The Black Mountains (60 page)

“I mean, yes, all right, I'll marry you.” There was no mistaking it now, that edge that shouldn't have been there. He shuddered slightly, then pushed the unwelcome thought away. Rosa was accepting his proposal. It didn't matter that she wasn't blushing and whispering shyly as all the girls in the music-hall songs did. She was no retiring maiden left behind by the Victorian era. Nor was she a modern miss either. She was a free spirit, as wild as the vixen who came down to the gardens at night to steal a hen to feed her cubs. She would never give herself lightly—if she gave herself at all! He must never, ever, expect too much of her, or try to cage her. He knew that with certainty. But it did not stop him from pulling her close again, his body on fire with joy.

“Rosa, you've just made me the happiest man alive! Come here.”

But she pushed herself free, all the passion she had displayed a few moments ago gone now.

“Not here, Jack Hall! What ever are you thinking of? Someone might come by and see us…”

He laughed, kissing the top of her head and taking her hand.

“All right. Let's go and tell them we're going to be married. Then if they see me kissing you, perhaps they'll have the decency to look the other way!”

She hung back.

“Tell who?”

“Well, your father might be a good start. I ought to ask him properly if it's all right, I suppose. And then there'll be a dickens of a lot to talk about—like where we're going to live for a start.”

“With us,” she said promptly. “I'll have to stay home to look after the boys.”

His face fell.

“Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. And I'll be in Bristol after the summer anyway. I couldn't travel every day. We'll have to work something out.”

She didn't answer. There was the strangest expression on her face, and he gave her hand a tug.

“Never mind about it now, anyway. For tonight, let's just think about celebrating. Tomorrow will be time enough for problems, eh?”

She nodded, and they left the shadow of the coal-houses and crossed the yard to the back door. With her hand on the latch she paused, looking up at him.

“Jack, you are sure, aren't you?”

In the moonlight her face was a pale oval beneath her heavy dark hair.

“I wouldn't have asked you if I hadn't been sure.”

“No, but …” Again the hesitation, then her eyes met his, challenging him. “You haven't said you love me.”

“Haven't I?” he asked, melting inside. “Well, in that case, I love you. Will that do? Or do you want me to say it again?”

She shook her head, a faint smile lifting the corners of her mouth.

“No, that'll do nicely. Let's go and see Dad, shall we?”

And as he followed her into the scullery, it did not occur to him that he hadn't asked whether she loved him too. And Rosa had certainly no intention of telling him.

WALTER CLEMENTS received the news of his daughter's engagement quietly and without surprise. He had known for some time which way the wind was blowing, and although he had expected it to be Ted who would take her down the aisle, he thought Jack would do almost as well, even if he did have a few ideas above his station.

There were, of course, certain things that would have to be sorted out, but he didn't expect any serious problems. The last few weeks he'd been chatting to Molly Hamblin, whose husband, Wilf, had been killed on the Somme, and he thought that he would be able to persuade her to come in and ‘do' for him and the boys, if nothing else. With Rosa at home, he had had no excuse to ask her, but if she was going to get married, that was rather different. Why, he might even think of getting married again himself. For all that Ada had been a poor, skinny creature and about as responsive to his love-making as a lump of best lard, his bed was cold on winter nights without her, and he was still barely middle-aged. Yes, maybe it wasn't such a bad stroke of fortune, Rosa wanting to get married.

On the other side of the dividing wall, however, at number eleven, Charlotte Hall was taking a less tolerant view.

When Jack came in and announced his intention of marrying Rosa Clements, she was both amazed and furious. “You must have taken leave of your senses!” she declared, her voice rising so loudly that he was afraid that, in spite of the thickness of the wall, Rosa might hear her. “You're just starting a job that's taken us all our time for the last ten years to get you into, and you talk about saddling yourself with a wife. Have you thought what it's going to mean to you, son?”

