Shelter from the Storm (30 page)

‘Tall and slender with golden hair, and she was wearing the most beautiful outfit. It must have cost a fortune — navy blue and white with a big hat.’

Somehow, finding out that Joe was not married made it
worse. If there was an innocent reason for his presence there with a woman he wasn’t married to, then it was her own marriage which prevented their happiness. If there was not, then he was in love with another man’s wife. It undermined all her ideas about him. Joe wasn’t like that, he was kind and loyal and caring. She had carried in her mind a picture of him unchanged, so when he walked down the steps of the hotel looking well off, confident and with a beautiful woman on his arm, it had brought her ideas crashing down.

Vinia was frowning.

‘Her husband could have been right behind them. They could have been having a meal—’

‘It was the middle of the morning and there was nobody with them. I watched them walk away down the street.’

‘Esther Margaret, if he was sleeping with another man’s wife he would hardly do it in Newcastle, would he? Everybody knows him.’

‘Loving people makes you careless.’ Esther Margaret felt sick.

‘He wouldn’t do such a thing,’ Vinia said.

The problem remained the same. Joe Forster was in love with another woman whether he was married to her or someone else was. He did not love Esther Margaret; he had doubtless forgotten her.

*

It was almost as though talking about Joe brought him to her. Esther Margaret saw him later that day, riding a fine black horse away from the pit and he stopped the horse abruptly so that it threw up its head and then he walked it across to her as she stared.

Seeing him so closely Esther Margaret was reminded of Daisy’s husband. How could her parents ever have seen Joe as anything other than well-bred and eligible? He must be the best catch for miles around and yet they thought he had not been good enough for her.

He got down from the horse and, still holding the reins, took both her hands and kissed her on the cheek and she was glad that somebody in the village was pleased to see her.

‘I never believed that you had died,’ he said.

Esther Margaret thought bitterly that if her parents had ever imagined Joe would turn out so well, if they ever saw him, which they must, how regretful they would feel that they denied him her company and spoiled all their lives.

He loved her no longer, she thought sadly, she could tell by his polite relief and jealousy cut her like a knife. She had forfeited Joe’s love with her innocent stupidity. It made her wretched and she brought to mind once again the images of him with the beautiful woman he could not marry.

She managed a smile.

‘I ran away,’ she admitted.

‘But you came back.’

Esther Margaret said nothing to that. Deerness Law was like a prison to which she had gained a lifetime’s sentence.

*

Vinia was in the yard that afternoon when Tom’s mother was in the back lane. Mary Cameron saw her and screamed down the lane, ‘You’re a whore! Living with another man under my Tommy’s roof. It’s disgusting. You ought not to be in my Tommy’s house. You have no right there. And him, the dirty gypsy!’

Vinia regarded her with indulgence. Mary’s mind had been lost with Tom’s death. She didn’t say anything. She swept the yard and then went into the house. Mary didn’t follow her but Vinia could hear her screaming and shouting until she closed the back door.

When Dryden came home Esther Margaret was conveniently upstairs. Dryden came to the pantry door.

‘Did you go to the shop today?’

‘What on earth made you ask that?’

‘I just wondered.’ He paused and then looked at her and said, ‘You should be there.’

‘No, I shouldn’t.’

‘You’ve got no excuse now. Esther Margaret can do this.’ He went to the foot of the stairs and yelled, and when she didn’t reply he went upstairs. He had come home in an awful mood, Vinia decided. No doubt Esther Margaret’s reappearance story was all over the village by now. He had probably put up with a good many cynical remarks. She could hear clearly through the open door.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So get downstairs and find something to do.’

It was perfect Tom, Vinia thought. He clattered back down the stairs.

‘Do you know what you sound like?’ she told him. ‘Like Tom Cameron.’

‘Is that why you aren’t at the shop? Maybe if I slapped you round the kitchen you would go to the shop, eh?’

A wet plate slipped out of her fingers and crashed on to the stone floor.

‘Don’t talk about Tom like that!’

‘It was a pit accident,’ he said. ‘It happens all the time.’

‘You shut up!’ Vinia said.

