Polly Pilgrim Read online

  That was the face Jack Thomson saw turned towards him as he came up behind her, walking soft-footed on the mossy undergrowth of the little wood. A young face, wet with recent tears, wide mouth quivering, dark eyes limpid with a longing she didn’t even begin to guess was a longing. Even before he sat down beside her the familiar excitement grew inside him, tightening like a low-down pain. He smiled at her, reaching out a hand to smooth her ruffled hair.

  ‘Crying, Gatty? All by yourself on a Sunday afternoon? What’s wrong? Your boy-friend chucked you? A pretty girl like you? He needs his head seeing to.’

  There was the added warmth of the best part of half a bottle of whisky inside him. Bella had been downstairs seeing to the baby, leaving him lying upstairs in bed, partaking of what he’d called his liquid breakfast. He’d tried to pull her down beside him as she’d walked past the bed, but she’d jerked away, nagging on about the whisky, warning him he’d get caught one of these fine days pinching it from the patients’ lockers.

  ‘Who’s to know?’ he’d said. ‘They’re not supposed to have it, anyroad. If their relatives are daft enough to smuggle it in, then I’m doing them a good turn taking it away. It’s wasted on them, anyroad up.’

  ‘I haven’t got a boy-friend.’ Gatty fluttered her eyelashes at him, flirting without realizing she was being provocative, enjoying the nearness of the big, good-looking man with his strange green eyes and his teasing ways. It was a way Jack had of looking at her, the way he was looking at her now. Jack Thomson always managed to satisfy her craving for masculine attention and flattery; a craving Gatty didn’t know she had. She shivered.

  ‘A goose walk over your grave?’

  She nodded. She could smell the drink on his breath, and a little warning bell rang in her head, but it was too late. When he slid a hand underneath her hair at the back of her neck, she felt a queer melting sensation inside her. She knew he wanted to kiss her, and her wanting to be kissed was just an extension of her tears, an added feeling of the unbearable sadness deep inside her. It didn’t have to be Jack; it could have been any man with arms to hold and a whispering voice telling her she was lovely.

  What she hadn’t expected was the change in him after the long, searching kiss ended. Jack’s face was burning so hot she could feel the heat on her own cheeks. His green eyes were glittering, and he seemed to be finding it hard to breathe. Gatty was filled with wonder. He was trembling now, and as his hands slid down her body she felt a strange power. That she, Gatty Pilgrim, could make a grown man feel like this!

  ‘That’s enough,’ she whispered in her light young voice. ‘Stop it, Jack!’

  But this was no young boy cuddling her on a settee at a party. This wasn’t a boy canoodling on the back seat at the pictures and grinning in the darkness as she slapped his hand away.

  Before Gatty knew what was happening, she was lying flat on her back with the weight of the big man on top of her. He was tearing at her underclothes, struggling with his own, and as she felt the hardness of him against the inside of her thighs she opened her mouth to scream, only to have his hand across her mouth suffocating the very life out of her. . . .

  Now, sitting up on the bed, staring wide-eyed at the wall, this was the part she had to remember clearly. In her terror she’d twisted, fought, felt a sharp pain; she had thrashed about, jerking her legs, biting the hand across her mouth. She remembered sweating and crying, and then, almost unconscious, feeling him grow suddenly limp. Rolling away from him to pull at her disordered clothes, she’d felt sticky and horrible as if she would never be clean again.

  Whimpering now, Gatty choked back the tears in her throat. Reliving it hadn’t helped. She still didn’t know exactly what had happened. It had been too quick. Surely it had been too quick? Making a baby couldn’t be like that. There had to be love, hadn’t there? Soft words spoken, not just a terrifying, over-in-a-minute struggle, lying on her back in a wood on a late Sunday afternoon? Gatty gulped back a sob.

  It had taken all her courage to seek Jack out that afternoon to ask him if she would be all right. She had never wanted to speak to him again, but she needed his reassurance so badly she had felt she couldn’t get through another day without it.

