Miss Appleby's Academy (4 page)

‘Now, young lady,’ her mother said, a trifle sharply.

Mick wished he could have said, as his mother might have done, ‘Come and sit with us – leave the dinner and let’s talk and think of other things.’ His mother had been the kind of woman who made stews so that it didn’t matter whether you ate at a particular time, but Isabel thought differently and her cooking was the kind that would not and should not wait, and the smell of it through the door she had left open drew him towards the dining room. His wife, Mick thought, was given to practical things, she cared nothing for books and her cooking was perfection.

Connie went on writing and looking at her book. Isabel glanced appealingly at him before she left the room. Then she went back to the kitchen.

‘You can finish it afterwards,’ he said to his daughter.

‘I’m stuck. Will you help me?’

‘I have to go straight back.’ She wasn’t stuck, he knew, she just wanted an excuse to keep him at home in the evenings and he wished he could have done so. He was saying these words as they reached the dining room.

‘Not again,’ his wife said.

‘I cannot help it. I’ve nobody reliable on the door and it’s Saturday.’

‘One of these days you’ll come home for your dinner and remember that you have a family.’

‘Isabel—’

‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘before it spoils.’

*

Mick’s pub was the Black Diamond, one of half a dozen public houses he owned locally and the biggest. It was a common enough name in that area. The Black Diamond was the coal which was mined there. The trouble was that coal-mining was already on the way down. At one time the little town had been home to five thousand people and although it was still buoyant enough in some ways it was as though the heart had already been knocked from it, and that was hard because it was his home. He had been born there when the ironworks and the coal-mining and the coke-making were at their most lucrative.

Now the ironworks was failing because the man who owned it, Eden Summers, had moved most of the work to another town a dozen miles away. Mick couldn’t think well of him for it. What was it with some men that they cared more for making fortunes than for people? It was as though the town sat on the edge of a cliff, though in fact it sat on a ridge high above Weardale and beyond it the moors petered out into mucky little pit towns before they reached Durham City, a dozen miles away.

The big pit in the town was still open, though there were
rumours that it wouldn’t be for much longer. Two thousand men worked there. He couldn’t imagine what would happen when it closed: it was too hard to think about.

He liked his pub, especially at this time of year when the nights were drawing in. The men drank there all year round, some of them every night, though most of the pitmen couldn’t do that because they were on different shifts, so it was usually Fridays and Saturdays or whenever they could get away.

The place was big. It had been built years ago as a private house, but the man who owned it went off to South America, and Mick had bought it at a knock-down price. Most people rented their houses and those who could afford to buy them rarely bought a big house in such a place. Only the vicar and the doctor owned houses this size, and he had been granted a licence for it.

It was well built: thick stone walls, big marble fireplaces, a number of outhouses, a square yard at the back, but at the front it faced right onto the road beyond the wide pavement, another reason why he thought nobody else would have wanted it.

When he got back it was almost nine o’clock and the place was already rowdy with voices. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, despite his wife’s annoyance, he had to be there. Employing other people to make certain everything was all right did not work, he had discovered over the years, though the smaller pubs were in tiny places and he did not have the same problems there. He was big and it was useful to be able to throw people out,
though usually there were willing hands to help him.

The men didn’t like fighting, but after a few pints the younger ones in particular, not satisfied with hewing coal or quarrying stone all week or sweating in Summers’ damned foundry, had sufficient energy to quarrel and then they would break tables, chairs, glasses, bottles – anything they could – and he wasn’t having that. They could fight outside. The people living nearby might and could complain often at the noise, but once men were beyond the doors of the pub Mick didn’t consider it his problem.

Saturdays were the worst because nobody had to work the following day. He and Ed Higgins, a Yorkshireman who had worked behind the bar for five years, were prepared. Ed, not tall, had been a boxer in his youth, and though he was stouter than he used to be he would not have any brawls in the bars and was inclined to bang troublemakers’ heads together and throw them out.

