Nest of Sorrows (12 page)

‘And I’ll sleep alone.’

She bit her tongue; this was not the moment to bring up his extra-curricular activities. ‘You’ll manage. How do you think I manage when you go away on business? Can’t you be the fixture for a change? Do I have to provide the permanence in the house all the time? Be fair, Geoff.’

‘I’m trying to be fair. It just doesn’t seem right for you to go off and leave Melanie while you nurse a man who never treated you properly.’

‘He’s my father. More to the point, she’s my mother. Now, just settle down and accept it. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.’

But it didn’t work out that way. Peter Murray lingered for months, his temper shortened even further by the realization that he was not long for this world. He took it out on Kate, on Rachel, on doctors and nurses – he even turned on Judith when she paid a brief visit before setting off for Moscow. ‘Bloody Commie,’ he spat viciously. ‘Anybody who’ll visit that country has to be a stinking Red.’

Judith glanced across the bed to where her sister sat knitting. ‘Is he always like this?’

Kate changed needles. ‘Except when he’s asleep.’

‘You don’t give a damn, either of you. Neither does your flaming mother. Look at this one!’ He waved a thin hand towards his elder daughter. ‘She knows I’m dying, she knows she’ll never see me again. And all she can go on about is getting her blinking visa for foreign parts!’

‘Calm yourself.’ Judith, as always, seemed very unruffled. ‘I’m only going for three months.’

‘Aye, and I’ll not be here when you get back.’ He glanced at Kate. ‘Look at her. She’s like one of them that sat by the guillotine while heads got cut off. I suppose she never put my bet on today.’

‘I did!’ Kate struggled with a dropped stitch. ‘Sparkling Sam in the three thirty. I put it on in my lunch hour and I hope none of the parents saw me. I called back after school to see if you’d won, but they all laughed and said the horse was still running. That’s another five shillings down the plug hole. Do you want a drink?’

‘No. I want to go out.’

The sisters glanced at one another. ‘Where to?’ asked Judith eventually.

‘I want to go to the memorial.’

‘Middle of Bolton?’ Kate’s eyebrows shot upward. ‘Whatever for?’

‘To say a last ta-ra to my mates. Do you know how many Lancashire Fusiliers never came back? Bloody thousands. Well, I want to say ta-ra in this world before I say hello in the next. Tomorrow, you can shove me down in that there wheelchair.’

Judith scratched her head. ‘It’s not the pushing you down, Dad. That’ll be easy enough. But it’s uphill all the way back . . .’

‘You’re strong enough, the pair of you. Is it too much to ask for you to respect the wish of a dying man? And don’t start with all that stuff about chronic bronchitis, Katherine. I know what I’ve got.’

Rachel came in with his bowl of broth. ‘Shall I feed you?’ she asked, her voice trembling slightly at the sight of the three of them together. This was how it should have been all their lives, not just now. Not just at the end, when one life was almost over.

‘Judith can give it me,’ he said breathlessly. ‘She’s the only one of you that can get the spoon in my gob without spilling half down the bed.’

Rachel and Kate left the room together. ‘Nothing changes,’ muttered the latter. ‘She got the Sunday outings and the best coat, now she’s given the praise.’

‘Stop it. He’s got days, that’s what the doctor said. Just a few days now.’

‘If he’d take the morphine . . . ah . . . I don’t know . . .’ Kate’s words tailed away to nothing.

‘If he took the morphine, he’d be no trouble.’

‘He’d have less pain. He wants us to wheel him out tomorrow.’

‘Then do it. It’ll be his last time.’

They took him. First one, then the other pushed the wheelchair down Derby Street and through the town centre till they reached the cenotaph. He sat quietly, medals pinned to his chest, sunken eyes glued to the statues. ‘We can’t stand here forever,’ whispered Judith after a while. ‘I’ll just nip across to the library and look at the languages section.’ She turned and fled towards the civic buildings, leaving Kate to stand between her father and the passing shoppers.

‘Rachel?’ The voice cracked through parched lips.

‘It’s Kate.’

‘Oh. Should have been a lad.’

‘I know.’

‘Where’s Judith?’

‘In the library looking for a Russian book.’

He sighed, sputum rattling in his chest. ‘God, it hurts.’

‘There’s no need. You could have the medicine.’

‘No. The pain reminds me that I’m alive. The pain’s all I have left now. Is that our Katherine?’

