Far From My Father's House (5 page)

Five

By the time Madge left school they needed her to go out and work too and she went to Frank’s house to help with the general housework. Annie knew that her mother could have done with at least one of them at home but they needed the money. Times were hard.

Her grandmother and aunt lived in a small house in the village and her father had to keep them. Her aunt was continually ill and sometimes her father grumbled about the doctor’s bills. Her mother worried about how much it cost to keep his mother and sister and Annie knew that her grandma didn’t like her mother because she was not backward in coming forward about it.

Sometimes Annie had to go and see her grandmother. Her mother did not encourage her to go but her father asked her and although she didn’t like the old woman or her dark little house or her Aunt Myra who did nothing but sit around the fire knitting or reading Annie felt obliged to go. She usually took Elsie with her because her grandma seemed to like Elsie (which was unusual because she liked nobody else) and only then because she said that Elsie looked like her and was a true Lowe. She claimed that the rest of the family looked like their mother except for Tommy of course because he was the only boy. Tommy could do nothing wrong.

‘I don’t know why your father married your mother,’ her grandmother said on one such occasion, a rainy autumn afternoon when the turning leaves dripped wetly in the small garden and the hills were blotted out with mist.

‘There were plenty of nice girls around here who would have married him. He was always very popular, was your father. Nice chapel girls they were too.’

Another reason that her grandma didn’t like her mother was because she was a Roman Catholic. Annie remembered her mother saying that her other grandma, Mary Ann, had come from Seaton Town to see them and said, ‘Never mind, Rose, there not being a Catholic church. You can send them to the parish church. It’s the next best thing.’

And to the parish church they went in spite of how Jack’s mother had objected. Annie thought that secretly her mother was pleased to send them there just to spite her, her grandmother being what folk called ‘chepel’. In her worst time her grandmother had called her mother ‘that common little nowt’ because Rose’s father had been a pitman over on the coast. The local people thought that pitmen were another breed, not quite human somehow. Rose’s father had died when she was a very little girl and her mother, Mary Ann, had married again and sometimes Ralph and Mary Ann came to the farm. They stayed overnight on these occasions. Annie liked Mary Ann. She had had six children, most of whom were scattered and whom Annie had never seen.

Ralph was kind and funny and would play silly games. He was big and dark. He was a pitman as well. Annie thought if pitmen were like Ralph there wouldn’t be much wrong with them but her grandmother had never come to the farm to meet Ralph so she didn’t know.

Ralph and Mary Ann used to hold hands when they went for a walk up the road to the village. Annie thought if her grandmother had known such a thing she would have been spluttering with jealousy since her husband had died long since and according to Jack they had never got on. Annie secretly thought that one of the reasons her father had married her mother was because his mother didn’t like her.

‘When he married your mother he put us out,’ her grandmother declared.

Sometimes Annie wondered why her father should be obliged to keep so many people. No wonder she and Madge had to go out and work.

That autumn her aunt died. Annie found it difficult to be sorry, she was only glad that the doctor’s bills had ceased. Her father worked so hard and got no thanks for it but then sometimes when she wandered into the kitchen she caught her father kissing her mother or holding her just smiling, so maybe that was thanks enough.

Madge liked working for the Harlingtons just as much as Annie disliked the farm work at Alistair’s house. She came home with tales of Mr and Mrs Harlington.

‘She drinks so much that she has to go to bed in the afternoons,’ Madge said.

The Hall was a curious place, the biggest house that Annie had ever seen, and living so close – it was just across the field and up the hill – they had all spent a lot of time there when they were younger before Frank went away to school and afterwards in the school holidays.

Like Alistair Frank was an only child. He lived there with his parents and his father’s two old aunts. The aunts wore dark brown clothes, skirts with big pleats and shapeless sweaters and they smelled to Annie of another century. They would tell her stories of when they were girls, of the parties, the picnics and the musical evenings. She could not understand why they had never married, they seemed no more ugly than anyone else and even plain women married – there were plenty of those everywhere – but when she had tried politely to enquire they said it was because they had no money, their father had drunk it away.

