South Riding (54 page)

Then she awoke to the enormity of her son’s behaviour.

“How dared he? How dared he? After all I’ve done for him. No one can say a better cook lives in the South Riding. I work my fingers to the bone. Stay in night after night. Never been so much as to pictures for three years. And he throws it back into my face.”

“Nay, nay, Mother. In tid’ pot.”

“Pot or no pot. I won’t be answered back.”

“But look here, Mrs. Brimsley—” Bill was all for peace and reason. “It’s only natural, if you come to think of it, that he should want to wed. Peg Pudsey’s not a bad sort of girl. He might do worse.”

“Aye; but he’ll not do that. I’ll have no Pudsey here. Kin to that drunken, greasy, ditch-ligging beast. Beast man, they call him. Hard on the dumb beasts, poor things. We’ve been respectable here and respectable we’ll stay. Thank you very much.”

She rose and pushed back her chair.

“You can wash your own pots,” she announced.

“Where i’you going, Ma?” gasped Hal.

“The pictures!”

She might have been saying “The Devil.”

And to the pictures she went, catching the afternoon bus to Kiplington, a formidable woman in maroon plush hat, bear stole and cotton gloves.

She was deeply hurt. Nat was her favourite son. She felt that by courting Peg Pudsey he had betrayed her.

It wasn’t fair. He wanted to rob her of her vocation, to bring another housekeeper into her domain. She felt too young for that. She could not stand aside yet.

She had been kitchen-maid at Lissell Grange when she began walking out with Nathaniel Brimsley. She was two months off eighteen when she married, a jolly laughing girl, brisk as a terrier, and capable as a head waitress at Lyons Corner House. At nineteen she was mother of Polly, the eldest of five girls, now all out in the world, married or in service. She was not fifty yet, and she was hanged if she would play second fiddle to a girl of Pudsey’s. She knew, she knew what happened when brides entered the homes of their mothers-in-law.

Tightly clutching her bag she sat through the news reel, all sport and soldiers, the comic, all American slang that she could not understand, and the big romance, which brought tears to her eyes. Lovely she thought it. It filled her with vague longings.

She looked at the languishing lady on the screen and saw sinuous movements, hips slim as a whiting’s, wet dark lips and lashes luxuriant as goose-grass in a hedge bottom. She thought: I’m a back number. Nobody wants me. The boys are sick of me. She remembered her square, uncompromising reflection in the polished mirror above her chest of drawers.

The star on the sofa leant back to receive her lover’s passionate embrace.

Well now, that’s not what I call nice, criticised Mrs. Brimsley. If I caught one of my girls carrying on like that, I know what I’d do to her.

Yet she had her memories.

She remembered that day when she threw the basket of gooseberries right into Nathaniel’s face because she was so sick of its solemnity. The sequel to her rebellion had been far from solemn. When Thaniel (she had never called her husband Nat) was roused, he was a One. Well you knew.

No, it wasn’t all fun being a widow. There were times . . .

The screen drama approached its climax. The misunderstanding between husband and wife dissolved in the catastrophe of a motor accident. The erring woman knelt by her husband’s bed. “Darling! Darling! I never meant it. Come back to me. I love you!” The glycerine tears rolled down her lovely cheeks.

Mrs. Brimsley’s experienced eye swept the huge flower-filled bedroom. There’s not much time for that sort of thing in a real illness, she thought.

Her husband had died after three days of double pneumonia, and not thus had she wrestled with death in the crowded bedroom, the chimney smoking, the window stuffed with rags against the draught, the children crying in the yard and the unmilked cows bellowing from the paddock.

And then she had lost him.

He had been a good husband to her, old though he was. He had left her a tidy sum of money too, made during wartime when farming was farming, so that she had five hundred pounds of her own in savings bank.

The boys could stand on their own feet now. If she wanted a little house, she could take one. If she wanted to clear out and be a lady, why, she could. She could always get a day’s charring, or cooking, or keep a little pastry shop.

