He contemplated me as I grew. I was only aware of his appraisal as a blush inside me, because he wouldn’t look at me with his eyes. He turned away with a statue’s indifference if he ever spoke to me, yet he watched me too; my skin knew it.
My mother was flustered by him, and mentioned him repeatedly; my father merely nodded his approval. I was fifteen when I understood their hope that I might one day have a chance with John Tay-Mosby, though he was as old as a father, and the shock of the realisation was so much worse than the terror of the blood when it first came out of me, worse than the killing of baby birds by Dougie and his friends, worse than seeing my father bang his head against the door because the beet crop’s roots grew cysts.
You’re so pretty, they said, pretty as a picture, bonny as the day, smooth down your frock, stockings at sixteen. I was the picture; my parents were the frame. Mr. Tay-Mosby looked at me by not looking at me.
“Will she have me?” Dougie said to my father, to silence. “Please. Sir?”
“Will you—will you—shall we be married?” Dougie stumbled to me, his neck bulge so close it blotted out the clouds behind him.
In my surprise, I couldn’t answer. I was nearly nineteen by then; I was taking my teaching certificate, and they were scrimping and dressing me, and it was for Mr. Tay-Mosby’s benefit as I was nudged towards him. All points led towards the Oxenhope road. By prettifying me, they wound me in shrouds that went over my mouth, but not my eyes.
My mind shot along that road. The garden. The tussocks beyond.
“Yes. I will, then. Thank you,” I said to Dougie, and wanted to hurt myself, but beyond the Adam’s apple was not the sky, only the stick of Tay-Mosby.
The rumour of my engagement to Dougie Spreckley was put about the village, and my parents waited for Mr. Tay-Mosby to emerge from the Hall with his own offer, but John Tay-Mosby wouldn’t marry me, though I could see him considering it, fighting with himself then resisting, as my parents rose and fell with the currents from the Hall. He would take aristocracy, or something close to it. I knew this. He did.
My wedding night, it was like a wound that was scab-crusted and could only be broken with battering, Dougie pounding and belabouring, all concentration tight in a face like sinew, his eyes closed, and though I cried out and so nearly begged him to stop, so nearly, I knew that if I didn’t let him through that night, he would never get there. I would be unable to face the hunger in his stranger’s eyes again, his trembling hips, the jolting spine on top of me. I would cry out, or be sick, or tear in two. So I let him ram through the scar, scab, skin, and he got there and all was warmth and blood and death and soreness, then the searing pain subsided.
We had to live with my parents at first, because there was no money, though I hoped to escape that village with its frost-shattered houses like kennels straggling along the Keighley road, its sinking farms and cottages. The babies came, and when they were old enough, I went to Hessenton to teach in the mornings, and there she was.
Mary Lewthorne. It was as though I recognised her the first time I saw her, her face a heart on a stem in a grey teaching dress, her very being so serene, yet complicated, and complete. She would have been my dear friend if we had been at school together as children, instead of working there as adults, but the friendship was as sudden and as fast as those forged by girls.
The babies were dears, and naughty good children, and they became my companions. We talked when we didn’t play, and I snuffled up their scenty skin, and I loved them like little otters. Dougie looked after us well enough, but we barely knew each other better over the years, and I wasn’t sure how much there was to discover. I married a man who never read a book, and he married a woman who never watched a game. I sank my face into the washing of my little ones to breathe them in, but I touched his smalls with the ends of my fingers. He tried, and then he didn’t try. I pretended, straining to feel the love for him, but I didn’t, and it was my private sin, my sorrow. I could hardly look at him or taste him, with his bobbing neck, his few words. He tired me; he bored me. He was not a bad man. I could almost like him.
We moved into our own place outside the village later: a little cottage with a midden, so beaten by the winds, so sleet-cracked, the rains came in and the drains croaked when the storms poured down from Gibbeswick Fell. John Tay-Mosby tightened when he saw me, and pretended he hadn’t.
I taught at the school just a few hours a week, and there, there and on the fells, I felt most alive.
