Snow Angels (22 page)

‘Abby.’ He made as if to sit up and then changed his mind.

‘I had second thoughts. Matthew can’t stay here.’

The look on Gil’s face showed such relief that she was glad she had come.

‘My father’s got used to him. Would you let me take him back?’

‘I wish you would.’

He still didn’t move. Abby couldn’t understand it. She went across to the little boy but he backed away from her.

‘Matt?’ Gil called from the bed and the child ran across. ‘Go, just for a little while, just for now.’

Matthew began to cry. It made Abby think of how a small animal would have reacted. Children knew things that adults had long since forgotten. She hadn’t thought he would go so readily with Gil and she hadn’t imagined that he would not want to leave this vile place. Matthew tugged at the bedclothes and Abby caught a glimpse of what had been a good shirt at one time. The light from the rain-spattered window showed what looked to her like blood. She tried to meet Gil’s eyes but he was concentrating on the child, talking to him and adjusting the bedclothes. Neither his face nor his eyes told her that there was any kind of problem.

She went to him.

‘Go with Abby now,’ he was saying.

‘Is there something the matter?’

‘No, everything’s fine.’

She touched Matthew, drew him away a little. Then she pulled at the bedclothes. Blood, all wet and shiny and frothy, a lot of it, so much of it, all over his clothes and all over the bed, sticky, oozing, bright red, more blood than she had ever seen in her life. Abby’s experience was cut fingers and knees. Blood was something that stopped almost immediately, but this was not. Her first instinct was to try and stop it, but when she touched him her hands sank in it.

‘Oh God. Oh my God, what have you done?’ she accused him, starting to cry. ‘What on earth have you done?’

Hearing her, Matthew began to cry too.

‘It’s nothing,’ Gil said.

The blood ran down Abby’s hands, down her wrists and onto the white cuffs of her blouse.

‘I’ll be fine. Please take him.’

‘Oh yes, fine,’ Abby said. ‘What are you going to do, lie here and die?’

‘I’m not going to die.’

‘No? No, of course not.’ Why had she had not noticed the grey of his face, the pain in his eyes? ‘What happened? What on earth happened? No, never mind. A doctor.’

Gil clasped her wrist in his fingers.

‘No!’ he said.

‘I see,’ Abby said, suddenly cold and crafty. ‘You think you can just die on me and I will do nothing.’

‘You don’t have to do anything. You’re not owing me. As long as you take him, that was all I was bothered about. Just take him and go.’

‘And have you on my conscience for the rest of my life? I will not!’ She dragged free, wiped her hands on her skirt, picked up the child and went carefully down the stairs. The woman came out of the kitchen.

‘Don’t close the door, I’m coming back in a minute,’ Abby told her.

She ran down the street with Matthew in her arms and ordered the driver to take the carriage down the narrow road. When they reached the house she told Matthew to stay inside and then urged the driver into the house. He was not keen and when he saw Gil, he was even less so.

‘He’s a goner,’ he declared, ‘might as well leave him here.’

‘I will not,’ Abby said firmly. ‘Gil, I want you to get up.’

‘I can’t.’

He had never seemed as big to Abby as when she tried to move him. The driver eyed the blood with distaste but, seeing her determination, pulled Gil out of the bed. They hurt him, but Abby knew that if she didn’t get him out of here he would
die anyway and she didn’t want him to. She didn’t think about this at the time because she would have said that she didn’t care any more, but she felt responsible, she wanted nothing to do directly with anybody’s death. Somehow they got him out of the room, Gil walked part of the way and he certainly walked down the stairs because they were so narrow and steep that he couldn’t have been carried down them, at least not by a small woman and an old man. He was unconscious before they reached the end of the street, but all Abby had to do then was get him home.

*

Dr Brown was not a happy man. He tut-tutted over his patient.

‘Knifed,’ the doctor surmised, ‘I would say. Nasty wounds. It didn’t help moving him.’

‘I couldn’t leave him there,’ Abby said and the doctor looked surprised at her vehemence. She had discovered that guilt came in various forms and, stupidly, all she could think of was Gil begging her to marry him. She kept telling herself that it was a long time ago and of little consequence any more, but it did not make her comfortable. She engaged two nurses so that neither Kate, Mrs Wilkins nor she would have to go into the room where Gil lay half-conscious. She would have nothing to do with this and there was no reason why their servants should have anything to do with it either. She had sent a note to her father and he came back, quietly delighted to see the child, but he came out of the bedroom grave-faced.

