A Prodigal Child Read online

  Half an hour later he was still sitting by the wooden table and the doors of the public house were about to be closed.

  ‘A last one,’ he said, ‘then I s’ll have to be off.’

  He skipped inside, jangling the last coins in his pocket, and came out with two glasses.

  ‘Here’s to it,’ said the man for the fifth or sixth time since Mr Morley had joined him, and drank as quickly from his glass as he had from the first. ‘Which road are you off?’ he added.

  ‘Straight back.’ Mr Morley’s speech was slurred.

  ‘Wi’ one or two wiggles.’

  He got up from the table. ‘Nay, I’m as steady now as I wa’ when I started.’ The glasses on the table jangled.

  ‘I should walk home, Arthur, if I were you.’

  ‘Nay,’ Mr Morley said, conscious of the time if of nothing else. ‘I have to get back.’

  He got on his bike.

  The front wheel wobbled.

  ‘Want a shove?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  He pedalled on.

  ‘By God,’ he thought, ‘what a day to come a cropper.’

  At the hump-backed bridge, where the stream from Spencer’s Farm crossed under the road, he laid the bike down; he scrambled through the hedge and, where several ducks and geese were swimming up and down in the shadow of the bridge itself, he knelt on the bank, cupped his hands, drew up the water and splashed his face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ a man called from the pub across the stream.

  Mr Morley waved his arm.

  He cupped his hands again, drew up the water, missed his face, and drenched the front of his shirt and jacket.

  He lay back in the grass; he was aware of the honking of the geese and the quacking of the ducks, of the dampness drying on the back of his hands. Lulled by the murmuring of the stream and the heat of the day, and thinking, ‘She won’t have the bed ready by the time I get back. I might as well rest here,’ he fell asleep.

  ‘Where on earth have you been to?’ Sarah said.

  Mr Morley could see that his wife had been crying and his resolve to describe in detail the farmer’s conversation, a compendium of all Mr Spencer had told him over the previous week, melted at the sight of her tear-streaked face. ‘Is anything up?

  ‘It’s nearly seven o’clock.’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘You’ve been gone six hours.’

  ‘Six?’

  He looked for his watch. The room had been tidied. It had, perhaps, been tidied several times: his watch had gone; the chairs were in place, the sideboard had been dusted; a fire was burning in the grate. Where on earth, he wondered, had she got the coal? Then he remembered Patterson had said he’d lend them some.

  He sat down at the table; that, too, he noticed, had been rearranged. The curtains had been put up on the windows.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Spencer.’

  ‘All afternoon?’

  ‘I met Jack Bannister. He wa’re at the Three Bells.’

  ‘Alan’ll be in bed,’ he thought. ‘First night in a new home and I wasn’t here to see it.’

  ‘He wa’ telling me about his job at Havercroft.’

  ‘Jack Bannister was sacked at Spencer’s. He was always drunk.’

  ‘I near fell off the bike.’

  He held up his hand: the back had been cut where he’d scrambled through the hedge.

  ‘Mr Patterson was home five hours ago.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘This is our first day in our new home.’

  He didn’t look up. ‘I lay down in Spencer’s field and fell asleep. I meant to have a rest and come on again.’

  She went out of the room; her feet came from the stairs: they sounded across the boards of the narrow landing; a door was closed above his head.

  A moment later the sound of her sobbing came through the ceiling.

  ‘Hell,’ he thought, ‘what a mess,’ gazing out at the darkening road, with the sunset glowing on the houses opposite. ‘All fresh and I go and bugger it up.’ He gazed about him at the room: a feeling of sadness absorbed him entirely, not at his mistake, but at the evidence of his wife’s preoccupation with the house, the innumerable touches with which she’d sought to eradicate the bareness of the room, the alignment of the chairs, the setting of a poker in the hearth, the sweeping away of the ashes.

  ‘She’ll cry long enough and loud enough to rub it in,’ he thought, ‘and I s’ll have to sit down here and listen.’