There were three scuffles that night and it was late when they closed the doors and locked up. Ed and Jack Allen, the young lad who helped during the day moving barrels of beer and clearing up and anything else Mick and Ed couldn’t see to, finished behind the bar while Mick went into the back to add up the takings. They would wash and dry the glasses and put them away and wipe the table tops. In the morning two women came in to sweep and scrub the floors, the passages, the windows and anything else which Ed thought needed attention.

Mick always meant to stay at home until eleven in the mornings, but somehow it never worked out like that.
There was always too much to see to, a delivery or a problem, and it wasn’t right to leave the others to sort it out: they didn’t have the kind of experience or the ability to deal with it.

It was after one o’clock when he arrived home. He did not expect Isabel to be waiting for him. The only one who greeted him was Hector, the big black dog. Ulysses, the other black dog who used to stay at the pub overnight until some years previously when armed men had broken in – God only knows what they were doing, nothing was left there – came home with him. They didn’t kill Ulysses but he was lucky they missed him. There were bullets stuck in the woodwork. Mick thought the dog had run low and quick and hidden, as his instincts bid him, and Mick decided he would rather lose what there was – no cash, he always took it home with him – than his beloved dog.

So the house was silent. He let the dogs out into the garden and followed them there for a few minutes, but they knew how late it was and did not linger.

He took them back into the kitchen and the minute he made a light he knew that something was wrong. The place was a mess. Isabel always cleared up before going to bed, but the pots and pans were just as they had been before dinner. The warmth had long since died. It smelled of cold grease.

He bounded upstairs. He went straight into the bedroom which he shared with his wife, and there too it was untidy. She had shed her clothes before she got into bed, there was a trail of them upon the floor, and what hit him was
the strong smell of brandy. A glass lay on the rug where some of the brandy had run out. His wife was asleep.

‘Isabel?’ As he drew nearer the stink of brandy grew stronger, and he knew from experience that there was no point in trying to rouse her. She was drunk.

*

He didn’t go to the Black Diamond the next morning. Isabel did not stir. He went downstairs and gave Connie her breakfast and stopped her from going up to see her mother; he told her that Isabel was feeling a bit queasy and needed to go back to sleep.

At midday, the time that the roast was usually underway in the oven and there was the promise of Sunday dinner to come, he went down to the pub and took Connie and the dogs with him. When he got back Isabel had still not been downstairs. He distracted Connie by promising her a walk in the afternoon and finding cheese and bread for her to stave off the hunger, and then he went upstairs and found Isabel awake.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Mick—’ She sounded as though she were about to cry.

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Connie—’

‘I’ll see to Connie. Do you want anything?’

She managed to shake her head.

‘Go back to sleep,’ he said.

She did. He went downstairs and took Connie and the dogs for a long walk and then he cleaned the kitchen. He had already told Ed and Tom that he would not be back
that day. He made up the fire and sat there by it and read to Connie in the evening. When she had gone to bed, he went to bed too – he was exhausted.

In the morning when he awoke his wife was crying.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what happened. I just—’ She stopped there.

He took her into his arms. ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ he said. ‘It was nothing. Everybody does that sooner or later. It was frustration. You were fed up. I wasn’t there and I should have been, that’s all.’

‘I will try to be a better wife to you.’

‘You always are.’ He kissed her. He put his arms around her. He held her close. He laughed into her ear. ‘You snored,’ he said, and she protested and pushed at him, and they both laughed until it was forgotten.

*

‘Connie has stopped attending lessons, Mr Castle.’ Sister Luke had tried to put it delicately. Mick looked into the nun’s sweet round face and noted that there was regret.

‘She became very naughty over a period of time. At first we didn’t like to say anything. It’s hard when a child looks like an angel and behaves as what can only be described as the very opposite. We did attempt to remonstrate with her, but it did no good and we didn’t like to say anything to you – there was such a feeling of failure. Gradually over the past few weeks she has been absent more and more.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ was all Mick could manage. He felt as if he were back at school himself, sitting there
on the other side of the headmistress’s desk in the heart of the convent school.