“There’s a world outside here,” Mary Lewthorne said when we sat in Hessenton, and she showed me. She had lost her husband young, had a room in an older widow’s house, and worked every day to make her living, using her big, twisting mind. We found each other where we could, along the ginnel that led to the paths that led to the fells, and chattered like the fastest starlings.
My poor husband Dougie Spreckley went to work one day, as he always did, but that morning he was run over by an apprentice backing towards the mechanic’s shed in his father’s garage, and they mended his legs while his lungs bubbled, but it was infections that later killed him in the hospital, and left my three without a father. I said my sorries to him when we buried him, and wept for what wasn’t, and couldn’t be.
John Tay-Mosby began courting me with improper haste, seeing no reason to wait. He was between wives, the first having produced the heir and back-up, a Scottish landowner’s daughter rumoured to be her successor. This time, he visited. My parents knew nothing of it. He offered me his company, dining and protection, and I resisted. He gazed at me this time, his eyes like the mud puddles on Tarey Carr. He stood as upright as his stick in his rain-coloured shooting coat, his taste for moorland game shining pink on his lower lip, and I said no, and thank you, and no. No.
Reader, I married him because I liked him.
I did not desire him. Robert Briley, serious and considerate, was a teacher at the school in Hessenton along with Mary Lewthorne, and he visited me to offer his help after Dougie died, and when we were married, we moved into the town. We needed more money than I could ever make, but I didn’t want John Tay-Mosby’s riches; my children needed a father, and they found a good and an interesting man in Robert Briley, my husband. We were safe again. Wives in Gibbeswick had eyed me askance when I was widowed, though I had the stains of three children on my dress and their tugs on my hair and was shabbier by the week. Robert was my friend and theirs.
Mary and I stole conversations between lessons, between days and nights, every moment with her treasured, even the times when we clashed and tangled and cried, then tried so hard to start afresh. But how could you love a woman as I loved her? She lined my existence because she lived inside me, and at night as Robert slept, there were the colours of her, the fragrance, the smooth shell of skin behind her ear. When we could escape town, no one else on the moors on wet days, she walked with me in all the winds, which had names, and by the stream sources, among the curlews, the peregrine nests. She showed me the sandstone and the thorns and waterfalls: all the pretty places where the toadstools grew in dark secret; the drowning ponds, sphagnum, fairy-tale growth in tree shadows.
She touched my temple first. After that, her hand was on my face all night, every night until I saw her again, and all my body desired was her fingertips on me once more.
We could talk, Robert and I, read books together, and guard those children as they grew to be tall, healthy things, the joy of their grandparents before they died. We closed the curtains on the dark after the evening’s supper and chatted, and when he slept, I dreamed of hiding in a bower, a nest, with my three young, and her.
It was as the children grew older and there was a slackening to the days’ bustling routine that he began, from time to time, to look at me differently. He had a deep understanding of me as I did of him, and he saw, more clearly, the screen that lay between us, but he was too much of a gentleman to fight me.
I tensed at night. My body no longer wanted children; it never wanted him inside, and his clean
smell made me stiffen when he was near me, though I tried.
“I saw you today,” he said finally.
“What?” I said, and all the colour in my body seemed to leach at once. Mary and I had grown more careless over time, taken to meeting in the alleys behind school when the sleet was too vicious and the hail was running flat over the moors.
He raised one eyebrow, and walked out of the room. And then he kept watching me, his sadness a stain on the house.
He and I scarcely spoke of it again, but he divorced me in the end, when the children were off and happy. I protested and tried a little, but in my most hidden thoughts I understood what it was about me that had driven him away. I wanted to die of the shame, though I was older, and the disgrace did not hurt as terribly as it would have done in previous years.
So Mary and I had our dangerous walks at night where no townspeople could catch us, along the old quarry tracks, the pony beatings, the tunnels between the gorse; or the other way, over the scarred fell tops where the wind might tip you into the air, but the race to her was faster.
Reader I married, married, married him.