  Yet, having decided that, he got to his feet.

  He climbed the stairs: he looked in the little back room, then he looked in the other bedroom at the front. The cot was empty.

  He knocked on his bedroom door and stepped inside.

  His wife lay curled up, her back to the door; the boy was sleeping on the bed beside her.

  ‘Is he asleep?’

  His wife didn’t answer.

  He knelt on the bed; the boy was wearing a patterned nightshirt, his feet bare, his arms outstretched.

  He glanced at his wife across whose back he was leaning. ‘Shall I put him in his cot?’

  Her eyes were open, her figure stiff.

  He got off the bed and went round the other side. Only when he was about to lift the boy did she say, ‘Leave him,’ and, as he paused, as if she suspected he hadn’t heard, she added, ‘Leave him,’ once again. ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘I’m sober.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she said, tonelessly. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘Nay, I’ll be damned. I’ve pedalled back miles.’

  ‘Just think,’ she said, ‘if you’d taken him with you.’

  ‘I’d have come straight home.’

  ‘I’m glad I never let you. My God, just think of a drunken man with a child.’

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you,’ yet he stood back from the bed, gazing at the child, thinking, ‘It might have more of me, but it’s hers now, and always will be.’

  ‘Look at your clothes,’ she added.

  ‘Nay, well, I s’ll not give a damn next time,’ he said. ‘I s’ll take my bloody time and be damned whether I come back here or not.’

  ‘Lifting a child to its cot when you’re not even safe to stand,’ she said, not listening. ‘All the furniture I’ve had to straighten. You’ve not given a hand since you lifted it in.’

  ‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’ Morley said.

  ‘My God, I wish you weren’t,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d never met you.’

  ‘That’s soon arranged, is that. That soon is,’ Morley said.

  He closed the door.

  He went back down. He looked in the scullery: there, too, the crockery and the cutlery had been put away and the pans set up on a wooden shelf, close to the ceiling, behind the scullery door. A gas-ring stood on a wooden-topped copper.

  Unable to find the kettle he picked up a pan and filled it with water and set it on the ring.

  He washed his hands, winced as he took the scab off his knuckles and, looking round for a towel and finding none, took out his handkerchief.

  Steam rose from the pan. Finding the tea in the stone-slabbed pantry he mashed it in a pot.

  He took the pot out to the porch.

  The sun was setting: before him stretched the upturned garden – clods of clay alternating with clumps of grass – and builders’ rubble – and, beyond the wooden rail designating the end of the garden, stretched the field, circumscribed on the opposite side by a row of uncompleted houses.

  He was hungry; he’d had no lunch. He’d set off that morning before seven o’clock to fetch the cart; it was twelve hours since he’d eaten. ‘She must think I live on fresh air,’ he thought. ‘She’s never been fair to me, not ever.’

  In the adjoining garden Mr Patterson was turning the soil: a neat patch of yellowish clay stretched out before him to the edge of the field.

  ‘How go?’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ Morley s
aid, and considered that Patterson had heard, through the thin partitioning of the walls between the houses, something of the quarrel.

  ‘Nought but clay.’ Patterson gestured with his spade.

  ‘I s’ll have a go tomorrow.’

  ‘Aye.’

  The gasps of Mr Patterson as he stooped to the spade alternated with the cries of children playing in the field.

  Morley watched their figures running to and fro: the sounds of their voices echoed between the houses.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ His wife’s voice sounded in the door behind.

  ‘No.’

  She was standing there as if nothing had happened: hearing his voice and Mr Patterson’s replying, she had come down to indicate to the neighbour that nothing was amiss.

  ‘I put your lunch in the oven,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dried up by now.’

  ‘You cooked something, did you?’ Morley got up. ‘Put it on the table,’ he added, following her inside. ‘If you’ve cooked it, love,’ he continued, in a voice loud enough to be heard outside, ‘it’ll be good enough for me.’

