Mother’s Boy, page 3
He was holding his hat before him, looking about him.
Insofar as she had calculated at all, she had assumed he’d be driving the doctor to and from the Quaker meeting house, which surely was in Torbay or Exeter, for there was none she knew of in Teignmouth, where Quakers were as rare as Jews. So when she said walk after church, she meant precisely that, and with time for her to go home and change into something less Sundayish, certainly into her second-best boots, which were properly broken in so kinder than the ones she had on for walking any distance. But here he was and he had seen her and smiled and walked directly over just as the organ struck up for ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’. Mrs Ashbridge nudged her, though for what exactly she had no idea. He reached them as they stood up with their hymn books and because his hat was already off, he made a gesture as though he had just that moment taken it off to greet them both and with a murmured, ‘May I?’ took the spare space beside Mrs Ashbridge.
He had a nice enough voice, in tune at least, although he did that comical thing men often had to of fumbling for lower octaves when the tune went too high. She caught his eye a couple of times before the last verse but then he stopped singing altogether and smiled broadly at her so she felt sure people noticed. She found it extremely hard to focus her thoughts on the service that followed or even to feel her usual sense of connection with her mother. He was so very spectacular – she could think of no other word – so unafraid of being looked at.
Mrs Ashbridge was a heavy-set woman with poor powers of concentration, much given to shifting in her pew and fiddling with cuffs or buttons, and yet, from that first hymn to the last, through the sermon and the Eucharist, Laura was constantly aware of his presence on Mrs Ashbridge’s other side, like the confident rumble of a farm roller beneath the chattering of starlings. She avoided catching his eye or even looking his way again, but she could hear him in the hymns and in the mumbled responses, and when the time came to go up to the altar for Communion she stood aside to let Mrs Ashbridge out first so that she should be first back in and Mrs Ashbridge didn’t think to let him pass in front of her as well for the same reason. So Laura ended up with him beside her in the pew for the final hymn and dismissal. Her mother had taught her always to kneel when she returned from the altar: ‘It’s a lovely moment and you don’t want to fritter it away with idle thoughts.’
So Laura knelt as usual, even though she could see from the corner of her eye that he was sitting, like Mrs Ashbridge, and could feel his eyes were on her back. But she had the glow on her, a sort of flush from the drama of walking to the altar, the sudden sweet shock of Communion wine on an almost empty stomach. She rarely prayed at this point, merely hid her face and let her thoughts settle. Today they would not settle and she hoped, once the organ struck up and they all stood for ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, that her face at least was calm.
She need not have worried, for naturally Mrs Ashbridge dominated the conversation as they walked slowly out to shake the rector’s hand by the door and, through her fearless questioning, Laura learned things that might have taken her hours to uncover: that his family were from up the river at Trusham, that he was born in Canada (Canada!) and that Dr Butler did not always attend Quaker meetings but some weeks preferred, as he put it, to worship God in nature by taking a solitary walk instead. And that Charlie had in mind to walk Laura over the bridge to Shaldon for lunch.
‘Have the crab savoury,’ Mrs Ashbridge told her as she saw them off. ‘It’s famous and I want to know what goes into it so we can make it too.’
‘You don’t sound Canadian,’ Laura said as they were finally alone and walking down through the streets towards the water.
‘How does Canadian sound?’ he asked.
‘I dunno. Like American but politer?’
He laughed. He had such good, white teeth. All the men in her family – her uncles, her brothers and brothers-in-law – were missing one or two and had yellowed the rest with tobacco. Only her brother Stanley’s were as white, but then he did not smoke and was what Mrs Ashbridge called ‘exceptionally good-looking’. Charlie stepped between her and the gutter to shield her from the dust raised by a passing farm cart.
‘I was born in Canada,’ he explained, ‘but Father didn’t make a success out there, not like he’d hoped for, and we moved back to Devon before I’d formed any memories. All my memories are of Trusham.’
‘My younger brother emigrated last year,’ she told him.
‘To be a farmer?’ he asked. ‘They’re still offering free land.’