‘Yes, it’s me. You should be home in your bed.’

‘We called a gun after you. All the lads put names in a hat and Katherine came out. A big cannon, it was. Mad Katie, they called her. She was an angry gun. Like you. Angry.’

‘Oh.’ She didn’t know what to say to this stranger who had occupied her whole life.

He looked up at her, his eyes brimming with tears. ‘It’s time, lass. Just thee and me and my time’s come. Use it, Katherine. That cleverness. Use it.’

‘I will.’

‘Like we used Mad Katie.’

‘More constructively, I hope. Do you want to go home now? We can pass the library and collect Judith.’

‘I am home.’ He stared briefly at the words on the monument, shivered, then dropped his head.

Instantly, Kate fell to her knees. ‘Dad?’ She touched his shoulder and he slid sideways, hanging like a doll over the side of the wheelchair. With an agility that belied her state of mind, she jumped up and straightened her father’s body, closing his eyes with the pads of her thumbs.

For an interminable and very shaky half-hour, she stood with the corpse and waited for her sister. At last Judith arrived, a large volume clutched to her chest. ‘Right. Let’s get him home, shall we?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘What? Don’t be silly, he’s just asleep.’

‘He came out here to die and that’s what he’s done. Hold him steady while I push.’

Judith stood, mouth agape, precious book still folded in her arms.

‘He died while you were in the library,’ said Kate softly. ‘The least you can do is help me to get him home.’

‘But . . . but . . .’

‘Are you practising to be a goldfish? Pull yourself together, Judith Murray.’ Although she herself felt far from ‘together’, one of them needed to display a bit of commonsense.

‘Shouldn’t we tell somebody? We can’t take a dead man through the streets without telling somebody.’

‘Why not? He’s been dead for weeks anyway, only hung on till you came home. This is how he wanted it. We take him back, put him in bed and say he died there. He is not to be taken to any hospital – you know how he feels about hospitals.’

They stared at one another. ‘You’re not crying,’ said Judith at last.

‘Neither are you. Do you think Mam will cry?’

‘Yes. She’ll cry because she wasn’t with him. He gave her one hell of a life, Kate.’

‘I know.’ They began to push their burden which seemed heavier now in its inert state. ‘He always made Mam feel so guilty,’ Kate continued. ‘Me too for being a girl. He messed up my mind, Judith. But, oh God, I’m sorry he’s dead. He was waiting for us, expecting us to do great things, waiting for grandsons.’

Judith took over the pushing. ‘Everything seems so unimportant now. Russian, Swedish, German, all I’ve worked for. When you see a life snuffed out like this . . . What’s it all about, Kate?’

‘Strangely enough, it’s about staying alive. So stick to your books and your plans. It’s what he would have wanted.’

‘And you?’

‘What about me?’

‘He expected a lot from you, Kate. He thought you’d end up running the country or something like that. Are you going to carry on with that silly marriage?’

Kate pushed her sister to one side. ‘I don’t know. Let me take the chair for a while. I’ll do what I have to do. When the time comes. I just wish . . .’

‘What?’

‘That I could trust and love somebody for a while.’

Judith glanced down at the dead man. ‘He took a lot away from you, Kate.’

‘Yes, well, he probably couldn’t help it. Now, let’s get home and explain all this to Mam. We’ll have to make all the arrangements for her. Strange how she always stood by him in life. Now he’s dead, she’ll probably be absolutely useless.’

But Rachel proved far from useless. Once she recovered from the initial and very brutal shock, she set to with funeral arrangements and insurance policies, bought herself a nice navy-blue suit – ‘it’ll be more useful than black’ – and shoo-ed her daughters out of the house as soon as her husband was buried.

‘But, Mam!’ protested Kate. ‘You’ll be on your own for the first time ever!’

‘Then I’d best get used to it, eh?’

Judith was busy with her packing, but even she looked astonished when she understood her mother’s intention. ‘Let Kate stay a while. I can’t, unfortunately. I’ve to see my professor before I set off for Russia. Don’t be on your own, not just yet.’

‘Stop talking as if I’m ill!’ Rachel pushed a damp curl from her forehead, then carried on cleaning the grate. ‘I shall manage. In fact, I’ve plenty of thinking to do and you two only get in the road.’

‘What’s there to think about?’ asked Kate.

