Miss Appleby's Academy (30 page)

‘I don’t want to leave Nell here without me.’

‘I’ll sit up. Nobody will touch anything.’

*

She didn’t stop staring at the fire, as though it held her somehow, as though it were all there was to look at. Then she said softly and desperately, so that he wished he could take her into his arms, ‘How could it have happened and why didn’t they do something?’

‘People are afraid of things they don’t know.’ He sat for a few moments and then he said, apologetically, ‘I need a drink. Would you like some whisky?’

‘I don’t know, I never had any.’

That was invitation enough. He went and found a bottle behind the bar and poured it into little glasses and brought it across. She didn’t drink it: she just held the glass in her hands and smelled it from time to time. It was comforting, he knew, and if you closed your eyes you were
in Scotland, staying in some lochside hotel, by a grand fire, and there were dogs asleep as Hector was now and the brass of the bar glinted in the firelight. In the morning you would awake to mist and that day you were to climb a mountain which you could see beyond the loch from your hotel window, and when you went to bed you heard the soft lapping of the loch in the wind. You could look forward to the day and all would be well. He was enjoying this vision, just getting to the part where Emma was there with him and they were together, when she said, ‘I’ll have to try and persuade Laurence to come and live with me.’

‘That might not be easy,’ Mick said.

Emma wanted to go upstairs and see her sister again and he went with her.

‘Can she stay here until I talk to the vicar?’ she said.

‘Would you like me to go?’

‘No, I would like to do it myself.’

Laurence awoke, they could hear him moving around downstairs and they went down immediately, thinking he might have forgotten what he was doing here, but he was merely sitting over the ashes of the fire. Mick had been putting coal on it all night, but had felt too drowsy to move for the past hour or so. He had just watched Emma looking at the blaze as it died down and he tried to commit to memory every part of her: the small well-worn hands, her straight hair (he had never seen such straight hair, and always put up so neatly out of the way as though it were nothing but a nuisance).

No expensive lotions could ever have reached Emma’s
face, so that every mark could be seen from what she had suffered in her life. She had never been beautiful, but her skin looked so soft to him and her eyes so steady that he loved all of her, every inch, every move, every time she spoke, every breath she took.

Her dress was worn, though at one time it had been a deep blue, and her body was skinny, and then he remembered that it wasn’t when you touched her, she was satin and silk below the shapeless dress. She was the dearest person in the whole world and he wanted her so much that he thought he might die for lack of her.

He wanted to be with her, so that each second he was not there mattered to him. All else bored him; he was desperate for her presence. The world was grey and unnatural without her, but he understood what she felt for Nell, that her world was the less without the sister she had found, and he was angry for what Nell had had to put up with and he wanted to change things for the better, and he knew that Emma’s school could do that, she was right. They would keep and look after the little girls and whatever other children were sent to them. They would try for a better world for them; that was how it was meant to be.

*

By the next morning Emma’s feelings for Nell intruded and she was so aware of Laurence, how hurt he was, how he grieved. She must put her own feelings aside and think of him.

‘Can I not stay here?’ he was saying.

‘Wouldn’t you like to see Edie and Rose?’

Laurence shook his head and Emma knew that he did not want to leave Nell. Indeed he said nothing more and she could hear him as he climbed the stairs, and after that there was silence.

*

In the end Emma told the two girls that their mother had died and gone to heaven. What on earth else could she say? She was surprised by their response. They both stood for a few moments, taking in what she thought they could not understand, and then they turned and ran away. She left them to get used to it, if anybody ever got used to loss – she didn’t think they did other than those who believed in heaven. She would say anything to ease their grief and heaven was such a lovely idea, but later Rose, the elder child, came to her in the kitchen when she was preparing the evening meal and said, ‘Can I talk to you, Miss?’ (In vain had she told them she was Miss Appleby and she had given up trying to persuade them to call her that.)

Emma turned from the stove and regarded the child’s serious face and encouraged her to sit down at the big table. When they were seated close, Rose said, ‘We’re worried about me mam.’

