The Night Following

Chapter 5: Off to Morecambe

Evelyn got the scissors from Mam, without anyone noticing, after the ceremony, and on the short walk from the registry office to the Co-op Rooms she turned to Stan and told him what she intended to do. He said she was daft but agreed to stand still while she, laughing and with trembling hands, snipped off a few strands of his hair and secured them in the locket. She had already got Daphne to write their initials and the date in minute writing on a tiny piece of paper, and she had set that in the locket, too. She was too excited about getting married to see clearly to do it herself.

It was a grand day, for late February. There was a gleam in the air although the sun didn’t quite come out, as Stan’s mother grumbled. But as Daphne said, it was shining away up there really, behind the clouds, it just couldn’t be bothered with poking through. As one of the witnesses, she had got herself up as fine as you like in an ochre wool dress with matching gloves and her mother’s fox fur. She hated wearing hats and had fixed a spray of artificial carnations in her wiry hair. The other witness was Stan’s uncle, his mother’s brother. He was no end of a swell in his double-breasted suit and spats, with his greying hair slicked down and sliced in a razor-sharp, off-centre parting. He owned three shops and had a car and a house in St. Helens. When Evelyn told Daphne this, she giggled and whispered he looked the part, all right. He certainly did, Evelyn thought. He was wearing a generous amount of a heavy cologne that smelled to her like burnt cake and he had pink, immaculate hands. He had come alone. It was known that his wife didn’t keep well.

The tea was a wonder. There were sandwiches galore: ham, egg, and tomato, and dainty bridge rolls filled with fish paste. And thanks to Mam and her squad of helpers drawn from family and neighbours, there was an array of cakes and pastries that brought oohs and aahs from everyone. Urns were filled and emptied, the windows steamed up, and by half past three Evelyn was feeling she’d had quite enough excitement for one day.

But there were still the speeches to hear. Stan’s uncle went first, addressing the “blushing bride” and saying, with a sly wink that really did make Evelyn blush to the roots of her hair, that he hoped their union would be blessed with a houseful of little Ashworths.

Then Stan made a halting speech, thanking Mrs. Leigh for the grand spread and then, goaded by the assembled company, led by his beaming uncle, he finished hesitantly with, “And we are right pleased you could all come today. Right pleased we are, I and my wife.” Afterward he went outside for a smoke. He needed a breath of air after such an ordeal.

Stan’s uncle took them all the way in his car to the railway station in Manchester. Daphne came, too, clutching Evelyn’s bridal posy that she’d managed to catch, mainly because the bride had thrown it firmly in her direction. Daphne and Stan’s uncle seemed to have hit it off and he had invited her along just for the spin and to wave them off.

There were more high jinks at the station. Instead of just leaving them at the entrance, Stan’s uncle marched them into the high, echoing ticket hall, poked his nose at the window, and demanded in a very loud voice and waving his arms, “Two first-class tickets to Morecambe for Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Ashworth! And a nice cosy private compartment, if you please, for the newlyweds!”

His voice boomed all over the ticket hall. Daphne burst out laughing but Evelyn was so embarrassed she wished the ground would open and swallow her up. Stan looked extremely uncomfortable, too, though he smiled when his uncle drew his wallet from his jacket and with a flourish paid up for their tickets. Not content with that, Stan’s uncle turned to Daphne, who, Evelyn noticed for the first time, was holding a brown paper bag, which she handed to him with a smirk.

“Time to do the honours,” he announced, and with a loud laugh he pulled from the bag a bottle of whisky for Stan and for Evelyn a box of Fry’s chocolates. Evelyn had never seen, let alone been given, such a splendid box: the “Antony” assortment, it said on the lid.

“That’s one of the finest assortments from one of the finest names in the confectionery trade, “ Stan’s uncle told her. He tapped on the box.

“That’s not cardboard. That’s a proper lacquered box, that is. Unique to Fry’s. It’s meant for keeping your hankies in after. Or your whatnots, your little bits and pieces, eh? You ladies’ve all got your bits and pieces!”

