For Many a Long Day (3 page)

At the thought of the immense distance opening up between them, the tears flowed faster. For as long as she could remember, he’d been next door, a minute or two’s walk down the shortcut from her own house, past his father’s barns, along the front of the substantial two-storey dwelling and into the farmyard. And if she couldn’t see him anywhere, or hear his voice echoing from stable or byre, she’d only to go to his mother in the dairy or the scullery, or even in to old Granny Robinson sitting by the fire in the big kitchen and ask them where he was.

What
was
she going to do?

She turned restlessly in the large bed, big enough to have taken all four sisters together when they were still small. If only she wasn’t on her own with all her brothers and sisters gone. Mary, it’s true, was always so bound up in her own affairs, she’d seldom been any help, but Florence was only a little older
than herself and always sorry if something had upset her little sister. Although she might not be very good at giving advice she would always listen. She’d try to encourage her and remind her things were never as bad as one thought and often she’d been right.

It was Polly she needed now, but her eldest and dearest sister, was in Toronto with a husband, two small boys and a little one and a load of worries of her own. Not that Polly would ever let her own problems get in the way. If you asked her something, you could always be sure she’d pay attention. She had a way of looking at you as if she was hearing more than you were telling her. When you’d finished, she’d say not what would comfort you, or what she thought you wanted to hear, and certainly not what she herself would do, but what might actually help you to see your way.

If only there were more time, she could write and ask her what she thought of George’s plan and what she herself should do. But even though letters took only five or six days each way, there still wasn’t time to get an answer back before he went. She’d just have to manage by herself.

Tired out, she fell asleep at last, her face wet with tears. It felt like only minutes later that she woke suddenly, her whole body rigid with tension. A large brown bear had been staring at her and as she wondered whatever she was going to do, it began to lumber towards her. Her eyes flew open in the dim
room and the whole evening with George unrolled before her once again.

She knew he loved her and indeed she had loved him for as long as she could remember. He certainly wasn’t the first young man to go away, work hard for a year or two and send for his sweetheart. It happened all the time. But the whole thing had been so sudden. They’d never even considered it themselves. Maybe if he’d told her what Uncle George was proposing, or asked her what she thought before everything was settled, it would be easier. But then, he was doing his best, thinking of how they might be together. If he was the one who had to go she could hardly say ‘don’t go’ when going was to give them the future together they’d planned.

But all the time, she felt something was wrong. Try as she would, she couldn’t see what it was, except that she just didn’t know how she could go on living at home and working in Freeburns with no George and no one but girlfriends to talk to. The very thought of it brought the tears streaming down her cheeks again until the pillow was so wet she had to turn it over before she made another attempt to go to sleep.

‘Ellie, are ye up?’

She jerked awake at the sound of her father’s voice.

Brilliant light was streaming through the
dust-streaked 
windows and making bright patches on the linoleum. She knew without looking at her clock she’d overslept. She, who always woke early and lay, warm and comfortable, till she heard her father raking out the stove.

‘Just coming,’ she replied, jumping out of bed and pouring water from the jug into her wash basin.

The water was icy on her face and warm body but she moved so quickly she hardly noticed. Within minutes, she was dressed in her black skirt and white, shop assistant’s blouse. She brushed her hair while pushing her feet into her everyday shoes, closed her bedroom door firmly on the unmade bed and the chair with her floral dress still draped over it, and hurried across the small entrance hall to the open kitchen door.

Her father was frying soda bread in the heavy griddle, the smoke rising already from the over-hot fat, the smell of burning just beginning to taint the air.

‘Can I do that for you, Da?’

‘Aye. Yer a better han’ at it than me. Yer Ma says she’s not well.’

‘Would she like a cup of tea?’

He flicked his eyes upwards and tightened his lips. He’d forgotten to ask and he knew as well as Ellie neither of them would hear the end of it until the day was out or some better opportunity for complaint turned up.

‘Will I away and see?’

