Miss Appleby's Academy (20 page)

‘You love the woman you married. Nobody would recognize her now.’

‘At least I got Connie out.’

Sam accepted the change of direction. ‘Does she like being with Miss Appleby?’

‘I think it’s too soon to tell, maybe it’ll be all right for a while and then she’ll hate it like she has other schools. What are you looking at?’

Sam was staring at him across the room. ‘You do know people are talking?’

Mick lifted his eyes to the heavens. ‘There’s nothing for them to talk about.’

‘She lived at your pub.’

‘Not with me. I went home. She’s an old maid, give me some credit. She’s plain and prim, and I don’t think she even likes me.’

‘People won’t send their children to her if you spend time there.’

‘I go to see Connie. And besides, they have very little choice. Norton English is a clever man, but he can’t control children, and nuns are, well, nuns. Miss Appleby will run a good school.’

‘And you’re paying for it?’

‘One of the best deals I ever made if Connie is happy,’ Mick said.

*

One Monday afternoon that autumn George and Connie were sitting over the living-room fire reading when Emma saw a well-dressed woman coming up the road and turning in at her path. The woman wore dark but expensive clothes and was smiling politely.

‘Good day, Miss Appleby. I am Mrs Summers. I would like to have a word with you.’

Emma wanted to suggest that it might wait for another day, but there was something determined about Mrs Summers’ mouth that made Emma think the woman might try to insist, and so she gave way and invited her in.

‘My husband is Eden Summers, he owns the ironworks here and is on the council. We are very much involved in the church. I understand you attended while I was away. I’m sorry that the vicar and his wife were apparently so unwelcoming, but you must understand that if you intend living here you have made a very bad start. You have upset a good many other people by setting up a school. You are an incomer, Miss Appleby, and have taken a great deal on
yourself without leave from anyone.’

All this before they had even sat down, Emma thought wearily. She had been going to offer Mrs Summers tea, but after this long speech Emma sat down with the woman and then couldn’t think of anything to say. But it wasn’t necessary. Mrs Summers merely paused for breath and then carried on.

‘Mr English is paid to teach the children here. It is hard to believe that you went to the school and taught the children, unasked and uninvited. You must not attempt to usurp his position here. It is a small town, everyone knows everyone. I’m only sorry that you took it into your head to imagine that we needed another school. If you had made enquiries before plunging into this matter without asking anyone you would have been better informed. I’m sure I don’t need to say anything else. You will naturally take down the sign and perhaps find somewhere which needs your services. It will not, however, be here.

‘You have no right either legal or moral to stop me from setting up a school here,’ Emma said. ‘I am educated and—’

‘Not in England. Do you intend to beggar Mr English by your conduct? How is he to make a living if you steal his pupils away? Have you no concern for anyone other than yourself? I understand that the Englishes live here with you. Do you know how that looks?’

Emma just wished that she would go.

‘This place needs him,’ Mrs Summers said. ‘It does not need somebody from a foreign land coming here and
trying to teach her granny how to suck eggs.’

‘I am not from any foreign place. I am English. I was born here.’

That stopped Mrs Summers. She stared.

‘My father lectured at Durham University when he was a very young man; my mother came from this place, they had a house here, my grandparents are buried here.’

Mrs Summers had gone white.

‘My father won a place to teach at a New England college and my brother was born there. I was born a few houses along from here. I even remembered the view. I left here when I was a small child and I wanted to come back. I did not think to be so ill received.’

Mrs Summers didn’t answer immediately, but when she did there was an expression on her face which Emma was surprised to see. It was pity. She watched the woman pause and it was as if the pity was not real but just a front for some kind of different feeling. It was almost like watching someone eat a piece of chocolate cake: it was a triumph, an enjoyment. Mrs Summers was pressing her lips together so that she would not smile and the pity was completely gone. She spoke slowly as though she relished what she was saying.

‘Your father was estranged from his parents, Miss Appleby. When he met your mother he walked out and left his wife and three children for her. After you were born there was no way they could have remained here. He had to claim you as his own; she had to endure the stigma of being an unmarried mother in a pit town until
he did so. His wife was so ashamed of what he had done, his parents were broken-hearted. Three small children, one of them only a baby, four months old, I think. He had been conducting a clandestine affair with your mother when his wife was pregnant with their third child.’

Emma stared. She didn’t know how long she went on staring. She wanted to deny such terrible things, to claim them as untrue. Her father could not have done such a thing. She remembered how gentle and caring he was.

‘Your parents were never married, how could they be?’

Stupidly all Emma could think was how horrified Laurence would be if he discovered that he was illegitimate. So stuffy, so righteous. And then she remembered what he had said, that he was a better man than their father had been. Laurence knew, or at least he knew some of it, and yet he had not told her. He had risked her leaving. No wonder he had been so upset at the docks in Boston. He had tried to shield her because he knew how much love and respect she had for their father and he had gone about it the wrong way and this was the result. Emma could not help knowing that if she had been his brother rather than his sister he would have said something.

After that she had a desire to cry, long and hard, to run away so far that she need never come back, but she had done that once already and it seemed that it had caused more problems. Since she could do neither of these things she sat there, trying to keep a civilized expression on her face.

Somehow she rose to her feet. ‘Thank you for coming, Mrs Summers.’

‘I’m sorry to bring you such ill tidings,’ the woman said, smirking.

‘Not at all,’ Emma said stiffly.

Nothing else was said. It seemed an interminable amount of time before her visitor got to the front door and during that time Emma tried not to hurry her along; it seemed that the distance between there and the outside door was a hundred miles and Mrs Summers’ steps slowed and then lagged and it took several years before they reached the door. Emma grasped it, hung on, even though her nails were breaking against the wood and her breath had left her.

