Shelter from the Storm (23 page)

When Luisa Morgan had first been married she had not come home at all, but that summer she came back for a long stay. Her parents organised a party for her, and Joe was invited to attend and to spend the night. He had forgotten how beautiful she was. She looked to him rather like Esther Margaret, fair haired and blue eyed, but her eyes were not innocent and young — she was self-assured and went around talking to everybody, her silk dress rustling as she moved.

It was a perfect summer evening and the windows were open, so that the noise of the music streamed into the garden like a flood. People sat about outside, drinking champagne and talking, the men in dark suits and the women in pretty dresses, the young ones showing off their creamy shoulders. The garden was thick with flowers and trees in full green leaf.

Joe felt obliged to ask Luisa to dance. He hadn’t seen her much since she had been married, he had always managed to keep out of the way when she visited, and he didn’t know what to say to her. Luisa reminded him that he had not wanted to dance with her the first time they met.

‘You hated me,’ she said.

‘I did not.’

‘Yes, you did. You declined to dance with me a second time. I was mortified.’

‘You told me your mother was boring.’

‘She is. She’s also my mother. I didn’t realise that being boring was not confined to my mother.’

Luisa said she was hot and they walked out into the garden, and when they were well away from the house she stopped and put a white-gloved hand up to his cheek and kissed him. It was a sweet kiss and Joe was not pleased with himself when he liked it.

‘You’re supposed to join in,’ she said.

‘You’re married.’

‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy. It’s just a kiss. Lord, I wish I had you in Edinburgh — my friends would go wild for you. They all have old husbands, you see. Old men have money. You don’t know anything about this, do you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re so refreshing,’ she said. ‘Who else would admit it?’

Joe found himself kissing her, pulling her into his arms, ashamed of himself because he didn’t care about her. He realised the difference between wanting someone and caring for them but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to go on kissing her for ever and feeling the curves of her body beneath the rustling of her dress. He kissed her until she stopped him. She did it gently enough, putting a restraining hand to his shoulder and smiling at him, but Joe couldn’t look at her and when they went back inside he felt wretched, thinking of how much he had loved Esther Margaret and had had not even a kind word from her, whereas this woman, whom he didn’t even like, had given him her mouth until he was shaking with want. He went back outside without her, and in the cool of the evening Thaddeus found him.

‘I saw you dancing with Luisa.’

Joe hoped that was all he had seen. What a way to behave in the house of the only man who had ever been kind to him. No, more than that, Thaddeus was generous. Joe couldn’t speak he was so mortified.

‘She isn’t happy,’ Thaddeus said. ‘McAndrew is too old for
her. I thought so at the time but she wouldn’t be told. Money and power are strange things, they take a hold of people.’

Joe knew that he should have gone home but he couldn’t. He wanted to hold Luisa again. People danced until late, and although he didn’t want to dance with anybody else he made himself be polite and talk about things that did not interest him. But even when the music stopped, the party was over and he went to bed he was unhappy. He called himself weak and stupid, he stood by the window and wished himself at home where there were no temptations, and then he heard the door and when he turned around Luisa slid into the room. There was no light but the dawn, which was breaking in spectacular gold and pink beyond the windows, but even from across the room Joe could see that she was wearing something very thin and clinging. She stood back against the door after she closed it and then she came to him.

Joe didn’t look at her any more; he regarded the view from the window — all trees and lawns with the River Wear below it — as though the rest of his life depended upon it.

‘Where is Mr McAndrew that he doesn’t come with you?’

‘He’s at some boring meeting in Glasgow.’

‘Is everything boring to you?’

‘You aren’t — at least not yet.’

That made Joe smile, and as he did so she reached up an almost bare arm and kissed him and already he remembered how wonderful her kisses were.

‘I don’t love you,’ he said.

‘I don’t love you either. Does it matter? You’re not going to go all puritanical on me, are you? You cannot imagine how appalling it is being bedded by an old man. Really, you just cannot think.’

