Precious Time (20 page)

Caspar had laughed. ‘Just listen to him.’ Then, ‘But what I don’t understand, Jonah, is why the long face? Anyone would think this was a wake and not a celebration of your forthcoming nuptials with this heavenly creature. For heaven’s sake, cheer up.’

While they were getting into bed that night, Emily had said, ‘Your brother was right, you did look miserable during dinner. Are you sure you haven’t exaggerated the stories you’ve told me about him?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re jealous of him.’

‘Jealous? You have to be joking!’ He had tried to laugh off her accusation, but she had pursued the subject doggedly.

‘You kept looking at him as though you hated him, Jonah. I’ve never seen you like that before. It’s very worrying. You’re showing me a side to you that I didn’t know existed.’

All he could say was, ‘You’ve never seen me in the bosom of my family before.’ He had tried to make love to her, to reassure himself that her feelings for him hadn’t changed. But it hadn’t worked. He had been too anxious, too convinced of his own failings. Defeated, he had slept with his back to her.

The next day, after breakfast, Caspar had suggested they treated themselves to some fresh air by going for a walk. Val said she wanted to go to church and their father said he had more important things to do. Damson said she needed to be alone so that she could meditate and realign her aura, and Caspar’s girlfriend, who was getting the message that she was history, pouted and said she didn’t have any suitable footwear. But Emily had reacted as though she had just been invited to fly to Paris for lunch. ‘What a wonderful idea, Caspar. You must have been reading my mind. A walk is exactly what I need to blow away the cobwebs.’

‘Cobwebs, Emily? Don’t tell me my brother doesn’t take you out enough and he’s allowed you to collect cobwebs.’

It was no kind of joke, yet Emily seemed to find it hysterically funny, and Jonah knew that the only thing being blown away was his chance of marrying Emily.

Caspar and Emily strode on ahead, leaving Jonah to plod along with the sulky model who was wearing a pair of Val’s boots as well as a borrowed waxed jacket.

‘Is Caspar always like this?’ she said, pausing for the umpteenth time to catch her breath as they climbed the gentlest of slopes - she might have been racehorse thin, but she had as much stamina as a soggy Ryvita.

‘Always like what?’

‘So rude. And why don’t you stop what he’s doing with your girlfriend? Or are you so stupid you haven’t noticed?’

Oh, he’d noticed all right, and if the skinny, lettuce-nibbling girl hadn’t stopped every few hundred yards, Caspar and Emily wouldn’t have got so far ahead. Way off in the distance, and in the shelter of a rocky outcrop, he could see Caspar standing behind Emily, an arm over her left shoulder as he supposedly pointed out the landmarks to her - Kinder Scout, Cracken Edge and Chinley. Then he saw the hand stroke her windblown hair. When Emily turned to face him, her face tilted upwards so that he could kiss her, Jonah knew it was over.

Leaving Caspar’s girlfriend to sort herself out, he took off back to Mermaid House. He packed his things and left without telling Val or his father what he was doing.

Another man - a real man, as his father would have been quick to say - would have confronted Caspar and beaten the living daylights out of him. But apart from that one incident at school, Jonah had never resorted to violence and preferred to keep it that way.

That evening, Emily called to tell him what he already knew, that their engagement was off. Riding high on the euphoria created by Caspar’s attention, she told Jonah she hadn’t realised until now how dull he was. She told him that she was moving in with Caspar, that she had never known anyone so amazing. ‘It was love at first sight,’

she went on. ‘I hope you can understand that. He’s literally swept me off my feet.’

But in less than a month, she discovered what it felt like to be swept aside. As was to be expected, Caspar had lost interest in her. She wrote to Jonah, apologising for what had happened, saying that she had been a fool, that she didn’t know what had come over her. She even asked if there was any chance of them getting back together.

He never replied to her letter. What was there to say? He had warned her that Caspar liked nothing better than to play games with other people’s emotions.

There was no point in him asking why Caspar had done it. His answer, as it had been the first time he had taken a girlfriend from Jonah, would have been, ‘Because I can, Jonah.’ When the dust had finally settled, all he said on the matter was, ‘She clearly wasn’t in love with you, Jonah. If she had been, I wouldn’t have been a temptation for her. Think of the episode as my having done you a favour. You’re better off without her. No need to thank me.’

