The Night Following (12 page)

On the train, Stan read the Racing Post while Evelyn lay with her eyes closed. They were stinging again and she hadn’t slept well, being unused to sharing a bed with Stan. She thought back over her Big Day. It had been grand, really. She counted herself lucky. Nobody was having big weddings anymore and only the well-to-do had proper honeymoons. She fingered the slim gold band on her finger and felt the locket at her neck. It wasn’t, as she’d reassured Mam, as if she had ever wanted a big shindig, anyway.

   It was the paling of the darkness or the birdsong that woke me. The ground was dusty with a dew like powdered pearls, only a degree away from sugary white frost. Some small creature had paddled across the grass leaving the dark threads of its tracks. I blinked, and tears rushed to the cold surface of my eyes and made them sting. I sneezed and yawned and tried to stretch my back, and then a sudden flash drew my attention to the house.

The sun had just struck the lowest glass panes of the conservatory, and the curtains at every window stood open to the glare. I ached so much I could hardly stand, but I had to get away from the sight of the house so exposed and penetrated. I prayed that Arthur was asleep and would not feel it. I prayed that even though he would have to wake and know again she was gone, he was now asleep and for a while untroubled by thoughts of Ruth. As I crept across the grass I whispered to him that I wouldn’t be away for long.

My clothes were soaked and freezing and I was miles from home. I wanted to crawl into the shed and hunker down in a corner until it was dark again, but I didn’t dare. It was hard to negotiate my way back; by night I had walked this way easily and freely, now I stumbled and tripped. Buildings and walls and turnings and parked cars loomed out and crowded me. The sky was flaring lilac and orange and pink, and light was shoving in everywhere. It was coming fast, another day of sights I could not bear, a day of breakages, of choking dust and blinding commotion, of futures torn up.

My own house sat in the morning sun, exuding—because it contained—nothing. I barged in and stood gasping for breath in the kitchen. The clock ticked flatly. It was just after six. My heart was hammering with the ecstasy of knowing I’d had a narrow escape. Upstairs, my quiet room waited, where curtains could be drawn against the light until night came again. I started to shake while I was undressing and my damp clothes amassed on the floor where I dropped them.

After a few hours I got up. I looked at myself in the mirror, and in the dimness of the curtained room I was stunned at how marked were the effects of those hours on the shed’s steps. I had behaved rather foolishly, I felt, staying out all night and not noticing how late and cold it was getting. I had never spent a night out-of-doors before. I thought then of my great-uncle, and I understood how a man’s heart might lose time against the passing minutes of a single night, and wind down beat by beat like a clock, and be discovered in the morning, stopped. My eyes looked young and pale and I couldn’t imagine that, were my flesh to be cut and opened, my blood would pulse as fast or be as garish a red as other people’s. My body felt hard and small. None of these changes displeased me.

   Trains didn’t run on Christmas Day. And during the winter of 1962, the coldest of the century, they were often canceled anyway because of fresh snowfalls or frozen points or split rails. So they didn’t find my great-uncle until early in the afternoon of Boxing Day. By then he had been dead for more than a day and a night, slumped near the middle of the station footbridge and covered in snow, his cheek frozen against a line of riveted bolts on the metal parapet, directly underneath the embossed brass plate that read:

London & North Western Railway
Passengers Crossing Footbridge Do So At Own Risk
No Loitering No Urinating No Spitting
Fine 5/-in accordance with L&NWR Bylaw 5(2).

These details came to me later. My grandmother told me only that he had died of cold. I took this to mean the same as dying of
a
cold, and I clung to her wailing and speechless; I had always understood that nobody died of a cold and my grandmother seemed to be suffering from one, even if it was what she called only a sniffle, a great deal of the time. She had to tell me finally that he had frozen to death, that a night out of doors in such weather was more than flesh and blood could stand. I found this easier to accept. It did not seem so terrible, a mishap rather than a catastrophe. I imagined him lying calmly in a haze of frost and very cold to the touch, waiting, as I was, for something to be done about it. For if he had frozen to death, could he not simply be warmed back to life? Then it might also turn out to be not so terrible that his suspension in the ice was my fault, and forgiveness might be possible.

