A Daughter's Duty (8 page)

‘Hey, what do you think –’ Alf expostulated, caught off balance for a minute. But she wasn’t listening.

‘Mam? Mam? Can you hear us?’ cried Rose, taking hold of her mother’s hand, so stiff and heavy it was and cold too, even though Rose had built up the fire and brought down an extra blanket from her own bed to pile on top of her mother’s. She rubbed the poor hand and stared at her mother’s eyes. The windows of the soul, they said. Did she blink just then? She had,
and
the blue lips moved. Rose could swear they had moved. ‘She moved, Dad, she did!’

Alf Sharpe peered over her shoulder. ‘Hadaway, lass,’ he said. ‘She’s past talking, she’s not budged a muscle.’

Rose stood up straight and glared at him. ‘You don’t care one bloody jot, do you?’ she demanded.

‘Aye, I do,’ he asserted. ‘She’s me wife, isn’t she? Me an’ your mam, we used to have some good times, you know, years ago.’ He dropped his eyes and rubbed his nose with his forefinger then walked from the room. Rose heard the armchair by the fire creak as he sat down in it. She pulled the bedclothes up to her mother’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on her pale cheek then she too left the room. Her father was leaning forward, pulling coals down from the shelf at the back of the fire with the coal rake.

‘We all used to have good times, Dad,’ she said. ‘What happened? Why did you change?’

‘Me? I didn’t change,’ he replied. ‘It was you, you and your mother, both of you. Neither of you want me now. You never touch me, you never run and give me a kiss when I come in from work, you never give me a bit of loving …’

Rose could only stare. He looked really badly done by, his tone pathetic. Good Lord, he really believed what he was saying. For the first time she had an inkling that he thought his attitude towards her was natural, not wrong at all. But he wasn’t ignorant, he knew enough to be secretive about his ways, keeping folk out so there were no prying eyes seeing what went on. And he was frightened Mam would say something …

Rose shook her head to clear it of the dark images which crowded in on her. She opened the oven door and took out the two plates of dinner which Kate Morland had put in to keep hot for her and her father. The gravy was dried and the meat kizened and curled up at the edges but when she set it on the table for him, Alf ate his way steadily through it. Rose herself ate a few mouthfuls before giving up. They sat in silence, the door to the room open, Rose listening keenly, eager to hear even the slightest sound from the bed.

‘We’ll try to make a bit of Christmas for the sake of the bairns,’ Aunt Elsie said to Rose. ‘Have you got anything put away for them?’

‘Oh, yes, what I could get. You know what it’s like.’ Toys and small luxuries were slowly coming into the shops, though the export drive took the best.

Aunt Elsie had arrived on the half-past-five bus, wasting no time when she got her brother’s message. ‘Well, you know how it is, I’ve nobody but meself at home now,’ she had said when Rose had expressed surprise at her speed. Uncle Tom Brown had been killed in the pit before the war and Aunt Elsie lived in a council house on what the locals called the ‘new site’ on the edge of Shotton Colliery. The family used to visit her there at one time, but during the war, when Elsie worked in the munition factory and Mam had begun to fail, the visits had dropped off, probably because of Alf. But here she was now and Rose was grateful for it. She felt as if the load she’d carried for weeks was at last being shared.

‘Now then, our Alf,’ was Elsie’s only greeting to her brother. She made no attempt to kiss his cheek or anything like that.

‘How are you doing, Elsie?’ he responded and managed a thin smile.

‘Champion,’ she said. ‘In the room, is she?’ She had put her weekend bag on the table and gone straight through to see her sister-in-law. Rose followed behind her and watched as Aunt Elsie stood by the side of the bed and studied Sarah, before shaking her head. She looked round at her niece.

‘By, Rosie, it’s a bad do, this,’ she said, and drew her lips down at the corners. Rose felt the tears suddenly prickle at the back of her eyes. She turned away, just in case her mother should be able to see from her blank, open eyes, and went out into the kitchen, empty now for her father seemed to have abandoned his responsibilities to his sister and gone out. Though where she couldn’t think. He wouldn’t be able to get a pint until the Club opened at seven o’clock. And it was Monday tomorrow, he had to work.

‘Has she been like this since it happened?’