‘So the whole point of it was to annoy Tom?’

‘Of course it wasn’t.’ Vinia couldn’t think how they had got to here. He was making her lose her temper, something he never did.

‘He half killed both of us over it.’

‘Don’t talk about it! Don’t! Don’t!’ She came out of the pantry and pushed him up against the wall. Tom would have knocked her off her feet for it. She slammed a fist into his chest. All he said was, ‘I wish that you would go. Just once. I wish you would.’

She could hear Esther Margaret coming down the stairs and
she moved away, and after that the evening took on a strange quality, as though she were viewing it from somewhere else. Esther Margaret helped though she wasn’t needed, and after that Vinia felt worse because there was not enough work for two women in the house. She would be the one who was not needed soon. For that and for other reasons, she must find somewhere else to live.

The next morning she made herself go to the shop, but it took all the courage she had to walk up the main street with the keys heavy in her coat pocket and unlock the door and go in. Dryden was right. She needed Tom there to kick against in a way, and without him there seemed to be no point in anything. She felt guilty too that she might actually enjoy something when he was dead.

The counter was bare; the windows cried out for the clothes in which she had envisaged dressing them. She remembered having worked out her window displays, excited, keen. There were still a few sketches about. She sat down and gazed at them for a while, flicking through, and then she heard a tapping on the shop door. When she went through Em Little was standing there, looking embarrassed and not quite smiling.

‘I heard you were here. You don’t mind?’

Shortly afterwards, while they were talking at the front of the shop, a woman walked in, asking if they were open for business and saying that she had a dress she needed altering — would they do it? Em looked at Vinia and when she nodded said they would do it straight away. Shortly afterwards another woman called in, Mrs Jamieson, who had been before. Her daughter was getting married and they didn’t know what kind of dress she wanted but would like some ideas.

‘I didn’t know what was happening. So sorry to hear about your husband, Mrs Cameron. It’s best to keep busy is what I always say.’

Em began with the dress alteration and Vinia found herself making sketches of what the bride might like as her mother
discussed her height and colouring. They agreed that she should bring her daughter in the very next day. At teatime Em went home and Vinia locked up and walked slowly down the street. There were lights on at the house, and when she went in Esther Margaret had the tea table laid and she had baked and everything was on the table. It gave Vinia a strange jolt — she had not experienced anything like it since she had been a little girl when her parents were alive. Tom’s mother had not made her welcome like this. When Dryden came home they sat down in a civilised fashion and ate. This time they did actually eat something.

The following morning Esther Margaret said she would like to see the shop, so Vinia took her there and showed her around. Halfway through the morning a carriage pulled up outside and Mrs Morgan, whom Vinia knew by sight, and a young woman got out of the carriage and came into the shop.

‘That’s her,’ Esther Margaret whispered as the young woman got down, ‘that’s the woman Joe came out of the hotel with.’

Mrs Morgan came in, all politeness, and introduced her daughter. Vinia didn’t know what to say. She knew that Luisa Morgan had married a rich man and gone to live away, and from the look of her dress she didn’t usually buy her clothes in little shops in pit villages. She couldn’t imagine Joe with such a woman. Luisa was bright and hard like a shiny penny. Vinia brought out various hats she had made and then stored in boxes when the accident occurred. Luisa Morgan, being fair and beautiful, suited all of them and actually bought two. Vinia was inclined to be sceptical. They were hardly smart enough for such a person and she doubted whether the woman would ever wear them, but she had become shopkeeper enough to be glad of the sale and to have some money to put into the till.

After they left Em made tea and they sat about in the back room talking about what they would produce for Christmas. Mid-afternoon Esther Margaret went back to see to the house. It was a heady feeling — somebody else was going to do the
domestic things and Vinia could stay and take pleasure in her new project. It held her with its possibilities, with its magic.

Mid-evening there was a knock on the door. When she opened it Dryden stood there, washed and changed and ready to go to the pub. He came in and wandered about the shop and asked about the customers. She related the incident of Mrs Morgan and her daughter to his willing ears, and heard herself laughing.

‘Don’t stop,’ he told her.

