“And she’s that bad-tempered,” he went on. “Told me she didn’t care for my friends and I wasn’t to go to any more meetings.”
Stan’s mother gave a short snort.“Hasn’t wasted her time, has she? Six weeks wed and laying down the law. I never liked them Leighs.You have to stand up to her, Stan.”
“I did! I says to her I’m not having that, I’ll do what I like when I like with who I like. I says to her, what’s the ruddy point of sticking round here, anyway? I says, you’re as switched off as your ruddy lightbulbs, you. I told her.”
Evelyn heard a sharp laugh from her mother-in-law. “Fact is, Stan, you’re too soft. Aye, and you’re a daft beggar an’ all. You let her lead you on, didn’t yer? Don’t tell me that baby’s an accident, she’s made a fool out of you. Got you just where she wanted you, up the ruddy aisle. You’ve only yourself to blame, Stanley Ashworth.”
Evelyn set down her parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, her eyes stinging with tears. She smoothed her hands over her stomach and tried to breathe evenly. She wouldn’t raise her voice in this house, she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. But she couldn’t just walk in now and cook Stan’s tea as if nothing had happened. His mother had probably given him his tea, anyway. She always did if Evelyn’s shift hours meant Evelyn didn’t get back until after him. A man’s tea should be on the table as soon as he got home, according to Mrs. Ashworth. The same rule didn’t apply to her tea, of course, so once Stan was off for the evening and Mrs. Ashworth was listening to the wireless, Evelyn would get herself something to eat alone, a cheese and pickle sandwich, maybe an egg. More often than not she would eat her lonely tea standing in the kitchen, and then wash up and go to bed.
She tiptoed away upstairs. She had to get herself under a blanket to cry so they wouldn’t hear.
Later, lying curled in bed, she reflected that she probably did seem to be what Stan had called switched off. She either had too much on her mind or she was thinking of nothing at all, and whichever it was, she was just keeping quiet so she could concentrate. If she’d been a big talker he’d have been the first to complain, wouldn’t he? If she talked all the time she’d miss all the little noises that kept her in the picture. Her eyes were so tired from the bulb testing work these days, she relied on sounds, and on smells, too, to keep herself from making mistakes. She hadn’t noticed it so much at home at Roper Street, it being so familiar to her, how fuzzy things had got. But here in a different house, even though it was just a mile away and practically the same layout as her Mam’s, it was taking a bit of time to get the hang of things. She already knew when the kettle was ready or the fire needed coal. She knew who’d come in, Stan or his Mam, before she heard a voice; it was all in the feet. She had also worked out their different smells. Lucky Strikes and Brilliantine was Stan, a sweetness like very old jam mixed with mothballs, Mrs. Ashworth. Even without those signs, their breath was enough to go on. Most days, Stan’s was beery. Mrs. Ashworth had taken the pledge years ago and never touched a drop, but she was wheezy and dyspeptic. Evelyn could track her whereabouts easily from the traces of her frequent peppermint belches.
Evelyn reckoned she could even smell the weather, too. She could tell when it was going to rain without so much as a glance at the sky, though Stan said she was talking rubbish because round here it was always
But as her Mam said, life was a sea of worries. There was the worry of where this baby was going to go when it arrived, since she and Stan had only the little room next to Stan’s Mam’s bedroom, small enough even for two and with no space for a cradle. Mrs. Ashworth-Evelyn simply could not call her “Mam”-wouldn’t hear of them changing a thing, so they were stuck with Stan’s grandfather’s big black iron bedstead and a mattress that seemed to have bricks in it, and only the one chest of drawers. Somehow Evelyn would have to make Stan face up to his mother and let them put in a few things for the baby. And they didn’t have so much as an inch to call their own outside the bedroom. Even Evelyn’s knitting couldn’t be left downstairs at the end of the evening.
