Cotter's England (12 page)

"Aye, but money isn't a compensation," said Nellie.

Tom said, "It's enough for me. My life before me is a series of weekly payments till I'm an old man. That counts for me."

"Ah, don't talk that way, Tom. That's not the humane plane, chick. Don't put human life and love in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. She's got an incurable sickness. You've taken her out of the labor market. She's afraid of men because of you. Have pity on the woman. She needs you."

Tom said, "Pounds, shillings and pence are an incurable sickness."

The wife said, "I think you owe it to me to look after me. I'm terribly alone and what difference does it make to you? You told me you didn't care for love; sex was overrated. You said you never wanted to hear the word love again. You told Nellie you wanted to look after the sick, that you didn't know any other way to fight the troubles of our epoch; that you'd never fight again, you wouldn't inflict any more pain. You said you'd be a stretcherbearer, an orderly, a male nurse. You said you'd go off to a sanitarium or a leper colony."

Nellie said, "Yes, you said that, chick, and I thought it grand of you."

Tom said, "Very well; find out what's wrong with you before we set off for any colonies. Now I must go. It'll take me I don't know how long at this hour to get to the North Road and I won't get into Bridgehead till late."

Nellie ran after him, "And where were you all last night, pet? Where did you sleep?"

"On the floor, by Marion. I've done that for a whole year, slept near her to hear when she calls."

Nellie was embarrassed. "I'll get ye the parcels, Tom; and be easy in your mind. You can rely on your old Nellie."

"I know that," he said, laughing.

He shut the door, fixed his pockets, lighted a cigarette and started the car. He had maneuvered Nellie into an uneasy state of mind; but as soon as she contemplated her two invalids and George's acquiescent Eliza, she would feel strong again; new combinations would occur to her. He laughed.

Tom moved out of Lamb Street, started up towards the main road, backed into one of the crossroads, came round the Square and in a few minutes was blowing his horn outside the house. The door was standing open and he could look straight through into the backyard. Eliza was standing at the top of the back steps singing,
Canny at night, bonny at morn.
Estelle and Nellie were on the stairs going up to the attic, to Marion of course.

Nellie ran down and out, "Did you forget something, pet?"

"Yes, Marion. I'm taking her with me."

"Are you playing games, you fool?"

"Yes, playing games."

Estelle came downstairs and slipped into the front room. She had not seen Marion. Eliza came upstairs with him to help him.

She said, "You did the right thing, love. What does she want with us? She wants you. Though I never saw a friendlier woman. You can't take her far, Tom; not to Glasgow. She's not got far to go."

"I'm taking her home."

"Aye, good."

They helped her downstairs. Nellie came running after them with presents for Marion. She begged; "And where are you going now, pet? Where will you be?"

"I'll drop you a line, Nellie. Or to Eliza."

"But where, but where?"

"We're going to Glasgow to find the healer."

Marion said, turning her wasted energetic face, with a smile to Nellie, "I'll send you the play and you'll type it out and send it round won't you?"

"Aye, pet, I certainly will. Yes, love."

"It's a good idea. I know it will go," said Marion.

"You send it along, pet."

Tom started the car. They were nearly home before Marion realized they were not going to Glasgow. She became upset; but Tom promised to leave at once for Glasgow himself to see the faith-healer.

Eliza and Nellie were having tea. Eliza said, "What will he do when she dies? He's spent years living only for Marion. He told me all about it. I don't cry for myself, I don't cry for others; but tears came into my eyes."

Nellie was putting up her hair into a thin sprout on top of her head.

"It isn't that that worries me: it's the harpy who'll get him after she's gone."

She stuck a comb into the back hair and pinched up her small bright eyes this way and that, to see the effect.

"If I don't do my hair better, so George says, he'll up and leave me, the blighter! What gets into the men? They study the soap adverts; and every decent woman has to look like a bloody painted post."

The women laughed. Eliza said; "Where's the harm? I ought to look after meself a bit better. Look at me waist."