So I waited, during a succession of days that were bulky and irregular with visitors and discussions in dark voices and the soft sifting of papers. Around this time it was explained to me that in fact he was not my mother’s but my long-dead grandfather’s uncle, and so was my great-
great
-uncle. The sudden bestowal and its immediate retraction, by his absence, of the extra “great”seemed like another of his unraveling gifts, lost in the snow.

After a while our rooms on the two floors above the shop hung empty and the air seemed muffled, and I realized it was too late for him to come back now. The glass smashed on Christmas Eve was replaced in the boarded-up windows and my mother and grandmother reopened the shop, which, it turned out, my mother now owned.

We continued in the usual way except of course that my uncle no longer called in on Saturday evenings for the week’s earnings and lingered, in a manner tense and jovial, until after dinner on Sunday. In periods of sobriety my mother worked in the shop and kept the books; in her absence my grandmother sat behind the counter knitting, or worked at chores upstairs, keeping an ear open for the sound of the shop bell below. Having memorized the position of every jar on the shelves, she could pick and measure out from any of them the two-and four-ounce bags of sweets that people asked for, just by the feel of the weight in her hand. There was, by law, a set of scales on the counter, but our customers were regulars and knew better than to be skeptical. She also identified and sold by smell several varieties of English, Aromatic, and Virginia loose tobacco, and in the same way she could detect the difference not just between brands of packaged cigarettes but between tipped and untipped. She couldn’t, though, stop the thieving of Black Jacks, penny chews, and sweetie cigarettes from the open boxes on the counter, of which crime I was, by collusion, as guilty as any of the older children who peered into the shop every day and came in only if my grandmother was there.

After school I would usually be there, too, swinging my legs from a chair, drawing pictures instead of doing my homework. I dreaded the shop bell. They came in pairs. They ignored me; because my grandmother could not see me any more than she could see them, it seemed I was invisible to them, too. They would fix upon me eyes as apparently sightless and flat with tacit challenge as hers, and in front of me they stole from her with impunity, knowing I would say nothing. One would go for the sweets while the other would spend a halfpenny on something or other, talking in a voice loud enough to cover any rustling of the waxed paper lining the boxes. “I’ll have a sherbet fountain, please, missus. All right, kiddo? What’re you up to there, then? Oh, that’s a nice picture, look, i’n’t she doin’a nice picture?”

And before they left they would sometimes, and always unsmilingly, select a licorice stick or a couple of toffees from their haul and push them into my waiting hands. I was afraid of them, I suppose, but I also despised them, the sniggering amateurs. The pilfering of a few sweets was a villainy almost laughably inferior to that of letting my great-
great
uncle vanish forever into a freezing cloud of snow.

Dear Ruth
All this writing letters and not getting any replies is no good. I shouldn’t even be up reading that story of yours, it’s the middle of the night and I need my sleep. You should know that. I catch up in the day but I need my sleep
NOW
and you don’t seem to understand.
I get the impression I’ve made you angry and now you’re not speaking. You used to do that. I brought you in a bunch of flowers from the garden to say sorry. I used to do that.
But it’s you that gets them in water, I’m no good with that sort of thing, flower arranging. They’re in the conservatory.
A funny thing to do, not speaking—funny for you, I mean. You of all people. It was me you were trying to punish when you were not speaking, but it was you it hurt. You hated not talking, you talked about every little thing. There’s a story in every minute of every hour of every day, you said. You had all the words for everything, and if you didn’t, you knew some poet who did and you’d know where to find them.
The point is, when you withheld words and went around with your mouth locked, I didn’t mind. I quite liked it, the quiet. I just never told you that.
This time I do mind. I don’t like all the quiet. When it’s quiet I get a notion I’m not really alone. The quiet is in the room with me, somehow, and it’s not a nice, settled thing, it’s an angry kind of quiet. A quiet waiting to explode. I feel like shouting into it but who’s to hear? And what would I say?
Because what they don’t grasp, all these people who troop through this place asking how I am—is how on earth should I know, since you’re not telling me anymore?
Arthur
PS Egg sandwiches do
NOT
freeze. Or they do but they’re not egg sandwiches when they come out again. They mashed up all right though. I managed to eat them.