‘You’d better,’ she replied, her back to him as she bent over the pan, drawing it away from the heat and tipping it gently to redistribute the melted suet.

It was only as she heard a muffled step behind her that the confused dark shadows she’d brought from sleep finally came together in her head. George was going to Canada. There’d be no wedding after the harvest, this year or next. She had no idea how she would tell either her father or the woman who now limped across the kitchen in her bare feet and subsided with a heavy sigh on the wooden settle by the fire.

‘I was dying of thirst,’ she said, addressing no one in particular. ‘I just hadta make mysel’ get up, I was that parched.’

‘I could bring you some breakfast to bed if you want to go back,’ said Ellie, knowing perfectly well the offer would be refused.

‘Ach, I haven’t the energy to walk that far without a bite in me.’

‘Well it won’t be long now,’ Ellie responded, glancing round at her.

Her mother’s hair had been grey for years, but now, though she was only in her early fifties, it had gone both thin and white. Once she had worn it in a plait, curved round and pinned up in a bun, but these days she let it hang lank and loose round her wrinkled face in a tattered curtain that brushed
against her dull skin and her too-bright, red cheeks.

‘Ye’ll have to bring me water from the well afore ye go to work, Ellie, for I’m not fit for it today.’

‘Sure I’ll get the water. Hasn’t Ellie to go to her work for half past eight?’ Robert asked crossly.

‘Sit over, Da, it’s ready,’ said Ellie, moving between them with the teapot in one hand and a dish of fried bread in the other. ‘Will you have yours there, Ma?’

‘Aye, if I can eat a bit at all. Sure I hardly slept a wink last night.’

Robert pulled his wooden armchair up to the table and sat with his eyes on his plate as he munched the crisp pieces of soda bread and drank deep from a large mug of tea. Ellie brought a plate and cup across to her mother where she sat round-shouldered and slack on the wooden settle, her pale, watery eyes peering at the tiny bright points of flame dancing and flickering beyond the open front of the stove.

She appeared not to notice the cup of tea and the plate of fried bread Ellie placed beside her, but that was nothing new. She would only eat if no one were looking at her, as if by avoiding their gaze she could pretend she hadn’t eaten at all.

Ellie drew up her own chair to the table. She knew she was thirsty but eating was going to be an effort. She would have to do her best, for her father would notice if she left anything on her plate. She’d
always been slim and sometimes when she was tired or very busy at work, she lost weight quite quickly. He always noticed and she knew it worried him. As if he didn’t have worries enough.

He never knew what tale of woe he’d hear when he came up from the forge. Sometimes it was just a string of complaints about trivial things, so he’d just fetch water, or make tea, or see to the breadman. Other times, she was lying down. If she was on the settle in the big, dark kitchen, then it wasn’t too bad. If she retired to the sofa in the sitting-room, it meant he’d have to fend for himself and try to find out what she wanted. If she went back to bed, he’d have to decide if she really was ill this time and whether or not he ought to send for the doctor.

She had a chest complaint common to spinners, a legacy of the days before her marriage when she worked at Drumcairn mill. She also had what she called ‘bad legs’, a rheumatic condition which varied with the season, usually made worse by cold and damp. But most of all Ellen Scott suffered from a condition that lacked a medical name. She had neither hope, joy, nor enthusiasm. In their place, she put dissatisfaction, anxiety and despair. Nothing in her life was right. It never had been. It never would be.

Ellie had often puzzled over her mother’s endless complaints and had come to the conclusion many years ago that the only thing her mother enjoyed
was feeding her hens. Standing outside her front door, a dirty apron over her oldest dress, her carpet slippers still on her feet, she would chatter and call, laughing in a strange, high-pitched voice, addressing them by name, throwing pieces of broken bread to her favourites, crowing with pleasure as they argued and squabbled over the scraps.

That was the only time Ellie recalled ever seeing her mother smile. For her husband and family, there had never been word of warmth or comfort.