‘I don’t understand why you married him if you don’t like him.’

She laughed.

‘He is a very rich and powerful man. He is one of the most powerful industrialists in Scotland, whereas you are …’

‘I’m what?’

‘You own a pit, or rather half a pit since my father owns the other half, and part of a small foundry in a backwater. When my father tried to persuade me to marry you I have to say that I couldn’t take him seriously. Dear me, how old are you — twenty? I didn’t want to marry a boy. Don’t look at me like that. You wouldn’t have married me for the world. Be honest, you thought I was a nasty little wretch.’

‘I still think you’re a nasty little wretch.’

‘Do you, darling?’ She kissed him again and put her slender white arms up to his neck. Joe couldn’t resist her. She encouraged him to do all the things he had wanted to do and tried not to think about with Esther Margaret. He hadn’t known how bitter he was until then, or that he could want a woman so much without having a regard for her, but when he had pulled the clothes off her and kissed her and caressed her and and had her he discovered that this was not true either, that nothing was that simple, because he did have some regard for her. He liked her laughter and her enthusiasm and her body, he liked the way that she didn’t care about anything, he liked the champagne she had brought with her and insisted on sprinkling all over the bed and over him and drinking out of the bottle. He liked her recklessness, the way that all she cared for was now — and her husband’s money and power, of course, she said.

‘Does he love you?’ Joe asked.

She laughed.

‘Of course he doesn’t. He says that he does. Just think if you were very old, say forty and you could buy and possess a girl who looks like me and have her when you wanted her and own what other men desire and dress her up like a doll and have her pretend that she wants you in bed, wouldn’t you want that?’

‘I don’t think so, no. I can’t imagine being that advanced in years but I rather hoped that I could marry and be happy and have children and grow old with somebody I loved.’

She laughed again and squirted champagne at him.

‘What a romantic you are, Joe, and how young!’

He took the champagne from her and fought with her, since she wanted him to, and rolled her over and made love to her and afterwards she looked up into his eyes and said earnestly, ‘No one loves anyone, you know, darling, not really.’

And he thought it was true. Esther Margaret had not loved or she would not have killed herself. His father had despised his mother and been the cause of her death, just as Dryden had with Esther Margaret, and Thaddeus and Alice tolerated one another. Perhaps it was all you could hope for, that and to have a beautiful woman in your bed. And then he thought of his house, of the emptiness, the silence. If the future was to be like that there was nothing worth having. But in the morning, when she had to leave him, there were tears in her eyes.

‘You will stay tonight, won’t you?’

‘I can’t. I have to go to work.’

‘Then come back.’

‘It will look obvious to your parents and I wouldn’t hurt them.’

She looked patiently at him.

‘You’re never going to get what you want that way,’ she said, and left.

Joe felt as though he had betrayed Thaddeus and Alice, but Luisa’s father in particular. If she was not happy with George McAndrew he was not making things any better by complicating it and he owed Thaddeus more than that, but it wasn’t easy. During the day he managed because he had work to distract him, but that night and the one that followed and all the other nights that week he couldn’t sleep for thinking about her and wanting her, and it made him bad tempered during the day so that the office workers and the men he came into contact with looked at him in surprise. He had to stop himself from going to her. He wished that she would go back to Scotland and he could have some peace.

On the Saturday evening he came back from work angry and
tired and wishing he could make up some excuse and go to the house when he had already told Thaddeus that he was too busy to attend a dinner party. He thought of her wearing one of those exquisite dresses which McAndrew was rich enough to buy for her, the kind that showed off her shoulders and the tops of her breasts to advantage. He thought of her smiling and making conversation and drinking champagne, and he wondered whether she would make up to some other man if he were not there. It made him want to groan aloud or follow his father’s example and hit the bottle.

The following morning, having not gone to church or the office, he was surprised to hear a banging on the front door. When he opened it she stood there, wearing a blue riding dress. A white pony grazed the lawn behind her.

