Miss Appleby's Academy (26 page)

‘Nothing.’

‘Lies won’t help.’

‘I have to go.’

‘Mick—’

But Mick strode out of the surgery and slammed the door.

*

He went to houses in the village where people were of various help but the influenza had taken down a lot of them. Eventually he managed to make sure there was somebody to open up the other pubs, but nobody from the Black Diamond. He opened the place himself.

Sunday was the busiest day of all, the only full day the pitmen had off, and many of them came as soon as he opened. They would drink all day, but some would have several pints, go home for their Sunday dinner, sleep it off and be back in the evening. It was very late indeed when he finished, closed up, went to see Ed.

‘I’ll be up tomorrow,’ Ed offered, but Mick could see how ill he was.

‘If you aren’t better tomorrow I’ll send for Dr Blythe.’

Ed couldn’t eat, Mick made him some tea and he sat up for that, which Mick took to be a good sign.

Finally he went home. It had been such a bright sunny day, though most of it he had only seen beyond the windows of the pub, and the night had turned cold and clear. Ulysses enjoyed the walk back, Mick dreaded what he might find.

The house was silent and he thought if she was in bed then there would be no noise, he had convinced himself and he would be able to sleep. Having had no sleep the previous night it was the only thing he cared for but he could tell as he stepped inside that that was not the case. He didn’t understand how he knew – nothing was altered, the house was clean and even smelled of the lavender polish which Mrs Dexter favoured, but when he drew nearer the sitting room there was the now familiar smell of gin.

No light burned in there, he had to make one, and what he found was no surprise. A gin bottle lay empty on the floor and another further over and then another and the whole room was permeated with the smell of juniper. Isabel lay on the sofa, breathing shallowly.

Mick carried his wife all the way to Sam’s house. He had nobody to help at that hour and he did not want anybody to know what was happening. She was light, but her clothes, breath and body reeked of gin. The surgery was closed of course, but he went to the back door and managed to hammer on it in the darkness. He was sure Sam was often called out at the front door or the back, and indeed Sam did not look very surprised as he opened the door, but he looked dismayed when he saw who it was. They put her to bed, Marjorie helped and said she would keep an eye on her and Sam took his friend downstairs and into the sitting room.

Sam went across to the oak court cupboard and took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the upper bit with the neat little door and glasses from the underneath where it looked as though many such things were housed, judging by the glint of the crystal.

‘I don’t need that,’ Mick objected.

‘Yes, you do.’ He poured the golden liquid and handed it to Mick.

Mick downed the whisky and said, ‘How can I still like the way this tastes?’

‘Why can’t you be honest with me?’

All Mick said was, ‘More,’ as he held out his empty glass and Sam filled it.

Sam sat down in his chair by the fire and contemplated the blaze for a few moments. He waited.

Mick could speak when he too had contemplated the blaze and his insides felt warm with the second glass of whisky.

‘She has a lover.’

It was, he thought, the very last thing that Sam expected to hear. Somehow he didn’t have to look at Sam to know this. The silence and the way that Sam sat so still and then moved about in his chair told him what his friend thought.

‘She isn’t happy with me, I don’t think she’s happy with Connie.’

Sam said into the silence that followed, ‘Somebody else?’ He looked not surprised as Mick had thought he would, rather his look was caustic. Mick couldn’t hold his gaze.

‘He lives here. His business is here.’

‘How long’s it been going on?’

‘Years, I think.’

‘How do you know about him?’

‘I went after her one day and – and heard them together.’

‘Christ,’ Sam said.

‘He’s married. He has several children.’

When Sam did speak it was not what Mick expected him to say.

‘Isabel is killing herself. Would you rather she were dead than with somebody else?’

Sam got up and helped himself to an enormous whisky. Mick listened to how the liquid sploshed into the short squat glass and how Sam put down the decanter with a bang that might have shattered it.

After that Sam was brisk.

‘You and Isabel are staying here and if she changes at all you must shout in the night; if she vomits and chokes you yell at the top of your voice, do you hear?’