Only the thought of wheeling her bicycle down the lane and leaving the dark, stuffy kitchen behind her helped her get through the morning routine. But not for one minute was she able to put out of mind that this kitchen and this woman would to be her life for as long as it took for George to make his way in Canada and send for her.

If ever he did.

The May morning was once again fresh and pleasant as Ellie pushed her bicycle along the bumpy lane to the main road, caught up her skirt and freewheeled down the slope to where the gradient levelled out and ran past the three separate entrances to Robinson’s farm.

Pedalling slowly, she glanced at the
silver-painted
, decorative gates her father had made for the shrub-lined avenue. They were closed as they always were, the drive beyond rising sharply to the farmhouse itself. Standing squarely, surrounded by a low wall, pierced by a small garden gate, also of her father’s making, the morning sun reflected from its blank windows. There was no one in sight.

She could hear the clatter of pails from the nearby byre, but was not really surprised there was no one to be seen either on the driveway or in front of the house itself. The front door was seldom used. Only the doctor or someone collecting for the Parish church would walk up the gravel path under the
shadow of the monkey-puzzle to disturb the
highly-polished
brass knocker.

She moved on and drew level with the wide entrance to the farmyard. The large, five-barred field gate was seldom closed but there was no sign of life there either and no familiar figure to greet her. As she paused to glance in, the only movement was a row of ducks crossing from their shallow pond behind the hedge to peck hopefully among the scattered residues on the floor of the hayshed.

She stared up and down the familiar cobbled yard, its surface now caked with dried mud after two days of warmth. The hayshed stood open to the mild breeze, its year’s supply of fodder almost at an end. The tall ladders needed to stack the uppermost bales after the harvest were neatly laid to one side until the new crop came home and the solid battlements were rebuilt for another year.

Still she waited, but George was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, the pain of disappointment so sharp she felt angry with herself. She’d missed seeing him yesterday morning, because of setting out half an hour before her usual time, but surely he could have made a special effort to walk down the yard from the byre this morning. He knew exactly what time she left home and it would only take him a few minutes. She so needed to see him, just to exchange a few words, after the turbulence of the night.

She turned her eyes back reluctantly to the empty road and pedalled off vigorously. There was no use at all hoping she might see him at the third and final entrance to the farm. It would not be used till the milking was finished and the cows were herded along its rough, dung-splattered surface and back across the road into the largest of the Robinson meadows.

As she cycled the two miles into Armagh she barely saw the passing countryside. Yesterday, she’d had an eye for every bush and tree, for every sign of the approaching summer, and especially for the flowers of garden or hedgerow. Today, she spared not a thought to her surroundings. She could not get beyond the fact that George was going away. Going to Canada. And she was not going with him.

Without the slightest prompting on her part, the facts printed out like newspaper headlines. It felt as if she were having an argument with someone who kept asking the same things over and over again, because they either wouldn’t listen to what she was saying or didn’t accept the answers she gave them.

‘He never even thought of taking you.’

‘But that’s perfectly reasonable,’ she retorted, stung by the implicit criticism. ‘He couldn’t very well take me to a lumber camp.’

‘He might just have asked you whether you thought it was worth the separation to be able to start your married life with a home in a new country.’

As she came alongside the railway bridge, she was so absorbed in arguing on George’s behalf, she didn’t even hear the approaching roar of the Portadown train. It steamed past in the direction from which she’d come, enveloping her in a cloud of smoke and steam, but she hardly noticed the sting in her eyes or the catch in her throat and gave not a thought to the daily threat of soot particles falling on her clean blouse.

Perhaps Uncle George didn’t realise that his nephew was as good as engaged. Surely George would have told him the only reason it wasn’t announced was a lack of means. Everyone agreed there was no point getting engaged when you had no immediate prospect of getting married.

She cycled past the newly-opened gates of Drumsollen without noticing the elegant motor that paused between them until she had gone by. Sitting behind the wheel, wearing his chauffeur’s uniform, Ned Wylie watched her go and wondered what could be the matter with Ellie Scott that she didn’t give him her usual cheery wave.

