Shadow Baby (42 page)

‘My voice?’

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‘Your singing voice, apparently. She told me as we passed a ruined church on the Moorhouse road where, she was told by your cousin at the Fox and Hound, you used to sing in the choir.’

Henry carried on, describing the trip to Newcastle, but Leah heard no more. She was back in that little church and singing her heart out, and Hugo was coming home soon to claim her and the baby she had just written to say she was carrying. So many years since that happy time - then she caught herself, astonished. A happy time? It was now that she was happy, surely, and that other time belonged to dark days, when she was lost and abandoned and a fool. Singing in that church she had been foolish and only in that sense ‘happy’, meaning vacant, stupid. It made her feel hot just to remember her trust and faith in Hugo Todhunter who, compared to Henry,‘her Henry, was weak and faithless, and had not known the meaning of the word love. She hated him. It had taken years for the hatred to build up - Oh, how forgiving she had been, it made her sick to think of it now: such excuses she had made for him, such blind understanding of his position she had shown. And he had left her with evidence of his betrayal, that crying scrap of a baby - and she could not bear it.

So the child had grown up to have her voice. It surprised her. She had not the build to have a good voice. She was too thin, with hardly any chest, and looked as if she could have no power. It was a useless gift in any case. Singing had never helped her get on in life and it had not helped this girl, this daughter of Hugo’s.

Henry had finished his recital. ‘We came back the same road,’ he was saying, ‘but the village was all in darkness.’

‘It would be,’ she said, ‘nights start early in Moorhouse. I dreaded the winter, dark by three in the afternoon on bad days.’ She paused. Henry was giving her such a strange, pitying look. She turned away from him and said, ‘She passed her father’s house too, on that road, but you know nothing of him.’ Henry cleared his throat. ‘Do you wish to, Henry? Do you wish to?’

‘Not if it distresses you. I haven’t known, or asked, all these years, and I can manage.’

‘But do you wish to know?’

‘If you wish to tell me, at last.’

Leah went and stood by the fire and, leaning on the mantelpiece and staring into the flames, she said, speaking rapidly and in an irritated tone, ‘His name was Hugo Todhunter. I vowed I’d never

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say it again. He was well-to-do. His family had the only big house in the village, on the edge, outside it. He went off and got into trouble and came home only when it was made a condition of his debts being paid. He met me on the road, he on his horse. You know the rest.’ She turned round so suddenly that her dress was in danger of catching alight and Henry cried a warning. ‘She is his daughter,’ Leah said, ‘she should go in search of him.’

‘She has no interest in him. She does not even wish to know who he was and made that plain.’

‘But she ought to know, it is her right. It is he who is responsible for her lack of a mother.’

‘That does not make sense, Leah.’

‘It does to me. It ought to make sense to her. Let her go to Moorhouse, to the Todhunters. I wrote to them, to the mother and the sister, and told them I had baptized their son’s daughter and given her their name, Evelyn. Does she know that? Tell her that, tell her to go to Moorhouse and present herself

Henry did tell her. He told Evie the very next day, but he could see at once that she still had no interest. ‘Of course,’ Henry said, carefully, ‘my wife does not know what happened to him after he went to Canada and left her. He may have returned, or he may be dead. There is no way of knowing. But if you were to visit the Todhunters and explain …’ Evie shook her head and stood still with an air of waiting to be dismissed. She was looking prettier lately, though that was not so very pretty. Her better clothes helped. She was wearing a deep royal blue dress with darker blue trimmings and it gave a brightness to her pale face. She had a more confident posture too. She stood with her thin shoulders back and her head lifted whereas formerly she had seemed hunched and her eyes were always on the ground. It was pleasing to see this improvement and he was sure others would have noticed it. He wondered, as he sent her back to work, if Evie might now attract a suitor, but it was not something he could ask her. He wished some young man would come along and take an interest in her and make her happy, but then while wishing this he had to remind himself that nothing would apparently make Evie happy except acknowledgement by her mother, or so she believed.