‘Me job for a start. I’ve a widow’s pension now, plus a few bob a week from some policy of your dad’s. If I’m not careful, I shall lose me pension in tax. So happen I’ll do a bit of cleaning, cash in hand. Or get a job that doesn’t pay enough for me to be penalized. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Years he struggled on with his bad leg and never a penny for all that pain from the war. Then there’s the war widows, treated like muck, they are. Their husbands went out and died for England, but what do the women get? Nowt. A fistful of pennies every week, that’s all. So if you ever have lads and they start on about defending Queen and country, tell them to hang on a bit, ’cos it’s not worth it.’

Kate and Judith stared at one another. This was the longest speech their mother had ever made within their hearing. ‘So you’ll give up the mill?’ asked Judith.

‘I will that, and never a backward glance. I’ve got you two through now, and that’s what it was about. Do you think I’d have stuck all them years without a darned good reason? No. I’ve finished with spinning.’

‘There was no need. He earned enough . . .’

‘Shut up, Katherine!’ Rachel’s face glowed in the light from the fire. ‘I know what he was. There’s no need for you to be telling me what he was and him hardly cold in the grave. If he hadn’t gambled, if he hadn’t been a drinker. Yes, he was a weak man. Your father was a hurt man, and don’t you ever forget that.’

‘He never let any of us forget it, did he?’

Rachel rose from the floor and slapped the cleaning cloth on to the table. ‘He’s dead, lass. There’s no need for revenge now. You can’t hurt him past dead, can you?’

‘I never set out to hurt anyone!’

‘Aye, but you never forgave him for his mistakes, did you? He wasn’t lovable, I know that. But he was a human being, our Katie, a human being with feelings the same as the rest of us. He loved you and Judith in his way.’

‘In his way.’ There was a steely edge to Kate’s voice. ‘And I loved him in my way, the way he showed me. So don’t blame me for my dad’s failure.’

‘I’m not blaming you. I’m just asking you to accept the way he was. Accept it and get on with your lives, both of you. I’m going to get on with mine, and it’ll be easier without two grown women under me feet all day. You’d best get back to your job, Katherine, or they’ll be finding somebody else. And our Judith has to finish her education. I’ll be all right. I don’t need anybody with me.’

‘Are you sure? Shall we have a phone put in?’ It occurred to Kate that this would be the first time ever that Rachel had been truly alone. As a child she had been surrounded by brothers and sisters; even during the war she had had company. ‘A phone would be useful.’

‘I’m not having one of them things! Jessie Turnbull’s daughter had one put in for her, and she keeps it in a cupboard so she can’t hear it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she feels right daft talking to somebody who’s not there. Embarrassed, like. Mind, she always was three sheets in the wind, was Jessie Turnbull. Did I tell you she’s got a new dog? Fierce, it is. It’ll let anybody in the house, but it won’t let them out. It took five men to get him from the Wesleyan and General through the back door last week. Still, he should be well-insured being as he’s the insurance man. Now. Where did I put me brass polish? I’ll just give that plaque another once-over . . .’

Judith and Kate stared at their mother. She was different, voluble, amusing. Although saddened by her husband’s death, she seemed to be breaking free from some invisible bond that had held her shackled for many years. ‘She doesn’t need us,’ said Kate to her sister. Her mother apparently had all she needed for now. And the chief ingredient seemed to be freedom.

Kate’s own freedom was confined to school. At home, Dora was well dug in by this time; in fact, she seemed to resent Kate’s going back to Crompton Way after her father’s death. ‘You should have stayed with your mother, dear. We can manage here perfectly well.’ Yes, Dora had all she wanted. Her son, a lovely home and a baby to care for.

Little Melanie’s relationship with her mother was a difficult one. As a toddler, she began to discover that she needed only to run to Dora or Geoff and her own way could be had instantly. But Kate was not so easy, not so malleable. Kate did not believe in giving in to children, but in the face of the other two adults in the house, there was little she could do to prevent the spoiling of her daughter. In the end, she took what she later realized to be the easy route, the lazy way out. Dora brought up Melanie while Kate went to work. At the weekends, she tried to instil some discipline into the child, but all her good work was ruined by Monday morning when Dora took over.

Kate tackled her mother-in-law just once. ‘There are too many tantrums,’ she said. ‘Melanie is growing up believing she’ll get her own way just by screaming. You give in to her too easily.’

Dora bridled. ‘She’s just a baby. How can it be possible to spoil a baby? It’s only a few sweets . . .’