The Night Following

stunned at how marked were the effects of those hours on the shed’s steps. I had behaved rather foolishly, I felt, staying out all night and not noticing how late and cold it was getting. I had never spent a night out-of-doors before. I thought then of my great-uncle, and I understood how a man’s heart might lose time against the passing minutes of a single night, and wind down beat by beat like a clock, and be discovered in the morning, stopped. My eyes looked young and pale and I couldn’t imagine that, were my flesh to be cut and opened, my blood would pulse as fast or be as garish a red as other people’s. My body felt hard and small. None of these changes displeased me.

Trains didn’t run on Christmas Day. And during the winter of 1962, the coldest of the century, they were often cancelled anyway because of fresh snowfalls or frozen points or split rails. So they didn’t find my great-uncle until early in the afternoon of Boxing Day. By then he had been dead for more than a day and a night, slumped near the middle of the station footbridge and covered in snow, his cheek frozen against a line of riveted bolts on the metal parapet, directly underneath the embossed brass plate that read:

London & North Western Railway

Passengers Crossing Footbridge Do So At Own Risk

No Loitering No Urinating No Spitting

Fine 5/- in accordance with L &NWR Bylaw 5(2).

These details came to me later. My grandmother told me only that he had died of cold. I took this to mean the same as dying of a cold, and I clung to her, wailing and speechless; I had always understood that nobody died of a cold and my grandmother seemed to be suffering from one, even if it was what she called only a sniffle, a great deal of the time. She had to tell me finally that he had frozen to death, that a night out of doors in such weather was more than flesh and blood could stand. I found this easier to accept. It did not seem so terrible, a mishap rather than a catastrophe. I imagined him lying calmly in a haze of frost and very cold to the touch, waiting, as I was, for something to be done about it. For if he had frozen to death, could he not simply be warmed back to life? Then it might also turn out to be not so terrible that his suspension in the ice was my fault, and forgiveness might be possible.

So I waited, during a succession of days that were bulky and irregular with visitors and discussions in dark voices and the soft sifting of papers. Around this time it was explained to me that in fact he was not my mother’s but my long-dead grandfather’s uncle, and so was my great-great-uncle. The sudden bestowal and its immediate retraction, by his absence, of the extra “great” seemed like another of his unravelling gifts, lost in the snow.

After a while our rooms on the two floors above the shop hung empty and the air seemed muffled, and I realized it was too late for him to come back now. The glass smashed on Christmas Eve was replaced in the boarded-up windows and my mother and grandmother re-opened the shop, which, it turned out, my mother now owned.

We continued in the usual way except of course that my uncle no longer called in on Saturday evenings for the week’s earnings and lingered, in a manner tense and jovial, until after dinner on Sunday. In periods of sobriety my mother worked in the shop and kept the books; in her absence my grandmother sat behind the counter knitting, or worked at chores upstairs, keeping an ear open for the sound of the shop bell below. Having memorized the position of every jar on the shelves, she could pick and measure out from any of them the two- and four-ounce bags of sweets that people asked for, just by the feel of the weight in her hand. There was, by law, a set of scales on the counter, but our customers were regulars and knew better than to be sceptical. She also identified and sold by smell several varieties of English, Aromatic, and Virginia loose tobacco, and in the same way she could detect the difference not just between brands of packaged cigarettes but between tipped and untipped. She couldn’t, though, stop the thieving of Black Jacks, penny chews, and sweetie cigarettes from the open boxes on the counter, of which crime I was, by collusion, as guilty as any of the older children who peered into the shop every day and came in only if my grandmother was there.

After school I would usually be there, too, swinging my legs from a chair, drawing pictures instead of doing my homework. I dreaded the shop bell. They came in pairs. They ignored me; because my grandmother could not see me any more than she could see them, it seemed I was invisible to them, too. They would fix upon me eyes as apparently sightless and flat with tacit challenge as hers, and in front of me they stole from her with impunity, knowing I would say nothing. One would go for the sweets while the other would spend a halfpenny on something or other, talking in a voice loud enough to cover any rustling of the waxed paper lining the boxes. “I’ll have a sherbet fountain, please, missus. All right, kiddo? What’re you up to there, then? Oh, that’s a nice picture, look, i’n’t she doin’ a nice picture?”

And before they left they would sometimes, and always unsmilingly, select a liquorice stick or a couple of toffees from their haul and push them into my waiting hands. I was afraid of them, I suppose, but I also despised them, the sniggering amateurs. The pilfering of a few sweets was a villainy almost laughably inferior to that of letting my great-great uncle vanish forever into a freezing cloud of snow.

Dear Ruth

All this writing letters and not getting any replies is no good. I shouldn’t even be up reading that story of yours, it’s the middle of the night and I need my sleep. You should know that. I catch up in the day but I need my sleep NOW and you don’t seem to understand.

I get the impression I’ve made you angry and now you’re not speaking. You used to do that. I brought you in a bunch of flowers from the garden to say sorry. I used to do that.

But it’s you that gets them in water, I’m no good with that sort of thing, flower arranging. They’re in the conservatory.

A funny thing to do, not speaking-funny for you, I mean. You of all people. It was me you were trying to punish when you were not speaking, but it was you it hurt. You hated not talking, you talked about every little thing. There’s a story in every minute of every hour of every day, you said. You had all the words for everything, and if you didn’t, you knew some poet who did and you’d know where to find them.

The point is, when you withheld words and went around with your mouth locked, I didn’t mind. I quite liked it, the quiet. I just never told you that.

This time I do mind. I don’t like all the quiet. When it’s quiet I get a notion I’m not really alone. The quiet is in the room with me, somehow, and it’s not a nice, settled thing, it’s an angry kind of quiet. A quiet waiting to explode. I feel like shouting into it but who’s to hear? And what would I say?

Because what they don’t grasp, all these people who troop through this place asking how I am-is how on earth should I know, since you’re not telling me anymore?

Arthur

PS Egg sandwiches do NOT freeze. Or they do but they’re not egg sandwiches when they come out again. They mashed up all right though. I managed to eat them.

THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK

1932

Chapter 6: The Ashworths at Bank Street

Evelyn took her coat off quietly and paused in the passage outside the kitchen. She could hear Stan’s complaining voice clearly and it was she, as she fully expected, who was the subject of his complaint.

“She’s switched off. Half the time she don’t even know when I’ve come in the room,” he said. His mother said something Evelyn couldn’t hear.