John Tay-Mosby asked me outright to become his wife soon after my divorce, no preparatory courtship, no hawk gaze on the horizons. I said yes, I would. Yes, I will marry you. He was old by then, half-sprightly, half-bowed, with a cluster of cooks, nurses, day-help to serve him, and oh he was the merry gentleman with a twinkle in his eye, the naughty-boy lord of the manor to be flirted with and pampered and wiped down.
We were married in the chapel on his land, no parents left to witness the event they had frocked me for, and later in the evening, I turned to him, and said, smiling at my feet, “Our real marriage must be on the moor. Where we were all those years ago, Tarey Carr where you took me.”
He laughed. “I have a bed that the scurrilous eighth Edward is rumoured to have owned,” he said in the game-fed tenor that seemed to emerge through his nose. “Although I suspect that is apocryphal. But it’s a fine bed with a superlative mattress.”
“I want Tarey Carr, the heather flowers and the skies. It’s a warm evening.”
He laughed. The guests had gone; the staff had retired to leave us to our pleasure. I began to walk that way, through the garden gate past the vegetables, out past Gibbeswick Fell, and he had to follow.
“This is madness.”
“It’s what I want.”
I turned my back on him, and only looked once to see he was following me, stumbling with that stick, the modern version, Ranger Boy and Ranger Son long dead. I brought him round the fell towards the marshes of Tarey Carr, where he had shot golden plover.
“You’re beautiful,” he said the one time I looked at him, and he followed me.
“Even now?” I murmured, but I didn’t turn.
I thought of Mary as I walked. The way she traced her finger over me for lingering minutes, how I kissed her curves; her beauty, her contradictions, her gentleness. My legs softened as I thought of her, even after so many years. Oh, that I could live with her in the bracken: me, her, my children, who were grown, always visiting. I loved her as you shouldn’t. We both knew. We knew what was to be and what was not.
I saw two girls once in town, much much younger than me—decades, an age—holding hands. Quite openly on the causey, just like that. I never forgot them. They were young ladies, not the foreign young women you sometimes saw arm in arm, but young women in love, and they made me want to cry.
I lay down on our marriage bed.
“This is insanity, my dear,” he said, but I pulled him down on the sheet of sweet asphodel covering the rocking watery ground of Tarey Carr beside me, and stroked him, and he moaned a little and closed his eyes.
He became excited, at once, soft and hard, but not hurting, not that scream that the marsh had swallowed so many many years before, and I curved over him, a cat, in the evening-scented breeze, to perform our marriage rite, our vows, and he was grunting like a small animal, a calf whose vocal cords were not formed as I pressed into him.
“Do it,” I said, arching further, and all the delightful little mud fountains sprang up around him, like points of a crown, springs of a bed, and I cat-lay all over him, a puma, moor beast, stretching over his length. “Do it, then,” I said, pressing against him, into him.
Do it as you did when all I had was a young body.
“Marriage is one flesh, you said it then.”
I ground into him, and the calf vibrations deepened, and all our bed’s mud swelled over us, like the breaking of a membrane, the tear before the gush, but it was cool, and I pressed myself into him, his face, his body, covering his fowl-eating lips that were blackening with marsh, my hair falling over him as my hair had fallen on him so long before, when I was a girl, but in long strands and hooks then, curled by my mother, mud-knitted. I stretched and rubbed myself against him, splashed by swamp-scented Tarey Carr, almost covered as I lay over him with my weight. “Happy, my dear?” I said, his own long-ago words slipping on the air as it chilled. Sheep’s breath was loud beside us. His voice was a dying bittern in the mud. The sky darkened, his skin the colour of where he lay beneath me.
We two curled together on our marriage bed, my husband growing cold as the wind gathered and the cows nodded unseeingly. Reader, I married him.
IT’S A MAN’S LIFE, LADIES
JANE GARDAM
MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Gertrude, was born in the lonely seaside village on the northeast coast of England where most of her family had been born, worked, idled and died since the days when, so it was said, bad girls stole away at night from low parts of the town around Fisherman’s Square to lie with the seals under the darkness of Hunt Cliff after sunset.