Annie knew that there had once been another estate further down the country and a house in London. But those had gone.

Mr Harlington did little work. He walked his spaniels in the afternoons with a gun broken over his arm and the villagers bowed or curtsied or acknowledged him in some other way as their superior. Mrs Harlington did even less. She talked to the cook and she wrote letters in her little sunlit room in the mornings. She took tea with the aunts in the afternoons and occasionally went visiting friends, driving precariously in their old car.

Annie liked the house and she could see why Madge liked being there. It was shabby in a nice sort of way with a fire in the hall where the spaniels slept when they couldn’t persuade anybody to take them for a walk. Old Mrs Donaldson from the village was their cook and nice smells permeated the whole house all day and there were dark pictures on the walls of hopeful-looking people. Madge was given her meals and those who ventured near in mid-morning or afternoon were greeted with enthusiasm in the kitchen and given spice cake and hot tea. Often much of the food which went to the dining-room came back uneaten and Mrs Donaldson shook her head over people with small appetites.

The rooms smelled of books and tobacco and sherry which Frank’s aunts drank in minute quantities. His father drank brandy and his mother drank anything but they drank a lot. Many of Frank’s parents’ days were spent in fuddled glee. All they had left now was the Hall and the farms in the valley.

It seemed to Annie that the Harlingtons had no idea of how other people lived. Mr Harlington did nothing. He sat mostly in the library and read books which had probably never been read before or maybe he just dozed and drank and thought of how things might have been. There was an air of decay around the house, like an ending of some kind was taking place, as though something was over. The house was very shabby. Things were not replaced. Broken machinery was left in corners. Fences were falling down. The gardens were growing wild. That Christmas when Frank came home Madge seemed to be at the house more and more.

‘I don’t know,’ Rose said, taking scones from the oven one Sunday afternoon, ‘she’s not supposed to be there this afternoon.’

Rose and Annie were alone in the kitchen making tea. Madge was supposed to come back after helping to wash the dinner dishes at about two o’clock.

‘Maybe they had something on,’ she said.

‘And maybe they didn’t,’ her mother said, gingerly putting the scones on to a wire rack to cool.

‘What do you mean?’

Her mother shot her a telling look.

‘I think Madge has taken a shine to young Frank. If we could afford it I’d have her back at home. Goodness knows I could do with her here. I’m trying to find her something else.’

‘Frank? Frank wouldn’t look at Madge.’

‘Why wouldn’t he? She’s coming up fifteen and she has that way of looking at men through her eyelashes that gives me the collywobbles.’

Annie half-wanted to laugh but she knew that her mother was serious. She was also a little bit jealous. She didn’t particularly like Frank but she didn’t want him to like her sister better than he liked her.

‘It’s dangerous, Annie, I wish there was something I could do.’

‘Frank’s not dangerous,’ Annie said, laughing.

‘He might be if he knew Madge liked him. His family aren’t rich like they used to be but they still own most of the dale including this place. I don’t want Madge mixed up in anything like that. This is our home.’

‘If you take her away from there Mr Harlington would probably be offended. They pay better than the Vanes pay me so he wouldn’t think you had a good reason and she likes being there.’

‘Yes, I noticed,’ her mother said.

Annie looked critically at Frank the next time she saw him. He walked his dogs around to the farm almost every day and it was only a few days later. Annie had her dog with her and he patted Rufus and smiled and Annie thought, yes, she could see how Madge might like him. He was almost finished school, talking about university and he had breeding. He was tall and slender and wore shabby expensive clothes. He had warm brown eyes and a shy smile, he spoke well without a local accent. He had grace in his walk and bearing, his hands were fine from never doing any work and there was that sadness about him which she knew came from the way he loved his parents which would appeal to a girl like Madge.