“I know it's come as a bit of a surprise to you, Mam,” he said, trying to pacify her. “ But we can work something out, I know. I'm not hard up. I've got my gratuity put by, and the ex-serviceman's grant to come. We'll find somewhere in Bristol to live and …”

“Hah!” Charlotte exclaimed shortly. “ Finding somewhere to live isn't so easy these days. Don't you know there's a housing shortage on? Or haven't you heard about the people building themselves shacks to live in out of any old oddments they can find? Disgusting, I call it!”

“Look, Mam, I've got no intentions of doing anything so daft,” Jack said. “ There must be places to rent if you can pay. And when I've finished training and get a job, there might be a house to go with it.”

“And what if babies come along, have you thought of that?” Charlotte asked him. “They do, you know, once you start your goings-on.”

Jack coloured. At heart he was still quite reserved, and the subject of contraception was not one he felt ready to discuss with his mother.

“There's no need to start a family until you want to nowadays,” he said quietly. “There's ways and means, you know.”

“Ah, and so there always has been for those in the know,” Charlotte informed him. “But all it takes is a drop too much to drink and a bit of carelessness, and all the ways and means in the world won't do you any good.”

“I don't drink, Mam,” Jack snapped, growing a little tired of the opposition. “And nothing you can say is going to make me change my mind, so you might as well accept it. I'm going to marry Rosa.”

Charlotte turned away, slicing bread ready for supper with a ferocity that alarmed him.

“Mam …” he said, still hoping for her approval, and after a moment her rigid back slumped, and she turned back to face him, the breadknife still in her hand.

“You'll regret it, Jack, I'm telling you. When you get to college, you'll meet girls more like yourself…”

Jack's temper, slow to rise, was up now. Offended by her words, he sprang to Rosa's defence. “So that's it! I wondered how long it would be before you started telling me she wasn't good enough for me, Mam.”

Charlotte recoiled a little at his tone, then returned to the attack.

“She's a nice enough girl, Jack, I'll give you that. And she's got the looks as well. It's not that I'm blaming you. It's just that I know, if you wait, you can do better for yourself.”

He shook his head.

“I don't understand you, Mam. Just who do you think we are, that she's not good enough? You always stood up for her when people pointed the finger at her. But when it comes to welcoming her into your own family, it's a different story. And I call that hypocritical.”

“Oh, maybe, Jack.” She brandished the breadknife helplessly. “It's just that I don't want to see you throw yourself away. If you marry her, you'll to regret it. It's as simple as that. Maybe she and Ted could have made a go of it. It don't know. But in the end, when those looks of hers have gone, or when you come to wanting more than love morning, noon and night, you'll get tired of her. You need your own kind, Jack, that's what it boils down to. And she's not your kind.”

He stared at her, not understanding the certainty in her tone, but shaken by it all the same. Then he straightened his shoulders.

“I think you've said enough, Mam,” he said coldly. “I'd hoped you would be pleased for me, but as you're not, it would be better for all of us in the long run if you were to keep your thoughts to yourself. And you might as well make up your mind to it I'm going to marry Rosa, and nothing you can say is going to alter that.”

“I see. Well …” Charlotte stopped suddenly mid-sentence, biting on the words that had flown to her lips, then turning away. “Well, if that's the way you feel, I dare say there's no more to be said. But I hope you won't rush into this just to prove me wrong. I hope you'll take your time and sort things out properly.”

He nodded.

“I'm not the fool you seem to take me for, Mam. When I marry Rosa, it'll be all done properly, with a chapel service and a reception and a few days away. It's what she wants, and I owe that to her. And I only hope that by then you'll see things differently.” His voice softened. “ I'm grateful to you, Mam, for all you've done for me. Don't think I don't know the sacrifices you made. But that doesn't give you the right to choose my wife for me. Never that.”

