Since He Went Away Read online

  ‘The tea’s nobbut ready, Mrs Battersby,’ Gladys called brightly from the kitchen.

  Phyllis shuddered, straining her ears for sounds from upstairs, staring into the fire till her eyes went dry.

  Amy had seen the note the minute she went into the front bedroom. It was held in place by Wesley’s leather stud box, a single sheet of notepaper, folded once. She gave a little cry as she read it and her face went as white as milk. Her legs went to nothing, and she caught at the kidney-shaped dressing table for support. She closed her eyes and when she opened them the baskets of flowers repeated all over the wallpaper blurred into each other.

  ‘My son would never take his own life. He’s made of sterner stuff.’ Phyllis glared at Gladys coming innocently through from the back with a tray of cups and saucers.

  ‘Sorry if I spoke out of turn,’ Gladys said, humble and contrite, putting the tray down on the table, going back for the teapot.

  ‘He’d have to be driven to it,’ Phyllis said, anxiety sharpening her voice.

  ‘I hope you don’t mean by my daughter!’ Gladys wasn’t going to stand for that. ‘She’s waited on him hand and foot, been a slave to him.’

  Amy heard her mother say that as she stumbled, sickened, down the stairs. It was no good. She couldn’t face them, not yet, even though she was very quiet inside her head, hardly feeling anything at all.

  Turning right instead of left at the foot of the stairs she went down the lobby and out through the open front door. She saw her father-in-law sitting inside his car at the kerb, his head sunk deep on his chest as if he were asleep. She had no clear idea of where she was going, knowing only that she had to get away from the house, away from the time when she would have to tell them what Wesley had done.

  ‘Mrs Battersby?’

  For the second time in less than an hour, Mr Dale from four doors down appeared before her.

  ‘I was coming along to see you,’ he said, and gave a slight embarrassed cough. ‘I think I can shed some light . . .’

  But Amy was in total shock – gone, he could see, into some far-off place where mercifully, for a little while, nothing could touch her. Bernard had seen that same rigid expression on the faces of men in the trenches when news came from home that a loved one had died. Taking her arm he led her gently into his house, not in the least surprised when she made no objection. Gently he led her to the chair by the fire, pushed her down into it, knelt by her side, took both her hands in his, rubbed them between his own.

  ‘Nothing bad has happened to your husband,’ he told her. ‘I should have said before . . .’ Even now, wanting to spare her, he hesitated. ‘I saw him walking down Balaclava Street, carrying a case. He seemed to be . . .’

  ‘He was going to her,’ Amy interrupted in a cold, matter-of-fact voice. ‘Here. Look at this. See for yourself.’ Withdrawing her hands from his grasp, she took a sheet of paper from a pocket in the side of her skirt and handed it to him. ‘Go on. I want you to read it. I need you to read it. Please . . .’

  At once Bernard stood up, first pushing the letter back at her. He hadn’t bargained for this. She looked terrible with her hair hanging like wet string down each side of her face. Her eyes were dead eyes, looking at him but not seeing him. The sweet damp smell of April violets rose from her, and he knew that deep inside her she was crying bitterly, the worst kind of crying there is.

  He liked Mrs Battersby. They were comparative strangers, doing no more than pass the time of day, but he liked her. She had been born to be happy. How did he know that? Once he had seen her holding a kitten up to her cheek, but when he stopped and asked was it hers, she had explained that her husband was allergic to fur, so that wouldn’t be possible.

  He knelt down again by her side. ‘You’re not yourself, lassie. You’ve had a shock.’ He touched her hand. ‘I’m sure you don’t really want me to read a very private letter . . .’

  ‘You have to read it!’ For a moment she came alive with the force of her emotions. ‘Can’t you see, I have to tell someone. I can’t tell the others. Not yet. An’ you don’t know me very well, an’ I don’t know you hardly at all, so please read it.’ There was the wail of desolation in her voice. ‘Share it with me, please.’

  Bernard was used to reading reports at speed, skimming down the page, taking in the salient points. He had already guessed the gist of it, but phrases jumped out at him, as if they’d been underlined in red ink. It was strange indeed the way some of the words sounded familiar:

  At long last I have come to the time when I can keep quiet no longer, a time at the very beginning of a New Year when to carry on without the woman I love beside me would be too heavy a burden . . .