But she did not want that. She wanted to be needed. She wanted to feel her hands full of necessary work and her services appreciated. She wanted to scold her family and sacrifice herself as she had scolded and sacrificed at Cold Harbour Colony. Anything less meant an end to active living; and she was not ready to make an end.

She left the picture theatre even more discontented than she had entered it. She had settled nothing, asserted nothing, not even enjoyed herself.

She wanted a cup of tea, though she grudged the pence spent on such extravagances. She compromised on a twopenny cup in a nasty little sweet shop, then went bargain-hunting until bus-time. Her outburst of prodigality had cost her one shilling and her bus fare. She felt wildly reckless, and displeased with herself because of that.

The white sea roke blew up the street and billowed into rolling yellow fog that had lain day long across the coast. Shop windows suffused a pale glow at intervals along the street, but Mrs. Brimsley could not tell the grocer’s from the draper’s without pressing her face close against the window.

At the bus stop a shivering group prophesied delay.

“I’ll never be home to get their teas at this rate.”

“Then they’ll have to get it theirselves.”

“Oh, my hubby’s never got his tea since we were married. I doubt if he knows where to look for caddy.”

“Good-evening, Mrs. Brimsley. What brings you here?”

She spun round and saw at her side, twinkling and irrepressible, Mr. Barnabas Holly.

She remembered, with unaccountable pleasure, how she had boxed his ears. They had met several times since then. He amused her and she enjoyed their incessant but good-humoured bickering. He was out of work now.

“I might say the same of you,” she retorted.

“Well then, I’ll do hetter than you. I’ll
tell
you. I’ve been in high society. Mind you, no more than I ought to be if we all had our due. I’ve been taking tea with the head mistress of the High School, Miss Sarah Burton, M.A.”

“You never!”

“And why not? Wasn’t my girl Lydia smartest of the lot there? I’ve been seated on a cushioned couch with Lady Sarah, drinking tea out of a thimble and discoursing on the universities in a way more edifying than you’d imagine.”

“Go on.”

“‘I can see where Lydia gets her imagination from,’ says she. ‘If all parents was as intellectual as you, Mr. Holly,’ says she, ‘I’d be a happier woman, that I would,’ says she, passing me cake cut in bits no bigger than a tit’s arse-hole, begging your pardon. I’ve had bad luck as you might say since my old woman died. A good mother if ever there was one. And I had to fetch Lyd away from school to look after the kiddies. And it isn’t good enough.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Mrs. Brimsley, as usual intrigued by any domestic problem.

“That’s the question, as Shakespeare said. That is the question.”

The bus rolled round the corner of the street, trailing clouds of swirling fog. The group shifted. Mr. Holly took charge.

“Now then, hand us that basket. Ups-a-daisy. Of course I’m coming with you. Think I’d let a pretty woman like you go home alone on a night like this?”

“Where’s your cycle?”

“Now you’re asking.
Now
you’re asking. That’s right There’s less draught here on the driver’s side. I know how to choose a place in a bus, I will say. Fact is, I popped the bike. Had to get a new collar and so on to face her highness. Here, young fellow, two to Cold Harbour. Oh, got a return, have you? Well, come to think on, you
would
have. Single to Cold Harbour then, and make it a good ’un.”

“What d’you think you’re going to do at Cold Harbour?” asked the widow, stimulated and intrigued by the preposterous little man.

“See you safe and sound into your home. What d’you take me for? Miss a chance of a chat with the only woman in the South Riding who knows what to do with a rolling pin? Not likely.”

The bus rocked cautiously southward, stopping to let down passengers as it went, parting the soft heavy curtains of mist before it. Two lads in the back produced a mouth organ and began to experiment wheezily with reminiscences of Jack Payne.

“D’you like going to pictures?” asked Mr. Holly, producing a poisonous-looking little pipe and rubber pouch from Woolworth’s.

“Who said I’d been to pictures?” she bridled.

