The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (8 page)

‘Major Hardy?’

The man had a slight north-eastern accent, Joe recognized; he had met many men from Durham and Newcastle when he was in France, though they had flatter vowels than this man, he must have been educated, middle-class. He was about Joe’s height, in his thirties, and well dressed, with a coat and scarf and hat and leather gloves. And he had been a soldier, Joe could tell; he had about him that rigid, tired air that they all had, those who had come through, as though he had seen too much too young and everything was dulled.

‘My name is Edgar Bainbridge. I’m a solicitor. I would like to talk to you. May we go inside?’

Joe ushered him along the hall and into the library. There was still nothing but one chair; it was obvious from the pillow and blankets that Joe was using the room to sleep in.

Joe could see Mr Bainbridge trying not to stare. The fire was dead in the grate – other than his blankets and pillow there were no signs of habitation. Joe tried to look at it objectively, but it defeated him; this was his whole world now.

‘You see, Major Hardy—’

‘It’s “mister”,’ Joe said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Mr Hardy. I’m not in the army any more.’

‘People usually …’

Joe waved at the armchair, tired of the whole thing and hoping this wouldn’t take long since there was only one chair.

‘Do have a seat,’ he said.

Edgar Bainbridge nodded and sat down among the cushions and the blankets as though he did it most days. Joe admired that.

Mr Bainbridge hesitated and then said, ‘I don’t know much about your circumstances, Mr Hardy, so you will have to forgive me if I’m indelicate here. You have been left a house in Durham City, in County Durham.’

‘I have been left what?’ Joe said.

‘A house,’ the man said, as though neither he nor Joe had ever heard anything of the kind.

‘I think you’ve made a mistake,’ Joe said. ‘I had a house in Northumberland where I used to spend a lot of time, but everything’s gone now. I know nothing about Durham and nobody of my family or my close friends ever lived in the
county. I’ve never even been there.’ He had heard there was a cathedral, surrounded by coalmines. He had never had any inclination to go there.

Mr Bainbridge frowned. ‘The will reads simply. It is yours.’

‘Is it something I can sell?’

‘The will states that you must go and live in it for a year. It’s quite a substantial building,’ he said, ‘a tower house. What we call a pele tower, a fortification. They are often situated in the borders, from the disputed lands in the days of the reivers – many of them have survived, only this is in the city.’

Having an estate in Northumberland Joe knew something of this but hadn’t considered it before.

‘Is there any money?’

Mr Bainbridge looked patiently at him. ‘No.’

Joe smiled in tolerance. ‘I don’t understand then. Which side of the family is it?’

‘I have no idea who it is in relation to you.’

‘What is the name of the person?’

‘Miss Priscilla Lee.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Joe said.

Perhaps, he thought, it was some dotty old aunt. Both his grandfathers had apparently been landowners so their families must have been rich at some time, before gambling, drinking and debts took care of it.

‘After a year you own it and may do what you please.’

‘So this Lee family – who are they and how did they come by such a place?’

‘I don’t know anything about it. When Miss Lee’s will was made I was a small child – my father is dead now and I have
no information on the subject. What you do is up to you.’ He handed Joe a card. ‘When you come north I will give you the key.’

Joe was dazed. After Mr Bainbridge had gone he thought how peculiar the whole thing was. His life was nothing like he had imagined it would be. All he had thought of was reaching home, seeing his father and holding Angela in his arms. He didn’t know how to go on looking for her any more. As for his staying here, the house would be sold and he would be homeless. He didn’t make a decision, only went back to his chair and fell asleep. It had become his one refuge.

The weather turned bitterly cold and even after what he had been through in France, Joe felt it. He thought that he could only put up with so much for so long and his limits had been reached in every direction. He didn’t know what to do, whom to contact – he couldn’t think how he might find Angela now. Even this house had become an alien place and yet he could not make himself leave, he felt as though he were clinging to the wreckage of his life.

One morning in January he had a letter from Mr Barrington to say that there were several interested parties for the London house and that he would employ someone to show them around. Joe took that as a hint that he could no longer stay.

He felt like holding doors, hiding in the attic. He even went upstairs – it was darker and colder than he remembered, and daylight, such as it was at this time of the year, peeped in where the roof should have been repaired. It had been left as everything else: neglected.

There were various discarded pieces of furniture, none of them worth anything, some of them broken, and a few of his toys, small painted soldiers in red and blue, and an old rocking horse whose mane had gone and whose eyes were wild. There were books, their pages mottled brown with damp. There was his old school trunk. He opened it; inside was a cricket bat he had once used and a rugby ball and, to his surprise, some papers at the bottom. They didn’t look as if they had been casually set aside but deliberately put there – folded thick pieces of paper.

They were letters, he saw in the dim light, dozens of them. He couldn’t help but be curious so he took them with him back downstairs and into the chair. He untied the ribbons they were bound with and soon realized they were the letters he had written to his father, each one folded carefully and kept together with blue ribbons.

His father had not written him one letter in five years, but he had kept every one that Joe had written him. It brought tears to Joe’s eyes. There were a great many of the letters. Under the ribboned ones he found another whole set, unbound. He opened the first one of these, dated right at the beginning of the war – it was a letter from his father to him.