‘Worried?’ Emma didn’t understand this. ‘Why is that?’

‘Well …’ Rose looked down at her thin fingers in some dismay, and then she said, ‘Our dad died, you know, ages ago like. Do you think he went to heaven, Miss?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Emma said readily. She couldn’t think of anything else which might satisfy the child.

‘We don’t want me mam to go then.’

This was not what Emma had expected, and she waited for the explanation. But the child said nothing more and went crimson in the face and her bottom lip wobbled as though she would cry.

Emma said, ‘Why not?’

‘Because me dad used to knock me mam around and we don’t want him doing it up there,’ and she pointed to the ceiling.

Emma had to stop herself from gathering this child into her arms, and she also had to stop herself from smiling.

‘It isn’t like that up there.’

Rose waited for a moment and then she raised doubtful eyes to Emma’s face. ‘Are you sure, Miss?’

‘Absolutely positive. When people go to heaven they become lovely like angels.’

‘Even me dad?’

‘Even him. It’s there for all of us.’

Rose looked all over Emma’s face to make sure she was not being deceived and Emma had to hold her expression still to meet the child’s needs. For such young people, she thought, they knew a great deal.

Rose went off, seemingly pleased with this, but within hours the younger child, Edie, wanted her mam and cried to go home until she cried herself to sleep on Emma’s lap. Emma didn’t blame them, it was how she was feeling herself.

She apologized to Jack for leaving him there with four children, but he seemed unperturbed.

‘Me mam came over and stayed until late and then I watched her home, but I didn’t leave the bairns.’

She thanked him, told him how kind he was and watched his face glow. There was nothing better than a lad who was responsible in a crisis.

‘Would you wish to become a teacher, Jack?’ she asked him, and his face lit up.

‘Do you think I might, Miss?’

‘I think you would make an excellent teacher,’ she said. ‘I will help you as much as I can.’

He went home to see his mam, Emma thought, to tell her of the teaching, and then came back almost immediately to catch up on various jobs, so she left him to mind the children again and she went to the Black Diamond. Mick was still there, sitting watching Laurence who had spent a lot of time upstairs with Nell’s body and was now stretched out, asleep in the bar.

‘Shouldn’t you be with Isabel?’ she said, and he looked up. He seemed so tired, so drawn, pale and with a dark shadow where he had not shaved.

‘I’m going to take Larry back to the schoolhouse,’ she said. ‘I think he will be better when he sees the little girls.’

Mick didn’t get up immediately when she sat down, and she had a terrible desire to touch him, but of course she didn’t. She gave him what she was not convinced was a bright smile and watched him as he walked towards the door. When he had gone she looked down and hoped that Laurence would sleep for a while, but he awoke at that moment, looking confused.

At first he thought she was Nell and said her name, but she shook her head and told him flatly that Nell was dead, as she had promised herself she would, hoping it was the best thing to do, hoping that in time he would accept the idea. She hoped in time that she would accept it too.

He then insisted on going upstairs to sit with her and it seemed fruitless to try to persuade him otherwise. Ed had come in, and he looked so pale that it was obvious he had not slept either. After a long while Laurence came downstairs and wanted to go to the house at Road Ends because Nell must be there, and she found herself following him, trying to talk to him, and Laurence picking up speed when he knew she was trying to stop him.

When they got to the house he had a key and undid the lock rapidly and then he went inside and shouted Nell’s name. Up and downstairs he ran. Emma stood by the door and watched him until at last he stopped, exhausted. It took time – she thought he was never going to halt the blind scurrying – but in the end even he could finally understand that Nell was not there and neither were the children, and that was when he came back to her and stood, disconsolate. She waited. He stood for a long time; all the while she could hear the cold wind blowing across the fields towards them.

‘Come back to the schoolhouse with me. The children are there.’

He looked hopefully at her. Then he nodded.

