The Night Following (7 page)

But then, she reflected, Stan might just call in late on his way back from the meeting if he saw a light on. So Evelyn waited, yawning from time to time and half-listening to the voice on the wireless introducing a dance band from somewhere or other. The rain came on again, harder than ever. She went to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Even the lamp right in front of number 58 on the other side of the street was hard to make out. Surely it was unusual for it to rain so hard you couldn’t even see a street lamp? Raining ink, she thought. Evelyn watched it pour down the window till the glass looked as if it were melting. Then she drew the curtain back, put out the light, and returned to her chair, thinking of Stan pushing his bike past, glancing at the window, and thinking she’d gone to bed. In the dark, she began to cry again.

He’d be out there, caught in the rain. He could catch his death, and serve him right. But then her baby would never know its father. So in that respect the little mite would be like her, although not quite; Evelyn had been twelve years old when the telegram had come about her Da, “Missing in action, presumed killed,”so she always felt that she should have kept hold of something more of her father to remember than the slow-moving, silent figure she hardly dared speak to. Over the years she tried to forget how the rasp of his boots in the yard and the click of the back door latch struck terror into her. She tried to forget his cruelties, a savage clip round the head or a snarled remark, and also his drunken rages when it was positively dangerous to be around him. She preferred to imagine that he might have come back from the War changed somehow, kind and smiling. She was careful to remember him only from the telegram, a few photos, and four postcards sent from the Belgian front.

She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. Suppose Stan did die and their baby grew up without him. There wouldn’t be much difference, in the end. It didn’t matter whether your Da got a chill on the lungs after a soaking, or laid down his life in the Great War, he was dead and gone just the same. You wouldn’t know his voice. You wouldn’t be able to tell the back of his head in a crowd. You’d never know if he might have been the best father in the world. Whether his name was among The Fallen on the War Memorial or not, you’d just go without.

I should go to bed, Evelyn thought, blinking. Sometimes it felt as if her eyelids didn’t keep the light out anymore. When she closed them, fireworks started going off across the insides, dots bursting in the blackness. It sounded pretty put like that, colored stars on the insides of your eyes, but it wasn’t. It could be hard to get to sleep with lights pricking away all the time, popping off like at work, fancy lights flashing all night long. Some of the other girls at Brightaglow said it happened, some people got the flashing lights and some didn’t, but it went after a bit. It hadn’t bothered Daphne past her first three weeks, after all. She would just have to stop going on about it.

When she woke in her chair, the broadcast had finished and the wireless was crackling. The sound, like a match put to paper and kindling, had sent her into a half-dream that she was lighting a fire. Her eyes were watering now at the fading firelight, and she closed them again. When the stinging subsided, she read the clock. It was gone eleven and the fire had burned down to a few coals. The only other light in the room was coming off the wireless dial, dull and cool and greenish, as if from shining from under water.

She should have given herself an early night instead of waiting up on the off-chance Stan would drop in. He’d feel bad about tonight when he stopped to think about it. After all, they were getting married. He’d agreed.

Evelyn went to the kitchen to put the kettle on in the dark for her hot water bottle, and stood thinking her sad thoughts in the soft blue light from the gas. She had turned the gas off and was filling the bottle before it occurred to her it was foolish not to have put a light on. But she managed it fine, as easily as if she could see. She smiled. It was like Mam often said about this little chore or that, turning the heel on a sock or crimping the edge of the pastry on one of her famous meat and potato pies, Oh, I could do it blindfold.

Evelyn got the stopper on and stood for a while, pressing the bottle against her stomach.

The earthy aroma of warmed stone and the smells of damp brushes under the sink, burnt matches and potato peelings and gas were as familiar to Evelyn as the back of her own hand. She could breathe those smells anywhere and she’d be straight back in Mam’s kitchen, but nevertheless tonight she felt a bit lost. It definitely did make you a bit nervy and weepy, being in the family way, she thought. She tiptoed upstairs, avoiding the creaky spots. As soon as she was in her bed with her feet on her bottle, she would feel as right as rain.