‘People who drink too much don’t care about food,’ he had confided to Annie. ‘It spoils the pleasure of the alcohol.’

He knew too much about things like that for somebody his age, Annie thought, shuddering. She was glad that her parents didn’t go on like that or like Alistair’s. No wonder Alistair and Frank liked to come to the small farm where there was little money but kind people who were trying hard, to her mother’s meals made with love and her mother singing in the kitchen.

It was not always like that of course, they fought quite a lot being so many of them and her mother had a quick Irish temper and her father a slow dales one which made for some lively battles and she and Madge being of an age fought and sometimes even Elsie joined in, throwing things without thought. Blake never fought but then he was never entirely one of the family and when arguments started he would go to his tiny bedroom and read. Sometimes Annie sat up there with him on the single bed and talked. She didn’t think it was ever anything important, not like when she talked to Alistair who was now into politics and music and art and it was not gossip such as she talked with the family and obviously it was not the same things as she talked about with other girls. It was just general stuff about the farm and the horses and the day-to-day things. As the year progressed it got colder and colder in Blake’s room but they went on sitting there in the evening until her mother said, ‘I think you ought to come downstairs to talk to Blake.’

‘Why?’

‘I just think you should.’

‘We can’t talk the same with Elsie and Madge there.’

Tommy wasn’t often in the house. He was in the local silver band by now and went off to concerts and practices and sometimes he went to the pub in the village – unbeknown, she hoped, to her parents.

‘You ought not to go and sit in his room with him, Annie.’

‘I’d like to know why.’

Her mother looked at her like she was being particularly stupid.

‘Because you’re both growing up,’ she said.

Annie was instantly cross.

‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘How could it be? Blake’s like Tommy.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ her mother said and when she thought about it afterwards she knew that her mother was right. She wouldn’t have spent five minutes sitting on Tommy’s bed talking to him and Tommy wouldn’t have wanted her to. So after that she didn’t go to his room any more but it was getting so cold up there that Blake retreated to the back room to do his reading and since the others sat in the big kitchen during the evening her mother apparently had no objection to her sitting with Blake in the little back room by the range, drinking tea and watching the flames lick green and blue around the wood and being glad of the comfort of being inside while the wind howled its way in and out of the buildings which made up the farm.

It was the hardest winter that Annie had ever known. Getting up in the icy darkness and going to the Vanes and working there in the cold and then helping her father outside much of the time made Annie miserable. The ice rarely gave way and when it did there was deep snow. Her father and Blake spent much of their time looking for sheep and even when the spring came and the lambs were born the weather was unrelenting. Her father brought the sheep as near the farm as he could and those he was concerned about inside, but when the weather should have softened and there should have been nothing more than the odd lambing storm it was bitterly cold and her father and Blake rarely went to bed for days at a time because the work was so hard and she had to do extra because they had so much more to do.

When Alistair came home from school for Easter she resented the fact that he had so little to do. His father employed sufficient help so that his only son could be a gentleman, Annie had heard him say often enough, and when Alistair complained about school and exams, Annie turned on him.

‘You’ve never done a decent day’s work in your life,’ she declared and went off home to begin again. She expected that he would follow her there and apologise but he didn’t and he didn’t come the next day either. She didn’t see him when she went there to work and to her dismay, the following Saturday night, when it looked as though there would be nothing to do because the lambing was finished and the weather had finally warmed, he did not invite her to the small dance which was being held at the village hall. She had waited all week for him to ask her and when Madge came home on the Friday and announced that she was going with Frank and that Alistair was taking Clara, Annie ran up to her room and threw herself on the bed, crying.

Blake found her there.

‘You’re not meant to come in here,’ Annie said, cross that he had walked in when she had no control over herself.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Nothing you can do anything about anyway.’

‘Don’t be so prickly,’ Blake said, sitting down beside her on the big bed which Madge and Elsie shared.