Since nothing could be done about this, Henry learned to put it out of his mind for longer and longer stretches of time. Evie seemed settled. She had her house, she was doing well at work. And Leah,

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though still bolting the door when she was alone, had settled down too. She was not quite her old self, not quite as carefree and cheerful, but there were no more tearful outbursts nor any overt signs of irrational behaviour. He hoped that she had come to believe that what he had told her was true - Evie Messenger would not make any trouble. If she could not have her mother’s love she was now apparently prepared to forget about it and resign herself to being motherless. Perhaps she had decided it did not matter so much after all. What was a mother? An accident of nature, no more than that, and a father even more so. Only when one was young was a mother important and he reasoned that Evie had worked this out and accepted her loss. She might have found her mother, but she could not put the clock back and therefore rejection by her was all simply part of a tragedy that was over. It had become a fuss about nothing.

Henry was all the more surprised, having rationalised the situation to his satisfaction, when one afternoon two years later he returned to his house to find Leah refusing at first to unlock the door for him. He had to bang and shout before he saw her face pressed up against the stained glass, peering through it to check that it was indeed him. Then when the bolt was drawn and he gained entry it was only to see his wife run up the stairs and into their bedroom without a word of explanation. He called after her but she would not answer and he was obliged to follow her, highly irritated at the disruption to his usually soothing homecoming.

‘Well, Leah?’ he said, rather more sharply than he had intended. ‘This nonsense again, after all this time?’ She lay on the bed looking, he suddenly saw, so truly ill that for the first time he was concerned. ‘Leah? What has happened? Are the girls …?’

‘The girls are out, at Maisie Hawthorne’s, they are fine.’

‘Well, then?’

‘She came. I always knew she would.’

‘Who? Evie Messenger?’

‘Yes. Her.’

He was stunned, and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Good God. When?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘But she would be at work.’

‘It is Thursday. She works Saturday and has Thursday afternoon free now. You told me yourself of this change for your staff.’

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‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing. I closed the door.’

‘In her face?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was that necessary, Leah? After all this time …’

‘Time? What has time to do with it? She is allowed to do anything simply because two years or so have gone by in which she has done nothing? I knew she was biding her time, I knew she would come one day.’

Henry sighed and held his head in his hands. ‘I am tired and hungry,’ he said.

‘There is food prepared for you. I cannot eat.’

Henry went slowly downstairs and into the dining-room where there were several plates laid out with covers over them. He went first to the cupboard and poured himself a whisky, which he had taken to drinking recently. Then he ate his way through the cold meats and the potato salad and the cheese, and afterwards got up and defiantly had another whisky which left him feeling sick. There had been no sound meanwhile from upstairs. He wished his daughters would come back to liven the place up and distract him. If Leah did not come down he would have to go up again to her. It was more tempting to go to Evie and find out from her why on earth she had come here, but his pony and trap were put away and, though trams ran into town now, it would mean walking to the top of the bank to catch one and then changing at the Town Hall. He would have to wait until tomorrow to see Evie and straighten this out. There was no point in talking to Leah before he had seen Evie. If she had shut the door in the face of her unexpected and dreaded visitor without allowing her to speak, then she could not possibly know anything.

It was an uncomfortable night. Leah wept, though quietly, and Henry slept only fitfully. Any sympathy he had previously had for his wife had disappeared. Her behaviour was inexcusable now and his main feeling was one of profound annoyance. They had been through all this and it was exceedingly tiresome to be faced with the prospect of having to go through it all again. He rose early and saw to his own breakfast and left without taking Leah any tea - she could make of that what she liked. The moment he arrived at work, he sent for Evie only to be told she was in attendance at a fitting, helping Miss Minto. Since he could hardly drag her out of it without arousing intense curiosity, he had to wait a whole hour, by which

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time he could hardly conceal his very real impatience. It was not a sensible state of mind to be in and he tried hard to seem calm when Evie at last appeared.