Back then there was still talk of babies born with webbed feet and whiskers, though nobody had ever seen one. My grandmother, Gertrude, did once strike us all dumb by saying that her toes tended to stick together and were long as flippers if she did not curl them up. Looks were exchanged. When I knew Granny she was old but she did have some whiskers which she used to remove one by one with silver sugar-tongs. I have inherited the sugar-tongs, though not the toes and whiskers.
Once, I told my best friend at school about the seals. It was when we were paddling around in the pools in the cliff’s shadow. The shadows were sometimes dappled rather in the shape of seals at rest and I said, “My granny got a baby down here, but it died,” and Mary said, “Where d’you get that sort of fancy from?” and I said, “They go honk-honk together and fling about and later there’s a baby. With flippers. Someone said.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ask our maid,” I said. “And there’s a bit of shawl at home made of seal-cloth. They made them up to cover the faces of the babies if they died. Most of them did. There was one baby died in our family, called Bertie.”
“Did he have flippers?”
“They never said.”
I used to imagine my solemn and ever-bewildered grandmother (she could be bewildered by a boiled egg) going honk-honk at the sea’s edge, the white lacy water running, and then just sitting for long, long hours at home. Just sitting. She and her two busy sisters.
Granny’s big topic was her lonely childhood (“I was born to be lonely”) while her older but still lively sisters, my great-aunts Fanny and Beatrice, who sometimes trembled out of sheer exhaustion and old age, would say, “Well, you never kept busy, Gertie. You will spend your time just sitting alone. Here—take this wash-cloth.”
But Granny Gertie pleaded tired legs.
“How I wish,” she would say, “that I had strong legs, or none,” and my aunts would exchange a dire glance.
Every Wednesday afternoon I would be sitting at the kitchen table of the three old sisters. It is the one where I am writing now. I can see the marks where they used to screw down the mincer to mince the meat for the cottage pies. They would leave me a sixpence there to pick up on my way home from school. I would go on doing my homework while poor old Granny Gertrude—the youngest
, silly sister, the only married one—rambled on and wept.
The black-leaded shining grate in that kitchen raged and blustered towards the spread of woollen washing hung up or draped about on clothes horses to dry. The woollens were either the family’s or those of the lodgers upstairs. The lodgers’ undergarments (twopence for a bodice, threepence for socks) were never displayed and certainly never washed alongside the undergarments of the family and the maid, because of the proprieties. I used to try to guess which pearl-buttoned vest or Liberty bodice or flannel belt belonged to which lodger. Or to which aunt, or to the sturdy maid Charlotte, or to my gran.
The long-term lodgers in my great-aunts’ house included a Miss Gowland who worked in the Middlesbrough post office counting out postage stamps, a Mr. Shaw and old Mr. Hennessey, who was somehow connected to Lord Nelson and therefore like royalty along this old-world coast where the sea was king. I never saw him.
My great-aunts gave the household a breakfast, midday dinner at weekends, a full high tea daily and a traditional tea with cakes and scones (extra one penny) on Sunday afternoons. All were provided with clean sheets, pillowcases and towels every Monday, a bright coal fire in bedrooms in winter (plus a scuttle of clean coal) and were always welcome in our own family sitting room (which was usually empty because the family were cooking) at any time. There would always be a bowl of fruit—“lodgers’ fruit”—for them, books, the parish magazine, writing materials and even a wireless set labelled “Please Ask Advice.” It had a dangerous-looking bottle of purple spirit beside it to coax it into life. All this for seven shillings and sixpence a week.
During one of my sixpence visits, Aunt Fanny, the oldest, chinless great-aunt, came downstairs and into the kitchen with streaming eyes. She had been summoned after his afternoon rest to Mr. Shaw’s bedsit, the fire making a keen blaze, the sun on his polished shoes. Mr. Shaw was a little uncertain in the head. He was heir to one of the nation’s ironworks six miles away but could not be at his own home because of his funny habits. On this occasion he had summoned his landlady to ask her to reduce his rent from seven shillings a week to six and sixpence.