similarities in the hairline, or a likeness in the smile, because she wants to see Alf living in her. The idea does not trouble her, it just lives in those seas of her mother's soul that she cannot fathom.