South Riding (55 page)

“Tha’s all right. Tha’s all right,” muttered Mr. Holly, his mouth full of her hair. For her hat had fallen off, and she lay draped across his head and shoulders in an attitude not unlike that known as the fireman’s lift. She had lost her fur; she had lost her paper carrier of tomatoes, tea, heather-mixture knitting yarn and Zam-Buk; she had lost her nerve completely. But Mr. Holly’s arms were round her, and Mr. Holly’s chest, as he struggled up and levered her back on to the now sloping seat, seemed a pleasant and comfortable place on which to have hysterics. So Mrs. Brimsley, an energetic woman with courage enough to face life’s real crises without faltering, abandoned herself to the luxury of this lesser occasion, and laughed and cried in unashamed abandon.

As it happened no great damage had been done. The bus had been crawling at foot pace down the road, the driver had mistaken smooth turf for smoother highway; but the ditch was not a deep one. Beyond the death of two chickens in the basket, and the complete annihilation of Mrs. Brimsley’s tomatoes under Mr. Holly’s trousers, no one was seriously hurt.

But the bus was firmly lodged in the ditch, and the ditch was somewhere—rather vaguely—just past Maythorpe.

“All fine
and
dandy, fine
and
dandy,” sang the conductor. “No, no one’s hurt. Not even the dawg here.”

“What are we going to do? Oh, let me out. Help me out. Oh, how are we to get home?”

“You just sit tight. I’ll get you home. We can’t be so far from a telephone. I’m just going to ring up the office, and they’ll send an emergency relief. It’s no use getting out— unless you
like
to walk. We shouldn’t be more than an hour at the outside. Sit tight and keep warm—unless any of you
fancy
a nice cold walk home.”

It was the only sensible thing to do.

The angle of the bus was unusual, but not entirely uncomfortable once the passengers had rearranged themselves, and it made Mrs. Brimsley feel more natural when she found herself seated on Mr. Holly’s knee drying her eyes with his new cotton handkerchief, bought in honour of Miss Burton.

At first there was desultory conversation among the travellers; they talked of the fog, the cold, of other accidents, of their probable locality, of Maythorpe and its inhabitants; but soon the youth with the mouth organ recovered his breath and spirits, and before they fairly knew what they were doing, the company had developed naturally into a sing song choir.

Mrs. Brimsley lay back in comfort. She could feel the vibration of Mr. Holly’s chest as he swelled, with an unexpectedly sweet and tuneful voice, the familiar chorus
:

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,

I’m just crazy, all for the love of you!”

His arm tightened protectively round the widow’s waist.

“It won’t be a stylish marriage,
For I can’t afford a carriage . . .”

An old song. Why, they’d sung it when she and Thaniel were courting.

“But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat,

Of a bicycle built for two!”

“What is your name? Daisy?” breathed Mr. Holly.

“No. Jessy. Give over now,” giggled the emotional girl, who, a few minutes ago, had been the brisk and formidable Mrs. B.

“I’m not going to give over. I haven’t talked to anything as nice as you since I were a lad, and I’m not going to waste my chances.”

Mr. Holly spoke with surprising firmness and authority. He did not snigger: he did not play silly tricks which alienated her; he simply held her warmly and companionably in his arms—and she liked it.

All those clever children, she thought. You can see he’s a loving father.

The mouth-organist struck up
The Lost Chord.
Mr. Holly cleared his throat and began to sing softly. Jessy stirred in his arms.

“Go on, go on. You know it. Give us a solo,” someone called.

Delicately he shifted his pleasant burden, and his true clear baritone rose into the humming heat of tobacco, petrol, dogs, fowls and human stuffiness.

“Seated one day at the organ

I felt weary and ill-at-ease.”

