Secrets to Keep (29 page)

Aidy was gawping at her. Arch had gone?

Now the woman was saying to her, ‘Maybe one of the neighbours might be able to help you. You will excuse me but I must get on or I’ll still be at it when the cart arrives with my furniture in the morning.’

As she shut the door, the front door of the house next door opened and another middle-aged woman came out to put milk bottles on the doorstep. Spotting Aidy, Hilda Morris smiled broadly as recognition struck. ‘Why, Aidy love, how nice to see you.’ A look of genuine sadness clouded her face. ‘I was so sorry to hear about yer mam. You have my condolences. Jessie was such a fine lady. As yer know, I used to chat to her over the yard wall when she came to visit you. I really wanted to attend the funeral to
pay my last respects, but I wasn’t well at all that day so couldn’t manage it. I was so sorry to learn about you and Arch, too. If ever a couple was together for life, I thought it was you two.’

Aidy smiled wanly at her. ‘I thought so at one time too. Er … I’ve just found out Arch has moved out of next door, Mrs Morris. Did he by any chance tell you where he was moving to before he went?’

‘I can’t help you there, love. He’d no idea where he was heading. Just told me what had happened to cause your marriage to end, and said that’s why he’d made the decision to go away and make a fresh start.’

So he’d discussed with their neighbour the events that had led to their break up! How could he do this to Aidy? Tell others all their most personal business, for it to be gossiped and sniggered over by all and sundry. Just to confirm that she had indeed heard the woman right, Aidy asked, ‘Arch called on you and told you what had gone off between us?’

‘Well, no, he never actually came to see me and volunteered the information. He only told me after I found him huddled at the back of your privy, sobbing his heart out, the night it all ended between you both. I heard him … well, it was impossible not to … when I went to fill the coal bucket and popped me head over the wall to investigate. It was obvious he was deeply upset. Men like Arch don’t cry openly cry like that in public without a very good reason.
It wouldn’t have been very neighbourly of me not to offer my help to him, would it? I thought, you see, that it was something to do with you … you’d had a fatal accident or something, the way he was carrying on.’

She stopped talking as a woman approached and nodded a greeting. Hilda responded then said to Aidy, ‘Look, we can’t talk out here – come in. Oh, and Arch left me a letter for you, which I need to give you.’

A few minutes later, a cup of stewed sweet tea cradled between her hands, Aidy was seated at Hilda’s kitchen table. Her husband was asleep in the chair by the range in the back room, round hornrimmed spectacles balancing precariously on the very end of his pug nose, the newspaper spread across his paunch.

Sitting opposite Aidy, Hilda carried on where she’d left off. ‘Once Arch got started I couldn’t stop him. Like a dam bursting it was. He told me how badly he’d let you down when you’d needed his full support to help you look after your grandmother and your orphaned brother and sisters. About his mother’s diabolical plan to get her hands on your mother’s house, too. How he’d stood by and not done anything when she was being so nasty to you and your family because he was so terrified of her turning on him in front of you all. Especially you, Aidy. He couldn’t
bear the thought of you witnessing just what a coward he was as far as his mother was concerned.

‘He said he knew that it was over between you, and there was no going back, after he told you you wouldn’t be able manage to look after your family without him. He told me he so regretted saying that to you, letting you think he had no faith in you when he knew that, if anyone could, it was you. He was desperate by then to find any way he could to get you to give him another chance. But since you’d made it very clear to him that it was over between you, he couldn’t stay around here. He knew the struggle you faced, but that he would be the last person you’d turn to for help. And the thought of you maybe meeting another man … well, he couldn’t bear it. He said he had to go away.

‘I tried to persuade him that he was being hasty, should just let the dust settle a bit and see how the land lay between you both then, but he said he’d let you down far too badly to hope you’d ever trust him enough again to give your marriage another go. And there was the fact that his mother and father had taken over his own home. He couldn’t face the thought of having to live under the same roof as them, even for a short time until he found himself somewhere else to live … just couldn’t do it. I thought he was exaggerating how bad his mother was until I witnessed what she was like for myself. Then
I couldn’t blame him for wanting to put a great distance between them.