‘Maybe, eventually. But he’s a lumberjack at the moment. Timber’s what he knows. Boys in Launceston either go into timber, quarrying, slaughtering or tanning. If they’re not on the land, that is. We were so glad when he went into timber. Father was killed in the slate quarry, and those other jobs, well, they make a man stink!’
She thought of Stanley with a pang. He was much her favourite sibling, to the point where she had harboured a guilty fantasy that he might send for her to keep house for him. She knew why he had gone; Launceston was too small for him and he was stifled living at home with Mother in her tiny house. Living away from home herself made it easier to forget he was no longer living there either, and when something reminded her he was now a vast ocean away she felt afresh the pain of his leaving as if he had only just gone. She wondered what Stanley would make of Charlie. They were a perfect contrast, he blond and cream-fed where Charlie was black haired and sharper boned. Stanley would like him; he had it in him to like everybody and she worried he would be taken advantage of, with no sister to look out for him.
‘Is your father still alive?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘He and Mother are both gathered. Worn out by work and grieving. He was a carter and market gardener in Trusham, at the end. He liked that. Liked what he did. How did your father die?’
‘A splinter of slate was driven into his skull.’ She could tell him quite dispassionately, having been only a child at the time. ‘It wasn’t even from stone he was cutting. It came from overhead, straight through his cloth cap. He was dead long before the men could get him on a board and carry him home to Mother.’
‘How did she cope?’
‘She worked,’ she told him. ‘Cleaned houses and took in washing, raised some of us single-handed that way.’
He whistled. ‘No poor house for her, then?’
‘She’d have died sooner.’
They had reached the middle of the broad bridge across the Teign and paused there to admire the dramatic view. The river dock to their left, where moorland clay was unloaded and shipped out all week, was Sunday quiet but a train whistled as it passed the dock on its way to the station and on towards Exeter. Older people still muttered about the noise and ugliness of having a railway line plough through the centre of the town and out along the old sea wall between red cliffs and beach but the few times she had caught the train to Exeter she had laughed at the audacity of it, especially where the line plunged through the rock before Dawlish. Ahead of them the brown waters swirled around the town’s promontory of fishermen’s huts and pubs, past the little beach where the boats were hauled up and a few men were mending and checking nets, and out to the open sea. As they gazed and the smell of cooking lunch from somewhere made her stomach rumble, she asked if he had brothers and sisters. Two sisters and a brother surviving, he told her: Maggie, who was like a second mother to him; and Dora and Lewis, who were younger. Two sisters had died: Hepzibah of meningitis when he was four and barely aware, lovely Edith more traumatically, when he was seven. They had been delivering a box of vegetables to the Trusham lime kiln when Edith’s waist-length golden hair, a wonder of the village, somehow caught fire along with her dress.
‘I beat out the flames with my bare hands,’ he said, ‘but my hands were still only small and she died that night all the same.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Laura said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him.
‘I mean I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘Of course you should. Let’s walk on,’ she said, and let him lead her on to Shaldon.
But perhaps he shouldn’t have told her. The lunch was delicious. She obediently ordered the crab savoury and persuaded the waitress to tell her what went in it – crab, butter, cayenne, cheese, breadcrumbs, lemon and brandy – but whenever she looked at his hands she pictured them beating out the flames on a burning child and felt death was at the table with them.
Charlie put her at ease again by telling her about his work for the doctor and how he loved horses and found them easier to work with than pigs, cattle or sheep. And he said how the doctor was a great believer in education for adults and encouraged him to read more by lending him the simpler books from his library.
‘He has me come to lectures with him sometimes,’ he added. ‘On history and fossils and that.’
‘Does that interest you?’ she asked, and he pulled a face, wrinkling his high forehead.
‘Reckon I’m better at reading than listening. And my reading’s pretty slow.’
She admitted that she loved reading but was always so tired after work that she could rarely stay awake long enough to read more than a page or two.
