“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.