Miss Appleby's Academy (15 page)

The church was very well attended and a great number of smart people sang and prayed and listened to the sermon and endeavoured to keep their children in order and their babies from crying. Most of it was from the cold, Emma could not help thinking. The church smelled damp, as though despite the warmer weather which was trying to produce spring, and mostly failing, nothing penetrated the stone.

She found the sermon long and the vicar was the kind of man her father would have referred to as ‘a church emptier’. He was not a learned nor a kind man, she thought, listening to him telling people that they would
go to hell unless they did a great number of unpleasant things, like not enjoying their lives one little bit.

You obviously had to be miserable, Emma thought, to go to this man’s heaven. She was bored. George was even more bored. He fidgeted, and the look of relief on his face when the sermon ended was so obvious that she had to hide a smile. George was used to a man who would tell the children stories to keep their interest, to encourage his congregation to live varied and interesting lives, to make them happy before they went home to another difficult week.

These people were poor, they worked hard, the men were either pitmen, quarrymen or ironworkers. They lived in tiny houses. They worked shifts and their women had to be up no matter what time it was to see to their needs and to the needs of their many children. The church here was gloomy and filled with a dark-grey light, yet when she and George stepped outside after the service finally finished she could not believe what she saw. It was raining, light spring rain, and through it the sun shone and beyond sun and the rain a perfect rainbow arched above the little fell town.

The vicar did not even come outside to shake his parishioners by the hand. Emma was ready to make her way back to the pub. She was not prepared for the woman who came up to her as she was leaving and said, ‘Excuse me.’ When Emma heard her, she stopped and turned, summoning a smile to her lips. The woman said with an effort, ‘My husband is not the kind of man who turns
people from his church but I’m afraid I must tell you that we don’t like women of dubious morals to attend our services. It wouldn’t be right for the rest of the congregation.’

Emma was so angry that she could feel her face burning. The woman was ugly, Emma decided. It was not her looks, it was the expression in her eyes. The wind blew her hair about and it fell loose in wisps about her bonnet. A going-to-church bonnet, Emma thought, and then thought herself frivolous.

‘You are a – a single woman with a child and – you live in a—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, so Emma helped.

‘I understand it’s a public house,’ she said.

‘A dreadful place.’

‘Well, actually it’s not that bad if you ignore the spitting and swearing and fighting,’ Emma said, and she turned away and walked George off down the path to the road.

‘There isn’t spitting and swearing, at least not much,’ he said. ‘It only counts as spitting when you spit on the floor, Mr Higgins told me.’

‘Mr Higgins tells you too much,’ Emma said.

George ignored this. ‘And even though we saw that fight Mr Higgins says there isn’t as much fighting as there used to be when he first came here because he and Mr Castle bang their heads together regularly and everybody knows except the Crook lads. Mr Castle makes people bleed. Mr Higgins says he’s a really good fighter. He could have been a professional pugilist, Mr Higgins says.’

‘Thank you, George,’ she said.

‘As for the swearing—’

‘Thank you, George,’ she said again, and he laughed.

Mr Higgins was in the kitchen when they got back and George related what had happened. Mr Higgins shook his head. ‘I don’t hold with too much church,’ he said, ‘and you couldn’t go to the Catholics either, or the Methodys, and as for the Presbyterians—’ and he went back to the bar, shaking his head.

*

Emma found after that day that she didn’t want to be there at the public house. She wanted not to care what people thought, and such people, but it was difficult to feel that she had made so bad a start. She wished she could make some kind of money somehow so that she could find a small house of her own. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to stay here, she felt just as out of place as she had done in Mid Haven, but there seemed no help for it.

*

The warmer weather had come even to this place, though it was not what she was used to. The seasons had no definite times. One was very like another. The cold intruded even now, whereas at home – she tried not to think about that. In the garden at the house – Laurence and Verity’s house, she insisted to herself – all the trees would be in bud and some of the flowers would be giving out pink and purple colour, whereas here the cutting wind came straight down from the fells and there was little warmth.