"Aye, darling, but it's harm; I've changed for the worse, since I fell in with your George. I'm not a free woman. Soaping and mending and painting and powdering and putting jeweled combs in me hair—is that a decent woman? Is me bodice clean, are me drawers clean, are me stockings wrinkled, are me heels over, is me skirt buttoned? I never was a fidget before. I've got no character left."

Eliza teased, "I saw you on Fleet Street with a pair of gloves the other day."

"Vi says I've gone back on my past; she has no respect for me anymore. But I don't know what to do, now George has got to running around Europe with the bourgeois dames that go to congresses. The buggers should never be allowed into politics, running after the men, the blinking bastards."

Nellie lamented, "I had a letter from me gay cavalier. Do you know a bourgeois dame lent George money this last trip and expected him to take her to lunch, in return? And I've got no respect for your George, Eliza. He was grateful for it. I'll leave you, I wrote to him this morning, if I catch ye drooling after the bloody bourgeois dames, buying men with purses fat with their husband's money. He got into a taxi and halfway along the street he sees the bourgeois dame. She can speak the lingo; he can't. George is too wedded to the doric. So he hails her and she gets in and she wants to go to lunch at a real workers' restaurant, patronizing the workers, the blinking bourgeois bleeder and the damned innocent has no more sense than to take her along. They rode all round Florence and the taxi driver took them to a workers' restaurant and said, It's all right, no charge, comrade; and the bloody dame insulted him by paying him; and afterwards she found the food wasn't good enough. What does me loyal husband say? He's learning something, he's learning to appreciate good food; she was right; the food was not good enough. I told him, Don't come home telling me about good food. In Bridgehead we didn't know what good food was. We had better things to think about. And now he tells me we must start to collect cookery books. That's no library for a trades union man to have."

Estelle now came down to them and said she was leaving. She was going back to Crewe, "You got me here Nellie, but when I saw Tom today I had a feeling of dread. He goes about weaving women into his life and then something dreadful happens to them."

Nellie said in a strained voice, "What do ye mean? What's wrong?"

"I expect he's right: it's a skin disease. But I never want to see him again. He'll kill me. I'd never go away with him. He draws life out of you. There's nothing there and he feeds and feeds on you. I'm terrified of him."

"I don't understand you," said Nellie.

Eliza said, "Neither do I. Tom's a dear. I love the lad. There was only one man born into the world with the heart of Tom."

Estelle said bitterly, "If you really love him, I'm sorry for you. You'll have weeks and months of tension and bedlam; and he'll feel nothing of it, but sit there with a pleasant face like a rose. When you're suffering he'll go and look at himself in the mirror and wonder what is wrong with his face that he can't get round you immediately. I used to conspire with Nellie to get him to come and see me—"

"You didn't conspire, pet: it was your right."

"He came. He sat there looking at me, pink, fresh, untouched by life. He did nothing. He was kind. He went away; and I was sick and horrified, full of nausea. He had only to sit and look at me. And I felt doubt, sorrow, sickness, hopeless love, emptiness and blackness; such a gulf! Yet when he's there, you're happy. He begins to smile and glide and haunt with his voice; and tell you his tales. Before you know it, he's walking by the mirror and looking in to smile and coming back to you like a man out of the mirror and he eats your heart away. Other men seem rough and loutish. You could never love another man as you love Tom. Unless he is just such another man. And he brings you old age, sickness, despair, I don't know what. The worst is that he lets you know what's wrong with him and begs your forgiveness that your love is an incurable disease." "Ah," said Nellie.

"Love for him is hopeless love," said Estelle despondently.

Nellie was again embarrassed and covered this with chat, "The boy's all right, the boy's all right, he's no ghoul. It's just that he's got in with this ghoul, this damn silly little vampire. We must reclaim him."

"I won't. I've had enough," said Estelle.

"Why, think of the good times we all had together in the old days, you and Tom and me and Vi—"

Estelle said, "They were terrible days."

"Why, love, we used to sit there laughing and chewing the rag till morning."

"You sat in our bedroom all night to separate us; and early in the morning he had to go to work."

