The Likes of Us (16 page)

He waited for her to say something now that the first direct reference to their past relationship had been made. But she looked into the fire as though she had not heard him and made no reply.

‘It's in pretty bad shape,' he went on. ‘It'll want a bit of brass spending on it to make it comfortable. I had a good look around. I fancy extending it a bit besides modernising. I reckon I'd as soon live there as anywhere... I can't stop in a hotel for the rest of my life…'

She had resumed her hand-sewing and she went on with her work, not looking at him and not speaking. He was suddenly seized with the idea that she knew exactly what he was leading to and was only waiting for him to get to the point. But what would her reaction be? He glanced at her, uncertainly. Should he, so quickly? Perhaps he should wait until she had grown more used to having him about again? But time was slipping b
y
. Neither of them was young and each of them was avoiding talking about the important things that concerned them both.

‘Of course,' he said carefully, ‘I shall need somebody to look after it for me... keep it tidy and cook…' He stopped for a moment, then went doggedly on. ‘I know it'll seem a bit sudden-like after all this time, Sarah, but you know there's nobody I –'

He stopped again, alarmed this time, as Sarah stiffened in her chair, then stood up her eyes flashing and all the smouldering antagonism he had felt flaring openly.

‘So it's housekeeping you're offering me after all these years, Morgan Lightly. Well if that's what's in your mind I'll tell you now that I need neither you nor your money. I wonder how you can find the face to come here as you do and expect me to fall in with your plans. I managed very well without you thirty years ago, and I can do the same now!'

‘But, Sarah,' Morgan said, getting to his feet. ‘You don't understand –'

‘I understand well enough,' she said in a low, furious voice; ‘and I want no part of it.' She turned her back on him and picked up the blouse she was sewing. ‘Now if you don't mind, I've got work to do.'

Morgan stood there for a moment, frowning helplessly. He could not make her out at all; and when she took no further notice of his presence he said good-bye and left.

Driving back to town he cursed himself for being a hasty fool and shook his head in wonder at the ways of women.

 

‘I made a mess of it, Thomas,' he confided later, when sitting in the living-room over his brother's grocery shop in one of Cressley's dingy back streets. ‘I should have bided my time. You can't step over thirty years as easy as all that.' He pulled thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘But I can't understand why she flared up like that. I think she nearly hated me just then; as though I'd done her a wrong.'

‘You touched her conscience, turning up like you did,' Thomas said. ‘And I'm surprised at you, I must say, running to her of all people as soon as you get home. After what she did to you... Running off and marrying that chap the minute your back was turned, and you with it all fixed up for her to join you as soon as you got settled down a bit.'

Morgan sighed. ‘Aye, but she was a grand lass, Thomas – and still is! A fine, proud woman. That's what's wrong with her – pride. If I could get round that I might do it yet. A fine woman... Just the comfort for a chap like me in the twilight of his days.'

‘Twilight of your days!' Thomas scoffed. ‘You want to go talking like that it your age! How old are you – fifty-two-three? And a fine upstanding chap with a bit of brass behind you. You shouldn't go short of comfort. There'll be plenty ready to see 'at you're comfortable. And a fat lot o' comfort she was to you. I never knew her well but I heard tell 'at you never knew which way she'd jump next.'

Morgan shook his head and smiled reflectively. ‘I thought I knew, Thomas,' he said. ‘I thought I knew, lad.'

Christmas came, and then the new year, bringing with it weeks of dry, biting winds; until February arrived, ferocious with driving snow and ice: a month when it did not rise above freezing point for days together. And at last, when it seemed that the long grim winter was without end, the earth softened to the coming of spring. Catkins flickered like green light in the dark winter woods and crocuses appeared, white and mauve and yellow, in the public gardens of the town.

Morgan filled his days with the leisurely pleasures of looking up old friends and renewing old acquaintanceships, and with his plans for making Greystone Cottage his home. His solitary home, it seemed now. For in all this time he had not seen Sarah once; but she was never far from his thoughts.