Now, as he tipped his mushroom risotto on to his plate, and poured himself another glass of wine, Jonah wondered if anything, or anyone, could shame Caspar into behaving like a decent human being.

Archie had been too tired to face cooking supper that evening, so he had picked up fish and chips on the way home from the shop. He unwrapped the two parcels and tipped the contents on to the plates he had warmed under the grill, then put them on the table where Bessie was doing her best to butter some slices of white bread. Her movements were heartbreakingly slow and clumsy, and all at once he was reminded of past Christmases, when Bessie would cook the largest turkey they could afford and invite any neighbours who were on their own to share it with them. One Christmas morning, she had sent Archie out on his bike to round up Miss Glenys Watson, a retired music teacher, who was so proud she would rather sit on her own listening to the radio than admit she couldn’t afford to celebrate Christmas. Nor did she want it known that, other than her ageing cat, she didn’t have anyone to spend it with. ‘Please, Miss Watson,’

he had said, after knocking on her door, ‘Mum says she needs your help. She wants us all to sing carols after lunch and you’re the only one she knows who can play the piano without her getting a headache. Will you come?’

Miss Watson must have known what his mother was up to, but she never let on. She had accepted the invitation graciously, pulled on her hat and scarf, her gloves and coat, locked the door and walked alongside him as he pushed his bike. They had almost reached home, when she said, ‘Do you play the piano, Archie?’

‘Oh, no, Miss Watson. I’m not at all musical.’

‘Perhaps it’s time someone taught you. I could give you lessons after school.’

He had said he would like that very much, but he didn’t think his mother could afford it. ‘But you mustn’t tell her I said that,’ he had confided.

She had smiled and said, ‘I’m sure we can find a way round that little problem.’

At ten years old, he didn’t understand that he had just become a bridge between his mother’s warmhearted generosity and an old lady’s pride. All he knew was that it was Christmas morning and a whole day of seeing his mother happy lay ahead of him. She liked nothing better than having people around her, especially those she thought she was helping. ‘The world is full of sad and lonely people,’

she would say to Archie, ‘so it’s down to the rest of us to put a smile on their faces.’ One of her favourite games was to sit on a bus and see how many people she could make smile during their journey. The bigger the challenge, the more she enjoyed herself. ‘See that poor old soul just getting on, the one in the tatty gabardine and the rucked-up face to match,’ she whispered to him one day. ‘Two peppermint humbugs says I can have her lips twitching by the time she gets off.’

And, of course, she had, and with so little effort. ‘It doesn’t take much to spread a little happiness,’ she always claimed.

The first Christmas Miss Watson spent with them was also the year his father had turned up unexpectedly on Boxing Day. They had heard nothing from him for years, then out of the blue there he was, sprawled on the settee, throwing peanuts into the air and catching them in his mouth, expecting to be fed before he strolled down to the pub to pick up where he had left off with his drinking cronies. In bed that night, Archie had heard his mother telling his dad that, for the sake of their son, if he was back, it had to be for ever or not at all.

Archie had held his breath. He didn’t want his father around: he knew it would make his mother unhappy, that it would mean more drunken, violent rages. There would be no more amusing bus rides together, no more cosy evenings by the fire while his mother read to him. His heart had crashed to a stop when he heard his father say, “Course I’m back for good, Bess. What can I do to convince you I’m a reformed character? I’m gonna take the first job that comes along and prove to you I’m as good as my word.’

That first job never did come along and he lay on the settee smoking and drinking beer while Bessie worked at the bakery. He even suggested, since he was around to see to the boy - he always called Archie ‘the boy’ - that she ought to work more shifts because the extra money would come in handy.

Archie had never been able to understand why his mother, when she could be so strong - she was known as the rock of the

neighbourhood - was so weak when it came to dealing with a husband who treated her so badly. Perhaps her feelings for him overruled common sense and allowed her to compromise where otherwise she would have held firm.