Rose jumped. She had sat down by the fire and was drying her eyes on the hand towel, which she’d pulled from the brass rail over the range, so she didn’t notice Aunt Elsie enter the kitchen.

‘Yes.’

‘Come on, lass, bear up,’ Elsie said bracingly, putting an arm awkwardly around her shoulders. ‘Where’s that brother of mine anyway?’

‘Out.’

Elsie nodded. ‘Aye, he would be. Well, never mind, let’s have a nice cup of tea. Where’s the twins?’

‘Oh, I forgot. They were tired out, you know, they saw Mam fall. So I put them to bed. By, they’ve slept two hours, I’d best get them up.’

‘No, leave them a few minutes, they’ll take no harm. They can stay up a bit later the night,’ said her aunt. Rose pushed the kettle on to the fire and set the table, bringing out bread and butter and sliced Spam. She’d been going to stew plums for tea and make custard but it was too late now. Instead she brought out a cake she had been saving for Christmas.

‘I brought a few things and me ration book, of course.’ Elsie said now. ‘By, who’d have thought there would still be rationing two years after the end of the war? We all believed the Labour government would see things right, but now we’re beginning to wonder. I know those poor folk on the continent are in a worse state than we are, or at least that’s what we’re told, but who
won
the flaming war? That’s what I want to know.’

Rose found to her surprise that she was hungry. She ate her way through the bread and butter (well, marge), and had a piece of cake, all the time listening to Aunt Elsie talk while keeping an ear open for her mother and the twins. And in spite of all her troubles, she was comforted.

There was a letter for Marina among the Christmas cards which came to the house on Christmas Eve. Kate picked it out and handed it over to her. ‘Oh, look, this is for you,’ she said. ‘Who do you know in North Yorkshire? Apart from Hetty and Penny that is. This is a man’s writing.’

Marina took the letter and turned away in case her face betrayed the rush of excitement she felt when she saw Charlie’s narrow hand. ‘I expect it’s just someone from work, down there for Christmas,’ she said. She felt wretched in a way. Why couldn’t she acknowledge Charlie, tell her family all about him, be proud of her gorgeous boyfriend? After all, the family would have to know when they got married, wouldn’t they? But still, she kept him a secret as he wanted her to, though she told herself she had no doubts about him, she loved him, didn’t she? And here was a letter, proof that he couldn’t get through the Christmas vacation without her.

‘Well, go on, open it,’ said Kate, who couldn’t imagine that Marina could have anything which she wanted to keep private from her. Reluctantly, she slit the top of the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper.

It was a note rather than a letter. There wasn’t even a proper signature, just a
C
, and a sweeping line underneath it. Very stylish, she thought.

‘Meet me in the usual place in Durham,’
it read.
‘7 p.m. Boxing Day. I have tickets for the concert at St Nicholas’s.’

Marina stared at it, a feeling of resentment beginning to quell her excitement. Who did he think he was, not even getting in touch for over a week and then summoning her like this?

‘What is it?’ asked Kate. She peered over Marina’s shoulder and Marina let her. After all, there was nothing suspicious in the note, nothing at all. ‘Who is it? Why didn’t whoever it is sign his name properly? Affected, that is.’

‘It’s not a man, it’s a woman … Celia. You must have heard me mention her? She works in the Surveyor’s Department. She’s on holiday, comes back on Boxing Day.’ Even as she said it, Marina amazed herself with how easily the lies rolled off her tongue. She didn’t even know why she was lying, or why Charlie wanted their meetings kept quiet. In any case, she wasn’t going to meet him, she decided. To heck with him! She wasn’t at any lad’s beck and call.

It was 7.05 p.m. on a cold and frosty Boxing Night when Marina walked up Silver Street from the bus station to the market place in Durham City. There were very few folk in the street; she had to stand to the side of the narrow thoroughfare only once as a bus lumbered down, bumping over the cobbles. In the market place there were more, a fair number of people making their way to St Nicholas’s in the corner opposite. And under the statue of Lord Londonderry on his horse, their own special place, stood Charlie, his college scarf wound round and round his neck and chin, his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets. Her pulse quickened at the sight of him.

‘There you are,’ he said, and cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her lightly on the cheek. His lips were warm in contrast to the frosty air. ‘I was beginning to think you hadn’t got my note, that you weren’t coming.’