After lunch they walked around Shaldon. Then he treated her to the little ferry back to Teignmouth where they strolled along the front, enjoying the Sunday crowds. There were children everywhere, as ever, and she realised she was watching to see how he’d react to them. Some men seemed to regard children as an irritant, to be ignored or brushed off like flies, but Charlie caught a small boy’s wayward ball before it could bounce between the railings and on to the beach, and handed it back to him, ruffling his hair as he did so. Laura thought again of him beating out the flames engulfing his sister when still a child himself and she shivered, even though she was warming to him.
Thinking she was cold, he ushered her into a little pavilion to buy them each a cup of tea. She declined his offer of a bun. He ate the first half of his in a few swift mouthfuls.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m always hungry. Unless I’ve just eaten. Maggie says I have hollow legs.’
She saw how his expression softened when he spoke of his sister as it hadn’t when he mentioned his parents, and guessed she had parented him in the way that happened in larger families, where grief or plain exhaustion could leave a mother slow to love a late child.
They spoke, as she imagined younger servants often must, of whether they would be in service all their lives. Each had felt the obligation to take the job offered to spare their families the cost of housing and feeding them.
‘But Launceston must be a busy town,’ he said. ‘Could you not have found work there?’
‘I tried,’ she said, remembering the humiliating succession of visits to tradesmen’s entrances and back doors in her funeral dress. ‘But it’s a tight sort of place where everyone watches each other and, well, I think people prefer to hire servants who aren’t too local. They worry about gossip and trust. And my mother’s place is small and she wanted me to fly the nest like the others. There was only Stanley still at home when I left and that made sense as he was working just up the valley in the sawmill then, and happy to be man of the house.’
‘But he went to Canada after?’
‘Yes,’ she said, remembering as she stirred her tea to cool it. Stanley had found Mother’s constant pressure on him to take a wife bothersome. ‘I saw him just once more. The train he caught to get the boat from Liverpool stopped here and Mrs Ashbridge let me slip out to meet him on the platform and say my goodbye. It was awful. There was so little time and he had such a journey ahead of him. He’s not a great letter writer. Neither of us is. But he sends a card sometimes, so I know where he is.’ Her longing for Stanley, like homesickness, was always worse on Sundays because she had the leisure for it. It rose in her now like nausea. Charlie seemed to sense this and kindly changed the subject, pressing a last piece of his buttered bun on her and saying how he could never have stayed in Trusham. It was tiny and jobs were few. He loved horses but he was not a countryman, he realised.
‘Town suits me,’ he said, ‘better than mud and rain. Money was the challenge,’ he added. He liked working for Dr Butler well enough as he was a kind and interesting man. The house was comfortable and the food more plentiful than he had ever known growing up. ‘But in jobs like ours there’s no progressing, is there? If we could progress that wouldn’t suit our masters.’
‘So what’s your dream?’ she asked him, and he said it was to run a little boarding house there for holidaymakers, maybe keep a horse and cart to fetch them to and from the trains and have a wife to run it with him.
‘It’d be hard work,’ she said. ‘All those mouths to feed and beds to change.’
‘Yes, but it’d be different when the work was for yourself.’
She wasn’t so sure of that; dirty sheets were dirty sheets, and she imagined paying guests could be as demanding as masters, maybe more so, and possibly less considerate as they’d be moving on. She had not thought much of the future beyond imagining that Mrs Ashbridge might retire one day and she would take her place and have a country girl to train up in her turn.
She was mindful of all this and of Mrs Ashbridge’s warnings when he walked her back up the hill behind the station and paused to ask what she was doing the following Sunday. Quite truthfully, she was able to say she was going to one of her sisters to celebrate their mother’s birthday – a day she rather dreaded because her siblings all treated her like a child still. But he looked so crestfallen that she couldn’t stop herself saying, ‘But I’m free the Sunday after, Charlie.’