‘It was the night after Arch packed up and went that I caught Pat stealing coal out of my shed. I heard a noise in the yard and came out to investigate. Apart from the fact I hadn’t a clue who she was then, when I asked her what she was doing, she told me she’d run out and didn’t think I’d mind her having a few lumps as neighbours helped each other. That was when she introduced herself to me. But, as I told her then, neighbours did help each other out but usually
asked
first. And, besides, her idea of a “few lumps” of coal was to be taking all I had. Cheek of her! She didn’t like it at all when I told her to put it back and that she could have just a bucketful to do her that night. I didn’t mind that … so long as I got it back the next day. Got in a right rage then, she did. Used language I’d never heard before. Kicked a hole in my shed door in temper.

‘I realised afterwards why she got so mad. She was going to sell on that coal. And how I know is because Mrs Kite, the other side of her, found all
her
coal missing the next day, and Mr Nelson was heard asking around the pub the night before if anyone was after a bit of coal on the side.

‘Well, while they lived here we had a spate of things going missing from backyards hereabouts. It’s stopped since they went so the finger is pointed firmly in the
Nelsons’ direction. I got so fed up with her coming round asking to borrow a cup of sugar, a drop of milk, couple of spuds … you name it … which were never returned even though she always promised faithfully that she would. It was no good telling her I hadn’t got what she was after either. Very clever was Mrs Nelson. She’d wheedle out of you in a cunning way what you’d actually got before she asked. Well, I expect you know that trick of hers better than me, you being her daughter-in-law. I don’t know how you coped with her, love. I suppose there’s one consolation for you in respect of your marriage breaking up. You don’t have to have anything to do with Pat any more, do you?’ Before Aidy could make any response, Hilda continued. ‘Anyway, I got sidetracked. I told Arch that if he was going away and, the way he was talking, might never come back to Leicester, you deserved to know. He asked me if I would tell you. I told him no, it was only fair he should tell you himself. I think he asked me because he was ashamed to face you again after the way he acted to you. Anyway, he said he’d go round and tell you what he was planning to do before he headed off for the railway station, after he’d been back home and packed his bags. I got the impression he had no intention of letting his mother in on what he was up to, just going to sneak off and let her find out after he’d gone. So didn’t he come and tell you he was going away, after all?’

Yes, he had. That must have been the night he’d knocked on the door but she hadn’t answered because she hadn’t been ready to face him again so soon. Had she opened the door to him, would she have tried to persuade him not to go? Or would she have encouraged him to make a new life for himself, knowing there was little chance of their ever reconciling their differences? Aidy didn’t know the answer, and it didn’t matter anyway. She hadn’t answered the door and Arch had gone off to wherever it was he was heading, to try to start a new life for himself. The letter had been left to tell her what he hadn’t been able to in person. She hadn’t time to analyse how she was feeling about his going off, and the fact he might never come back, as Hilda was interrupting her thoughts.

‘I found an envelope addressed to you the next morning, pushed through my letter box. I should have brought it round to you straight away, but you know how time runs away with you.’ She got up from her chair. ‘I’ll fetch it for you.’ Then she went off into the back room and returned moments later, the envelope in her hand.

Retaking her seat, she said, ‘Just to put your mind at rest, what Arch told me that night, Aidy … it hasn’t gone any further and it won’t.’

Aidy knew she meant it. Hilda Morris listened eagerly to gossip and would keep it going by
imparting it to others, but Aidy had never known her actually instigate any during all the years she had been living next door. She smiled at her gratefully. ‘I appreciate that, Mrs Morris.’ She’d picked up her handbag ready to leave when another question presented itself.

