The Most Precious Thing (22 page)
When she was dry again, she spent some time rubbing her hair through her fingers, sitting in front of the glowing range wrapped in a blanket, wearing just her drawers and shift, her head bent towards the heat. After brushing the silky waves exactly one hundred times, a habit from childhood, she left it loose about her face while she pulled on the rest of her clothes and emptied the now cold bath, bucket by bucketful.
Once that was accomplished, she brought in more water for the shallow bath David had each night on returning home from the colliery. When the water was heated and the bath was ready, Carrie stood looking at it for a moment or two.
What would folk say if they knew she’d been married for twelve months and had never once seen her husband naked? She always made sure David’s bath was ready when he walked in the door, but she would avert her eyes while he undressed and then gather up his work clothes and take them through to the backyard. She made sure she stayed outside beating the dust and grime out of them until he was dressed in his other pair of working trousers and shirt which they’d got out of pawn as soon as he was back in work. Well, that was going to change tonight. Her heart began to jump and race, and she shut her eyes tightly for a second.
If this was a new start, a rebirth, it had to begin as it was going to continue, and her mam had always washed her da’s back for him.
There was a pan of hodgepodge simmering on the hob, and she’d baked some stottie cake earlier to mop up the gravy with. The bread and butter pudding would be ready as they finished that. She nodded to herself, glancing round the room once again and smiling despite her nerves as Matthew made a little snuffling sound in his sleep.
And then she heard the front door open and close, and knew he was here.
‘All right, lass?’ David’s voice was quizzical and Carrie belatedly realised she was standing to attention next to the tin bath as though she was on sentry duty.
‘Aye, yes.’ Her voice was a little high and she coughed, clearing her throat before she said, ‘Your bath’s ready.’
‘Aye.’ His eyes narrowed for a moment, and he put his bait tin on the little table next to the tin of freshly made fireworks before he said, ‘Somethin’ smells good.’
‘It’s hodgepodge.’ She knew the rich stew made with mutton, turnips, carrots, peas, onions, broad beans, lettuce and barley was David’s favourite. ‘And there’s bread and butter pudding for afters.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘It’s not me birthday, is it?’
‘No.’
‘I thought for a minute we were celebrating something.’
Oh, if only he knew! Would he think she was forward, brazen, if she followed through with her plan? She stared at him, desperately conscious of the height and breadth of him and the overall maleness of the strong compact body in front of her. Well, she couldn’t help it if he did. It was now or never, she would never be able to work up the courage again, which had first reared its head out on Penshaw Hill.
She was aware he was standing as though slightly nonplussed, and following the normal procedure she now turned away, saying, ‘I’ll take your clothes through to the yard when you’re ready.’
She waited until he had sat down in the bath before she turned round, and the water was still swishing when she croaked - momentarily poleaxed by the broad muscled shoulders and lean back on view - ‘Would you like me to wash your back?’
He had been rubbing his legs with the soap before she spoke, but now he became absolutely still. All the ripples in the water died before he said, his voice sounding perfectly normal, ‘Aye, thanks, lass,’ and he stretched out the hand holding the soap.
She performed the task almost mechanically, one half of her brain registering the small, blue-black indentations which the coal stamped on those who had the temerity to plunder it, and the other concentrating on thinking of nothing at all. And then she had finished. She handed him the soap and gathered up his pit clothes. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said and bolted for the door.
He was fully dressed when she re-entered the room, and she could only admire his aplomb when he said, ‘I’ve cleared the table and the tea’s mashing, all right? You dish up and I’ll get rid of the bath water.’
Her taut body relaxed a little as she went about the normal everyday task of lading out the stew and pouring the tea, cutting shives of stottie cake and putting them on a plate in the middle of the small table. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed. It had been a bone of contention between them when in the early days she had insisted that he have the armchair drawn close to the table and she sit on the bed for their evening meal. It was only when she had pointed out that he was taller and bigger than she was and much more suited to the armchair that he agreed to use it.
When the meal was over and the dishes had been cleared away, she laid out the papers, pudding basin, paintbrush and blue touchpapers ready for morning. She watched David extinguish the oil lamp. When the room was dark she knew he would begin undressing, laying his clothes on the back of the armchair by feeling his way. He would don his nightshirt, and she her nightdress, and then they would climb into bed.
And there the pattern would be broken. She swallowed. If she could bring herself to do this. She pressed her lips tightly together, closed her eyes and bowed her head. She was not going to back out now.
She was not.
David was not like Alec. They might be brothers but they couldn’t be more different.
She was not.
David was not like Alec. They might be brothers but they couldn’t be more different.
A dart of memory, carrying the pain her first introduction to sex had brought with it, caused her to tense. It wouldn’t be the same with David, it wouldn’t.
She finished undressing, pulled on her nightdress and slipped under the covers a second before she heard him walk across the room and then climb in beside her. Again she repeated to herself, this was David.
David
. It would be different.
David
. It would be different.
It was different. It was different from the first moment she stretched out a trembling hand and touched him, murmuring, ‘David . . .’ and then found she just didn’t have the words to say anything more.
But she didn’t need to. He turned towards her, slowly and firmly put his arms about her and drew her into him, stroking her hair for long minutes until she relaxed against him.
She didn’t know quite what she had expected, she admitted to herself afterwards in the moments before she went to sleep in his arms, but it hadn’t been his tenderness and comfort, the way he had brought forth from her feelings she had never dreamed she was capable of. In fact, she didn’t know if it was right and proper to feel all that she had, for her body to be so . . . She couldn’t find a word for the pleasure she had experienced. And if she thought about some of the things he had done in the time before he had actually taken her, she would never be able to look him in the face again.