  Closing her eyes, she went over what had happened, trying to persuade herself that Jack’s anger had been because she was stupid enough to worry, not because he was worried himself.

  ‘You only got what you asked for,’ he’d told her. ‘An’ if you’re not all right then it’s none of my doing.’ He’d called her a bad name and pushed her away.

  ‘Gatty?’

  Polly’s voice spiralled upstairs, and wearily Gatty swung her legs on to the sloping floor and stood up.

  Jack Thomson was right. She was a silly what he’d called her. She knew nothing, nothing at all, not even if there was a need for this worry eating away at her. Taking her brush from the wash-stand, Gatty stroked her hair listlessly. The thing to do was to hold on, keep the dreadful secret tight inside her. Talk and eat, just as if nothing had happened. Go through the motions of living, even though the worry was so overwhelming she feared she might die of it.

  ‘Gatty? I’ve made a pot of tea, love. Aren’t you coming down?’

  ‘Oh, Mam.’ For a moment Gatty stared wide-eyed into the mirror on the wall. The urge to run downstairs, hurl herself into Polly’s arms and blurt it all out was so powerful she could almost feel it happening.

  ‘Just coming!’ she called out, then because the fear was like dark treacle cloying in her throat, her voice tightened with irritation. ‘I heard you the first time.’

  She sat down at the table, the all-pervading numbness taking over again. It was better this way with the worry temporarily paralysed. This way she could even eat and drink as if everything was normal. Gatty took a piece of bread and butter from the plate in the middle of the table, asked Martin to pass the jam and spread it carefully right to the crust, as if she was hungry and looking forward to enjoying her tea.

  — Five —

  FROM POLLY’S LONG table in the middle of the factory floor, she could see rows of heads bent over the uniformly spaced sewing machines. There were heads trimmed with rows of Dinkie curlers and tousled heads, all drooping over the drab material as they guided the foot of their machine swiftly round pockets, belts and the cut-out pieces of Mr Goldberg’s utilitarian raincoats.

  That morning, on her way to work, Polly had sensed a definite lethargy in the air itself as she’d walked from the Boulevard, taking a short cut through streets silvered with a gently falling drizzle. It had beaded her red coat in tiny globules, more wetting than a proper downpour, muckier, she’d decided, than the soft rain sweeping down from Pendle Hill as she’d left the cottage.

  With more mills closing down, or putting their workers on short time, it had seemed to her as if the whole town was dying. Blinds still drawn on a great number of the terraced houses spoke to her of whole families lying abed. Father, sons and daughters having a Monday morning lie-in because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go.

  She walked on through silent cobbled streets which not so long ago had rung to the hard clatter of clog irons. The flagstones were shiny-black wet, but some of the window bottoms showed rims of yellow stone where the rain had not quite washed it away.

  Smoke billowed from chimneys, and she imagined fires being lit in back living-rooms, with the aid of a newspaper held against a shovel. Fires for a mug of shaving water or that first comforting pot of tea.

  A man in shirt sleeves, with his braces dangling over his trousers, gazed hopelessly at the lowering sky. ‘Nasty morning, love,’ he called out, and Polly smiled an agreement from beneath her dripping umbrella.

  It wasn’t much more cheerful out of the wet that morning. Polly stared up at the high ceiling, imagining how it must have looked with the whirling leather belts of the machinery driving the looms of the weavers. She remembered the day her mother had taken her as a child to stand in the wide doorway of the mill round the corner. She’d nev
er forgotten the noise. Or the cotton dust floating like dandelion clocks in a summer breeze round the heads of the weavers standing on damp stone floors, with their fent aprons worn cross-over style. Or the weavers and overlookers, tacklers, engineers, oilers and greasers, lip-reading each other above the noise of the looms.

  ‘If you get your scholarship there’ll be better for you,’ Edna had said, and yet here her daughter was, standing in such a shed doing a job with far less dignity to it than that of any weaver at her loom.