  And more, much on the same lines. A letter to be read aloud, phrases so well turned they were meaningless:

  Clara is my life. Without her I am nothing . . . never knew such happiness could be . . . try to understand . . . she is filled with sadness for this hurt she is giving you . . . And for the hurt she is giving Charlie . . .

  Bernard handed the flimsy sheet of paper back, only just curbing an urge to screw it into a ball and throw it into the fire. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, at a loss for words. It was unbelievable, but it was true. Battersby had culled part of his farewell letter to his wife from Edward’s abdication speech on the radio and followed it up by a dramatic exit as the church bells rang in the New Year. He deserved an Oscar for a performance like that – he deserved his name in bloody great lights in London’s West End.

  Amy was putting the letter away in her pocket. She seemed calmer now. ‘Wesley is just play-acting, he’s like that.’ She stood up. ‘I’m all right now, but I’m not going to tell them yet. Thank you for helping me. You’ve earned an extra jewel in your heavenly crown tonight.’

  She was trying to smile, but she didn’t fool him for a minute. Her composure was nature’s way of holding back the unacceptable until she was ready to absorb it.

  Outside the rain had stopped and the air felt fresh and clean. At the front of Amy’s house an elderly man was getting out of his car, walking stiffly across the pavement as if his legs were paining him.

  ‘My father-in-law,’ Amy explained as they parted.

  ‘Who was that chap?’ Edgar blinked in the light. ‘Do I know him? For a minute I thought it was Wesley back again.’

  ‘What chap?’ Phyllis’s voice was as brittle as set toffee, only needing a tap to break into little pieces.

  From the look on their faces Amy could see that there had been words between them. Phyllis sat poker straight in her chair, while Amy’s mother stood in the doorway running a teacloth through her hands, her face flushed and defiant.

  ‘Going off like that.’ She glared at Amy. ‘Without saying. I nearly had a pink fit when I went upstairs and found you not there.’

  ‘What in the name of God is going on?’ Edgar had a red mark down the side of his face where he’d fallen asleep leaning against the car window. ‘Cheese and flippin’ rice, has everybody been struck dumb?’

  Amy thought she might faint, but knew she wouldn’t. She wasn’t a fainter, she hadn’t been brought up to be one. Nor would she shed a tear when anyone was looking. Gladys had taught her well.

  ‘Wesley has gone away for a spell,’ Amy told them. ‘He’s been having a bad time with his nerves. He’s gone somewhere quiet to find himself. He left a note.’

  ‘He’ll have a job,’ Gladys said right out. ‘If he doesn’t know where he is at forty-one there’s no point in starting looking now.’

  No one else spoke or moved. Phyllis shot Gladys a look that would have split an oak tree, and Edgar sat down, closed his eyes and clutched at a spot beneath his ribs.

  ‘It’s delayed shell shock.’ Gladys couldn’t have kept quiet if she’d been paid to do so. ‘I know a man who lives down Inkerman Street – he’s still got it after twenty years. Men who fought in that terrible war are never the same. This man gets through a bottle of Phospherine a week. To steady his nerves. And on Bonfire Night
he has to be tied down or else he’d be . . .’

  ‘You silly woman!’ Phyllis could stand no more.

  Gladys accepted the rebuke. Her feelings weren’t hurt. She knew she was silly and said stupid things sometimes, and that people often got irritated by her, but she didn’t like Wesley’s mother saying it.

  ‘I’m not as silly as some,’ she muttered at the kitchen sink, clattering the pots about.

  Amy sat down on the piano stool. The copy of ‘One Alone’ was propped on the music stand. Wesley had sung it for them, unwillingly, she remembered, only at his mother’s insistence.

  ‘I think we should call the police,’ Phyllis said. ‘Give them a description. Tell them our boy is wandering about in the rain with his memory gone, knocking on doors, asking people who he is.’

  ‘He’d packed a suitcase and taken his white riding mac,’ Amy said. ‘He must have hidden them round the back.’ She hesitated. ‘He was seen walking quickly down Balaclava Street. There’s nothing wrong with his memory. He’s probably gone to the Preston shop to sleep in the upstairs flat.’

  ‘Did he say that in the note?’ Phyllis narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t you think that under the circumstances you should let us see it?’

