Miss Appleby's Academy (35 page)

‘Something’s the matter, isn’t it?’ she said, peering round the door. Mick got her to come inside and shut it. She was ashen-faced. ‘Is Mammy ill again?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to die?’

That made him want to laugh, but his child’s face, white and drawn, was nothing to laugh at.

‘Do you want me to go to boarding school? Have you changed your mind about it? Because I really do like it here, I don’t want to go.’

‘You aren’t going anywhere.’

Connie looked slightly relieved at this.

‘Your mother has left me. She’s gone away with another man.’

Connie was astounded, he could see. In her world people didn’t do things like that; in a pit village people couldn’t afford to go anywhere, never mind change their marital relationships and do what they wanted. It was unheard of. It wouldn’t be soon though, the whole place would talk of it.

Mick knew that he would be blamed in some quarters and she in others, and nobody would know the real truth, at least he didn’t think so. He didn’t care: he didn’t have any pride left. For his marriage to be officially over was only the extended version of what had happened. He had not really had a marriage at all, and this child looked so like her real father that he wanted to shudder at the idea though he could not have loved her any more than he did.

‘She wanted me to be different,’ Connie said. ‘I did try when I was little, but you can’t be something you aren’t and I never was going to be able to play the piano. Even Miss Appleby agrees with that, she says she never met anybody who knew less about music than me and I should
because it’s a source of joy to everybody, but I’m very good at other things, you know.’

He let her get all this out and then he said slowly, so that they might both get used to the idea, ‘Your mother didn’t intend to leave you. She would have taken you with her, and indeed if you want to go you may. They’re going to live in Italy and it’s very beautiful so I’m told, and you would learn a great deal about the Romans.’ He tried to make a joke of it, tried to imagine what life would be like without her. How would he bear it?

Connie considered this. ‘Will you get married again and have other children? Do you want me out of the way?’

The relief was like a tidal wave over his heart. ‘I won’t get married again—’

‘But you never know. Women go around marrying even old men like you.’

He acknowledged the truth of this. Then he said, ‘I would much prefer that you should stay here with me and keep on at Miss Appleby’s school, but I won’t hold you back if you want to go with your mother and if later you wanted to go I wouldn’t stop you.’

‘But I don’t want to go anywhere,’ Connie said, beginning to cry. ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

‘I don’t want you to go either. I love you very much and I want you here with me.’

He took her into his arms and held her close while she cried and cried, and when it was over and he disentangled her hot little self from him he wished he had the sense to carry a handkerchief and he said, ‘Do you want to stay
here for the weekend with Miss Appleby and George and the others or would you like to come home to me?

‘Will you be at the house, you won’t be working?’

‘I’ll be with you.’

‘I want to come home,’ she said, and gave an enormous sniff.

He took Connie home, and it was different from how it had been. The house and garden were still neat, as Mrs Dexter’s nephew was now doing the outside jobs and Mick had already gone to Mrs Dexter and Mrs Hobson and got them to come back so that when Connie did come home it would be a place worthy of her – a real home if not a particularly conventional one. There was the smell of polish and also of baking.

He could not quite rid himself of the idea that he would find Isabel in the sitting room with the reek of alcohol all around her, but when he got in there a fire had been lit against the closing afternoon and everything was as it should have been.

Mrs Dexter brought tea in and smiled at Connie. She asked her how she was getting on at school and Connie told her all about it, which took some time, and Mrs Dexter, who had children herself, although grown up, stood there as though she were riveted and took it in and asked all the right questions. Mick was so grateful that he wanted to kiss her.

He could not remember there having been such peace before. In the evening they sat by the fire with Ulysses and Connie read to them, though Ulysses did go to sleep
in the middle of it. Upstairs the night loomed as it always had. He had not got used to being up there alone without Isabel. Perhaps he never would, but he would have to endure it. There was nothing he could do about the circumstances, he would just have to be grateful for his child and work very hard to pay off all the debts.