Had he but known it, she was far away, trying to imagine a life in Canada, the wife of a lumber-man, or a clerk in a timber-office in an unknown town called Peterborough. The more she considered the prospect the more the thought of going to Canada filled her with anxiety. Her distress was the greater because she couldn’t imagine why she could
possibly be anxious about anything, so long as she had George at her side.

She knew of lots of women who had emigrated. Indeed, that’s what two of her own sisters had done. But things were different when Polly and Jimmy had gone off five years ago. In 1927, Jimmy had a good job in Toronto to go out to with a house available at a modest rent. Two years later, Polly newly pregnant with her second child, house and job had disappeared. They’d had to sell their lovely new furniture and go into lodgings and Jimmy had been lucky even to find a labouring job.

Still, that wouldn’t happen to her and George, surely. His uncle’s was a well-established business, selling lumber in Canada and the States and exporting to Europe as well. So what was she worrying about?

Struggling and perspiring, she found herself almost at the top of Asylum Hill without having stopped and wheeled her bicycle up its steep slope. Gasping, she got off to catch her breath.

Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she remembered something Polly had said quite recently. If she and George were thinking of Canada he had to have a job lined up and an employer’s address to put on his papers before Immigration would consider them.

She always told George about what Polly said in her letters. When she went to meet him that
particular evening, she’d wondered how he’d react when she mentioned the fact that Polly thought they might be thinking of joining her and Jimmy. But George had just listened to Polly’s news, laughed and said Canada wasn’t for him. He was a
home bird
and so was she. Something would turn up for them soon to let them get settled.

Some months later Polly had written to say the Canadian Government had begun to encourage immigrants who’d not become Canadian citizens to go back home. They were even handing out one-way tickets to speed up the process. With times as hard in Canada now as they were at home, there wasn’t much point either of them thinking any more about it whether they were
home birds
or not, so she hadn’t even mentioned it to George.

She wondered if this was why she felt so upset and so confused. She’d completely accepted that they were homebirds. Some people were like that. She’d heard many a person say, for better or worse, they wanted to stay where they were, her father for one.

Many times he’d told the story of having the chance to go out to Alberta. His much older half-brother, Charley, had a successful clothing business and wrote home to his mother and told her any one in the family, brothers or sisters, or even friends, would be welcome. He’d pay their fare, fill in their papers, have a job for them and
find them somewhere to live until they got settled. But her father had said no. Charley was a
good-hearted
man and it was generous of him to make the offer. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate it, but this was his place and here he intended to stay.

She sighed. Perhaps she had thought George was a man like her father, but clearly she’d been wrong.

The outskirts of the city were always quiet on a Saturday morning. As most of the goods arriving by rail came on weekdays, neither the jingle of harnesses nor the oppressive grinding of wheels on the cobbles outside the station gates interrupted her thoughts. Peddling on up Railway Street, she didn’t have to pull in and stop if two Wordie carts met each other head on, one with a projecting load, the other empty, the carters shouting to each other as they edged past in the confined space.

Later, it would be busy enough as farmers and their wives came in to do the weekly shopping. But they would not appear till the morning jobs were done in byre and dairy and the mare brought up from some nearby field to be put between the shafts of the trap.

As the sun moved higher and cleared the rooftops in English Street, she pedalled on, perspiring now, her thoughts exhausted for the moment. She slowed to a crawl behind a hay float laden with wooden crates on its way to the egg packing station in
Dobbin Street and scanned the frontage of the local newspaper office. Attached to the walls between the windows of the densely-packed shop were bright and bold posters. She loved their colour and pattern and their striking images, but this morning she couldn’t bear to look at the familiar images displaying the ships of the Canadian Pacific Line.

They had been advertising cruises and holidays for weeks now. She loved the white ships on the blue water, the sharp line of the hull contrasted with the smooth rounded curves of the clouds of steam set against a perfect summer sky. There was one of the Rockies as well, high and jagged with patches of snow in dazzling sunshine. Superimposed upon them was a train steaming across the prairies, a smiling couple, arms entwined, in the observation car just like those she’d seen on the screen at the Ritz cinema, the man pointing into the distance with a long, suntanned arm.