*

The bedroom where they were was in the front. It was a regular detached stone house, the kind of house which children would draw, and there would be a mother and a father and maybe even a dog and an even number of windows upstairs and down, a door in the middle. Mick felt a sudden pang for his black Labradors who were at the various pubs and at Emma’s house, sleeping. Only perhaps they weren’t, perhaps they knew that there was trouble and they were keeping watch. He hoped so.

At the front there was the kind of garden which even if he had not seen it before – and he had seen it many times – he would have known. It had at the far side a wall which divided the front garden from the back, and at this side all the flowers grew in beds which were so neat and divided up by paths, and they were even and regular and everything was in oblongs or squares as if designed by somebody who loved mathematics.

Sam did. Maybe Marjorie did too and they gardened
together. He envied the regularity of it. What must it be like to grow vegetables and pull mint from the ground for Sunday lamb dinner? To know that every day and every week you would be doing the same thing, and it would be usual, normal; you would go on and on and perhaps you would live a long time so that the pattern became ingrained and you expected nothing more and in time your children had children and you saw them and saw how everything was supposed to work. He thought it must be the greatest luxury of all.

There was a new wooden bridge with a little stream and beyond it lay an orchard and beyond that there were fields and he could hear the cry of a pheasant even now. The orchard was filled with bare fruit trees and long grass. He wished he could turn time back just a little to the only night he had spent with Emma when foolishly things had seemed possible.

*

Mick did not think that he could hate a man more than he hated Henry Atkinson, but somehow there was nothing to do but leave Isabel in the capable hands of Marjorie Blythe and go to see the man. Mick had protested and apologized and said he would send someone to care for her while he was out on this unexplained mission and Marjorie had said, ‘How stupid, who could know more than I do?’

So he had left Isabel there. He didn’t know what to say to Marjorie. How could he? He hadn’t slept, he hadn’t eaten. Marjorie, to be fair, had not asked him why he ate
nothing and then, the morning well advanced, he went to the White Hart, one of Henry Atkinson’s most successful ventures.

It was midday and the unforgiving sun showed him that this public house was as good as his, better perhaps. It had a light atmosphere and the man behind the bar was genial. No, Mr Atkinson was not here and would not be for some days, and Mick was envious that Henry Atkinson could do this when he could not: go and leave it to other people and know that everything would be all right.

He enquired as to where Mr Atkinson might be since he needed to see him on business and the barman eagerly announced that he had gone to Durham city where the brewery was; so Mick then got on a train and went to Durham.

Henry Atkinson’s family and his wife’s family were rich, two of the public houses in Durham were owned by him and some in other villages, so it was not easy to find where he might be. Mick went to several before he found the one he wanted. In any other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to be in the public house where he finally discovered the man he was seeking. It was one of those pubs which were set in a place which had been a drinking habitat for hundreds of years.

At the front it did not look much, but there were half a dozen small rooms, all leading into one another. Each of them had a a tiny black fireplace, corner seats and windows which opened into another room, and each led
back to the bar. He was not surprised to find that Henry Atkinson was there and he said he would like to see Mr Atkinson if it were at all possible, and when he was refused he pushed people aside and went into the back and there was the man his wife adored.

He was nothing like the idea of a man who women could not resist. He was not particularly tall, he was not lean, he was not young, he was not anything that Mick could ever have envisaged Isabel would have cared for and he was not a person you could compete against. If she loved this man she could never have loved Mick, he knew. Henry was grey-haired, middle height, middle-aged, ordinary, not fat or thin, nor was he particularly well dressed. He did not turn Mick from the room as people said, ‘He pushed his way in’ and ‘Sorry, Mr Atkinson.’

Instead, Henry Atkinson said, ‘No, it’s all right,’ in a calm manner, so Mick assumed he had no idea who his visitor was.

Mick was shown to a small office, not so different from his own, by a man he had thought of as his rival, but he was nothing of the kind. This was the man Isabel loved: a man with watery blue eyes, red-rimmed, possibly from spending too many hours at his desk.