‘I nearly didn’t.’

But Charlie hadn’t heard, he was drawing her along to the church, eager to join the queue. ‘Did you say something?’

She shook her head. He put an arm around her and bent his head closer. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you before I went home. It was difficult. You know what families are like.’ He laughed deprecatingly. ‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Marina replied like a polite little girl. It had been the usual family Christmas in the miner’s cottage in Jordan; the government had allowed everyone extra rations and so Kate had made a fruit cake, even securing a covering of almond paste from the Co-op. There had been a duck, courtesy of Farmer Brown, a cock chicken and mounds of vegetables and gravy. Even a fruit-laden pudding and sauce, flavoured with a quarter-bottle of rum Dad brought up from the Club. And afterwards, tangerines and hazelnuts and presents from the family. ‘You didn’t send a card,’ she said now and was immediately sorry, for it sounded like an accusation.

Charlie laughed softly. ‘Neither did you. It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s a silly custom, I always think. I thought we would rather see each other, enjoy the concert together.’

Marina thought he could have sent a card anyway but her resentment was melting in the warmth of his presence. She didn’t say that she didn’t even know his address, so how could she have written to him or sent a card? They had reached the door of the church now and went in and found their seats, hard wooden chairs brought in from the Sunday School to augment the pews. There was an air of magic about the place today, the people talking in hushed tones, the vaulted ceiling darkly mysterious, a lighted tree in the entrance, a crib and gold-painted cardboard angels above it. The choir and orchestra were taking their places, the audience rustled as they settled down in their seats and looked expectantly towards them, talk trailing into silence. Charlie took her hand in a warm, firm clasp and the orchestra tuned up and finally launched into Handel’s
Messiah.

It was magical all right. Charlie leaned over to her in a pause and whispered, ‘You look rapt. You see, I told you you’d love it.’

She did. ‘Oh, yes, it’s grand, it is,’ she assured him. ‘Thank you, Charlie.’ The evening passed in a haze of music and singing, low and reverent or sometimes unbearably sweet then swelling to a triumphant chorus which soared to the roof and beyond. And Marina’s heart swelled with it, her hand still held in Charlie’s firm grasp and her shoulder close against his and that was as sweet as the music. Too soon it was over.

Outside, balancing on cobblestones in the black strappy sandals she had got for Christmas from Kate, her toes curling up against the cold, Marina looked around the square at the coloured lights decorating the town hall and in Doggart’s windows the reflections of the street lamps. They seemed to carry all the enchantment of the evening after the dark of the blackout years of war. She thought of news reels she had seen of London with the lights on again: Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue, Oxford Street. No doubt Durham could not possibly compare but she would not change the little city for anywhere in the world, lit up or not.

‘That’s a faraway look you’ve got in your eyes,’ said Charlie, coming out of the church behind her. ‘What are you thinking about?’

Marina laughed and he tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Oh, just that I haven’t got used to the lights yet. Durham looks so lovely like this, doesn’t it?’ She lifted one foot off the ground as she spoke and shivered; the cold was shooting up her legs through the thin soles of the sandals.

He noticed the gesture. ‘You’re frozen!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why on earth are you wearing dancing sandals on a night like this?’

‘I … they were pretty …’ And her sensible brogues were shabby and scuffed and even if she had the coupons there was such a shortage of nice shoes in the shops, everything went to the great god export.

‘Come on, we’ll find a pub and warm you up,’ he said and drew her down a street and into the Mitre. The place was full and so was the lounge, but Charlie left her and fought his way to the bar with the ease of long practice. Marina kept her head down, feeling abandoned. She wasn’t used to pubs, wasn’t even old enough to be in one, and she was nervous that if the landlord noticed her he would know that immediately. Laughing and talking went on all around her and people pushed past her. ‘Scuse me, hinny, sorry,’ someone said and put a large hand on her shoulder to steady her after bumping into her. Marina smiled shyly.

Charlie was soon back, though, and led her to a corner by the fire and thrust a glass of sherry in her hand. Not the sweet ruby wine they usually drank to bring in the New Year at home but a clear amber-coloured liquid which tasted acidic on her tongue. She could feel its warmth coursing down her throat and even her toes felt better.