*

Emma had not imagined anything could be worse than not being able to see Mick Castle, but after his wife ran away it was impossible to go into the village without hearing the gossip. There were those who blamed him; there were rumours that he had beaten her and kept her short of money because the poor woman was never seen out of the house, chained to the kitchen sink by that man. No wonder she had turned to drink, anybody would.

Others said that she had always been flighty and that he should never have married her: he was too ordinary, too common for a lady like Isabel Hanlon. That would teach people who wanted to go up in the world. And now he had taken on a huge amount of debt and would probably lose everything and end up beggared.

Emma found that sometimes people stopped talking when she walked into places, but she kept on with her work and gradually she understood that they had stopped associating her with him in any way. She had found her place here, she was respected in her own right. It meant a good deal to her.

She saw Mick only when he came to bring Connie to school on Mondays and to collect her on Fridays, and in
some kind of unacknowledged agreement he did not stay a second longer than he needed to. They were never alone; he did not even drink a cup of tea in the kitchen with the children around, and very often Mr and Mrs English. She did ask him the first couple of times merely from politeness, but he thanked her and left.

She thought now of what luxury it was when he had been able to sit there and talk; it was so little, yet she yearned even for that. She tried not to think about him in other ways. She continued going to chapel with Marjorie Blythe.

They were on first-name terms by now, and sometimes she and Marjorie went out together to visit other people and she was introduced to more folk who sent their children to school, though all were day pupils it did bring in money. If she had any more boarders she would have had to move from the building and she did not want to do that. The house was all she seemed to have left of Mick. It was a proper school now with more than a dozen pupils and new children coming every week.

Connie was happy. She did not seem to miss her mother. She liked spending the weekends with her father, and sometimes, if he was going somewhere interesting, he took her out of school for a day. If he was away on business, which he often was now, Connie was content to be at school.

Emma was getting to the stage where she needed another teacher, or somebody just to look after the children if she could not be there, but she had no one she
could trust completely. Jack was not old enough and Mrs English was not well enough and Mr English had enough to do, so she coped alone.

In time, as she got to know people, she thought she would find another teacher; if not she must advertise in the local newspapers, but she was not comfortable with this. She didn’t want anybody she didn’t know well to be left in charge of her school. She was proud to think of it this way, and she had a new sign erected, and this time nobody disfigured it.

*

Laurence continued to walk daily to Nell’s grave. Emma didn’t always go with him, she had too much else to do and they had both got used to the routine. His grief was part of his life and he gained comfort from being there. In the dark afternoons she found herself at Nell’s grave before the light faded because she had nobody to talk to any more.

She didn’t want to tell Marjorie Blythe her closest secrets, she didn’t feel that she should say anything, but she knew that if Nell had been there she could have told her what it was like not to see the man you loved and to wish for him every day. It was frustrating, she told Nell’s headstone, because his wife was gone but he was not free, and no matter how long Isabel Castle lived in Italy with Henry Atkinson he never would be free.

Not that he seemed aware of any of this. He called in more and more briefly over the few weeks which followed, and then he stopped coming altogether; he would instruct
Jack to collect Connie from the academy because he was busy. Emma had no doubt that he was. His work was the only thing holding him together, she guessed – that and his child being happy.

Connie talked a lot about what she did with her father at weekends. He had time for his child, it seemed, but for no one else. Emma understood. In such a small town the fragile social position she had reached would not survive the slightest scandal.

He took Connie away to Harrogate, the watering town in Yorkshire, where they stayed at a fine hotel, and to Newcastle where she went to the museums and walked along the river. They had three days in Edinburgh, and Connie talked so much about it that Emma sensed a restlessness in George. The next time they went away Mick wrote a carefully worded note, asking if George could possibly go too because Carlisle was a fine old town and he might enjoy the change.