He asked first about the fitting at which she had just been present, nodding his way through her report without taking in a word. Only when he was sure his tone of voice would emerge as quite even, did he say, ‘I believe you called at my house yesterday afternoon, Evie.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She did not add that the door had been shut in her face. Evie, he well knew, never added anything unnecessary.

‘I am sorry my wife was indisposed,’ Henry said, ‘and had to close the door without hearing you - she was taken ill with such suddenness - but might I ask the reason for your visit?’

‘I am getting married, sir, Mr Arnesen.’

Henry was so startled he dropped the pair of scissors with which he had been fiddling, and had to cover his confusion by making a performance of picking them up again. ‘Married, Evie?’ he finally said.

‘Yes, sir. Next month.’

‘May I ask to whom?’

‘James Paterson, sir.’

‘Jimmy? Good heavens, I did not know he was courting you. Has it been a long engagement?’

‘There has been no engagement, sir. James has no money for an engagement ring and since we know our own minds there is no sense in an engagement.’

‘I am very happy for you, Evie.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘So you came to my home to tell me?’ Henry put into his voice his surprise that she should do this, since she must have known perfectly well he was at work, but Evie was not perturbed.

‘No, sir. I came to tell my mother and to ask her to be at my wedding and sign as witness to it. She is my mother, after all. It would not cause comment. James does not know, nobody does. It would be a favour, and your being my employer and my mother your wife, and you have been very good, and at other people’s weddings, sir, you have graced other occasions and are known for it, for the kindness and compliment. Otherwise, I have no one. It will be very quiet and simple and quick. Half an hour, sir, and that is all, and no breakfast or formalities.’

It was a veritable speech, and Henry recognised the effort it had

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cost Evie to make it. She had rehearsed the words over and over, he was sure, and thought about them long and carefully. But what she could not have calculated was the effect. Henry felt moved to tears and at the same time disturbed. There was in Evie’s voice an element he could not quite identify and it worried him - there seemed a note of warning in it, but of what was she warning him? And yet she had now gone back to looking as harmless and demure as usual, the sort of person who would not have the strength of character to issue warnings to her employer.

‘Well, Evie,’ Henry said, eventually, ‘I must discuss this with Mrs Arnesen, but I fear she will not be well enough to attend any wedding.’ Evie hung her head, but whether in disbelief or disappointment he could not tell. ‘When are you to marry, exactly?’

‘Saturday week, sir.’

‘At which church?’

‘Holy Trinity, sir, in Caldewgate, where my mother had me baptised.’

Again, Henry heard the same subtle message: take note, this is significant. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, pointlessly. ‘And will you carry on living at Holme Head?’

‘No, sir. Those houses are for single women. We have bought a house.’

Henry raised his eyebrows. There could be no ‘we’ about it. Jimmy Paterson could not possibly have any money. His money, the money he had settled on Evie which up to now she had refused to invest in a house, was the only identifiable source of the revenue needed for purchasing property. ‘I am pleased,’ he said, ‘it is a wise move. Where is the house, might I ask?’

‘Etterby Terrace, sir.’

Henry looked up sharply. Etterby Terrace was a tiny row of terraced houses running off to the left of Etterby Street, at the top of which, on Etterby Scaur, the Arnesens lived. Evie’s expression was free of anything remotely resembling triumph, but he was quite sure she had understood the impact of this news. ‘I did not know those Etterby Terrace houses could be got so cheap,’ he said.

‘It is in bad condition, sir, very bad.’

‘Is it wise then, to take on such a burden when neither of you are yet earning anything substantial?’

‘James’s brothers are builders, sir, and his father a carpenter, and

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they will see us all right. And we mean the house to work for us, to be a lodging house.1

‘You are full of plans, then.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I wish you luck.’

‘Thank you, sir. So you will come to my wedding, sir?’ There was the faintest emphasis on the word ‘you’ and once more the hint of threat.

‘I will let you know, Evie,’ Henry said, ‘but with my wife ill I cannot promise.’