Perhaps George had something like that in mind, she said to herself, suddenly glancing back at the smiling couple. She would come out to join him. He would meet her in Quebec and they would travel on to their new home, wherever that might be. Distances were so vast in Canada. Instead of an hour on the train to Belfast, you might say a day to Toronto, or two days to Alberta. George’s geography wasn’t any better than her own, but he’d made the point last evening about the size of the
country, the huge, wide open spaces. So different from the place they lived where nothing of any importance to you was more than a few miles away, and a hundred miles in almost any direction would take you to the sea.

Just as she was beginning to worry about being late for work, the float pulled off unexpectedly to one side of Market Place where the nurserymen were laying out their wares in front of the Technical College. As she set off again she saw a young man emerge from behind the egg boxes and begin unloading bundles of cabbages and a couple of young trees wrapped in sacking.

Though not the main one of the week, the Saturday market was already crowded and busy. Women were examining trays of bedding plants laid out on trestle tables and well-wrapped shrub roses parked against them. She glanced across at the splashes of colour, an equal and opposite grey sadness clutching at her. How often had she gone to walk among those same trestle tables in her lunch hour, looking at similar plants and just occasionally allowing herself to buy one she could slip for cuttings, growing them on in her own garden till such time as she and George would make their garden together. She couldn’t take wee plants to Canada, so there’d be no point in making any more.

She edged her way through the market and
was just rounding the corner into Scotch Street when she heard the clatter of hooves. She stopped and waited while three heavy Shire horses pulling grocery vans emerged one by one from the yard behind the tall, red-brick frontage of the Co-op. They blocked her path till there was a gap in the traffic coming up Scotch Street and they were able to turn right down Thomas Street on their way to begin their morning rounds in the villages to the west of the city.

She freewheeled the remaining short distance to Freeburns High Class Drapers, its wide, plate glass windows dazzling now in the morning light. She wheeled her bicycle up a narrow entry between high brick walls, pushed open the door into a crowded yard and parked it against a mangle left to rust beside the door of what had once been the privy. She had barely crossed the stone floor of the maid’s scullery and set foot on the servant’s staircase when a familiar voice echoed from the floor above.

‘Ah, Miss Scott, you have
arrived
.’

‘Good morning, Miss Walker,’ she replied politely, as she climbed the narrow stair, perfectly aware of the older woman’s half-concealed glance at the fob watch pinned to the ample bosom of her severe black dress.

Ellie did not possess a watch, but she knew the cathedral clock had not yet struck the half-hour. She followed the dark figure across a landing stacked to
the ceiling with cardboard boxes and into a small, congested room, known as ‘the Staff-room’ which also served as an additional store for bales of cloth and yet more boxes of extra stock. She hung up her bag on the hook provided, took out her comb, ran it quickly through her hair and straightened her blouse and skirt.

Now in her sixties, Miss Walker was a tall, unbending woman with steel grey hair and eyes so pale they seemed to lack any colour at all. She had been senior assistant at Freeburns for the last thirty-five years. Her greatest virtue was the meticulous attention she gave to any piece of information that passed before her eyes, accompanied by an enormous memory for detail. Her greatest vice was a complete lack of forgiveness for anyone not similarly gifted.

She stared at Ellie as if unwilling to accept, for the moment, the girl was presenting no opportunity for the sharp comments she felt entitled, and indeed required, to make on any aspect of her punctuality, appearance or demeanour. She compensated herself for this lost opportunity by a quite unnecessary asperity in conveying her instructions.

‘I’ve made a list of replacement stock, Miss Scott. As soon as Miss Hutchinson favours us with her presence, I want you to collect the boxes and take them downstairs. You will need to do them one at a time behind the counter so that there are no
boxes sitting on the floor when customers are …’