She ushered the woman out. She wished at that point she had stayed in New England and married the Judge and not known any of this. Did Mick Castle know? He might have done, but would not connect it up. Men would not, could not, see things like that. He was only grateful that his child had a teacher and some care.

The door was finally closed. She turned around and leaned against it hard as though Mrs Summers was about to break in, and when her breath had gone in and out several times and nothing happened she allowed her body to slide into the nearest chair.

Then she heard the sound of the children and was obliged to pretend that all was well. They were eager for supper; they knew she had had a visitor. Connie had known it was that awful Mrs Summers who tried to keep
everybody right, and they had waited. Mr English came back from school and Emma had to admit that he was looking much better now that he was well fed and he and his wife were well housed.

She paced the house long after everyone was asleep and then she took Hector outside. He stayed by her. How strange that the dog should comprehend when the children had not. They were self-absorbed as children always were. Hector followed close by as she walked around the garden, and watched the moon. It was the same moon that her parents had seen, that her grandparents had endured after their son disgraced them. What was her father like as a young man? She could not think of him as negligent. She could not accept that he would have done such a thing as to leave a woman who was his wife and with whom he had fathered three children. It must be wrong, and yet she saw in her mind Mrs Summers’ shocked and satisfied face. It was true. It must be true.

She remembered his caring of George. How she had brought the baby into the house in a blanket and he had accepted him so freely. Did he not think of his own children? Emma thought she could never have left her husband and three children. Was it not the same? Were you not bound irretrievably to the person you were married to by the Church and the law, when you had lain with them, spent so many days with your offspring? Was there no joy? Was there nothing to hold you? However did you walk out and leave three children and the woman you had sworn to stand by? She could not reconcile it with her idea of
how things were meant to be or how things had been.

For the first time she wished that she could have spoken to Laurence. She went to bed, but did not sleep. She tried not to see her father in this new light; she tried not to believe what he had done. She tried to comfort herself, saying that he was not that man, and then she remembered Mrs Summers’ face.

She lay watching as the dawn came early and then she got up and started the fire in the stove, sat over the hearth in her night things with a big blanket around her, and when it was alight she put on the kettle; when it finally boiled she made some tea.

The tea made her feel better, at least for a while, and then the children were awake and she was glad that she had no time to think, but later in the day after Jack arrived she sent him with a note to Mr Castle. She had no one else to confide in. Mick Castle might be able to help, she thought.

By the time he had come to see her Mr and Mrs English were alone by the back-room fire with the door shut, the children were in bed and she was exhausted though she didn’t know it until the room was quiet and the house was silent and there was only Mr Castle and Hector and herself and the door was closed. She burst into tears.

‘Emma?’ He hadn’t called her by her first name before and she wished he had not done so now. She held up one hand, palm turned to him, even backed away slightly as though he had made steps towards her.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I shall be fine.’

‘What is it?’

He drew nearer, and she wished he hadn’t and then was glad he had done. She turned a tear-stained face to him as she would never have done with another man, and she didn’t even understand how she could do it when he was there; it was just that she had had nobody to turn to since her father had died, and then she saw her father flawed and broke down.

Mick stood back since she didn’t seem to want him there, though that wasn’t quite true, but it was enough to hold him beyond her and she was perhaps grateful for that.

‘I heard such awful things about my father from Mrs Summers.’ She couldn’t get her breath.

He didn’t say anything. She waited for him to question her, though it was the last thing she could have stood and in a way she wished that he had been less sensitive. If he had ploughed in at that point she would have retreated, perhaps even apologized, and the moment would have passed and she would have stood alone, and she would have managed it. She thought for a second, I would have been fine, and then she knew that it was not so.

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘That my father – it isn’t true – that my father walked out on his family, ran away with my mother. He can’t have done it.’ She waited for him to say that it was not so, that he knew nothing about it, that it could not have been, but he did not and when the time went forward and still he did not she found the tears dripping. ‘Did you know?’

He stood silent until she could have screamed and as
the silence went on she felt worse and worse. And she could see comprehension in his face.

‘I didn’t make the connection,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ She glared suddenly at his white face, his dark eyes.

‘It’s a common enough name in these parts. How could I have known?’

‘He did then.’ It was almost a question, but she didn’t want it to be.

‘As far as I know.’

‘And how far is that?’ She was glaring at him again as though it were his fault.

He looked down, as if the floor held fascination.

‘I know the family.’

‘Are they here?’ Emma was aghast. It had not occurred to her that her father’s infamy mattered here, yet it would, she saw, that kind of thing mattered for years and years, perhaps even for generations.

‘Some of them.’

‘The wife?’

‘She died.’

‘Oh God! The children?’

‘One of the girls moved away. The other girl lives here. The boy, he’s here too.’

Emma’s hands were shaking. She could not look at him. ‘Tell me about them.’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t know about the one who moved away. The girl married a pitman. She’s widowed with children. The boy is here too. Larry.’

Emma stared in disbelief. ‘Is that Laurence?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is he married?’

‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘He sits by the fire in the Black Diamond in the afternoons.’

‘He’s a drunk then.’

Mick said nothing to that. Emma could not believe that her father had called both his sons by the same name. She knew that some people did such things, but surely that was only when one son had died. Was that how her father had felt?

‘My brother is called Laurence,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to come here, but I had no one else. You said the daughter was widowed. Is she very poor?’

‘Emma—’ he stopped. ‘How do I say this to you?’ He said it by walking away, standing beside the window, looking out though it had been dark for hours and there was nothing to see but shadows. ‘Nell Whittington is the local whore.’