While Evelyn stammered a thank you, Daphne touched Stan’s uncle’s arm and said, wide-eyed,“What a lovely box of chocs. That’s right generous of you, Mr. Hibbert.”

“Oh, there’s plenty more where that came from, pet,” Stan’s uncle said, winking at her, “if you play your cards right. And call me Uncle Les.”

Evelyn didn’t hear what Daphne had to say to that, because just then Stan announced that they’d miss their train if they didn’t hurry.

Evelyn’s first thought on arriving at The Haven on the seafront was that it wasn’t exactly posh. They had walked from the station and run into trouble finding it, so it was after six o’clock when they knocked on the door. The landlady smelled of lard and talcum powder. She pointed out, sniffing, that they were too late for high tea but she had left them a flask in the parlour. She made it clear that she was doing them a favour and at great inconvenience to herself.

But at least their room overlooked the front. That was what you were paying for, a proper sea view, Evelyn supposed aloud to Stan, who replied that that was a bit rich when there was bugger all to see except the sea. Evelyn laughed and went to the window. Of course it was drafty, being Morecambe with the breeze straight off the sands. It was strong enough to stir the curtain. Maybe Stan had a point about the view. The daylight was fading and the sea was just the same dark grey as the sky.

She shivered. “It is a bit draughty, Stan,” she said.

“No good moaning to me, it weren’t my idea to come here,” he replied.

“Oh, don’t be so grumpy, Stan!” Evelyn cried. “Not today!”

Stan grunted. “What d’you expect? There’s only a pane of glass between you and the ruddy Atlantic and the ruddy putty’s dropping out, by looks of it.”

Evelyn laughed. “So you’ll just have to cuddle me tighter to keep me warm, then,” she said. “Come on, let’s go down and see what the old harridan’s put out for us’ supper, shall we?”

It wasn’t much. A flask of tepid tea and a few soft biscuits, most of them broken, in a tin. At bedtime Evelyn was overcome with shyness and went along to the bathroom to change into her new nightgown. Stan was already in bed, sitting up drinking from the whisky bottle, when she got back. It was considerate of him, really, not to undress in front of her, she thought, though she had hoped he might ask her which side she preferred. She climbed in nervously at the other side. She was cold, but Stan didn’t offer her a warming sip of whisky, or a cuddle.

“I’m not used to this, Stan,” she giggled. “It’s amazing, in’t it? I’ve never been in a double bed with my husband before.”

“Bit late to be bashful, in’t it?” Stan said. “Seeing as you’re nigh on five months gone. Good night.”

But obviously, she reflected later, lying awake in the dark, he hadn’t meant any disrespect. He was just stating a fact. Despite the smell of whisky on him, she had tried to make it clear she wouldn’t object if, as she put it, he wanted to “be a husband” to her that night, but he had pretended not to understand. Wedding nerves, perhaps. Or more likely delicacy, because he probably thought she didn’t really want to but was pretending she wouldn’t mind just for his sake, and what decent man would insist, with his wife in a certain condition? Besides, she was probably bigger than she felt, and that would be off-putting.

In the morning Stan woke complaining of a sore neck because, he said, he had taken the window side and the worst of the draft. Evelyn tried to make light of it. “Oh, well, don’t go saying that to the landlady, will you, Stan? She’ll only charge you for it. A sore neck’s sixpence extra, I bet!” Stan glowered.

Breakfast was adequate. They had porridge and a boiled egg each, both overcooked, and bread and marmalade and tea. At least the dining room was empty and they didn’t have to endure the stares of other guests on the morning after their wedding night. After a walk in the drizzle along the seafront and a look round the few gift shops that were open, they had an early lunch of steak and kidney pie in the Red Rose Café, sitting in the window from where, as Evelyn said, they could watch the world go by, even though there didn’t seem to be much world that day. Then they made their way slowly to the station. Stan’s uncle had given them one-way tickets so they bought third-class seats on the two o’clock back to Manchester. From there they would get the local train to Aldbury.

