Miss Appleby's Academy (32 page)

She laughed bitterly. ‘I’m done trying for happiness. I was trying to build a bearable life around me.’

‘Connie has her own life to lead. She will come home on Friday nights and go back on Sunday nights and that is all you can expect. If it won’t do then I’m sorry.’

‘You put her first,’ Isabel said. ‘How can you put our child before me?’

‘I have always put you first, but you are an adult and she is a child and she has suffered.’

‘We’ve all suffered,’ Isabel said. ‘I am trying to build the life I thought you wanted, where we could be together.’

‘We cannot be together all the time. Connie has established herself at school and—’

‘That’s all you care about,’ his wife accused him. ‘Miss stuck-up Appleby and her precious little school.’

He said nothing.

‘Why do you do this?’ Isabel asked.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do.’ She looked so directly at him that Mick wondered if there might be evidence on his face of his love for Emma. ‘You know that Connie isn’t yours, you’re too intelligent not to, though you pretend. You know that the only man I ever loved was Henry and yet still there is in you the decency to try. What do you do it for?’

‘I want us to be a family. I want to have night after night and day after day.’

‘We had that and it didn’t work.’

‘You always wanted Henry.’

‘I still want him. I don’t drink when I’m with Henry, you see.’

*

Now he tried to concentrate on what he had decided to do, a final attempt for a decent life for the three of them. Here, confronting Henry Atkinson, he was beginning to feel that he might be able to manage something.

‘You said that your children were in London and that you wished to be there. If you could be there, if you could sell out, would you be reasonably happy?’

Henry sat back in his chair. ‘How could that be?’ he said.

‘I would buy you out.’

Henry was no longer sitting back in his chair, he was on the edge of his seat and his eyes were wide with amazement. He sat for a few moments longer and then he shook his head and said, ‘I should give up the love of my life.’

‘Perhaps it’s time. You have had so much for so long.’

‘You wouldn’t think that if you were married to my wife.’

‘You certainly wouldn’t think that if you’d been married to mine,’ Mick said, and Henry smiled in acknowledgement of the justice of this and nodded his head. ‘I would have married Isabel had I met her first.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you would. I doubt her father had enough money to tempt you.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Henry said with some energy, ‘and neither is it true.’

‘You seduced her, knowing that you couldn’t marry her.’

Henry looked straight at him. ‘And you have never done such a thing?’ he said.

Mick tried to keep his countenance, but he could feel how his neck burned against his collar and then his face joined in, and Henry laughed.

‘Will you sell your business to me?’ Mick said.

‘I’m surprised you think you can afford it.’

‘Name the price and let’s see.’

Henry did so.

Mick got up. ‘I’ll talk to my solicitor and my bank.’

‘Wait just a moment,’ Henry said. ‘What will happen to Connie?’

Mick had spent a lot of time considering. ‘Connie is my child,’ he said.

‘I could take her.’

‘You have six children. Why would you want another?’

‘They’re all boys,’ Henry said with mock sadness. ‘Can’t you see her in a beautiful dress and all the men in the ballroom drooling?’

‘Connie is a scholar,’ Mick said in disgust, and he left.

*

After Nell’s funeral Emma worried about Laurence. He took to wandering about outside day after day. She left him for the first few days and then gave in. She trod over the wet grass in the garden, and there he was, standing beside the fence which looked down and out across the neat square fields of the dale, waiting as though Nell
would come back up for him, and then she saw he was waiting because she would not come.

‘Do you really think she’s gone to paradise, Miss?’ he said.

‘I told you. We’re brother and sister and you can call me Emma. I think if there is paradise then Nell deserves to be there.’

‘I don’t think there’s owt,’ he said. ‘I think it’s all like this bastard place. I wish I could pull our Nell out the ground. She’s always looked after all of us. I couldn’t manage it. I couldn’t do what should’ve been done. There weren’t nobody like our Nell, ‘cept you.’

*

Isabel was trying very hard to make life good for the three of them and because of this Mick couldn’t deny her anything. Every Friday evening he picked up his child and took her home, but he did not pretend to himself that Connie wanted to be there.