But it had been nice. The word mocked her with its prim overtones, causing her to blush in the darkness. It had been very, very nice.
Part 3
An Uneasy Peace
1936
1936
Chapter Eleven
‘You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face, Da. Can’t you see that? You have to play the owners and the government at their own game.’
‘Play ’em at their own game be damned!’ Ned Sutton glared at Walter before taking out his all too apparent bad temper on a hapless potato beneath his garden fork. ‘They’ve got us by the short an’ curlies. They put us on short time an’ then say we can’t claim benefit unless there’s been three consecutive days without employment, so what’s the bettin’ that on the third day we’re given a day’s work? The owners are in with the government, you know that as well as I do. An’ them cocky little upstarts from the means test take the biscuit. They were round at poor old Amos’s yesterday sayin’ him an’ his wife had to sell the clock, pillow cases an’ sheets, everythin’ that wasn’t nailed down, afore he’d get a penny. I’d like ten minutes in a dark alley with one of them, I tell you straight.’
‘Aye, well, it’s rough on Amos, I know that, but it don’t help no one you flying off the handle with the deputy this morning when he wouldn’t say you were on for tomorrow. There’s not much chance you’ll even be given the odd day after the mouthful you came out with.’
‘I’ve only had two days’ work in the last six.’
‘And if you don’t get any more?’
‘Aye, well, at least I’ll know where I stand then, won’t I?’
‘In the dole queue, man. That’s where you’ll be standing.’
‘If you’re tryin’ to be funny, you’ll be off home with a split lip, m’lad, big as you are.’
‘All right, that’s enough, the pair of you.’ David rose from where he had been perched on an orange box outside the door of the ramshackle hut on his father’s square of allotment. Or, to be more precise, Amos Proudfoot’s allotment, his father’s old friend who in the last few years had become too debilitated with the miners’ curse of pneumoconiosis to do more than sit in a chair and try to breathe.
In return for a few fresh vegetables, Amos had turned the allotment over to Ned six years ago, and it was David’s private opinion that this act had saved his father’s sanity. It wasn’t just being able to work in the fresh air on a plot of ground that to all intents and purposes Ned could call his own that had been such a lifesaver, or being able to supplement the meagre diet they were forced to live on with fresh vegetables and fruit. It was more the fact that Ned could escape the house in James Armitage Street - or, to be blunt, the woman within - and come up here. Ned would sit for hours in the sunshine in the summer and autumn, and in the winter and spring he would huddle in front of a small fire enclosed in an ancient rusting brazier. Even when it was raining cats and dogs or snowing a blizzard, his father would find an excuse to be up here, sitting in the doubtful comfort of the hut made of corrugated iron, sacking swathed round him for warmth and the door propped open so he could survey his patch of land.
Mindful of all his da had to put up with at home, David’s voice was benign when he said, ‘It’s no use you taking out your anger at what they’ve done to Amos by having a go at our Walter, Da. It
was
daft, you sounding off at Tom earlier, and wouldn’t the owners and the rest of them just lick their lips to hear you two coming to blows? Eh?’
was
daft, you sounding off at Tom earlier, and wouldn’t the owners and the rest of them just lick their lips to hear you two coming to blows? Eh?’
Ned surveyed his two sons with narrowed eyes before pulling his grimy cap - the colour long since having been consigned to the onlooker’s imagination - down on to his forehead. His head moved in a series of small jerks before he said, ‘Aye, well, that’s as mebbe. Anyway, it’s done now an’ I’ve no intention of goin’ to Tom Burns cap in hand, if that’s what you’re suggestin’.’
‘Would we, knowing you?’ David’s grin brought forth a reluctant smile from Ned. ‘Anyway, Tom is all right, not like some of ’em who are nowt but boss’s lackeys. He don’t hold a grudge, Tom.’ David didn’t add here that before he’d left the colliery earlier that day he had made it his business to inform the deputy of Amos’s circumstances and how his father was feeling about his old friend. And Tom, a small upright bullet of a man who was a lay preacher in his spare time, had listened without comment before saying, ‘Aye, I thought somethin’ was gnawin’ at his vitals. He’s a good old boy, your da, Dave, so rest assured, no offence taken.’
Ned thrust a box of vegetables and fruit into David and Walter’s hands. ‘Here.’
Both the brothers knew it was their father’s way of apologising for his rancour, and this was further reinforced when Ned drew a piece of brown paper out of his pocket and said, ‘Sit yerselves down, the pair of you, an’ have a smoke afore you leave. Our Lillian picked up these tabs after they’d had a meeting in the office this week, an’ a few of ’em only half gone.’
David shook his head. He wanted to get home, besides which he had told his sister time and time again she was endangering her job at the firework factory by hanging about after there had been a meeting with the bigwigs in the office and nipping into the room to empty the ashtrays into her bag.
As his father carefully peeled back the paper to display the heap of cigarette stubs, David said, ‘I’m for home, man, and thanks for these,’ he nodded to the box in his hands. ‘Carrie said to be sure you and Mam come round tomorrow for the lad’s birthday party. You and Renee and Veronica as well, Walter.’
‘Aye, I know all about it, our Veronica’s been on about nowt else for weeks, when she bothers to come home, that is.’ Walter grinned at his brother. His daughter spent more time at David and Carrie’s than she ever did in her own home, and he couldn’t blame her. He only wished he could do the same. He had always thought his mam was a bitter pill, but Renee could match her any day.
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