It was slow progress because every moment he thought
that he might have missed something, she could tell; that in some corner he had not seen, in some cupboard where he had not looked, in some small part of the backyard Nell was there, hanging the clothes out in the stiff breeze, seeing to soup over the kitchen fire. Or she was about to come home, it was night and he was there by himself with the children and he was waiting for her footsteps, for the way that she alone could make him feel safe, her breathing and her presence, and perhaps she would even call softly up the stairs and tell him that she was back and all was well.

She would not care about the men who had taken her up the alley and had her body, however briefly. How could she do that? Emma wondered. How could you be so desperate? Yet thousands upon thousands of women had done so, and it was nothing worse than having a man like the one she’d once seen in the street who asked his wife if she was fucking mad, Emma had heard them, she a pace or two behind him as he shouted, wondering whether he might hit her.

Did men really hate women so very much? Some of them did. She had heard of one man who took his wife into the backyard in the stinging wind and pulled all her fingernails out with some implement while her children watched.

Nell made her money from their bodies and from her own, and it was much better than what many women had. How hard was that, how impossible? Did not women deserve better? Emma felt sure they did.

When they finally reached the academy Laurence hesitated as they went in by the gate. He did not expect Nell to be there, Emma thought, but the girls came to him, shouted his name, Uncle Laurence, Uncle Laurence, and they wrapped themselves around him, and he lifted them both up into his arms and said their names and kissed them.

The undertaker had been directed by Dr Blythe to the schoolhouse from the Black Diamond where Emma had left instructions. She could see that the first thing on the man’s mind was money. He did not seem happy to be there and gazed around the room she had made her study with great curiosity, as though he had not seen a woman in a study before. Perhaps, she thought, he had not.

She had two dozen girls coming from the council school that afternoon. She had suggested to Mr English that all the children should learn hygiene and cookery.

‘Hygiene?’ Mr English as a classics scholar could not envisage this, she could tell. Even now she had the Englishes to stay at least once a week: it gave Mrs English a change, and she knew that Mr English liked being there.

Mr English was sitting in the most comfortable of her chairs and Mrs English had fallen asleep after tea and cake in a way in which Emma hoped she did at home, but she thought that it was the noise of the children which Mrs English liked, perhaps the rhythm of their talk and laughter sent her to rest.

‘Hygiene is the most basic thing of all,’ Emma said, ‘and as for the ability to cook, everyone should know how
as we can’t always rely on someone else for this.’

She could see that Mr English was still not convinced these things should be taught in school. Tomorrow she would have the boys here for the same kind of lesson and that was going to be much more difficult. On top of this she had Nell’s funeral to arrange, the girls to console, and each day she had to prevent Laurence from going back to Road Ends because he was still convinced that Nell would come home.

He nodded over the fire while the freezing rain fell. She was even guiltily pleased when he went off to the Black Diamond in the early afternoons. She did try to make him eat first, but Laurence was reluctant to put anything inside him which would impede the effect of drink.

‘I don’t know how you intend to do this, Miss Appleby,’ the undertaker, Mr Crouch, said now, urging his fat form down into Emma’s only armchair in her study, as though he might be staying for some time. ‘But somebody must pay and I don’t suppose the parish is going to do it with any willingness in light of the kind of woman Mrs Whit-tington was.’

‘I imagine that might depend on how many of them were making use of Nell’s services,’ Emma said.

Mr Crouch fairly spluttered over the tea she had given him, and she only hoped he would choke. She was worried for the sake of her hearthrug; she didn’t want Mr Crouch’s spit anywhere near it.

‘There is no problem about money,’ she said, ‘and I will
let you know about the funeral arrangements.’

She did not want to approach the vicar, but since Nell had been Church of England it was the right thing to do. She went the very next morning and was seen inside by his wife, who pursed her lips together as though she had just devoured a lemon. Mr Inman’s study was dusty and his carpet was grimy. Emma was rather pleased that his wife was a shoddy housekeeper. She sat down unasked and waded in anyway.