“No one said you’d
been.
I asked you if you
like
to go. Might take you one day, when I remember.” He winked slowly at her, tugging at his pipe, his hands cupped round the match. The air of the bus by now was rank with the odour of tobacco, wet boots, wet mackintoshes, fog, and the Irish setter leaping and whimpering on its lead in the gangway.

“You and the pictures! I can see you taking me there. Losing yourself in the pub is more like your line.”

“No, no. I’ve turned T.T. since I found my Ideel.” He winked again. His arm stole round her tightly armoured waist.

“Ideel my fathers! All you care about is cupboard love. Hanging round my place to get a slice of cake.”

“It’s better cake than Miss Burton’s, I can tell you that. I could do with a bit now, if you ask me. Come to think on, d’you know a better love than cupboard love with as good a cook as you about? At least I know your value?”

“That’s more than some do,” she sighed. For, though she had no intention of letting Mr. Holly get fresh with her, it was pleasant to find a confidante for her grievances.

“Is it? Well, I say it would be a crime not to appreciate you.” The arm round her waist gave a warm hint of a squeeze.

She took no notice. Her grievance overwhelmed her. “Then there are some pretty fine criminals about,” she exploded, and suddenly the pent-up anguish of her soul overflowed in a torrent of confession.

The comfort she gained from the experience astounded her. Mrs. Brimsley was accustomed to silent men, to men who dealt daily with concrete things, who said less than they thought, expressed less than they felt, and damped down all emotion by the cold water of common sense. Her youthful vivacity had broken itself against the impregnable fortress of her husband’s disapproving silence. Even her son had scraped back the offending pie into the dish instead of throwing it at his mother’s face, as would have been far more likeable and natural. The Brimsleys were always boasting that there was no nonsense in them. After thirty years of them Mrs. Brimsley felt that she could do with a little nonsense.

Now Mr. Holly, whatever else he was, an idler, a prodigal, a shameless little heathen, was full of nonsense. He was a talker. What he felt, he said. He did not leave the atmosphere thick with unspoken thoughts. He said, indeed, far more than he meant, which was at least a change.

But he was genuinely interested in other people. He enjoyed news; he relished gossip. He had ideas. “I might,” he frequently speculated, “have been a poet, if I’d thought on, or an actor.” He was a great singer in public-houses. If an egotist, he was not a cold one. He listened with judicial gravity to Mrs. Brimsley’s grievance, and laughed to scorn her sorrow with most flattering attention.

“
You
not wanted?
You
on the shelf? A fine looking bonny woman like yourself, with your light step and your light hand on a pastry board!
You
not wanted? Why, you’re the only sort that
is
wanted. You’re the salt of the earth, and don’t I know it?” He sighed. That sheltering impersonal arm round her waist tightened.

“A fat lot of use to me that is. Stuck away in Cold Harbour with one son that wouldn’t know spring chicken from a black pudding, and another that knows all right, but would rather have cocoa and jam and Peg Pudsey than boned turkey and bacon cakes and his poor old mother. As for Bill Heyer, he’s as nice a chap as you could wish, but he’s not human. There’s something about a bachelor as neat in the house as he is that isn’t natural,
I
say. He might as well been a girl.”

“That’s right. It’s not natural. Though maybe if he had two arms instead of one they’d be tickling to get round you.”

With lady-like oblivion Mrs. Brimsley ignored altogether the arm which was already round her waist.

So preoccupied were the two on their front seat that they did not notice how the bus moved now more quickly, now slowly at foot pace, in the enveloping fog. They had even forgotten that there was a fog at all when a violent jolt suddenly threw Mrs. Brimsley right into her escort’s arms, and him on to his knees beneath her, gallantly shielding her from further shock.

Two children screamed, the setter yelped, a basket of live chickens flew from the rack and landed on an old gentleman’s bowler hat; the conductor called “Ups-a-daisy! Keep on smiling! Keep on shining!” But the left fore-wheel of the South Riding Motor Services Bus was in a ditch.

“Oh God! Oh God!” gasped Mrs. Brimsley.