  TWO

  Mrs Morley was the youngest of a family of eight: three sisters had alternated with four brothers and her own arrival had been greeted by her parents with despair. Despised by her brothers and abused by her sisters and disregarded entirely by her parents, she had lived amongst her family with scarcely more security than that of a household pet, condemned to be the last at table and the first to be called upon to do household tasks. A sullenness and capriciousness, like that of a beaten dog, characterized her early years, a tendency to go off, whenever she could, into corners and from there to gaze out at the world with a dark-eyed bitterness and fury. Not until she met Morley had she felt anything different: he had been in the army, a corporal, and home on leave when she met him at a dance hall. There, sheltering in the doorway during a shower of rain, he had offered her his greatcoat to put over her head. ‘It won’t bite,’ he told her. ‘There’s nought inside.’ They’d walked to her home together, their heads beneath the coat, his arm around her waist, and only as they neared the house and he realized they lived in adjoining streets had he suddenly released her and said, ‘You’re not one of the Wolmersley lasses, are you? I thought they were wed.’

  ‘They’re my sisters,’ Sarah had said.

  ‘I didn’t know there wa’re another,’ he told her.

  ‘Four of us,’ she said.

  ‘Four.’ He gazed at her from beneath the shoulders of the coat. ‘By go, they breed like rabbits in Hasleden Street.’

  ‘And four brothers,’ she added with a laugh.

  ‘I know thy brothers. So you’re the one that wa’re alus roaring and had her knickers wet, and that.’

  ‘Not me,’ she said, withdrawing from the coat.

  ‘Nay, it must have been,’ he said. ‘You were nobbut this high when I went away.’ He raised his hand above his waist. ‘Two foot o’ nought, and a mucky nose.’

  He’d laughed; she was used to abuse and gazed up at his genial, bright-eyed face and thought he must have recognized in her something of the beaten dog, for he placed his arm about her once again, and she felt the pressure of his hand through her waist, and felt the thrill, too, of that pressure go through her and thought, bitterly, ‘This is the first man who has seen me away from my sisters and now he is anxious to put me back with them again.’

  ‘I’d never have recognized you,’ he said. ‘You’ll remember the Morleys, o’ course, in Wentworth Street.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ she said.

  ‘I bet. There’s not a policeman within ten miles that hasn’t.’ He laughed. ‘I wa’ sent i’ the army. The old man said, “It’s jankers in the Yorks and Lancs where your mother and I can’t see you, or it’s fending for yourself.” They’d had enough of me.’

  On two successive nights they’d walked beyond the town: his arm around her waist had been followed by their lying on the grass, and his kissing had been succeeded by his attempts to release her dress. Only then had Sarah protested.

  ‘I shouldn’t hurt you,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I can’t go on until I’m married,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not what I’ve heard of the Wolmersley lasses,’ Morley said.

  ‘It’s what you’ll have to hear from me,’ she said, something of her sullenness returning.

  Her father, like her sisters and most of her brothers, worked at the mill; living in the small, dark houses beside the river she compared their existence to that of the rats which lived in the dark holes and crevices along the bank: the soldier was a challenge, almost senseless.

  In the Sarah Wolmersley girl Morley saw a confirmation of all he had achieved himself; in arousing her to smile, to cling to him, the world he’d moved out to was suddenly enhanced. He described to her his travels – a moonlit night off Madagascar, a storm-tossed crossing of the Bay of Biscay, a burning afternoon at Suez. He had thought of staying on in the army but, after a second, longer leave, he decided to come out. He was almost twenty-five; most of his brothers were married and all of his friends. He proposed to her at the end of the leave. She accepted: they had scarcely known each other a year and, during that time, they had never spent more than eight hours together.

  Her parents didn’t come to the wedding; neither did his. Her own parents didn’t approve of someone who was a wastrel – though he had worked by that time nine months at Spencer’s Farm – and his parents thought, patently, he might have married someone better.