Connie would walk so slowly that he wanted to shout at her, she lingered by every tree, gazed at every view as though she had not seen it before, she kept turning back as if she would run away once again and then she looked at him and set her face such as he thought a child should not need to, and she carried on up the now weeded drive and tidied garden, mown lawn and shining windows. She didn’t notice any of these things, he thought: she was concentrating on the mother she did not wish to go to.

Isabel would hear them and come out of the house and down the steps and take Connie into her embrace in a
way that he had rarely seen before. But the child was like wood; she did not relent even a little, she did not look at Isabel until his wife looked anxiously at him. He always smiled encouragingly.

Isabel made splendid dinners. They tasted like cardboard. He saw every mouthful which Connie ate and she chewed as though she had to get each piece of food into her very carefully.

‘So,’ Isabel would say brightly, ‘what are you doing at school?’

And Connie would tell her, and a lot of it, Mick could see, was Mr English’s doing, and he was glad of it, as on the Friday when her enthusiasm overtook her sullenness and she announced, ‘We’re learning about the Romans. They did a lot in this area, you know, Mr English says so. He takes us on walks. They had forts here and at the top end of Northumberland they built this wall to keep out the Scots. Hadrian did it. Mr English says we can go there by train and Miss Appleby has been telling us all about the flowers around the wall and how Northumberland has a great history and lots of castles and we are to go and look at some of them.’

Isabel’s eyes had already begun to glaze over with boredom and Connie, even in her enthusiasm, knew it, Mick could see. She went on like a circus animal performing. She told her mother about the way that Mr English was going to teach her Ancient Greek and all about Mrs English who sometimes came to stay because Miss Appleby wasn’t happy about where they lived and they were going
to move into the village because the smallholding produced nothing and Mrs English had terrible arthritis and Miss Appleby had found them a house and Mr English was so pleased because it was between the council school and the academy and therefore was perfect and it was dry and Mrs English was so pleased that she cried.

*

That Sunday night when Connie went back to the academy she flung wide the door and exclaimed, ‘I’m back!’ and George and the two girls and Hector dashed into the kitchen as though she had been gone a month. Connie flung herself at Emma and said, ‘What have I missed?’

When Mick was about to leave, Emma went outside with him, and as he was about to take his leave she said, ‘Try not to mind.’

‘I’m glad she’s found somewhere she loves.’

Emma folded her arms across her breasts and said, ‘She’s the perfect scholar for Mr English. He thinks she will go far. He’s going to teach her Latin.’

‘And Ancient Greek, so I hear.’

‘Really, how very wonderful,’ and she smiled right into his face.

A tiny house next door but one to the academy had become vacant. Emma had gone to take a look at it. She saw the woman moving out, knew that her husband had recently died and she was going to Stockton to live with her brother and his family. She had no family of her own, she said. Emma sympathized.

The woman, Mrs Henshaw, looked sadly at her little house. It was, she said, owned by Mr Barron, one of the few houses which were not pit houses. Emma asked whether she minded saying if anyone had spoken for it and Mrs Henshaw said it would be too small for almost anybody, it only had an up and a down. She showed Emma inside. It had indeed only one room downstairs, but it was a very big room with a lovely fireplace. Mrs Henshaw proudly showed her the oven and the boiler and the little whitewashed pantry on the end which had a tiny window overlooking the yard.

‘There was plenty of room for me to nurse Mr Henshaw down here. You can easily get a bed in. He never went upstairs the last year,’ Mrs Henshaw said, and she sighed.

Emma asked about the rent and it was very little, so she did something interfering. She went to Mr Barron’s
shop and asked him if he had anybody in line for the place and he said, no, most people had pit houses and those who didn’t were looking for something a bit bigger.

‘Do you know of somebody that might like it?’ he said and Emma said she thought she might but she wasn’t sure about the rent, she thought it was a lot for two rooms and nothing but a shared backyard, coalhouse and outside lavatory, and Mr Barron said that it was getting well known that Miss Appleby drove a hard bargain, but he would think about it and if she wanted she could let him know, but he couldn’t wait forever. Emma said she would sort it out that very day.