People huddled over their fires even though the nights were getting lighter, and now and then she heard the lambs in the fields, and sometimes on the breeze there was a sudden softness which could be there one day and gone the next. You couldn’t rely upon any kind of weather, but she was getting to understand that and even to like the unreliability of it.

If you didn’t know what the day could offer then you couldn’t predict anything and there was an excitement to it and she quite enjoyed the way that you needed to make fires all the year round, but she was sure that if summer did not arrive she would wish very much that she was back in Mid Haven, though not the Mid Haven she knew but the Mid Haven that had been before her father died.

She liked the way that the two men plus the young man, Jack Allen, ran the pub. It was competent and mostly organized, and she knew from what Mr Higgins said that Mr Castle had other public houses, and though they were smaller – some of them had been somebody’s front room or parlour or somebody’s house – they were now officially his. He had built up the business and though he displayed no sign that it made money she felt sure it must, and it no longer seemed a strange way to make a living. She thought he was shrewd.

But still she wanted something more than the life here offered. George did not like to go upstairs without her at bedtime, and although she was almost sure nobody would get past Mr Higgins, Mr Castle or the black dog who
roamed the hall, she was not quite happy when George was out of her sight with the noise from the bar, the men sometimes raucous towards the end of the evening. She didn’t trust anybody totally.

There were often fights, but she had grown used to that too. Mr Higgins would throw people out and though not a tall man he was big sideways and it was not flab, she thought, and after the big fight Jack was there to help.

He seemed a nice lad, from a few doors away, smiled a lot, didn’t say much, but he would do whatever was required of him. George took to following him around, and although she didn’t like to tell George all the time what she required of him, and she remembered that Mr Castle had said George wasn’t to go into anywhere other than the kitchen and upstairs, George needed male company and Jack was a good lad. He kept George out of the pub when it was busy or there might be trouble, she realized, having heard Jack say, ‘Not now, lad,’ because he was grown up and George worshipped him, ‘you just go and get on with your lessons and when you’re done we’ll go outside and I’ll show you how to play cricket.’

Emma knew nothing of games, but once or twice on a fine day she would see Mr Higgins and Mr Castle outside playing cricket with George and Jack. It was a rare occasion, mostly they were too busy, and she would keep herself back at these times so that George could enjoy their company.

Jack also taught George soccer (they called it football),
and she was glad of the respite and would go upstairs out of the way and read. She had only the books she had brought with her. She longed for new reading material, but there wasn’t another book in the place and she had no means of acquiring more.

Most of the men who came to the Black Diamond were content to sit by the fire and play dominoes or darts, or just quietly drink their evenings away; she had seen enough to know that, but she did not go anywhere near. She had a feeling that their staying here depended upon them not being seen or heard.

It had not occurred to her that people – men in particular – would talk about her or that it would matter to any of them. Mr Castle had been right, she was a middle-aged woman and she was the only one there at night and though there was no wrongdoing of any kind it made her angry, but then she knew what small towns were like: had she not lived in one all her life? Mid Haven was as different from this place as it could be, but in some ways it was very much the same.

*

The nights were now soft enough to leave the windows open when she went to bed. One particular night she couldn’t sleep for pondering her problems. She could hear from below the men’s guttural accents and their harsh laughter. She waited until it had quietened and thought then that she would sleep, but she didn’t, and in the end she took a candle and went downstairs.

A low growl, slow and venomous, met her and the big
sleek black dog emerged into what light there was, a halo from his head to his tail. She could see his bared teeth. She reached the bottom of the stairs and then got down to him.

‘Hector,’ she said, ‘it’s just me. Are you pretending to be useful?’ He recognized her voice, or understood what she said, and the growl ceased. She pulled his silky ears and to complete his discomfort she kissed him on top of his shiny head. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you went home with Mr Castle.’