  Polly shrugged her shoulders. There was never any point in dwelling. Situations dwelt upon never improved. Anyway, she didn’t have the right face for it, not with her pink cheeks and what she was sure was an incipient double chin. She gave the totally imaginary fullness a hearty slap. If her looks really pitied her that Monday morning, she would be grey and haggard, with a nerve twitching away at her jaw-line.

  No, the trouble with folding coats was that it left the mind free to wander down dark paths. That was if you were daft enough to let it. She patted the folds of a finished coat into place and added it to the growing pile on a side table, ready for packing and distribution.

  Harry had been away for not much more than two months, yet she was finding it hard to bring his face to mind. That scared her a little. His letters had dwindled to a few hastily scrawled lines every other week, telling her nothing, not even passing comment on the news she’d given him in her longer replies. There was nothing intimate in them, no lovey-dovey bits for her to sigh over. She sighed now, and reached for another coat. Harry had always been an inarticulate man, hating putting pen to paper as he called it, but it hadn’t used to matter. Harry’s was an untutored intelligence, for heaven’s sake, Polly reminded herself angrily. Then wondered at her anger.

  He had got his school-leaving certificate at twelve, worked half-time in the mill, then at thirteen he’d been out on his own, determined to turn his back on the ear-splitting noise of the weaving shed, gladly exchanging it for bird song and the sound of the wind in the trees. He’d slept in barns, worked for nothing more than his keep, until now, as Martin had said, he could grow a plant from a lump of granite.

  Bending down to pick the matching belt from a hamper on the floor by her side, Polly slotted it through the loops of the coat on the big table. She fastened the buttons, checked for loose threads, then turned the coat over ready for folding into the required neat oblong shape.

  Another coat, another belt. Polly’s mind wandered free. . . .

  Would Harry have known how to deal with Gatty and her moods which seemed to have grown blacker since her father went away? Would Harry have known what to do about Jack Thomson? She suspected that even Harry with his live-and-let-live attitude to life would have been shaken out of his quiet complacency by the sullen withdrawn girl, who had stared unseeing at her oatmeal porridge that morning with the eyes of a woman twice her age. Would Harry have squared up to Jack Thomson and demanded to know what the hell was going on?

  ‘Good morning, Polly!’

  Manny Goldberg walked past the long table, darting a glance at her from beneath his dark wandering eyebrows. He stopped and smiled. Just the sight of Polly Pilgrim was enough to lift his spirits on a morning when the sky outside seemed to be resting on the tops of the tall mill chimneys.

  There, he told himself, was a young woman totally at peace with herself and the world. In her yellow knitted jumper and blue tweed skirt she was a welcome splash of colour in the drab surroundings of the factory. She didn’t even seem to feel the cold, not like the majority of the machinists working in their jackets, faces pinched with a cold the newly installed oil heating wasn’t apparently doing much to alleviate. Polly’s warmth came from inside her, Manny decided sentimentally. He turned back the lapel of a coat to check the stitching.

  ‘Everything all right, Polly?’

  ‘Fine, Mr Goldberg. Just fine.’

  Her wide smile gladdened his heart. ‘Any further progress with the shorthand and typing?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Goldberg. It was a daft idea me thinking I could go on to night school after finishing work. I lost my chance to do that when I was seventeen.’ Her blue eyes twinkled at him. ‘We live too far out for one thing, and for another, my two kids seem to need watching even more than when they were babies.’ She pulled a raincoat towards her. ‘I’ll just have to wait till my husband comes back before I start fancying myself as a secretary.’

  Manny fingered his top lip. She was wasted doing the job she was doing. He felt a hurt seeing her standing there, hour after hour, doing a job that an intelligent nine-year-old could have done, given a box to stand on. Manny compressed his lips, chiding himself for taking too much of an interest in one of his workforce. Impartiality and fairness – that was the only way. Still he lingered.

  ‘Your husband hasn’t got himself fixed up with a job down south yet?’