‘Doctor Brown says he may not last the night,’ Abby told her father as they drank coffee in the sitting-room.

‘It could be the smallest funeral ever,’ her father said. ‘Why didn’t you leave him there?’

‘Would you have wanted me to?’

‘You could have taken the child and come home.’

‘He asked me to marry him once,’ Abby said. ‘I told him to go to hell.’

‘He seems to have managed it very successfully. I’m so disappointed.’

Gil didn’t die during the night. Abby went to bed and told herself she didn’t care and was wretched. She knew because she went in, told the nurse to go downstairs for a while and put the kettle on, the fire would be bright all night. She sat down by the bed and watched him. The room was silent. Abby sat down on the bed, afraid that he was quiet.

‘Don’t die on me. I don’t want your death on my conscience, you bastard. How could you? How could you do such a thing? You, of all people. Why couldn’t you die before I got there? That would have been easy but oh no, not you.’

Gil opened his eyes, reached for her hand and, when he found it, closed his eyes again and after that was quiet. When the nurse came back, Abby went to bed. She even dozed for a little while but she dreamed about him each time and then woke up, so in the end, when the daylight finally came, she pushed back the curtains. It was snowing. She thought of that Christmas time after her mother had died when she went to Bamburgh House with her father and Gil’s father had beaten him for stupidity and she had taught him how to make snow angels. It was such a long time ago.

*

In the darkness of the corner in the pub there had been deliverance. Amidst the smoke and the talk of the mighty ship they were building he was vaguely happy. Anonymity there. It didn’t matter who you were or what your name was. If they couldn’t remember, or hadn’t heard, they called you ‘Geordie’. Everybody was ‘Geordie’ here. The beer went down like velvet nectar and settled there so soothing inside you. It took the edge off everything, so that you could look back on anything at all and it was bearable. Amidst the sing-song sound of the Newcastle voices he felt safe. He didn’t have to say anything; he was accepted here, at home, warm and comforted and he could go
back to the night with beer for a blanket and disappear beneath it until the morning came. The morning wasn’t to be thought of, but then again there was only that gap between waking and working. Once he was working, the time went by because the men were there. They hid him. He could hide amongst them for a hundred years.

And then the door opened and a woman walked in. He thought it must be the first time a respectable woman had ever walked into such a place and she was more than respectable; she was quality. Such an entrance, such a dress. It was blue and his swift mind told him through the beer who it was, because she nearly always wore blue. Part of him was admiring, but most of him was angry because he knew straight away what she wanted. He drew back slightly into the corner and watched her. She couldn’t win here, but she didn’t seem to know that or care; she was ready to take on the pub. The landlord wasn’t a bad man and Gil didn’t worry until Eccles got hold of her. If Eccles got her outside she was done for, so he went over and got in the way. Eccles wouldn’t take a chance, not on somebody a lot bigger than him, even for a bonny piece like that and she was trouble, even Eccles would know that. She had always been trouble. He was so proud of her and wanted to smack her face.

He went outside and she followed him. He didn’t look at her because he was so angry. All she was thinking about was her father and herself. The boy didn’t matter. Her father and her mother and herself had been the only people who had ever come into the magic circle of Abby’s mind. He doubted that her marriage was a success. What would she be like in bed? Very bossy, probably. Poor Robert, given instructions. And yes, he had been right. She started up straight away, going on about how ill Henderson was. It was all guilt, because she wasn’t in Newcastle most of the time; she went swanning about on the continent, doing God knew what with all Robert’s posh friends, idle and wearing clothes like she had on now, which some poor bitch had ruined her eyesight stitching. She didn’t know anything
and she didn’t care about anybody. He listened to her ranting on, gave the answer she wanted and walked away. She stood there in the street looking stupid in her silk dress and her bonnet, or whatever the hell it was, standing there like Lady Muck.

He didn’t go far. He couldn’t count on Eccles or some other clever bastard not coming out of the pub before she reached the carriage, so he waited and watched from the end of the street until she got there and inside, the door slammed and the carriage moved away before he went any further.