She went to the council school and couldn’t help thinking how much it had changed. It now had two big stoves right in the centre of the room and Mr English had arranged his scholars and their desks in a circle right round them so that nobody was cold.

He didn’t stand at the front as he had done, the cane was gone and the blackboard had been relegated to the shadows by the far wall. Mr English sat among his pupils and told them stories of ancient Greece and Rome and he taught them maths by making it about how many fields and how many houses and how many streets they could count and multiply, subtract and divide, and he made up problems such as how long it would take Mary, who lived in Wesley Street, to walk to Thornley, the little village in the valley, if she walked at so many miles an hour. Emma was very bad at maths and thought it would have been a lot easier if Mary had stayed at home and
read a book by the fire because it was raining.

He read to them every day, exciting tales of far-away lands, and told them stories which he had begun making up about children like themselves so that they were eager to hear about them.

He combined history with geography, about the kings who fought over Northumberland, and the border reivers, and he told them that their names were very old and that their ancestors had fought not just Scots against English but Scots against Scots and English against English and that in this very area they had come screaming across the hills on horseback, taking away cattle, looting and thieving.

The children found this very exciting, Emma herself was rather taken, and wondered whether the Applebys had been involved. She was very pleased to find that they had been.

She sat down by the fire and told them bible stories. She had brought with her brownies which had cocoa in them and tasted like chocolate. There was a square each – it had taken some doing for all those children, but she was determined that they should have a treat, and she had ordered milk for everyone. She and Mr English had coffee and brownies, and he said he had never tasted anything quite as good.

While they were having this break she told Mr English about the little house and he shook his head and said he didn’t think that Mrs English would ever leave the smallholding which was where she had been born. He wasn’t
sure the school board would like him to move, and Emma said that she didn’t think it was any of their business, but of course they would say it was and he must put it to them that Mrs English would die if she were left there.

It was true of course, and he agreed, and once he had eaten his brownie he seemed to view the whole thing in a different light. He would put this to them and said that if he was in the village he could spend more time at the school and they had to be glad about that.

Emma thought she had never seen Mr English so content. He was a real schoolmaster now, a very good teacher. The children listened when he spoke, he didn’t have to command or punish, they liked him, she could see by their faces, and he was relaxed and would laugh with them and do as much for them as he could.

Emma stayed a while and he told them about the moon and the stars and also about the constellations which were to do with their birthdays, some thought, and there again they were keen to know which was theirs and the blackboard came back into play.

Two big boys pulled it forward, because it was now on wheels, one of Jack’s better ideas, and she drew for them the Plough and the Great and Little Bears, they thought that was funny and she told them what to look for in the skies at night. Emma could picture them standing outside their houses in the street, or perhaps behind where everything was quiet and dark and there was nothing between themselves and the stars. The stars were something to try for, Emma thought. Why not?

She asked Mr English if he thought they should have a picnic for all the scholars on the first good day, and she would bake for them. The children thought it was a very good idea, though as she suggested it the heavens seemed to open and the rain came down and stotted off the roof and all around the building, and it seemed so funny at that moment that they laughed.

*

She did not forget Nell. Daily she took Laurence to Nell’s grave. She would not have gone so often, but he insisted. It became part of his life, just as going home from the Black Diamond day after day had been his routine. Now he lived at the academy, had his own room and Emma was trying to persuade him to eat, but he couldn’t. All he wanted was beer and the sight of Nell’s grave, so she had to take him there.

Mick had given her Jack in the same way as he had given her Hector. Jack was an exceptionally clever lad and she thought Mick had done it deliberately because he wanted the boy to do what round here they called ‘better himself’. Jack’s mother was very proud of what her son was achieving. She greeted Emma loudly whenever she saw her, for the benefit of her friends and neighbours, and Emma would smile and tell her that Jack was the brightest lad in the world, which of course he was, and Mrs Allen was fairly glowing at this. ‘Eh, Miss Appleby,’ she said, ‘you’re a grand lass. Giving my Jack such an opportunity.’