The birthday Sunday was just as she’d predicted. Her older sister Ellen and her brothers’ wives patronised her in their married prosperity and gave her advice she hadn’t asked for and monopolised their mother. But through the day, when she felt belittled or talked over, and as she endured the long hours of train journeys in either direction, she found she was drawing comfort from the thought of Charlie, like a secret warm stone in her pocket. When he dropped off a note during the week asking if she’d like to come home to Trusham with him the Sunday after, she readily agreed.
They met at the station – she had dissuaded him from showing up at church again – caught a train to Newton Abbot and were collected there by his stern younger brother, Lewis.
‘He don’t speak much,’ he had warned her and, true enough, Lewis said nothing beyond an initial hat raise and how do. He fetched them in a pony and trap. Charlie helped her up into the back and climbed up there with her, so they sat facing backwards as the landscape spooled past them. Charlie made no attempt at conversation with Lewis so she didn’t either, just relishing the sights and smells of deep countryside after weeks of town life.
Trusham seemed a world away both from the bustle of Teignmouth or the industry of Newton Abbot. It lay up one of those mysterious Devon coombes barely touched by modernity, a cluster of cottages slung between a church and equally ancient inn, everything dappled green by sunlight through trees and any sounds cushioned by layers of moss and leaf mould.
When they pulled up beside an old, low house just along the lane from the church, a little round woman wreathed in smiles was waiting to greet them. Her hair was as black as Charlie’s but her face a sunlit version of Lewis’s, her eyes black buttons, which almost vanished when she smiled.
‘Hello, dear. I’m his big sister, Maggie,’ she said, taking both Laura’s hands in hers to look her over quickly. Feeling hands as work-hardened as her own, Laura liked her instinctively.
‘Big sister,’ Charlie said, chuckling as he bent his head to kiss the top of her head.
‘Cheek,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him back, then turned back to Laura. ‘Welcome to Trusham,’ she said, and ushered her through the gate where Lewis had led the pony and trap. The house kept its secrets from the road. Through the gate it revealed itself as an old farmhouse, forming an L shape with a little barn and washhouse-privy to one side. Its modest patch of land was set out as a market garden, with vegetable beds bordered by fruit trees and bushes. It seemed there was not an unproductive inch. The only flowers apart from pea and bean ones were on a climbing rose trained against the house, its base thick and gnarly with age, and a hedge of lavender noisy with bees. Chickens scratched and crooned beneath the bushes. All it lacked was a friendly cow, but one could be sure Maggie had an arrangement with a nearby dairy.
‘Father’s market garden,’ Maggie said shortly. ‘Lewis’s little kingdom now, though Dora and I do our bits when he lets us and our hands aren’t full of laundry. Dora, this is Charlie’s friend Laura Bartlett.’
A thin, rather mannishly dressed young woman with short hair ducked her head in greeting and darted back inside the house, scattering chickens.
‘Shy,’ mouthed Maggie with a grin, and sighed.
Lunch was leek and potato soup, and the delicious treat of a roasted chicken, Dora’s home-made cheese on which she refused Laura’s compliments, and a rhubarb pie served with yellow cream Maggie had clotted herself. The cream made Laura think of when they were small and still living in a farm labourer’s cottage in the countryside. She knew how to make it and had offered, but the Frasers were faddish and believed thin cream was healthier, for some reason.
Laura found Lewis’s almost aggressive silence and Dora’s shyness made her fairly wordless as well, but Maggie’s steady, salty conversation was like the crackle of a warm fire. Used to her younger siblings, Maggie respected Laura’s reserve and soon gave up trying to draw her out, falling back, inevitably, on a soothing litany of reminiscence with Charlie, punctuated with abrupt bulletins about people they knew in common: who had died, who married, who had moved away and who had taken over whose cottage. Not being a talker, Lewis had eaten whatever was set before him swiftly and he left the table as soon as the pie had been dealt with, off to sit in the pub, apparently, where nursing two pints of cider was a Sunday ritual that would see him through to an early night. Dora washed up, a task nobody was allowed to help her with as she had her particular way of doing it. Laura had assumed they might sit on softer chairs to chat or that Maggie might let her see around the old house but Maggie was insistent Charlie show her the village.