Dear Ruth
Is it going to be sad all the way through, this story?
I remembered something. You had some poem about mimosa. Where would that be lurking?
Tried to unearth it but no sign of it in any of the boxes of books or papers. Though would I know it for what it was, if I found it? Occurred to me I might not be clear about what I was looking for.
Instead, found heaps of stuff from Overdale! Ruth, was it at Overdale you told me about mimosa?
Later
Been looking further, still no sign.
Maybe you took it with you somehow. That’s how it seems. Plus you took away a lot of words on other subjects as well.
Excuse scrawl, light poor, bulb dead.
Legs giving trouble.
Arthur

I’d done it before, watched from an upstairs window as someone left, and then waited on long enough afterward to feel a reverberating absence imprison me like a circle of spears. But that April evening I was a grown-up married woman, who had struck and killed another human being, so the parallel was a surface similarity only. In fact it wasn’t the same kind of situation at all.

I was six the night the man I knew as my great-uncle left. He stalked out in a riot of hurled missiles, insults, and breaking glass, leaving a trail of strewn belongings and wrapped presents that shed their bright ribbons and paper across the snow. It was Christmas Eve of 1962. Whenever my mother talked about it, she made a great deal of that. Christmas bloody Eve, can you believe it,
Christmas bloody Eve,
she would say, as if he had chosen the moment so that particular and perpetual outrage at his sense of timing would stain the day forever, obliging her to rename it. She forgot that he didn’t choose it at all, and he wasn’t around after that to correct her, but left because she threw him out. Not literally, for he was a foot taller than she was and strong, even at his age; what she actually threw (as well as the Christmas presents he had shown up with), straight through the windows of the confectioner’s and tobacconist’s corner shop that he owned and my mother ran, were several glass jars of sweets from the shelves behind the counter, some clothes and shoes, two ashtrays and a lighter, a radio, a suitcase, a set of hairbrushes, and a collection of cigarette cards in a biscuit tin. If she could have lifted the cash register, that would have gone, too.

The part I don’t remember is before. He must have turned up very late; the shop was long since shut and my grandmother and I had gone to bed. I remember my intention to stay awake to see Santa Claus. I remember staring at my bedroom door but I don’t remember seeing it open. Would I, sleepily, in the dark, have mistaken one for the other? Would I have not known the wondrous, real Santa Claus from my great-uncle with his nicotine breath and damp lips, guiding my hand and whispering that maybe he had a sweetie for a good little girl in his pocket?

I don’t remember anything until I heard weeping and shouting and the stumbling of feet on the stairs. My room on the top floor had only a skylight facing the back so I scrambled out of bed and raced down to the window of the sitting room directly over the shop, overlooking the empty pavement. More snow had fallen. The surrounding buildings were dark and the crossroads of Coster Street and Station Road were deserted. Below I heard the frantic clang of the shop bell and then my mother and uncle lurched out onto the white street, stage-lit from the open door, their voices ringing off the snow.

She must have attacked first. Already he had dragged her blouse and sweater off one shoulder and was on the retreat, holding a hand to his nose. She waded after him, arms swinging, screaming
On Christmas bloody Eve!
, and cracked him over one ear. He roared, grabbed her hair, and slapped her, pulling her down, and as she screeched and fell she kicked at him and he fell, too. They staggered to their feet and went at each other again, arms and legs flailing; the elongated blue swords of their shadows clashing twenty feet across the snow and up the walls opposite in crisscross mimicry of the duel. Blood appeared from somewhere—his nose, her lip? not much, a few dark drops spattering the white—and maybe it was the sight of that or fear of where it could end that brought them both to a standstill, panting and soaked and staring at each other as clumps of snow dripped off them. Then from my mother came a long, low wailing that rose in pitch until her voice broke into sobs. She turned back to the shop, slamming the door.