‘Wretch!’ she declared. ‘Why didn’t you come to the dinner party? I devised it especially for you. How dare you refuse?’

‘How dare I what?’ Joe said. ‘Do you think I’m a puppy to come to heel? You chose what you wanted.’

‘I want you!’

‘No, you don’t. You’re just bored. You want laying. I’m told some men do it for money.’

She went for him. Joe was astonished at how easily he stopped her. That brought her into his arms and then she raised swimming eyes. Joe couldn’t help but laugh and when he released her she said, ‘You’re horrible.’

‘I am, yes. Aren’t you glad you didn’t marry me?’

‘I’m going back tomorrow.’

‘Give my regards to George.’

Dryden had thought that he would wake up and it would be the morning before or the week before or almost any other time but the time that it was. He had told himself when Esther Margaret said she was pregnant and Tom told him he would have to marry her that things couldn’t get any worse. After all, he had been through quite a lot for somebody his age. And then he married her and she kept from him and he thought again it couldn’t get any worse. And then the one night that he had gone to bed with another woman she had gone into labour and the baby had died, and he thought once more it couldn’t get any worse. And then she had disappeared and then there was the suicide note and then they found her body and then … He didn’t want to think any further because he had reached the conclusion that for some people things just went on getting worse all the time. He wished that he had gone back to Mrs Clancy’s to live. It might be dirty and uncomfortable and have awful food but there were much harder things in life.

Vinia was ambitious, she was difficult, she had even maybe planned to start on at Tom about the shop when he was in the house. She knew that she could push Tom too far. Had she not already done it at least once? Afraid and almost crying, she had looked like a different person, and Dryden had changed his mind and decided that if he could do nothing else at least he could
draw Tom away. Beyond that he had not thought. He didn’t want Tom to be a person who would hit his wife; however provoking she might be there was nothing seriously wrong with what she wanted. He did not understand why Tom had become so upset about it. She had not run off with another man, she had not had a dead child, left a suicide note, done away with herself. Vinia had done nothing that really mattered, as far as he could see.

So he drew Tom away and then he wished that he hadn’t. He loved Tom too much. There had been too many good times, too many evenings in the Golden Lion and the Black Horse, too many games, too many pints, too much warm conversation, too much laughter, and all those late nights, full of stars, when they had left the pub and walked down the main street and everybody else was in bed and they were fairly drunk and their footsteps resounded on the opposite pavement and the whole world had been empty except for them. Dryden knew with the simplicity of the unloved that there was nothing in the world to better that.

When there was no more fight left in Vinia or in him, Tom still had to prove something and he chased her and even when she screamed, and she was so slight, Tom drew back his fist and hit her. If Dryden could have closed his eyes over it he would have but he couldn’t, it would have been the coward’s way, and he thought that it was in that moment that all the love between himself and Tom ceased. It was a nasty short death for something that had been so important, and Dryden knew in those moments that he would never have anything like it again, that Tom would hate him. Even then Tom didn’t stop. Dryden thought that when she was hurt and on the floor it might be enough but it was not. He didn’t know what Tom planned to do after that, and he had no intention of waiting long enough to find out. He pulled Tom away from her and after that he wished he hadn’t. No love or compassion deterred Tom, he could see nothing but his quarry, and although Dryden told himself that there had been that time at the pub when he had put Tom on to the floor with three punches he could see that it was not going to
happen here. Tom had not been angry then like he was now. Tom had even laughed after it had happened, but now laughter was the farthest thing imaginable. Tom liked hitting him, who he was didn’t matter, and Dryden knew as the blows followed one another and his strength left him that the feeling that Tom had for him was dying. It was the only thing in his life which mattered, and so the more Tom hit him the less will he had to do anything about it. He got to the point where he didn’t mind if Tom killed him because the regard between them was stone dead and his insides were weeping and grieving over it and there was no repair to be made; beyond it there was nothing.