On a bright Sunday morning early in May he went as usual to Thomas's house for Sunday dinner. He found Meg, Thomas's wife, preparing the meal in the kitchen over the shop.

‘Thomas is up in the attic, Morgan,' she told him. ‘He's taken it into his head to sort out some of his old belongings.'

Morgan climbed up into the top of the house and found his brother bending over a tin chest, looking through a collection of dusty books. He paused for a moment in the doorway and watched him. In the crouching attitude of that slight figure he saw for an instant the dreamy, bookish lad of long ago. Then, almost immediately, the spell was broken as Thomas straightened up and looked round.

‘Oh, it's you, Morgan. Come in, come in. The sunshine shafted down through the skylight and Thomas screwed up his eyes behind his glasses. ‘I just bethought me to look at some of these old things of mine.'

Morgan sat down on a rickety chair and Thomas resumed his inspection of the dusty books, lifting them out one by one from the trunk, dusting them over, and peering at the titles. Occasionally he would stop and flip over the pages, reading a passage at random.

‘I had a look at some of these the other week,' he said. ‘First time I'd touched 'em in years.' He sat down on a box facing Morgan, a heavy, well-bound volume in his hands. ‘Remember how I scraped and saved to buy these, Morgan? I did all manner of jobs.' He read out the title on the spine: ‘
A History of England and its People
, in ten volumes. I reckoned there couldn't be much history I wouldn't know if I read these.'

Morgan nodded. ‘You were a rare lad for learning, Thomas.'

Thomas weighed the book in his hand. ‘And now these books are a history in themselves, Morgan. My history: the history of a failure.'

He removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his handkerchief. ‘It's funny the tricks life plays on you. When we were lads I was the one who was going to set the world on fire – me – Thomas, the scholar. Instead, I wind up keeping a backstreet grocery shop, while you, the rough and ready lad, come back from the other side of the world with your fortune made, just like somebody in a book.'

In their youth the brothers had felt their dissimilarity too keenly for real closeness, but now Morgan felt a surge of affection for Thomas. ‘You're too hard on yourself, lad,' he said gently. ‘There's all kinds of failure and all kinds of success. You've been happy, haven't you? You've made Meg happy, I can see that. All I have to show for everything is a few quid in the bank. I'd be a liar and a hypocrite if I said that didn't matter. It's a great comfort, Thomas. But there are things I'd rather have had.'

Thomas smiled and touched Morgan's knee. ‘I'm all right, Morgan. It's just you coming home that started me off thinking back. I'd not have had it any different – not if it had meant not having Meg.' He put the book aside and bent over the trunk.' She'd skin me alive if she heard me talking like that.'

In a few minutes Meg came to the foot of the attic stairs and called them to lunch. Morgan put his pipe away and stood up to go.

‘Just a minute, Morgan, before you go.'

Morgan turned and looked at his brother. Thomas, with a strange half-embarrassed expression on his thin face, was fumbling in his pocket. ‘I've got something belonging to you that I think you should have.' He produced an envelope. ‘It's been lying up here for years. I thought it was no good posting it on to you after all that time; but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.'

He handed the envelope to Morgan, who took it and turned it over to look at the writing on it. There was no stamp, just his name in dried and faded ink.

‘Well, what on earth is it?' he said.

‘It's probably nothing much at all,' said Thomas. ‘But it is yours and I think you should have it. Don't you know whose writing that is?'

‘No.'

‘It's hers – Sarah's. I reckon it was to tell you she wouldn't be coming out to you after all.'

Morgan made no move to open the envelope. ‘Tell me, Thomas, just how you came by it.'

Thomas sat down again on the box.