‘I’m—’

‘I know who you are,’ the man said, and he had an ordinary voice and that was strange somehow. He looked levelly across the distance between them and said, ‘Mr Castle. I was expecting you sooner or later.’

Mick stood where he was and didn’t say anything. He
couldn’t think of anything to say, he wanted to strangle the man sitting there, it was only somehow the insignificance of his body that disconcerted Mick. How could you knock a little old man like that about his own office and gain any satisfaction from it when he was looking at you almost with polite dismay?

He was intelligent though. He looked down and then back up at Mick as though it cost him an effort and then he said, ‘I’m so very sorry. None of it was meant to hurt anyone.’

Mick laughed. ‘Well then, what it was for?’ he said.

‘I love her, you see.’

‘I have bad news for you then. Your relationship with my wife has ruined our marriage and it has cost Isabel almost everything. She is very ill and you have caused it, you with your lack of restraint, with your greed, with your self-indulgence. She is drinking herself to death and I don’t know what more to do.’

Henry Atkinson looked puzzled and then he looked sad and strangest of all he looked lost.

‘God, I feared this would happen.’

‘This is the second time she has been like this. The first time I managed to stop her and to get her well again and now—’

There was a long silence as though Henry could not bear this any more than Mick could and Henry shook his head and looked around for something to distract him and he said, ‘I heard that she had been ill and I wanted to come to her, but of course I couldn’t.’

Henry sat where he was for a moment and then he got up and went to the fire and kicked the ashes back towards the grate.

‘How long have you known her?’ Mick said.

‘Twelve years.’

Mick stared and could not reconcile the idea of what the man was saying with the man himself. He was not aggressive or difficult or predatory, you could pass him in a street and not notice him, with his thin covering of hair on his head and permanently furrowed brow.

‘But we’ve only been married for eleven.’ Mick stared and stared and then he realized what it meant and he could have stood there for days. He had not understood, he had not known that the greatest reason for his life had not been of his doing, was in fact nothing to do with him.

Henry Atkinson threw him a look of apology. ‘I didn’t know until the child was born that she was unmistakably mine.’

Time passed. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. From somewhere there was a great wall of hurt and he resisted it and then he went numb. It was the only defence he had.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ Henry Atkinson asked him kindly.

And then Mick lost his temper and slammed Henry Atkinson up against the far wall of his office as though that might help. Henry didn’t complain, he just let go of his breath as though it hurt.

‘How could you do that? How could you use another
man in that way? Didn’t you know what would happen? Didn’t it occur to you that I might find out?’

‘Of course it did.’

Mick let go of him. ‘And didn’t that matter?’ He was looking down at the little man. Henry Atkinson seemed to have shrunk and put on ten years since Mick had walked into his office.

‘It was a risk I had to take.’

‘Fond of taking risks, are you?’

Henry shook his head and Mick saw in disgust that he was actually crying, his head turned aside as his eyes closed, like a schoolboy caught out in a prank.

‘Why on earth did she marry me?’ Mick said.

Henry shrugged. ‘She liked you. I think she thought you were a younger version of me. I have to say that I encouraged her. She was almost bound to conceive at some point. We were just grateful for the timing.’

Mick found that his hands were clinging to the front of Henry Atkinson’s untidy desk. Papers spilled towards him as he held on but they didn’t go any further.

‘I am married as I’m sure you know,’ Henry Atkinson said. ‘I have six children. Their mother is an excellent woman of her kind. The arrangement suited us very well, Isabel and me, except of course that you are not a younger version of me. I think she thought she could endure it and for a while she did and it seemed that no harm was done but—’ he stopped there and looked at Mick sympathetically, ‘forgive me – I think she found you dull, in the way that you live.

‘She found your friends worthy and earnest, the last thing that younger people ought to be. Frankly, she didn’t adjust well to marriage or motherhood. I held out hope, I wanted her to be happy. I would have given her up if she had been content with you. I do love her very much and despite what you think I would have given anything for this not to happen to her. If she had had other children it would possibly have been better. I know she feels like a failure, though I didn’t make her feel so and I’m not saying you did either, in fact, knowing you as a decent man, I’m sure you didn’t.’