Seaton sat in his cap and coat, smoking a cigarette by the empty fireplace. One hand shaded his eyes as if sun still shone into the room, and he held himself from looking up at her, which told her he must be angry about something. “Where’ve you been?”
“Mam’s,” she told him, hanging up her coat behind the door. “I got fed up, so I went this morning. I’ve just got back.” He said nothing, and Vera, feeling his hateful silence, asked: “What time did you come home?” He wouldn’t answer. “What’s the matter, then?”
“Nowt.”
She looked round the room. Clean. Tidy. Little to complain about there. The table had been set for the bare event of a meal since morning, and the note she’d left for him was still on the shelf, fastened down by the clock. “What time did you come home?”
“Five,” he muttered.
She remained standing, intrigued by the reason for his unbending anger, yet also afraid of it. “Why didn’t you cook summat for your tea?”
“What tea?”
“It’s all ready. In the cupboard. Bacon and potatoes. You only needed to fry ’em.”
His hand fell, and he looked up at last: “How the bloody hell was I to know that? Are you tryin’ to clamb me?” he shouted. “Where’ve you bin all day?”
She was unable to counter such blind unreason with swift arguments of her own because it blamed her too much for something she couldn’t quite prove was undeserved. “I’ve been to my mother’s. I’ve already towd you.”
“Well, you should be at ’ome cooking my tea. If I work all day, I want to come ’ome to some snap at night.”
“I didn’t know you’d be in as early as this,” she countered, thinking he was angry because she’d been to the Nook. He wasn’t fond of her parents, often referring to them as “that bloody lot.”
“I’m not a prisoner, am I?” she exclaimed righteously.
“And I can’t work if I’ve got no grub,” he contended.
“It was all ready for you.”
“How was I to know that then?” he went on.
“Because I left a note,” she protested, “to tell you what to have.”
His voice became calmer. “What note?” She took it from the shelf and handed it to him. “Here it is, plain as black and white.”
He looked at it meaninglessly while Vera lit the stove and set the table. Seaton screwed the note into a pellet and threw it into the fireplace, stood to take off his cap and coat.
“Didn’t you see it, then?” she said, in a pleasant voice.
“Yes, I did see it.”
“Then why didn’t you cook the dinner?”
He looked to where he had thrown the note: “I’m not much of a scholar, duck.”
“Neither am I,” she said, not quite understanding. “Only I felt like going to the Nook for a change. You didn’t mind that, did you?”
He burst into a vivid flower of swearing: “No, but I like to fucking-well come home to a bleeding meal.”
He merely glared at her request that he use less dirty talk, seating himself again by the fireless grate. She detested him for making her miserable, though she felt guilty at not having cooked his meal. “I left everything for you,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I left a note to tell you as well.”
But he’d had enough of quarrelling: “You bloody fool,” he said calmly, almost laughing, yet a little ashamed that she hadn’t quite understood, “don’t you know I’m not much of a scholar?”
It seemed at times she was still a girl of sixteen, single, back at the Nook helping Farmer Taylor with haymaking in the summer; and an hour later, involved with shopping or cleaning the rooms, she was married so firmly that she had never been anything else, had been so for a century, with the Nook (whose years she now looked on as wide with gaiety and freedom) a dream-house lingering in the sunlit outskirts of her mind. At times she wished she’d never set eyes on Seaton, often hoped he’d step out of the house one fine morning and never come back, that someone would rush to her from the skinyard to say he’d been run over or crushed by some fatal weight of bales.
Many quarrels centred on cigarettes. He came home from work one day:
“Any fags?”
She’d been dreading this question. “I ain’t got one. Have you?”
Young, stocky, and dark, he took off his coat, showing rolled-up sleeves and heavily muscled arms. “What do you think I’m asking yo’ for, then?”
“Can’t you go without ’em for one day?” she reasoned. “You get paid tomorrow.”
He couldn’t, swore and spat into the fire. The coal flames killed his spit, almost threw it back, they killed it with such speed. She faced him with eyes averted, arms folded over her breasts, unable to look when he was like this. “Can’t you get any?” he asked after a long silence.
“How?” she cried. “Shall I cadge some on the street? Pinch some?”
Such absolute logic could in no way stop the quarrel, made it worse in fact. “What about the corner shop?”
“We owe them ten bob already.”
He cursed under his breath. She saw the shape of the well-formed words. “You dirty beast. Why don’t you stop swearing?”
It was finished in a second, as she had guessed it would be. He stood up, took his steaming dinner from the table, and threw it against the burning soot of the fire-back. “That’s what your effing dinner’s worth.”
But the next day, all smiles and amiability, with a wage-packet in his pocket and a Woodbine fresh between his lips, nothing could shake his happiness. “Hello, Vera, my love,” he said as he came in, hoping she’d forgotten the previous evening. She knew he was sorry now, that he was trying to forget it and hoping hard that she’d already done so. He laughed as he sat down to his food. “Well, my duck, come on, talk to me.”
She turned her head, almost weeping again, his exuberance bringing it back more than taking her mind from it. She had made the meal he had thrown away. The food she had collected and scraped for he had fed to the devil.
“Now then, duck, now then!” he entreated, leaning across to touch her face. She pushed his hand off: it’s always the guilty who try to forget, she thought. But he looked into her eyes, and somehow it seemed foolish and unimportant to remember it, until she almost smiled at his clumsy attempts to reconcile her to his good humour, only wanting a few more endearing words and laughs to be won over. But:
“Take your hands off me.”
“Now then, Vera! Don’t get like that!” It wasn’t possible to rile him tonight. He drew back to begin his meal. “It’s pay-day,” he told her, in the same tone of endearment.
“What if it is?”
He laughed: “You want some money, don’t you?”
“You want your meals next week as well, don’t you?” Her quick retort did as much as his gallantry to break down the memory of the burnt dinner.
“I do,” he admitted, pouring a cup of tea. “Will you have one, duck?” The lure of peace was too attractive, and she relented. “All right. Pour me one in here”—pushing her cup across.
“Have summat to eat, as well.”
“No, I had summat before you came in. I eat bits and bobs all day and don’t feel like eating at dinner-time.” He pushed the empty plate aside and took out a cigarette, striking a match across the fender: “I drew thirty-two bob this week.”