He went home. My God, it was home. Beer and oblivion. He wouldn’t care, but the woman had offered him free board and lodgings when he first got there in return for bedding her. When he had refused the offer, she got two lads to try and throw him out. Gil had put them both down the stairs, had listened to the sound of the way that they bounced. After that she didn’t say anything and within days he was accepted in the area. Workmen were loyal to one another, at least in certain ways, so he had a tiny room to himself most of the time, though somebody else often slept in his bed during the day. He could not think now how his life had been, how complicated. Now it was simple. He went to work, he got paid, he got drunk and he slept. He let nothing else into his conscious mind except that twice he had gone to the kitchen door of Henderson’s house and given Kate money. He had seen the disgust on her face, on so many people’s faces. He expected nothing more, it didn’t matter. There was the present.

He tried not to think about Abby. She came from another time and it seemed so far away now, like something in another life. He would have to take the boy. He decided on that before he went to sleep. He could feel the way that his mind emptied. The beer did that. It kicked out all those creepy, itchy thoughts that turned your stomach in the darkness.

The following morning he had to go early to Jesmond. It would still make him late for work, but there was no help for it. One of his workmates lived nearby and his wife had a small
child, so on the way back he would ask her, if he paid her, whether she would look after Matthew. Also he would have to think about finding somewhere better to live. Matthew could not be kept in a hovel. There was not going to be enough money to pay her, somewhere to live and eat reasonably well, but he pushed that to a space at the back of his mind. First of all, there was Matthew to collect.

The funny thing was that he missed him. Discovering that he had a child had not been a pleasant shock, but he felt sympathy for the little boy because his whole life had been altered. He had lost his mother and his home, his grandparents, prosperity, security and the biggest shipyard the Tyne had ever seen. Almost everything had gone. What Gil hadn’t known at the time was that Matthew knew him better than he knew Edward; though Gil had not seen the fascination for someone else’s child, Matthew was used to him, to seeing him around the house, to him being part of the everyday furniture of his small existence and, because Gil was the only familiar person when Gil went to the back door and got down and spoke to him, the child came straight to him with gladness in his face. Gil had thought that he was beyond feeling, but when he took the little boy into his arms he knew that he was not and that he would try everything to get back a decent life for him.

He carried him all the way back. He called in at the house where he was hoping to leave Matthew and Jem’s wife was agreeable, tried to tell him that she would take no money. People in Newcastle, Gil thought, had to be some of the most generous in the world. She didn’t ask questions about where Matthew’s mother was. She accepted the child and Gil promised that he would pay her. He even spoke to Jem about it at work and the young man, who was about his own age, tried to say that they would not take money for such a thing, even though they had so little. Gil said again that he couldn’t leave Matthew without paying.

Suddenly the world looked better; it looked as though
something might work out. At the end of the day he collected Matthew from Jem’s wife and she offered Gil to stay and eat. He tried to refuse but he couldn’t because the smell of the stew she had made was like nothing he had ever come across in his whole life, so he and Matthew stayed and Gil was actually hungry. The taste of the vegetables and the small amount of meat was heaven. When he set out down the street he didn’t even want beer for the first time. Things had changed that day. It was the best day in so long. He got halfway down the street when he glimpsed somebody in the shadows and put Matthew down but he was not quick enough because he didn’t like to let loose of Matthew completely. In those few seconds his attacker came upon him and it was too late. The first cut was almost enough, the second had him on the ground, the third wasn’t really necessary, yet all he could think about was the boy.

He couldn’t think when it had happened. Was it dark or was it the next day? Could it have been light? Could he have gone home and slept and then come out the next morning? He didn’t remember much. He remembered pretending to Matthew that nothing important had happened. He remembered crawling up the stairs and it was like mountaineering. He remembered gaining the bed and after that his full concern had been that he was going to die and there was nobody to take Matthew. He cursed Abby a thousand times for what she had done. If only she had waited two more days, then it wouldn’t have been important. He was going to die and leave the child in such circumstances. And then she had come back. What he wanted was for her to walk out with the child and leave him. The world was nothing to do with him, but she had shouted and sworn and called him names and pulled him off the bed. The pain was unbearable, excruciating. She shouted and shouted at him, and the noise had brought other people near, not too close, blood always made them back off. Abby’s fishwife act was so annoying that he managed to get down the stairs and into the carriage. After that, everything went black. He was glad to be dead.