That’s a good song, thought Mrs. Brimsley, a song associated with chapel anniversary teas, and Sunday School, and holy pictures hanging on the walls of respectable houses. Classic, thought Mrs. Brimsley. Just because it was not a love song, because it brought into that queerly-huddled group the solemnity of Sabbath, the memory of good religious thoughts,
The Lost Chord
moved her. Mr. Holly’s voice rose and fell, and his chest with it, and she with his chest.

She was cut off from her usual considerations of worry and respectability. Here, in this crowded bus, she was detached from past and future. She could relax her vigilance, lie back, let go her burdens of foresight and self-defence, and submit to the comforting influence of the little man who gathered breath for the dragging sweetness of “the sound of that great Amen.”

The passengers clapped. Their applause confirmed Mrs. Brimsley’s happiness.

“Who taught you to sing?” she asked, trying to twist her voice to fashionable tartness.

“Oh, my dad was a great singer, and I used to do tenor solos in chapel at Farrowhill.
You’ve
got a sweet voice, I bet.”

“Oh no. I can’t sing. But I love listening.”

“
Do
you?”

Suddenly she remembered his idiotic song about the donkey driver, and his graceless head grinning through the hole in her stable roof. This time the memory only made her smile.

They were pressing him for other songs, and he was willing. He sang “Sweet Genevieve,” and “Drink to me only,” and “Londonderry Air,” sung with a wailing sorrow that would have wrung tears from a far harder heart than that of Mrs. Brimsley, lying so cosily in the singer’s arms.

No courting could have been more effective.

He did not woo her; he made himself the hero of the hour. He wiped from her mind the memory of his reputation as a feckless ne’er-do-weel. She remembered only his brilliant daughter, his friendly ways, his laughter, his voice which could charm the birds off the trees, his humour which could change a morning’s cup of tea into a party, his ready tongue, his sympathy.

By the time that the relief bus arrived, she had remembered her five hundred pounds, her quarrel with her son, and the Council Cottages to be built, they said, on a new housing estate between Skerrow and Kiplington.

Miss Burton, Alderman Mrs. Beddows, Councillor Huggins and Alderman Astell were all racking their brains for a solution of the Holly problem. Who would look after those motherless children if Lydia went to school and college?

They need not have troubled. Lying against his heart, drunk with music and happiness, Jessy Brimsley promised to share Barney Holly’s future and be a second mother to his family.

S
ARAH
had arranged to spend her Christmas holidays in her sister’s new house at Bradford-on-Avon. She had also decided to stop on her way there for a night in Manchester, to complete her neglected Christmas shopping, and to see her late head mistress, Miss Tattersall, as she passed through on her way to the Lake District.

Sarah enjoyed Miss Tattersall and enjoyed shopping. She had a grand time pouring out to her late head mistress the story of her mistakes and triumphs. She told the full, tale of Miss Sigglesthwaite (now packed off to her mother’s home in a state of convalescence), of the inspector’s report (admirable); of the intolerable and still unmarried Dolores (not so good); of the plans for Lydia’s return (doubtful), and of the anxiety about her future career (a matter for determination). She received encouragement, reproof, criticism and sympathy. She nearly made Miss Tattersall lose her train.

It was with a sense of exhilaration that she returned to her final shopping. Confession to her friend had lifted a burden of responsibility from her shoulders. She felt hopeful and stimulated and younger by ten years, because she had been again for a short time the junior mistress, consulting the wisdom of an older colleague.

Always resilient and capable of abrupt detachment, she was able to put behind her the anxieties and disappointments of the term, and the dull pain that since last summer had underlain all her more personal thoughts. With gay gusto she flung herself into the business of buying rubber animals for her nephew, handkerchiefs for her brother-in-law, silk stockings and amber satin underclothes for her sister.

Her arms were full when she emerged into Piccadilly. It was raining, but the shops were so bright that one noticed it only in the glitter of pools along the uneven cobbles. On the wet pavement women stood selling flowers in odd-shaped curving baskets; chrysanthemums, vivid dyed crimson leaves, holly, tight little bunches of scarlet tulips and roses in buds hard as porcelain.