I heard her thump up the stairs, and I hid behind the settee while she rampaged around grabbing everything that she recognized as his. Then she clumped back down, and I had taken up my position at the window again just as she flung first the radio and the sweet jars, followed by all the rest of the stuff, including the Christmas presents, straight through the front windows of the shop. My uncle stood swaying in the road as objects and spears of glass crash-landed around him. She managed to throw the things quite a distance but she didn’t manage to hit him, perhaps because she was drunk.

As was he. He didn’t
walk
out any more than she threw him. In the end he could only stagger away, whimpering excuses back at her, his feet kicking up more snow. It took him a few minutes to collect what he could in his arms and navigate his way up Station Road toward the alley and the footbridge over the railway, and after he had gone, all that remained besides the marks of the brawl—the dropped belongings, the broken glass, and the wrecked parcels—were the ragged, despoiling traces of his zigzag progress up the street, a hundred slips and skids and falls imprinted on the snow. That’s my memory of it.

I watched all this standing in my pajamas on the settee, peering over the back of it through the window with my chin resting on my crossed arms, the coal fire dying and the room dark behind me. I watched until long after he was gone and the silence told me that my mother must have got herself as far as her bedroom and passed out. She would be still in her clothes, grunting softly and curled up across the bed; I pictured her with the eiderdown up around her ears against the drafts. I knew that if the noise had woken her up, my grandmother would simply have turned over in bed, smiled into the dark, and gone back to sleep. I felt like the last person left. I knew I ought to be in bed and because I wasn’t I was deservedly guilty and forsaken, responsible both for the mess out on the street and for my own solitude. I had already let go of any idea that Santa Claus would be coming now—how could he come near a household like ours?—but I scanned the crossroads and the tops of buildings, clinging to a hope for some kind of timely, redemptive magic; I prayed for some power to appear and make everything all right. Then I started to cry.

Snow came. There was no wind so it floated out of the sky like weightless, frozen rags of wispy white cloth. Some of the school Nativity play propaganda must still have been fresh in my mind; if ever a place was crying out for Peace on Earth Goodwill Toward Men it was here, so I wiped my nose on my sleeve and trusted that someone—if not Santa, then the Baby Jesus or Mary and Joseph or the shepherds, maybe the whole holy caboodle—was watching me from up in the sky, ripping up white tissue paper and dropping the shreds down to cover up the chaos. The amassing snow covered the scars of our disgrace like bandages. The disintegrating red paper and pink ribbons, the dark bulks of my great-uncle’s abandoned things, the glinting javelins of glass lost their edges and grew round and safe. The snow went on falling until the tracks of his exit were swabbed away and I could tell myself that he may not have gone because there was no sign that he had ever been. All the bright broken relics, now vanished under a wrapping of whiteness, began to seem as dreamy as a memory that I held of him reaching out, just once, and stroking my hair.

As I watched the snow, my loneliness began to feel like safety. Nobody could see me, so I must be invisible. And nobody knew what I had seen so I could make that invisible, too. Not by forgetting, but by keeping it for myself, mine to rehearse in my mind until familiarity rendered its violence innocuous, I would make it disappear. The shock of the fight and my uncle’s desertion would lap its way over and over through my memory until in time its last waves spent themselves and died in the corners and my mother and uncle as they had appeared to me this night would recede, pulling shadows around themselves, the sounds of their departure faint and ghostly, merely sighs and whispers and a faraway door closing.

And I understood suddenly that I would be able to pretend, and forever if need be, that this night was simply another night separating any two days: neither holy nor enchanted, nor the night my poor uncle left, nor even, necessarily, Christmas Bloody Eve. Another night and then another would come, and another, and each time my memory of this one would lose a little sharpness, and each new night would be its own reliable little spell of quiet between dangers. For a brief time before I fell asleep on the settee, that was nearly enough, to know the glaring colors of our strife were obliterated and to hold in my mind a picture of the street transformed under the black sky and the dense, cleansing whiteness of the snow.

No, there’s no similarity at all, none to speak of. Jeremy went quietly. And I was very little then, and frightened.