‘Do you know what happened to Arch’s parents? From what I gathered when I last saw her, Mrs Nelson had made herself well and truly at home in my old house and had no intention of leaving.’ She needed to find out where they’d gone. Aidy had no doubt that Pat still had many of her possessions from the house, including the mattress. It was unlikely she was going to hand it over voluntarily but Aidy wouldn’t give up on it easily, the thought of doing without it affording her the courage.

Hilda’s eyes lit up and her tone of voice became excited when she responded, ‘Well, didn’t the Nelsons’ departure have all us neighbours out in the street to watch? And weren’t all of us glad to see the back of them, especially me and Mrs Kite who suffered the worst of it. I mean, we’re not used to Pat’s type around here, with her foul language and treating all of us like she owned the street. You could hear her shouting at her husband from halfway down the road and it weren’t just the odd occasion. It were most of the time they were both at home.

‘And we all do our best round here to keep the
rats down by keeping our yards clear of rubbish so it makes it difficult for them to nest. The Nelsons were only living next door a week at the most before the rubbish was piling up, and me and Mrs Kite were already remembering not to leave our back doors open.

‘And the noise Mr Nelson used to make at all hours, bringing back scrap metal he’d collected and sorting through it to sell on … Well, they might have been able to terrorise the neighbours and have them living in fear of them where they used to live, but they weren’t going to get away with it here!

‘I hung on a bit to make sure Arch didn’t change his mind and come back, but he didn’t, so last week I told Reggie Gimble, the rent collector, what was going on. That you’d both left the house and weren’t coming back, and that Arch’s parents had moved themselves in and of their atrocious behaviour and how they were mistreating the landlord’s property. Reggie Gimble paid a call on Pat, told her he’d heard her son and his wife had moved out of the property, and that as the previous tenant’s mother she was not entitled to live there without the express agreement of the landlord. Due to the state of the property and complaints from the neighbours about their behaviour, Reg Gimble told her that the landlord would never give them the official tenancy, so she and her husband had until noon the next day to quit or he
would have them forcibly removed and done for trespassing.

‘Talk about all hell let loose! Pat was like a woman possessed. I was in my back room at the time, she at her front door, and I could hear it all like she was in the same room as I was, she was bellowing at him that loud. She threatened to have him for slander, insinuating they were scum and not good enough to live in this street … which actually was the truth of it. She kicked Reggie Gimble on his shins, gave him a black eye, slammed the door in his face, then screamed at him through the letter box that this was her house now and she wasn’t leaving it. As soon as she saw he had gone off, she came storming round to me, banging that fat fist of hers on my front door, yelling at the top of her voice that if she found out it was me who had reported them to the rent collector then I was a dead woman. Suffice to say, I never opened the door to her.

‘Then she went to Mrs Kite and threatened her the same, but not before she threw a stone at my front window and broke it. She did the same to Mrs Kite’s front window. Then she stood in the middle of the road and bawled out, so loud she could be heard from one end of the street to the other, that the Nelsons weren’t moving from their house and all of us had better get used to that. Then she went back inside and for the rest of the night until the early
hours of the morning all I could hear was her screaming and raving and furniture being dragged across the floors, so it wasn’t much sleep me or Mr Morris got that night and neither did Mr and Mrs Kite.’

Aidy was neither shocked nor surprised to learn of Pat’s despicable behaviour, knowing only too well what she was capable of. She was, though, feeling somewhat ashamed that she was associated with this woman by marriage, and hoped that people around here would not look down on her for this fact.

Hilda, though, was thoroughly enjoying herself, relating events to Aidy. ‘Bang on noon the next day, Reggie Gimble turned up with six of the biggest bruisers I’ve ever seen. I’d only to look at them and they frightened me to death. One of them had a lump hammer with him, obviously to break the door down with should Pat not go voluntarily. They needed to use it. That furniture I’d heard being dragged across the floor the night before … well, she’d only barricaded the front and back doors! She obviously thought she had the place as secure as Fort Knox, but she wasn’t clever enough to give a thought to the windows.