  ‘Clara is my life. Without her I am nothing . . .’ Amy shivered. The flat above the Preston tobacconist’s shop, furnished during the last railway strike with a second-hand sofa and chairs, a rickety bed covered by a faded candlewick spread . . . Wesley lying in it with his love, bending over her, kissing her eyes, her lips, her throat . . . ‘At last,’ he was saying in his beautifully modulated voice. ‘Oh, my love, my own sweet love . . .’

  ‘The letter is private,’ Amy said. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Battersby.’

  She willed them to go. They looked shaky, pathetically puzzled, much older, as though a veil of senility had suddenly descended on them. She prayed they would go.

  Without another word Phyllis tied a lilac chiffon scarf over her grey waves and allowed herself to be helped into her musquash fur coat.

  ‘You’ve been drinking, Father,’ Amy heard her say as they went down the lobby. ‘I can smell it on your breath.’

  ‘Only a little snifter, Mother. For medicinal purposes.’

  The car doors slammed, the engine coughed, spluttered, roared into life.

  Gladys came through from the kitchen, still red in the face. She started brushing crumbs from the table into a cupped hand, needing something to do, unwilling to look at her daughter crouched in misery on the piano stool, her face all naked with despair as she rocked herself backwards and forwards. As if she had the stomach ache.

  It wasn’t true that Wesley had gone away on account of his nerves. Gladys had always known that one day he would lose his respect for her daughter. It always happened when a marriage was a shotgun affair. Even after twenty years she’d never forget seeing Amy standing there in the chapel wearing a grey costume and a hat like a boiler shovel, crying her way all through her vows. With half the Ladies’ Class from Sunday school filling the back rows and gloating. Wesley in his khaki uniform, his mother in navy crêpe-de-Chine with a cross-over bodice, and his father wearing a dark suit and an expression that said he’d been determined that his son did the right thing by this schoolgirl he’d got into trouble. Seventeen years and one month old. Dear Lord, it had been more like a funeral than a wedding.

  Gladys suspected that Wesley had gone off with another woman. He’d be spoilt for choice with all those stupid beggars at the Dramatics queueing up for half a chance. Amy would tell her when she felt like it, and not before. Secretive, that was Amy, clamming up tight if you asked her a question she didn’t want to answer.

  ‘I’ll stop the night if you want,’ Gladys said, out of her depth faced with all this misery, not knowing what to say or what to do for the best.

  Amy went over to kneel down on the rug and add a couple of cobs of coal to the fire from the scuttle. ‘I might not go to bed.’

  The back of her neck reminded Gladys of when Amy was a baby, all soft and vulnerable, with a few tendrils of hair curling down. What a fidget she’d been, forever twitching, even in her sleep.

  ‘Best have a hot drink then if you don’t want me to stop the night, and put plenty of sugar in it. You’ve had a nasty shock.’

  Amy took no notice.

  They had said all they could say to each other, mother and daughter. Amy had no way of knowing that behind her back her mother could hardly bear it all. That seeing Amy so beat, so downcast was almost more than she could stomach. Gladys was buttoning herself up into her tweed coat, ramming a felt hat shaped like a chamber pot down over her pepper-and-salt hair, blinking tears to the backs of her eyes.

  And equally, if there was a hurt child inside Amy crying out for loving arms around her, then that child had learned a long time ago to keep her sorrows to herself.

  ‘I’ll walk round the corner with you, Mam,’ she said. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘It’s tomorrow,’ Gladys agreed, ‘but it’s only a spit away, there’s no need to bother. Best wet your face and give it a good rub with the towel. You don’t want Wesley coming back and seeing you looking like a corpse.’

  They left the house together, Gladys holding on to her hat because a cold wind had sprung up. ‘Straight from Siberia,’ she said.

  ‘Wesley won’t be coming back,’ Amy said.

  ‘You talk as if he was dead.’

  ‘I wish he was after what he’s done to me tonight.’

  Gladys waited, but it was obvious there weren’t to be any more revelations, not yet.

  ‘Don’t you think Mr Battersby’s aged?’ she said as they turned the corner. ‘I don’t think he’ll make old bones. I think he might have what your dad had wrong with him. He’s a terrible colour.’