  ‘Not one good enough for him to feel he can settle, or even think of sending for us. What he had in mind was a job with a cottage to go with it. In the grounds of some big house maybe. One where you don’t need the paper qualifications they seem to insist on at Kew.’

  ‘Ah, certificates,’ said Manny, with the proper disdain of a man without a single paper qualification to his credit. ‘Ah, well. . . .’ He turned away. ‘Keep hoping, Polly. That’s all any of us can do these days. Just keep on hoping. What else can you do?’

  What else indeed? With nimble fingers Polly turned the coat inside out to examine the lining. But hope didn’t exactly buy the baby a new bonnet, did it?

  At dinnertime she ate her sandwiches quickly, then went outside into the short street fronting the loading area of the mill to where a telephone booth stood on the corner. Manny Goldberg would have been surprised to know that she had used a telephone only twice in her life before, and then only in dire emergency; telephones were akin to cars, and therefore well out of the range of the average pocket.

  Ensconced in the booth, Polly flipped over the pages of a local directory which was tethered to the wall by a long chain. As she dialled the number, she remembered the only time she had seen her mother use a telephone. Gripping the receiver as if it were greased and might slip from her grasp, Edna had bellowed her message as though the party she was calling lived in Outer Mongolia.

  Carefully monitoring her own voice, Polly made her request. ‘Accounts Department, please.’

  ‘Hold the line a minute. I’m putting you through.’

  Polly nodded. ‘Thank you. Very much.’

  Even Joan Crawford in that film where she wore a little white dress and a frilly white organdie collar couldn’t have done better than that, she told herself, well satisfied.

  ‘Accounts Department here.’

  Polly chided herself silently for the unexpected blush staining her cheeks. ‘Could I speak to Mr Dennis, please?’

  ‘Who is calling?’

  ‘Just a friend.’ The blush deepened.

  ‘I’m sorry, but Mr Dennis hasn’t come into the office this morning. Can I help in any way?’

  For a moment Polly hesitated. The voice at the other end was so cool, so impartial. Not homely, not one you could question further. A deep masculine voice with the suspicion of a chuckle in it. Polly shook her head, then remembered whoever it was couldn’t see her. ‘No, thank you. I’ll ring up again. Another day. Goodbye,’ she added quickly, and replaced the receiver.

  Before pushing open the heavy door she stood still for a moment, one half of her mind registering the rude word written on the wall in front of her, and the other registering the embarrassment flooding over her in a deep wave of prickly heat.

  What in God’s name was she, Polly Pilgrim, a married woman, doing rushing out in her dinner hour to telephone another man? In that moment she was all her mother, narrow-minded to the point of idiocy, a product of her upbringing, her round face stern with puritanical disbelief. In that moment Edna would have been proud of her.

  But as Polly hurried back down the short street, h
er commonsense took over. It was only natural that she wanted to know how Robert was after the fiasco of the day before. She frowned. His shoulder must have been badly hurt for him to take time off from his office. Even on their short acquaintance she guessed he was no malingerer. Had he gone to the doctor? Was he now sitting up at the Infirmary, waiting to be seen by a specialist? In pain, his face lean with suffering? Pale grey eyes cold with contempt as he dwelled on the reasons for him being there.

  She glanced up at the leaden sky. They were in for a real downpour by the look of it, and if so, she wished it would get a move on and get it over with.

  Putting Robert Dennis’s face from her with an effort, she imagined Martin walking up the hill from the bus, school satchel bouncing in his back, prized long trousers soaked by the rain sweeping down from the fells. Hurrying home to an empty cottage, cold as the grave, with a fire-lighter and a pile of sticks in the grate instead of leaping flames to greet him.

  Lifting her head, she felt the rain on her face and began to run.

  When she took her stand at the folding table she was smiling again, joining the girls in a spirited rendering of a Methodist hymn.

  ‘Tell me the stories of Jesus,’ she sang, her expression as serene as if not a single anxiety clouded her mind.