She stopped before a basket of red and yellow rosebuds. “Oh,” she thought, “I must have some for Pattie.”

Sarah had known poverty so well that caution usually controlled her spending, but that evening recklessness was in the air. Christmas was coming; holidays stretched before her; she was going to see Pattie whom she loved, therefore she loved everything—the jostling shoppers, the squatting flower girls, the posies of white and green and crimson, the freedom of spending the night alone in the second-rate hotel off Piccadilly. When she pushed her way round the revolving doors of that establishment, her cheeks were burning with bright wind-lashed colour, her eyes shone, her little green hat had been pushed to one side; her arms were full of golliwogs, crackers, boxes of preserved fruits and a great bunch of crimson roses; her red hair curled round her vivid face. Small, laughing, burdened with frivolous purchases, she struggled into the warm, half-empty lobby, and found herself face to face with Robert Carne.

He was standing with his back to the fireplace, looking over her head into nothing; there was upon his face a desolation so haggard and so hopeless that for a second she hardly recognised him. Then she stopped with an involuntary gasp, and a box of candy slid from her arm and smacked on to the floor beside her.

“Oh!” she gasped.

He started and saw her. For a moment he too blinked in surprised uncertainty. Then Sarah saw his face transformed by a smile which was to her the most lovely and astonishing thing that she had ever seen, and which would remain in her memory as lovely and astonishing until she died.

For he was glad to see her. He smiled with radiant welcome. It was as though his spirit returned to its blank habitation, as though she had witnessed a resurrection from the dead.

She stood before him, passive, expectant, happy. All possible journeys had led toward this end.

Then he stooped and picked up her dropped parcel and held out his hands to relieve her of the others, and both inquired simultaneously: “What are
you
doing here?”

It was she who explained, suddenly grown over-voluble with the singing joy which had no reason and no justification.

“I’m on my way to my sister’s. Christmas shopping. Those are candied fruits and this is a golliwog. D’you think my four-year-old nephew will be too old for golliwogs? Why are little boys supposed to like them, when they turn up their noses at dolls? Did you?”

He drew her towards a small glass-covered table and helped her to set down her parcels.

“Are you staying in Manchester?” he asked in his slow deep voice.

“Just for to-night. I go off to-morrow morning.”

“So do I.”

She had no words, yet her mouth was full of them. She showed him the handkerchiefs for her brother-in-law, asking his opinion, which he gave judiciously.

Into her witless pleasure stabbed a terror of loss. At any moment he might get up and leave her. She must hold him.

“Heavens!” she cried. “I sympathise with housewives. An afternoon’s shopping is more exhausting than twenty speech days.” But she did not look exhausted. She glowed and laughed beside him, bright as the holly. “I’ve had no tea. I’ve got a terrible room up on the fifth floor that looks like a scene set for a Russian tragedy. I can’t face it until I’ve had a glass of sherry. Is there a bell anywhere? Won’t you have a drink with me? Unless you’re rushing away to dine somewhere?”

He beckoned to a waiter. Her heart stood still at his silence until he said: “Do you like dry, brown or medium?”

“Dry, please.”

He ordered two dry sherries, and sat back in his chair, contemplating her with appreciation.

He’s pleased to see me, sang her heart; he’s pleased to see me.

It was all she asked then—that they should sit there together, the door revolving beside them and disgorging its procession of business men, commercial travellers, and shopping women, the fire leaping, the palms doing their drooping best to appear exotic, the waiters hurrying with their plated trays.

The sherry arrived. Sarah said: “This is mine. I ordered it—I’m always having hospitality in your house.” She tossed half a crown on to the salver before he could unfold his notecase.

“Very well,” he said. “But then you must dine with me— unless you have another engagement.”

“None. I’d like to.”

This is a dream, she told herself. I shall wake up. After all, he is a governor of the school; I have been good to Midge; he couldn’t
not
ask me.