‘Shouldn’t you be at home with Esther Margaret?’

‘I’m going for a drink.’

‘She’s just come home.’

‘So?’

*

Only a very narrow-minded person would have said that Dryden was drunk when he got home. In fact he timed it nicely because he walked into the bedroom while his wife was undressing. He was well aware that Vinia’s room was dark and silent and that every sound could be heard through the wall, but there was no help for it — his wife was there and they belonged to each other with a kind of life sentence than he could not bear to think about. However, the sight of her almost naked body was pleasant, especially in candlelight. She grabbed the skirt she had taken off and held it up in front of her.

‘You don’t need to bother,’ he said. ‘I have seen you before.’

She got into bed and turned her back. Dryden finished his undressing and got in beside her. The room was uncomfortably cool but nothing compared to her back. He didn’t mean to touch her but the bed had suddenly got smaller. They brushed up against each other twice before he got back out of bed.

She was the wrong woman. She had always been the wrong woman, and even sheer animal instinct wouldn’t have got him to her. He heard Vinia turn over.

‘Where are you going?’ Esther Margaret said into the darkness.

‘Nowhere.’ Dryden began to dress, got into shirt and trousers and felt his way down the stairs. He put on his boots, which were near the door, and went outside. It was freezing. The buildings were iced like big cakes and the pithead loomed in the blackness and brought back Tom’s death, so close that Dryden thought he could hear him breathing.

All those weeks he had thought of Tom as the person who had beaten him, as the awful husband who had hit his wife, but his memory allowed him the wonderful evenings in the pub with Tom’s smile and silly remarks and the way he would clap an arm around him. It had been the way he wanted to remember him, only he hadn’t been able to because of the horror of the accident and what had happened before, and also because of Vinia. What kind of man lusted after his dead brother’s wife?

He heard footsteps down the yard.

‘Dryden, what on earth are you doing out here? You’ll catch your death.’ She was wearing her outdoor coat over her nightdress, so she was nobody to talk, he thought. He was, Dryden realised then, crying. How awful. He turned away.

‘Come inside. Come on. You could at least have put on a coat.’

The woman he adored was at her most practical, dragging him up the yard by his arm, closing the back door and sliding in the bolt. She started going on at him in the usual kind of way about drinking too much. Dryden listened to her gentle nagging and looked at her. Her hair was in one thick plait and she was wearing a long nightdress. There wasn’t an inch of her on show that didn’t have to be. He thought she was the most beautiful thing on God’s earth, completely out of reach and yet near enough to touch. He wasn’t allowed to touch her; it would have to be enough to see her, hear her voice, breathe in the scent of her.

‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’ she said severely. ‘People die through getting drunk and going to sleep in back lanes. For goodness’ sake, go to bed.’

He pretended he was going so that she would leave and in the end she went upstairs and left him there. Dryden lay down on the old settee in the kitchen. It was much warmer here than upstairs. He pulled a cushion to him against the draught and closed his eyes.

Luisa and George came to Durham just before Christmas, and Joe was invited to a party at the house. He didn’t want to go. He hadn’t seen Luisa all that autumn and was determined not to. Out of her sight he could think of other things. In her presence he was obsessed with her. She was his drug. He understood when he saw her how his father had felt about whisky. She looked like an ice queen, wearing the palest blue, and Joe thought she was more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen. Her eyes were blue flame, her skin was like pearl. She glowed.

‘Milan suits you.’

She laughed.

‘We went to Florence and Rome after that. The churches and the buildings were so beautiful, Joe. You would have hated it.’

‘But George liked it.’

‘George likes to humour his wife. It’s so good to see you again, though I have to say that you are very skinny. Have you pined for me?’

‘Certainly not.’

She danced. Joe watched her smile, her graceful movement. Alice came to him.

‘Doesn’t she look well? There is a world out there beyond the moors. I told your mother so. People can do better, try for other things — they don’t have to put up with this place. There’s
nothing here. I wanted for her all the things I didn’t have — culture, society, riches. George has those.’ She looked at him beyond Joe’s shoulder, smiling.