‘It was after you'd gone down to Southampton to see about your passage. I was coming down to see you off and visit Uncle Horace, remember? Well, you'd been gone a few days and Sarah gave me this to give to you. She was hanging about one night at the end of the street, waiting for me. I reckon she didn't know your address.' He shook his head and looked penitently at the floor. ‘I don't know how it happened, Morgan, but what with one thing and another, I clean forgot it. I remember I wasn't too fit about that time. It was the year I cracked up and had to go into the sanatorium. Anyway, it wasn't till months later that I came across it again in a book. I reckoned if it had been all that important Sarah would have surely seen me to ask if you'd got it. As it was, by that time she was married to Mark what's his name and had a kiddy too. I saw no good reason for bothering any more. I know I'd no right to keep it back, but I reckoned you were well out of it.'

Morgan's eyes were fixed on his brother's face. ‘And you mean you've hung on to it for thirty years?'

‘Well, not exactly. I couldn't bring meself to burn somebody else's letter, you see, so I shoved it in a book again and I didn't come across it again till a week or two ago when I was rummaging about up here. I've been turning over in my mind ever since whether to give it to you and own up or destroy it and let sleeping dogs lie.'

Morgan ripped open the envelope and read the letter inside. Thomas stared at him as the colour drained from his face.

‘For God's sake, Morgan, what is it, man?'

Morgan shook his head. ‘Nothing, Thomas, nothing. It just brought it all back for a minute, that's all.'

He refolded the letter and returned it to the envelope which he put carefully away in an inside pocket. Of what use was it to rant and foam at Thomas now? As he had said, he was ill at the time, seriously ill and not to be held responsible for a careless mistake. And nothing would be gained by telling him now that this letter, delivered at the right time, could have changed the course of two people's lives.

‘I... I am sorry, Morgan,' said Thomas, peering anxiously at his brother.

Morgan turned abruptly to the door. ‘Forget it, Thomas,' he said. ‘It was all a long time ago.'

They went downstairs as Meg called again. Throughout the meal Morgan was withdrawn and silent and it was not long after when he took his leave. Back at his hotel he sat down and wrote a note to Sarah. He thought for some time before putting pen to paper, and at length he wrote:

‘My dear Sarah, the enclosed letter has only just come into my hands. It has explained many things to me and the fact that owing to a series of mischances my brother Thomas delivered it thirty years too late may help to ease what must have embittered you for so long…'

He put the note and Sarah's letter to him together in an envelope, and walking along to the corner by the hotel, he posted them in the pillar box there.

 

In the fine warm afternoon of the following Sunday Morgan visited Sarah for the first time in several months. There was a short pause before she answered his knock, and they regarded each other in silence for a long moment as she stood in her doorway.

‘Well, Sarah,' Morgan said at last. ‘I thought it was a nice day for a drive out.'

Her eyes were unfathomable as she said, ‘I'll get a coat.'

He followed her into the house and was instantly drawn to the sideboard and the photograph of the young officer, Sarah's son. She returned suddenly to the room and her glance flickered briefly on his face as he stood there with the photograph in his hand.

‘I'm ready.'

‘Righto.' He replaced the picture on the sideboard and preceded her out of the house. Once clear of the narrow main street of the village, Morgan put on speed, heading straight for Greystone Cottage on which the work of conversion was now progressing. The hillside here was drenched in fresh green that was still untouched by the grimy smoke-fingers of industry which curled up out of the valley. In the orchard behind the house blossom sprang pink and white among the neglected trees. They walked in silence up the path and Morgan unlocked the door and stood aside for Sarah to enter. There was a new strangeness in their manner together now and they had spoken little in the car. From the cardboard tube he carried Morgan took out a copy of the architect's plan for the conversion. As they walked from room to room, striding over rubble and builders' materials, he explained to her all that was being done. She listened to him, nodding now and then, but making little comment. They came to the kitchen last of all and Morgan pointed to the tall cast-iron range and fireplace.

‘That's going, Sarah. I'm knocking this wall right out and extending four feet back. There'll be all built-in units along that wall there. It's wonderful the things they make for kitchens nowadays.' He talked on, flourishing catalogues with shiny illustrations of gleaming kitchen equipment. ‘It'll be fair dinkum when it's done.'

‘Fair dinkum?'

‘Australian for proper champion.'