Emma was grateful. There was no way she could take George to such places by herself and she understood that change was good, but being left with her school and all its benefits, she fretted and then was impatient with herself. This was what she had wanted, she was free, she was doing the thing she loved best. Was nothing ever enough?

George came back, and his conversation for days was about Mr Castle. Emma escaped to Nell’s grave and complained about her lot and then felt guilty. Nell had never had an easy life, it was much harder than hers, and
now she was dead. Emma started to cry and she concluded that it was for both of them.

*

One evening when Emma was visiting Nell’s grave, she heard the gate at the entrance. Usually she wouldn’t have taken any notice, many people did as she and went there to talk to people they had loved and tried to keep them alive in this way, but she turned around. A woman was walking in her direction.

Emma didn’t recognize her at first in the rapidly failing light, and then she did, and thought herself stupid. She began to feel very strange because the woman was Nell: the same height, the same build, with Nell’s pale looks. Emma had never been convinced of ghosts but these feelings were altering quickly now; she didn’t know whether what she had wanted had come true or if she was losing her mind.

The woman came all the way to her and by then Emma was shaking.

‘You must be Miss Appleby,’ the woman said, and it was Nell’s tones exactly. ‘I’m Margaret, Nell’s sister.’

She looked intently beyond Emma and Emma stood aside so that she could see the grave.

‘An old friend wrote to me and said our Nell had died.’

Emma didn’t like to say anything. She couldn’t get used to the idea that this was not Nell and she feasted her eyes upon the woman’s familiar face. After what seemed like several lifetimes Margaret seemed to be able to drag her gaze away from the stone and she said, ‘I’ve been gone
from here more than fifteen years. I hated it, I hated how our Laurence was and the way that Nell would look after everything. I couldn’t manage it and me mam dying like that and – Mrs Inman wrote after I heard summat about what had happened and I asked her.’

Emma couldn’t help thinking that Mrs Inman would, it was just the kind of thing she would delight in doing. She was an interfering busybody.

‘I wasn’t going to come back here ever and then I thought about our Nell’s bairns. I haven’t got any, I never married.’

‘You’ve never seen the children then.’

‘Nay, I know nowt about them.’

She didn’t look rich, Emma thought, but neither did she look poor. She looked respectable, and Emma had the impression that she did not usually speak broad Durham, she was in a way assuring herself that she was home.

‘Come back with me,’ she said, ‘and if you like you can stay.’

Margaret looked suspiciously at her. ‘I don’t know whether I want to stay. I just wanted to come and see our Nell’s grave. We were close when we were bairns, and then she was the favourite and her and our Laurence got on and him and me never did so I packed my bags and went. Sometimes I think about this place and I think about my childhood and my family and I just wanted to come back.’

‘Would you like to come and see the children?’

Emma waited. Margaret went back to watching the grave and Emma walked around the graveyard. It was
quite dark now, but she was no longer afraid. Eventually Margaret came to her and they walked slowly back to the academy. Emma had no idea how she would tell the children about their aunt and decided there was no way round it so she ushered her guest into the kitchen where the two girls were sitting at the big table and introduced them.

Jack was there with them and looked as if he were fretting because he had said he would go to the Black Diamond since Mr Higgins was on his own, Mr Castle being away with George and Connie.

They sat down and had something to eat and then it was time for the girls to go to bed. She came back downstairs and Margaret was by the sitting-room fire, Hector stretched out on the rug before her.

‘They’re grand bairns,’ she said as Emma came in.

‘They miss her very much, but they can stay with me. Laurence will be in later, but there again he has a home here, so whatever you are doing or want to do with your life you don’t have to get involved.’

They sat until Laurence came in. He didn’t know her at first and then he thought she was Nell when he saw her by the lamplight, and then he realized she wasn’t. There were several things about her which gave it away. She was older for one thing, she had been the first child, her hair was almost white and she was pale, perhaps she had lived in a city where the sunshine did not fall readily on the streets.