  There was no goodbye at the door, not even a peck on the cheek. Amy was used to her mother coming and going without either a hail or farewell. There was merely a grating of the big key in its lock, a nod of the ugly hat, a closing of the door, leaving Amy standing forlorn on the flags.

  Back in her own house she went through into the kitchen, saw the dishcloth looped over the tap and the tea-towel spread on the draining-board to dry.

  ‘Your mother has a pinny mentality,’ Wesley had once said. ‘Look for Gladys and she’s either down on her knees with a scrubbing brush or standing at a sink scouring away at something.’

  Amy could remember exactly how he’d looked when he said it. She could recall the expression on his face. Teasing? Sarcastic? Derisory? Affectionate? It was hard to tell with Wesley. He could have her near to tears one minute and helpless with laughter the next. He could mimic her mother’s flat vowels with a wicked accuracy, and the way she moved her lips in an exaggerated way as she spoke. A legacy from her days as a weaver in Hornby’s cotton mill.

  ‘It was to make themselves understood over the noise of the looms,’ Amy had reminded him. ‘My mother was working in a weaving shed when she was twelve years old, and before that she had no schooling to speak of, being the eldest of a big family. She used to be kept at home to look after her younger sisters and brothers. No wonder she’s at home with a scrubbing brush in her hands and a pinny tied round her waist. No wonder she can barely read or write.’

  Wesley had tucked an imaginary violin beneath his chin, played a few bars of an imaginary lament. Amy frowned. Why had the memory of that popped into her mind, just as if it had happened yesterday? She carried a chair through into the hardly used front parlour, wrinkling her nose at the smell of damp soot and wax polish.

  ‘Shall I light a fire in here as well?’ she’d asked him that morning before he left the house in time to catch the twenty minutes past seven train to Preston.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he’d said, shrugging his shoulders almost up to his ears, a sure sign that he was preoccupied, not prepared to listen to trivia.

  Was he planning it all, right at that moment? Wondering if he could pack a case later on while she was busy in the kitchen making the sandwic
hes and whipping the cream for the trifle? As she stood stock-still on the front-room hearthrug, pegged in mauve and grey to match the curtains, Amy felt sick.

  Wesley must have been seeing Clara Marsden for months. The woolly piece of knitting that was Amy’s head was beginning to unravel. Without conscious volition, she moved back into the living room. He must have been seeing her every time he said there was a rehearsal for the Dramatics. Every time he’d said he was stopping on at the shop for stocktaking. Every time he’d said he was going round to his mother’s house. Amy leaned against the door, slumped against it in a gesture as theatrical as any Wesley could have made.

  Had he made love to Clara Marsden? She moved her head from side to side. Well, of course he’d flippin’ made love to her. She wouldn’t put it past Clara Marsden catching the train to Preston and climbing the narrow staircase to the upstairs flat on some of Wesley’s stocktaking nights. For a moment her mind was numbed, giving the storm inside her time to gather.

  The thought of Wesley touching Clara Marsden with his long fingers, his pianist’s fingers, surgeon’s fingers, touching her, kissing her, undressing her . . . An expression of disgust twisted Amy’s face. Didn’t Wesley know that Charlie Marsden’s wife was anybody’s? Easy meat. That it was rumoured she had men in the house while her husband was at work?

  Didn’t Wesley know that Clara Marsden dyed her hair, bleached it at the front? Kept her house like a pigsty, let her daughter Lottie stay out till all hours? Bought shop cakes, never mopped her doorstep, lay all day on the settee reading magazines? Painted her nails purple, wore bras like ice-cream cones to show off her bust, and dresses cut low for the same reason?

  Amy went to look at herself in the big mirror-back of the mahogany sideboard. Her hair had dried now, but it was flattened to her head as if stuck on with glue. The Crème Simone on her cheeks and nose had rubbed off so that she shone like a polished apple. She covered her face with her hands. Would Wesley have liked her better if she’d tarted herself up a bit more? Spit on a block of mascara and stabbed it on her eyelashes? Used Tangee lipstick to turn her lips orange? Used Pond’s cream with its skin vitamins on her face every night? Kept her eyebrows neatly brushed into line with Vaseline? Had a voice as low and resonant as Claudette Colbert’s? Worn a rosier powder? Taken Bile Beans to enhance her personal attractiveness? Padded her bra with cotton wool to make her bosoms look bigger?