She inclined her head abruptly. The years passed before her eyes, from the day when he had told her he wanted to become a teacher and proved what she had always known—that he was different from the others. She saw herself calling on Rector Archer, humbling herself for Jack's sake, baring her soul as she had never bared it in her life. She felt again the pain in her hands when they had cracked and bled from too many hours in a pail of hot soapy water on a winter-cold doorstep, and the tiredness she had fought and conquered so as to keep going to earn the money to keep him at school. Through it all, she had kept her eyes fixed firmly to a star—Jack's star—and her determination to help him win the position in life that was his birthright. Now he was going to throw it all away by marrying Rosa Clements.

It would be a mistake, she knew it in her bones. And it wasn't just a matter of snobbery. Charlotte was a realist, not a snob. She knew that Rosa, daughter of a washerwoman and a fairground man, could never fit into the life that Jack would want. If she had been clever, as he was clever, she could have made the jump, but she wasn't. No, as she had told him, once the physical attraction wore off, there would be nothing left.

But how to make him see it? How to stop him making such a terrible mistake? He was twenty-one now, so he could marry whom he pleased. And in any case, withholding consent often did more harm than good. She'd seen it happen.

There has to be a way, Charlotte thought, and whatever it is, I'll find it. I'll not stand by and see him throw it all away now. Not after all we've been through.

But to Jack, she nodded her head, so that the strand of greying hair escaped from her bun and fell down her cheek.

“Oh, well, I dare say in the end you'll do whatever you think,” she said. And went back to slicing bread.

“MRS HALL, excuse me, it is Mrs Hall, isn't it?”

Charlotte, who had been looking in the window of the butcher's shop, passing the time of day with Mercy Brixey and wondering what to get for a change for dinner, turned sharply at the sound of the unfamiliar voice speaking her name.

She saw a tall, well-built girl with a mop of reddish hair, and a smiling, good-natured face, not exactly pretty, but pleasant and full of character. She recognized her at once as O'Halloran's younger daughter, Stella.

Taken by surprise, she looked her up and down and the girl put a hand on her arm. “I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind me speaking to you like this, but I thought I'd ask after Jack. I nursed him, you know, in London, when he had his leg amputated.“

“That's right, you did. I remember him saying. Full of praise for you, he was.”

Slight colour suffused the girl's freckled face and she smiled, looking both pleased and embarrassed.

“Oh, well, I … How is he, anyway?”

Charlotte's eyes narrowed, her shrewd brain taking in more of the situation than the girl realized.

“Oh, he's not doing so badly at all. He's off to Bristol to the university after the summer, going to do the teacher training course so as to be properly qualified.”

“I'm so glad,” the girl said, smiling. “I knew he'd make it. I told him so.”

Charlotte nodded.

“And how about you? Stella, isn't it? I know he'd want me to ask.”

“Me? Oh, I'm still nursing. I went to France from London, and the demobilization is taking so long they still need medical attention for the troops even though the fighting is over, thank God. But I'd thought of coming back this way eventually, to Bath maybe—or Bristol …” The colour rose in her cheeks again, and Charlotte was quick to notice it.

“Bristol! Well I never! You might run into our Jack …”

“Yes …”

“But I thought …” Mercy Brixey, who had been listening with unashamed interest to the conversation, could keep silent no longer, and both women turned towards her rather strident voice. “ But I thought your Jack was getting married, Mrs Hall.”

“Yes, well …” Charlotte blustered, but Mercy was not to be done out of her moment of glory.

“Engaged to Rosa Clements, isn't he? Going to be married before he goes to college, surely.”

Charlotte, flustered as she was, could not help seeing the dismay on the girl's open face before she hastily covered it with a forced smile.

“Engaged to be married? Jack? Goodness, what a surprise!”

“Yes, to all of us,” Charlotte said drily. “ Now look …”

But before she could go any further, the girl interrupted her, touching her arm again with a quick, awkward movement.

“I must go, Mrs Hall. I'm so pleased to have seen you. Give my regards to Jack, won't you? And my congratulations.”

Then, before Charlotte could recover herself, she had gone, hurrying off down the street.

“Well, well, fancy Hal's daughter talking to you!” Mercy remarked in awe, but Charlotte cut her short.