And wasn’t that what he had done with Stella? Even when he had known she was having an affair, he had held on to the hope that she would once again feel for him what he still felt for her.

When he had met Stella, she had bowled him over: she was tall, elegant and knew how to dress to make the most of her long legs.

How proud he had been to catch such a stunner. She could have had anyone, but she had settled for plain old Archie Merryman. ‘It’s because you’re going to take me away from all this,’ she would laugh, when he asked her why she loved him. ‘All this’ had been the noisy, robust family in which she had grown up. Archie had thought her parents, brothers and sisters were full of fun and knew how to enjoy themselves, but she said they embarrassed her, that they didn’t aspire to anything. There was so much Stella wanted out of life, and that was one of the reasons he had started up his own business.

Nobody in her family had done that: the men had all been employed at the local steel works in Sheffield, while the women had cleaned and had babies.

‘Archie?’

He looked up from his plate, realising that his mother had been trying to talk to him. ‘Sorry, mum, what did you say?’

‘Sad?’

He shook his head. ‘No, just tired. It’s been a long day.’

She forked up a chip with her good hand. ‘Sorry.’

‘What for?’

Her words came out in a long jumble, but eventually he

disentangled them. ‘I told you earlier, there’s nothing to apologise for. It was great that you felt strong enough to go shopping, and it was a simple mistake you made, taking the wrong purse with you. It was only because you got flustered that your speech went all to cock.

Remember what the therapist said? It’s when you get upset that the words get clogged up inside your head.’

And if those people at the supermarket had been more understanding, she wouldn’t have got into such a pickle, he thought, and stood up to put the kettle on. Thank heavens that young woman and her little lad had been on hand to help. He didn’t like to think what would have happened if they hadn’t been there. It broke his heart to think how distressed Bessie must have been at not being able to explain what was wrong with her.

Water was gushing over the top of the kettle and he turned off the tap as his sadness turned to anger. His mother had been treated as if she was batty, until a stranger had come to her aid. Not so long ago, Bessie had been as strong and capable as any of them.

His mother was still eating her fish and chips when he sat down again with their mugs of tea. She never had been one to rush her food, but now she took twice as long. He wasn’t bothered. He didn’t have anything else to do that evening and was happy to sit with her.

He reached for the local paper and flicked through to the classifieds to make sure his regular house-clearance advert had gone in. The ‘What’s On’ section caught his eye. It was years since he had been to the cinema - Stella could never sit still long enough to watch a film and he was seized with the urge to go. ‘What do you think to seeing a film at the weekend?’ he asked his mother.

Without needing to disentangle her response, he could see that she approved of the idea. In the old days, going to the flicks had always been something of a treat for her. Clark Gable, Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn and Omar Sharif had provided her with a much needed touch of glamour and excitement.

He folded the newspaper and laid it flat on the table so that they could make their choice. Today’s movie stars might not be as glamorous as they’d been in Bessie’s day, but they might give her a chance to escape the unfairness of her life for a little while.

Their breakfast eaten and everything tidied away, Clara was keen to make a start on Mermaid House. Her only concern was keeping Ned occupied while she got down to work. Though he could amuse himself for quite long spells, she wasn’t sure how soon it would be before he was bored. And, like any parent, she knew that boredom might lead him into danger or mischief.

The answer was to keep him busy, and having already glimpsed some of the ground-floor rooms, she felt there was enough relatively safe-looking junk lying about the place with which Ned could play for hours.

Mr Liberty had offered to give them a tour of the house last night, but Clara had declined. Instead she and Ned had driven back into Deaconsbridge and made a return visit to the supermarket where, with a sub from Mr Liberty’s wallet, she had bought several carrier bags of cleaning products, rubber gloves, cloths, tins of polish, air fresheners, and several rolls of bin-bags.

She never did anything by half, and having made a deal with the old man she was determined to see it through. There had been no danger of her waking this morning and regretting her decision. That was not her style. She had always been the same, even as a child - so her mother had frequently told her. If she had wanted to come top in French she went all out to achieve it. Conversely, if she didn’t want to do something, like finish a piece of embroidery for a needlework lesson, there was no making her do it.