   Evelyn took her coat off quietly and paused in the passage outside the kitchen. She could hear Stan’s complaining voice clearly and it was she, as she fully expected, who was the subject of his complaint.

“She’s switched off. Half the time she don’t even know when I’ve come in the room,”he said. His mother said something Evelyn couldn’t hear.

“And she’s that bad-tempered,”he went on. “Told me she didn’t care for my friends and I wasn’t to go to any more meetings.”

Stan’s mother gave a short snort. “Hasn’t wasted her time, has she? Six weeks wed and laying down the law. I never liked them Leighs. You have to stand up to her, Stan.”

“I did! I says to her I’m not having that, I’ll do what I like when I like with who I like. I says to her, what’s the ruddy point of sticking round here, anyway? I says, you’re as switched off as your ruddy lightbulbs, you. I told her.”

Evelyn heard a sharp laugh from her mother-in-law. “Fact is, Stan, you’re too soft. Aye, and you’re a daft beggar an’all. You let her lead you on, didn’t yer? Don’t tell me that baby’s an accident, she’s made a fool out of you. Got you just where she wanted you, up the ruddy aisle. You’ve only yourself to blame, Stanley Ashworth.”

Evelyn set down her parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, her eyes stinging with tears. She smoothed her hands over her stomach and tried to breathe evenly. She wouldn’t raise her voice in this house, she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. But she couldn’t just walk in now and cook Stan’s tea as if nothing had happened. His mother had probably given him his tea, anyway. She always did if Evelyn’s shift hours meant Evelyn didn’t get back until after him. A man’s tea should be on the table as soon as he got home, according to Mrs. Ashworth. The same rule didn’t apply to her tea, of course, so once Stan was off for the evening and Mrs. Ashworth was listening to the wireless, Evelyn would get herself something to eat alone, a cheese and pickle sandwich, maybe an egg. More often than not she would eat her lonely tea standing in the kitchen, and then wash up and go to bed.

She tiptoed away upstairs. She had to get herself under a blanket to cry so they wouldn’t hear.

Later, lying curled in bed, she reflected that she probably did seem to be what Stan had called switched off. She either had too much on her mind or she was thinking of nothing at all, and whichever it was, she was just keeping quiet so she could concentrate. If she’d been a big talker he’d have been the first to complain, wouldn’t he? If she talked all the time she’d miss all the little noises that kept her in the picture. Her eyes were so tired from the bulb testing work these days, she relied on sounds, and on smells, too, to keep herself from making mistakes. She hadn’t noticed it so much at home at Roper Street, it being so familiar to her, how fuzzy things had got. But here in a different house, even though it was just a mile away and practically the same layout as her Mam’s, it was taking a bit of time to get the hang of things. She already knew when the kettle was ready or the fire needed coal. She knew who’d come in, Stan or his Mam, before she heard a voice; it was all in the feet. She had also worked out their different smells. Lucky Strikes and Brilliantine was Stan, a sweetness like very old jam mixed with mothballs, Mrs. Ashworth. Even without those signs, their breath was enough to go on. Most days, Stan’s was beery. Mrs. Ashworth had taken the pledge years ago and never touched a drop, but she was wheezy and dyspeptic. Evelyn could track her whereabouts easily from the traces of her frequent peppermint belches.

Evelyn reckoned she could even smell the weather, too. She could tell when it was going to rain without so much as a glance at the sky, though Stan said she was talking rubbish because round here it was always going to rain if it wasn’t already. She smiled, thinking of that. He could be that dry. He was all right, was Stan, if you touched his good side.

But as her Mam said, life was a sea of worries. There was the worry of where this baby was going to go when it arrived, since she and Stan had only the little room next to Stan’s Mam’s bedroom, small enough even for two and with no space for a cradle. Mrs. Ashworth—Evelyn simply could not call her “Mam”—wouldn’t hear of them changing a thing, so they were stuck with Stan’s grandfather’s big black iron bedstead and a mattress that seemed to have bricks in it, and only the one chest of drawers. Somehow Evelyn would have to make Stan face up to his mother and let them put in a few things for the baby. And they didn’t have so much as an inch to call their own outside the bedroom. Even Evelyn’s knitting couldn’t be left downstairs at the end of the evening.