Why had it not been posted? What was it doing here? Was it a draft of something his father had intended him to receive? Then why had he not received the final thing? He opened a second, then a third and that was when he saw in huge dismay that his father had written to him over and over again during the war, but he had not sent any of these things. Was it because he thought Joe did not deserve them?
Was it because he hated the idea of Joe being so far away that he couldn’t send them? Then why keep them?

There were so many. Joe didn’t want to read them. He wanted to put them on a fire. His father was dead; what did any of it matter now? He gazed at the black grate, then he got up and went into the back of the house and beyond into the great big courtyard. Here were the stables and the carriages and other outhouses – the washhouse and the hen house and the buildings where the outside servants had lived.

He found coal and wood and he shoved these into a bucket. He hauled them inside and set them down by the library fire. He took some of the letters which he had sent to his father and scrunched them into balls in his hands. He threw them onto the back of the big grate, doing the same with the letters his father had written and when he was happy with that he made a fire. He watched it flicker into life and then sat down until it should be big enough so that he could burn away the only things which were left.

He awoke some time later with a stiff neck. The fire had gone out. There was still a pile letters from his father. They seemed to mock him. He didn’t want to try to light the fire again, it was all too much effort. He had dreamed of being with his father in Northumberland; they had been riding into the wide open fields and it had been spring. The buttercups rose tall and bright yellow in the fields, the riverbanks were green and white with garlic, smelling like dinner, and the sky was blue with white scudding clouds, thick like fluff. He thought back to this pleasant dream.

Joe didn’t know whether it was that which made him decide to go north, that and the idea that he would at
least be able to take a look around the old estate. There just didn’t seem to be any point in staying here longer. He put together the things he had with the remaining letters which his father had not sent him and he left the house as the morning arrived, for the last time. He didn’t look back. There was nothing to look back for.

*

On the train he read the first of his father’s letters. Even taking the paper from the envelope and seeing his father’s distinctive looped handwriting hurt Joe so much that he wanted to fold it back up again and throw it out of the window, but he didn’t.

It was on thick quality cream paper and written in black ink. Joe could feel the love that his father had for him even before he read it and that made him feel just a little bit better as the train made its way northward. It was written in the first weeks after he had left home.

Lucy was glad when she left the university. She was pleased that it was over. But she had nowhere to live and needed to find some kind of work; though she would not be able to pay for articles until she made a great deal of money and that was impossible to think about now. She went to shops where they had ‘Help Wanted’ in the window, but she was dismissed mostly by a shake of the head. After four such experiences she began enquiring at various public houses and hotels, but it was just the same. After a long day she sat in the Silver Street café because it was so familiar. She said to the woman who was on the desk at the door, ‘Do you need any help?’

The woman looked at her in surprise and smiled a little. ‘We do, but not from lasses like yourself.’ It wasn’t said to offend, but Lucy knew that the woman recognized her; she had been in there so many times.

She felt bolder and asked, ‘What do you mean, like me?’

‘You talk different.’

‘I’m from Newcastle.’

The woman shook her head. ‘It’s not that. You sound like you’ve had a lot of schooling – you don’t belong in a place like this.’

‘But I need work.’

‘You’d frighten the customers. Sorry, love, but you’re above all this; it wouldn’t go down well.’

Lucy drank her tea and after it, since the day wasn’t over yet, she called at various offices which belonged to the businesses in the town.

Every time it was the same question: ‘Do you type?’

It seemed stupid that with all her qualifications the one thing which eluded her was something so small, and yet she didn’t know how to use a typewriter. She thought of all those days spent with Miss Shuttleworth at her father’s office. Why hadn’t it seemed important? She had only two more days to get her things out of her room.

She went to several boarding houses to find somewhere cheap to stay, but single women were not given to doing such things and she was turned away at the door. One woman made her cheeks burn saying that she ‘wanted no hoors’. In the cheaper parts of the town she was uncomfortable. Dirty children played in the street. Two of them threw stones at her so that she shouted at them – then they minded her and ran away.

She ended up by the river, which felt better, though the street here was dirty and the smells made Lucy wrinkle her nose. To her surprise a notice sat in one of the windows: ‘Typewriting Lessons’. She banged on the door and a middle-aged woman answered. She was large and wore much more expensive clothes than Lucy had imagined anyone wore in such places, though they were rather shabby. She smiled affably and spoke in an educated, cultured voice.

When Lucy said that she needed to take lessons the woman, who’d introduced herself as Miss Slater, invited her in, calling as she did so down the hall, ‘Bethany! We have company,’ and at that point another middle-aged woman appeared. ‘This is Miss Charlton. She wishes to learn to use a typewriter.’

‘Oh, my dear, do come in,’ Miss Bethany said. She was taller and slimmer than the first woman, whom Lucy supposed to be her sister, and she too wore an almost benign expression as though she could cope with most things.

There was poor and then there was
poor
, Lucy decided. These women had done what was called ‘coming down in the world’, she guessed. They had some lovely furniture, huge and old-fashioned and quite unsuited for such a dismal place. They even had a piano.

‘Sadly out of tune because of the damp,’ Miss Slater told her cheerfully.