On the train, Stan read the Racing Post while Evelyn lay with her eyes closed. They were stinging again and she hadn’t slept well, being unused to sharing a bed with Stan. She thought back over her Big Day. It had been grand, really. She counted herself lucky. Nobody was having big weddings any more and only the well-to-do had proper honeymoons. She fingered the slim gold band on her finger and felt the locket at her neck. It wasn’t, as she’d reassured Mam, as if she had ever wanted a big shindig, anyway.

It was the paling of the darkness or the birdsong that woke me. The ground was dusty with a dew like powdered pearls, only a degree away from sugary white frost. Some small creature had paddled across the grass leaving the dark threads of its tracks. I blinked, and tears rushed to the cold surface of my eyes and made them sting. I sneezed and yawned and tried to stretch my back, and then a sudden flash drew my attention to the house.

The sun had just struck the lowest glass panes of the conservatory, and the curtains at every window stood open to the glare. I ached so much I could hardly stand, but I had to get away from the sight of the house so exposed and penetrated. I prayed that Arthur was asleep and would not feel it. I prayed that even though he would have to wake and know again she was gone, he was now asleep and for a while untroubled by thoughts of Ruth. As I crept across the grass I whispered to him that I wouldn’t be away for long.

My clothes were soaked and freezing and I was miles from home. I wanted to crawl into the shed and hunker down in a corner until it was dark again, but I didn’t dare. It was hard to negotiate my way back; by night I had walked this way easily and freely, now I stumbled and tripped. Buildings and walls and turnings and parked cars loomed out and crowded me. The sky was flaring lilac and orange and pink, and light was shoving in everywhere. It was coming fast, another day of sights I could not bear, a day of breakages, of choking dust and blinding commotion, of futures torn up.

My own house sat in the morning sun, exuding-because it contained -nothing. I barged in and stood gasping for breath in the kitchen. The clock ticked flatly. It was just after six. My heart was hammering with the ecstasy of knowing I’d had a narrow escape. Upstairs, my quiet room waited, where curtains could be drawn against the light until night came again. I started to shake while I was undressing and my damp clothes amassed on the floor where I dropped them.

After a few hours I got up. I looked at myself in the mirror, and in the dimness of the curtained room I was stunned at how marked were the effects of those hours on the shed’s steps. I had behaved rather foolishly, I felt, staying out all night and not noticing how late and cold it was getting. I had never spent a night out-of-doors before. I thought then of my great-uncle, and I understood how a man’s heart might lose time against the passing minutes of a single night, and wind down beat by beat like a clock, and be discovered in the morning, stopped. My eyes looked young and pale and I couldn’t imagine that, were my flesh to be cut and opened, my blood would pulse as fast or be as garish a red as other people’s. My body felt hard and small. None of these changes displeased me.

Trains didn’t run on Christmas Day. And during the winter of 1962, the coldest of the century, they were often cancelled anyway because of fresh snowfalls or frozen points or split rails. So they didn’t find my great-uncle until early in the afternoon of Boxing Day. By then he had been dead for more than a day and a night, slumped near the middle of the station footbridge and covered in snow, his cheek frozen against a line of riveted bolts on the metal parapet, directly underneath the embossed brass plate that read:

London & North Western Railway

Passengers Crossing Footbridge Do So At Own Risk

No Loitering No Urinating No Spitting

Fine 5/- in accordance with L &NWR Bylaw 5(2).

These details came to me later. My grandmother told me only that he had died of cold. I took this to mean the same as dying of a cold, and I clung to her, wailing and speechless; I had always understood that nobody died of a cold and my grandmother seemed to be suffering from one, even if it was what she called only a sniffle, a great deal of the time. She had to tell me finally that he had frozen to death, that a night out of doors in such weather was more than flesh and blood could stand. I found this easier to accept. It did not seem so terrible, a mishap rather than a catastrophe. I imagined him lying calmly in a haze of frost and very cold to the touch, waiting, as I was, for something to be done about it. For if he had frozen to death, could he not simply be warmed back to life? Then it might also turn out to be not so terrible that his suspension in the ice was my fault, and forgiveness might be possible.