  Yet marriage brought all Sarah’s virtues to the fore – her tenacity, her loyalty, her determination, in having set herself a task, to see it through, her capacity to take rebuffs and, while wilting, even hating her oppressors, to carry on. They lived, for a while, with her parents, since her other brothers and sisters, having married, had already moved out, and, when the rancour and the quarrelling, with which she was familiar and to which she was almost immune, depressed Morley himself and damped his spirits to a degree which began to frighten her, they moved to his parents’ house and then, in succession, to the homes of his married brothers: all the while they saved to set up home themselves, their only disability Morley’s tendency to spend money as soon as he earned it: he liked ‘a good time’, and the good time invariably involved him in getting rid of every coin in his pocket and moralizing afterwards on the simple precept that having ‘a good time’ was what ‘life was all about’, and if you didn’t have ‘a good time’ what was ‘the point of living’?

  Yet Sarah’s instincts were to conserve, to dig herself out, as she saw it, from the poverty of the houses by the river. For every shilling she saved, Morley, by the end of the following week, had managed to spend ten pence of it: week succeeded week and, by the end of three years, they had scarcely saved sufficient to buy the furniture. Still she persevered: she worked in a shop, and he worked, despairingly at first, then, when a baby became due, more hopefully, at Spencer’s. They moved back to her parents’ for the birth, lived there for a while, then moved out to a brother’s, then moved back again and, finally, when the child was almost two years old, they were allocated the house on Stainforth estate.

  Looking at the house had involved Sarah in feelings she had never experienced before: she ran her hand along the woodwork, along the plaster, she moved up and down its stairs and between its rooms and, from the windows at the front, gazed down across the slope towards the town and, from the windows at the back, towards the headlands of the valley. The air was fresh; the brick shapes strewn out across the slope were a new beginning; the old world of terraces and cobbles and gas-lit crevices, of smoke-ridden rooms and rat-infested cellars, of poverty and grime, had been discarded; not only was her own face set to the future, but the faces of everyone around her – couples like themselves, children like Alan, neighbours like Patterson: they were pioneers.

  When she opened her eyes in the morning and saw the light on the curtains – the sun tracing in the material the thicker ou
tline of leaves and flowers – she felt happier than she had felt during any previous day of her marriage. The rancour of the day before had vanished; her husband snored beside her, lying on his back, his mouth open and, but for the sound, she was reminded of the uncanny resemblance between the father and the son: she could hear Alan stirring in his cot, rattling the sides, talking his indecipherable language, laughing at one point as if the strangeness of the room were no strangeness at all but something he had been familiar with all his life.

  It was Sunday morning; the estate was quiet: a dog barked, a child called out. Someone, closer, was chopping wood: a shovel scraped, a bucket rattled, coal tumbled against a metal screen. From the furthest distance came the tolling of a bell.

  She got out of bed and went downstairs: she opened the curtains; sunlight came into the living-room. She made the fire, taking out the ashes, emptying them on the undug garden, and for a moment stood in the porch gazing out across the field to the uncompleted houses on the other side. Everything was still: the half-erected structures were strewn like ships across the slope, the chimney-stacks like reddened funnels: white clouds scudded from across the valley: the whole estate was in progress to the south.

  Mr Patterson’s wife came out and emptied ashes, a small, dark-haired woman, dressed in an apron, and, glancing across from the adjoining, half-dug garden, she nodded.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Mrs Morley said.

  Everything was fresh; through the air came the smell of paint, and of the dew, and the less discernible scent of the countryside beyond the houses.

  ‘Isn’t it nice?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Mrs Morley said.

  ‘Still sleeping?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Like mine.’

  The ringing of a church bell was still audible from the summit of the slope.

  ‘Have you got your linoleum yet?’ Mrs Patterson said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Are you using Dobson’s?’

  ‘Hanley’s.’

  ‘Dobson’s give free fitting.’

  ‘I suppose they put it on the price.’

  ‘No. No. I checked on that.’ Mrs Patterson glanced round her at the garden: the spade had been left overnight in the upturned earth. ‘I better get in and see to his lordship.’