People were going and coming from the house, many of them unknown to the dogs, who hadn’t stopped barking and dragging their chains since early morning, despite Merton’s going out twice to them with the stick. She stood in the middle of the room, dressed now, unable to go downstairs, knowing that this was expected of her, yet unwilling to reconcile it with the fact that she had made up her mind not to get married. The stairfoot door opened: “Vera!” came her mother’s voice. “Are you ready? Don’t be too long, or we’s’ll keep Harold waiting at the church and that’d never do.” There was an intentional pause, giving her time to call out:
“I’m not coming.”
Another pause, from shock. Her mother ran up, and came into the bedroom with a worried end-of-the-world frown on her face. She leaned on the wash-stand to get her breath. “What do you mean?” was all she could ask for the moment.
“I’m not getting married, mam. I don’t want him. I want to stay single.” She was afraid of saying this, and afraid above all of the silence downstairs, as if the whole house had stopped breathing to listen to her argument, even the dogs quiet at last.
“I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said. She had wanted no trouble, hadn’t expected any after the tight-fitting locks of plans and arrangements had turned on her daughter’s life. Now she trembled and was upset because there looked like being a row.
Vera’s face set hard, though she knew her determination to be only a thing of the minute, a fluctuating protest to try and save herself. “I mean what I say. I don’t want to go to church.”
“But everything’s ready.”
“Well, let it be.”
“But don’t you love him?”
“No,” Vera said. “I never did either.”
Her mother felt a pain above the eyes. Merton also had thought she shouldn’t marry Seaton, but even he would agree it was too late to turn back now. Vera maintained a deadly silence in which time passed quickly, and her mother couldn’t stand such obstinacy. “Don’t you even like him then?” Vera began to say yes. “Well, come on down and get married. They’re waiting for you. Come on.”
“Oh, I can’t, mam,” she cried. “I don’t want to.”
Her mother’s voice was harder now: “For Jesus Christ’s sake, come on. Everything’s ready. If you let Harold down he’ll kill you.” She went to the stairdoor: “Ada, come up here a minute, will you?”
Ada had travelled from Chesterfield especially for the wedding of her sister, and if it were called off, her disappointment would be almost as great as Seaton’s. She was nearly thirty and already on her second husband, the first having stopped a bullet in Flanders. Brawling bombardier Doddoe had been fresh out of that fiasco when she met him. Ada was in her weeds at the time — she made a big laughable issue of her story now to Vera — going back into servant work to feed herself and the only child of her first quick set-to, taking a slow train to Chesterfield up through the black pimplescapes of the industrial Pennines. She was blonde and fair-skinned, handsome and attractive with a tantalizing expression of cheek and sadness, so that Doddoe, who got into the opposite seat of the empty carriage at Codnor Park, was soon in conversation with her. At Chesterfield he carried her box to the tram stop, and when she was on the platform fifty yards away he bawled out through the bell and grinding wheels: “Will you marry me, duck?” After a week of courting she said yes, and now she had another child and, to judge by her stomach, a third one was due in a month or two.
“How do you think most people get married?” she said to Vera. “You don’t want to bother that much about it. Just laugh and say yes and then the bad times you might ’ave now and again wain’t seem so bad. Come on, duck.”
Vera was confused, pinned on to the flat spirit-level of indecision. Her mother pleaded and took her hand. Shall I go, or shan’t I? she asked herself. It was like throwing a penny and seeing on which side it landed. Maybe Ada was right, and it didn’t matter either way, because if it isn’t Harold Seaton it’ll be somebody else. She rubbed a handkerchief over her eyes, followed her mother and sister down the dark stairs, comforting noises from the kitchen once more filling up the desolate, companionless void of protest. She knew she wouldn’t even be late at the church as the cab trotted under the long tunnel and emerged into the Radford Woodhouse sun.
CHAPTER 3
Ascending stone steps to the railway bridge, a fine spring rain began to fall, hiding towers, wheels, and sheds of the colliery below as Vera fastened her coat and hurried towards the first streets of the city. When Seaton left for the tannery that morning she had been unable to face the empty day and had gone to visit her mother at the Nook, short-cutting it there and back across the fields.
The novelty of decorating two unfurnished rooms had long since worn off, though it had been enjoyable while it lasted, had shown that Seaton, who had seemed too much of a numbskull to talk about anything (even his work had been described and forgotten in five minutes), had proved his worth of papering the walls and ceiling, painting doors and skirting boards, pinning down cheap lino from Sneinton Market. He set them both to making rugs from a pile of clippings and a couple of boiled-clean sackbags, using a sharpened piece of stick to thrust each sliver of coloured rag beneath and then pull it up above the rag-bag base. Plate-shelves and pot-shelves were plugged and bracketed on to the kitchen walls, covered with fancy paper and adorned with oddments unearthed from piles of penny junk. Even the tips yielded certain usable objects, such as screws and hinges, firebricks, and strips of wood that made a clumsy but effective clothes-horse.
Vera was next to useless in these slow constructions, sat on a chair and watched, looked through a newspaper or hummed a tune, mashed Seaton’s tea, and marvelled at what the black-clocked numbskull was doing with his clever slow-moving fingers. When his hammer tried to take a bite out of his thumb he swore with such awful care and deliberation for five minutes that Vera went into the other room until his vocabulary gave under the passing of time. She looked across the road at the large windows of the lace factory, seeing the cheeky bedevilled girls working at looms and threading bobbins, slaving under the forewoman’s eye when they weren’t winking at the men-mechanics or cat-calling to each other above the noise of their machines. That was me, Vera thought, not so long ago, and now I’m married to Harold Seaton, though at times I can’t believe it except when we’re in bed together at night and he gets up to his dirty tricks, and often he don’t even wait until then. Yet strangely, it seemed to her, there was a compensation in that she was on a higher plane of respect at the Nook. She had never seen more sense in her mother or more kindness and deference in her father, and it often occurred to her that had this been the case all her life she would never have got married, at least not so soon. But that’s how it is, she said to herself. “You’ve made your bed, so lie on it,” her mother said when she first mentioned in a not complaining voice that Harold’s temper wasn’t all he had led her to believe it would be when they walked together over the Cherry Orchard. Her eyes were drawn out and back to the bobbinating girls, across the road that widened the more she thought how wide it was. I was earning a quid a week then, and now Harold’s bringing thirty-eight bob home, so it’s no wonder we can hardly manage.
They did for a while, because Seaton was never a boozer, though the tuppences doled out for fags made holes enough in what his wages came to. But he picked up a decrepit pair of shoes for next to nothing in the market and cobbled them into good enough condition for work. He sometimes spent an evening at his father’s shop, pushed a loaded barrow to some pub or house and planted a half-crown in Vera’s palm when he came home. Nevertheless, she thought, hurrying through the Hartley Road traffic, he’s a sod to me when he loses his temper like he does. I wonder if he found the note I left telling him what to have for his tea? A red sky at evening settled over the fields behind as she walked into the house and climbed the stairs.