So I waited, during a succession of days that were bulky and irregular with visitors and discussions in dark voices and the soft sifting of papers. Around this time it was explained to me that in fact he was not my mother’s but my long-dead grandfather’s uncle, and so was my great-great-uncle. The sudden bestowal and its immediate retraction, by his absence, of the extra “great” seemed like another of his unravelling gifts, lost in the snow.

After a while our rooms on the two floors above the shop hung empty and the air seemed muffled, and I realized it was too late for him to come back now. The glass smashed on Christmas Eve was replaced in the boarded-up windows and my mother and grandmother re-opened the shop, which, it turned out, my mother now owned.

We continued in the usual way except of course that my uncle no longer called in on Saturday evenings for the week’s earnings and lingered, in a manner tense and jovial, until after dinner on Sunday. In periods of sobriety my mother worked in the shop and kept the books; in her absence my grandmother sat behind the counter knitting, or worked at chores upstairs, keeping an ear open for the sound of the shop bell below. Having memorized the position of every jar on the shelves, she could pick and measure out from any of them the two- and four-ounce bags of sweets that people asked for, just by the feel of the weight in her hand. There was, by law, a set of scales on the counter, but our customers were regulars and knew better than to be sceptical. She also identified and sold by smell several varieties of English, Aromatic, and Virginia loose tobacco, and in the same way she could detect the difference not just between brands of packaged cigarettes but between tipped and untipped. She couldn’t, though, stop the thieving of Black Jacks, penny chews, and sweetie cigarettes from the open boxes on the counter, of which crime I was, by collusion, as guilty as any of the older children who peered into the shop every day and came in only if my grandmother was there.

After school I would usually be there, too, swinging my legs from a chair, drawing pictures instead of doing my homework. I dreaded the shop bell. They came in pairs. They ignored me; because my grandmother could not see me any more than she could see them, it seemed I was invisible to them, too. They would fix upon me eyes as apparently sightless and flat with tacit challenge as hers, and in front of me they stole from her with impunity, knowing I would say nothing. One would go for the sweets while the other would spend a halfpenny on something or other, talking in a voice loud enough to cover any rustling of the waxed paper lining the boxes. “I’ll have a sherbet fountain, please, missus. All right, kiddo? What’re you up to there, then? Oh, that’s a nice picture, look, i’n’t she doin’ a nice picture?”

And before they left they would sometimes, and always unsmilingly, select a liquorice stick or a couple of toffees from their haul and push them into my waiting hands. I was afraid of them, I suppose, but I also despised them, the sniggering amateurs. The pilfering of a few sweets was a villainy almost laughably inferior to that of letting my great-great uncle vanish forever into a freezing cloud of snow.

Dear Ruth

All this writing letters and not getting any replies is no good. I shouldn’t even be up reading that story of yours, it’s the middle of the night and I need my sleep. You should know that. I catch up in the day but I need my sleep NOW and you don’t seem to understand.

I get the impression I’ve made you angry and now you’re not speaking. You used to do that. I brought you in a bunch of flowers from the garden to say sorry. I used to do that.

But it’s you that gets them in water, I’m no good with that sort of thing, flower arranging. They’re in the conservatory.

A funny thing to do, not speaking-funny for you, I mean. You of all people. It was me you were trying to punish when you were not speaking, but it was you it hurt. You hated not talking, you talked about every little thing. There’s a story in every minute of every hour of every day, you said. You had all the words for everything, and if you didn’t, you knew some poet who did and you’d know where to find them.

The point is, when you withheld words and went around with your mouth locked, I didn’t mind. I quite liked it, the quiet. I just never told you that.

This time I do mind. I don’t like all the quiet. When it’s quiet I get a notion I’m not really alone. The quiet is in the room with me, somehow, and it’s not a nice, settled thing, it’s an angry kind of quiet. A quiet waiting to explode. I feel like shouting into it but who’s to hear? And what would I say?

Because what they don’t grasp, all these people who troop through this place asking how I am-is how on earth should I know, since you’re not telling me anymore?

Arthur

PS Egg sandwiches do NOT freeze. Or they do but they’re not egg sandwiches when they come out again. They mashed up all right though. I managed to eat them.