‘I haven’t gone home yet,’ a voice said from the darkness, and she jumped.

‘Oh, I nearly died!’ she said.

She hadn’t seen him in days. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of him; occasionally they passed in the hall and merely nodded as though they were neighbours. She moved into the doorway, into the light, and he sat just as he always did amidst an ocean of papers.

‘Hector stays here now at night. Ed lets him out in the mornings. You aren’t afraid of the dog?’

‘I understand dogs. It’s people that are the problem.’ She liked the idea that Hector was there when she was alone, and she thought that Mr Castle was a better man than he appeared to be, leaving the dog there with her for whatever reason.

Mr Castle sat back and studied her. Not in the way in which a woman might object to, even though she was wearing a nightdress and shawl.

‘How long are we to have your company?’

She didn’t know what to say to that. ‘I didn’t mean to
put upon you and I do know what people are saying—’

He looked surprised and then nodded. ‘Sit down.’

Emma hesitated. There were two chairs, that was a surprise, though it couldn’t claim to be a comfortable chair, it was hard and unyielding.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he offered, picking up the whisky bottle which seemed ever present.

Emma couldn’t help her surprise, but shook her head. ‘I went to church and it didn’t work—’ She paused there, watched him shake his head. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ she protested. ‘If I had somewhere to go and live I would.’

Hector came over and put his face in her lap and she stroked his soft warm head.

‘He’s a lovely dog,’ she said.

‘I have half a dozen at the different pubs. They’re named after ancient heroes. Ulysses stays at home and looks after my wife and daughter.’

‘Is he black too?’

‘Aye, they’re brothers,’ and the dog, hearing his voice, left Emma and went to his idol. Mick caressed his ears.

‘Labradors are the best,’ Emma said.

She wished Mr Castle goodnight and went back to bed, feeling quite comforted somehow between the man and the dog. Hector went with her. He seemed to think it was his duty. She heard the dog lie down rather noisily at the side of the bed and give great sighs before he went to sleep. Somehow so did she.

*

Summer eventually arrived, such as it was: high winds, rain, the flowers by the roadsides lay low, battered by the wind, but dandelions studded every place where grass was allowed to lie in the little town, round faces making pools of colour. Sometimes, when Emma and George went walking, if they went by the allotments just outside the bottom end of the town down in the valley where it was more sheltered, men were working diligently, they had dug over the ground and planted it with potatoes, carrots, cabbages, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts, and as the year advanced Emma saw the neat rows of greenery waving in the wind.

There were leek trenches, currants and rows of gooseberry bushes, and she liked to see the progress of such things. She wished very much to have even a small patch of ground where she might be long enough to make such progress.

*

It was George’s birthday, he was thirteen, and on that Sunday she determined they would celebrate. She wrung a cockerel’s neck – he was eating too much and was a plump bird. She said to Mr Higgins that they were to have a special meal, so even though they were busy on Sundays she prepared it. Mr Higgins got Jack to see to the customers, and they sat down mid afternoon when it was quieter and most of the men had gone home to their Sunday dinner and a sleep before coming back for the evening session.

They were in the middle of this meal when the back door burst open and there stood the child that she had
seen swearing at Mr English and running from the classroom. The child hovered. Whatever was she doing here and how did she know where they were or who they were?

‘Shut the door,’ Emma advised her. ‘There’s a terrible draught.’

Though filled with curiosity Emma was determined to act as though children she didn’t know turned up there every day.

‘Do sit down,’ she said. ‘Would you like some pudding?’

The child didn’t say yes or no. Emma went on serving the sponge pudding with syrup to Mr Higgins and then to George, and because she was ignored the girl slid into a chair.

‘Would you like chicken first or just the pudding?’ Emma asked her.

‘The pudding first and then chicken.’

Emma duly served her a large portion and had to stop the child from eating it before she served herself.