The whole thing made him feel uncomfortable. He was not a God-fearing man, and the statues of Jesus in white looking strangely blonde, fair-skinned and pale-eyed, and Mary in blue left Mick confused. He had had to talk Sister Luke into taking Connie in the first place because he and Isabel were not Catholic. The children, depending on which school they went to, were divided into ‘Catholic Cats’ and ‘Church Dogs’, and there were fights on the streets on certain days.

He had thought that the quiet nuns would calm his daughter. It seemed now as though he had been wrong. He had known Connie was unhappy for some time, but was loath to move her because the other school took the children in the town up to the age of twelve, all in one class, and he didn’t think much could be learned that way.

‘Mr Castle,’ Sister Luke looked straight at him from large saucer-shaped blue eyes, ‘Connie is exceptionally clever. She is bored at our little school and we have a great many children here who need our help because they are so far behind. She is disrupting the other children. I am going to have to ask you to take her away.’

*

Telling Isabel was hard, and he had chosen the wrong time. She didn’t look at him. She was making the evening meal and her face was red and moist from working at the range, dealing with pans of simmering water and a hot
oven inside which was cooking pork with sage. The pans held potatoes and Brussels sprouts and carrots, and somewhere about there was the smell of apples baking slowly with rich butter.

Her bright yellow hair had gone into little damp tendrils about her face where it had escaped from its neat fastenings at the back of her head. She banged about for what seemed to him like a very long time. Then she said, ‘And what do you propose to do now?’

‘I think she should go to boarding school. There’s nothing here worthy of her.’

Isabel stopped what she was doing and turned to him. ‘You what?’ she said.

‘There is no practical alternative.’

‘She could go to the council school. It’s good enough for other children.’

‘Sister Luke says she’s very clever—’

‘I’ve seen no evidence of it unless you mean that she’d rather sit with her face in a book on her own than take part in what anyone else is doing or has suggested. She won’t even play with other children. I’m not sure that’s very clever. I have done everything I can. She’ll hardly let me put her into a pretty dress. She does nothing such as girls should. She cannot sew, knit or embroider, though I have tried to teach her. She won’t have piano lessons or go to dancing school. She avoids the kitchen. I don’t think she even knows how to put the kettle on. It’s as if we had the boy you always wanted.’

He was stung and answered too quickly, though he
didn’t realize this until it was too late. ‘I never said anything of the kind.’

‘You didn’t have to. It’s what all men want, a child in their image.’

Mick stood like a stranger and listened to her shouting at him. How had things got to this and why hadn’t he noticed?

‘I love her. I don’t care.’

Isabel didn’t seem to hear this; she didn’t acknowledge it.

‘Why don’t we ask her what she wants to do?’ he suggested.

‘She’s a child. What can she know?’ Isabel sounded tired, defeated.

He looked at her and then he said gently, ‘Why don’t we go away for a few days, the three of us?’

‘I don’t see how that would help and if you cannot even be here in the evening, how could you possibly manage it? And we are not going to look at boarding schools, so don’t think you can persuade me that way. We live in this godforsaken place because of your work and all I have is my child. You will not take her away from me.’

‘I wasn’t trying to—’

‘What else would you call it? You take everything,’ she said, and she ran from the kitchen and left the dinner.

He pulled the pans off the heat and followed her upstairs. She was sitting on the bed in their room, dashing the tears from her face.

Connie said from the doorway, ‘What’s wrong with Mammy?’

‘She’s been peeling onions.’

Isabel turned her drenched shiny face away from her child. ‘You’re going to the council school. The nuns won’t have you any more.’ And with that she got up and went off downstairs, back to the kitchen.

Mick sat where he was.

Connie hovered beside the door. ‘Do I have to go to Mr English’s school?’