"But, pet, we had all to live together! You didn't want a petty bourgeois marriage, with all our lovely friendship splintering apart!"

"I never had a husband. You made him yours early and I didn't know enough. I was right out of the convent."

With a delighted expression, Nellie got up and said, if Estelle was going, she'd go along, too; she had to be at her newspaper office at eleven. She'd be home late and she'd bring a bottle of gin.

She said once more, "I'm a bloody fool, Eliza, to care about my George, but love's an incurable disease. I made up my mind that if I didn't have a letter from the sod this morning, I'd get roaring drunk. So get in the beer and lemonade for your shandy, Lize and I'll drink my gin. I ought to dump George overboard, but I'm too fond of the two of you. Ah, Lize, I don't know where you get your sweet ways from. Well, I'm gannin'."

She went.

The afternoon of the …

T
HE
AFTERNOON
of the funeral, Constantine Ilger, Marion's husband, took Tom to the local station in the farm car. At the station, Constantine helped Tom with his luggage, asked him if he had the right change, said goodbye very kindly.

When Tom had his ticket, Constantine said, "Give me your name and address, if you like and I'll write to you one of these days."

Tom wrote and handed him a little card.

"Thomas A. Cotter?"

"Yes."

"Well, of course I knew your name wasn't Tom Green."

"I knew you knew."

"It was for her and I didn't mind. You were very good to her."

Tom said, "I wanted to be."

"You were better than Patrick. He went off and he knew she was dying."

"Yes, I thought a brother would not leave a sister. Even a half-brother."

Ilger said, "You did not know he was not her half-brother?"

"I was never sure. Her mother remarried twice."

"She was engaged to Patrick, when he went to the war. She met me and she liked me. We got married; but she never told Patrick. She kept on writing to him. She said, it wasn't fair to hurt him. When he came back, he found us married. He was quite broken up. She said we had to look after him and so we took him here to live with us. That's how it was."

"She could have told me. I would have understood."

"Marion always thought it was better not to go into things."

"Yes, I know."

"Well, goodbye and good luck, Tom."

"Thanks for the fowl."

"It was fresh killed this morning. I did that before the funeral."

"Thanks."

There was a train leaving King's Cross near midnight. He sat in a café till it was time, and had an interesting conversation with a man counting pennies in heaps, perhaps a newsboy. He was able to stretch out in the second-class carriage. Now that he was on his way, the last terrible days at the farm became real to him; and yet seemed weeks away. He was very tired. There were moments when he felt he had been happy there. "But the man's a fool who expects happiness or the happiness to last; I'm grateful for what I had."

One of his first thoughts was that he must look for another woman at once, who would take him and hold him, so that he could turn his back on the past eight years and begin again. But where should he look?

The train rattled along in the night and he thought for a while of the dark trains he had traveled in during the war and after he got the car, the dark roads, a hooded glimmer all that was allowed; but he had never driven into the ditch. How one's senses developed! And then it was to Marion he had traveled, by train and by car.

He slept as well as he could, waking not long before Bridgehead. "Back to Bridgehead gray," the color of his youth. It was a dark morning, the docks, bridges, ships were lighted. Different shifts were going to work and coming away; and he passed a stand where he got a cup of sour gray tea, "stewed water." He got to his old home before seven. The boy hadn't been around; the empty milk bottles were still standing there. Uncle Simon was some time answering the door; and when Tom heard the old voice, "What d'ye want?" he smiled.

"It's Tom."

Uncle Simon let him in, coughing. "Ye can get in now without that dog tearing the seat off your pants."

"Back home!" smiled Tom. He pushed his grip into the front room and took his parcels to the kitchen. His uncle was too polite to notice them at first, though he cast a few glances under his spectacles.

The fire was not going too well. A newspaper was fastened across the front of the stove and grate. The house was cold but it was warm enough there. The sky was black with smoke fog which had not come down. "If we had a decent government, it would do something about this weather," said Uncle Simon. He was heating his old tea from the night before on the stove and was about to pour some for Tom when he said hospitably, "A'll make ye a fresh pot. Did ye come in your car or off the train?"