That wasn’t all. It wasn’t exactly a worry now, because with her in the family way Stan never laid a finger on her, but what about afterwards, with Mrs. Ashworth sleeping next door and the walls so thin? They should be looking to find a place of their own. But Stan wouldn’t face that, either. Soon they’d be able to manage the rent on a small place, she kept telling him, but he wouldn’t listen, or he’d start spouting rubbish picked up from his daft meetings. He’d showed her a pamphlet written by Alan O’Reilly and a few others. She hadn’t understood a word of it, so Stan had explained. All that wanting a house and a few sticks of furniture to call your own was being oppressed, apparently. As long as she allowed herself to be manipulated into aping bourgeois materialist values, especially notions of private ownership, all she was doing was colluding in her own subjugation. It was capitalist forces, whose sole purpose was to bolster the bosses’ and the landlords’ and the government’s profits, that were manipulating her into
Well, she really had switched off when he’d come out with all that, but not before saying that in her opinion it was a lot of nonsense, just a lot of big words trying to tell her she didn’t know her own mind, and if Stan was falling for all that he was a bigger fool than she’d taken him for. Not that she’d lost her temper. In a quiet voice, just before he had stormed off to the pub, she had added that she didn’t recall agreeing to join any ruddy class struggle, least of all on Alan O’Reilly’s side of it, and that was her last word on the subject.
She was roused suddenly from her thoughts by noise and shouting, and rushed downstairs.
Mrs. Ashworth was a heavy woman. When her foot had landed on the parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, she’d skidded and fallen and twisted her ankle. Evelyn helped Stan get her up and seated in the front room, trying to close her ears to the tirade of complaints flowing between the pair of them. Stan went off to get Mrs. Flint four doors down, who worked at the Infirmary, to come and have a look at the injury, while Evelyn, with a sinking heart, went to scrape the squashed raw sausages off the linoleum in the hallway.
I made the shed mine. I brought blankets and cushions, enough to keep me quite comfortable, though not so comfortable that I might fall asleep. I liked the walls of the place, the hard beads of pine amber and the scorched gashes and knots in the wood, and I liked Ruth’s damp floral folding chairs hung on hooks and her spidery gardening gloves discarded and hardened into casts of her tired, curved hands. But the resiny smell of the timbers and the candle-smoky damp that made its way into the peppery blankets felt like mine. There was an outside tap nearby, so I considered getting a little spirit stove and a kettle, and perhaps one of those camping heaters, but then I realized that these would make the place too bright. Sometimes I lit a tea light or two but, like Arthur, I was happiest sitting in the dark.
He never drew a curtain at the back of the house, nor pulled a blind nor closed doors between rooms. He spent a lot of time upstairs, moving clothes and books and bundles of paper around. Then he started going up and down to the attic, too, via a folding ladder hauled down from the ceiling onto the landing. I could see the bottom of it slanting across the doorway of the bedroom that was full of luggage and clothes. That was a worry to me. Whenever I saw his feet, one splayed on the ladder and the other swimming in midair trying to make the next rung, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. My heart would pound while I counted the seconds; sometimes it would take him four minutes to manage the first three steps. It was worse when he got higher and disappeared altogether. All I could do then was watch the foot of the ladder, dreading that the next thing I would see would be a flailing bundle of limbs tumbling down into a broken heap. Even if I could have heard him call out I wouldn’t have been in time to prevent that.
So I would wait, counting, and there were times I was out of my chair ready to go to him-once I was even setting out across the grass-before I would see a pale blue flash from the attic skylight. Then at least I knew he had made it as far as the light switch. The strip of fluorescent light would tremble and blink and grow steady, and I would settle down to watch.
But that he had got himself up there was all I knew. I had to carry on watching because what I couldn’t tell from the shadows as they moved across the skylight was whether he was clambering around on a solid floor or wobbling from joist to joist on those spindly legs of his. I was afraid if I let my attention falter his whole weight might land on some frail partition of gypsum and plaster and he would plunge to the floor below.
I did wonder what was up there that could occupy him for two and three hours at a time. I imagined an Aladdin’s cave where he went to gloat every night, but it could hold only a hoarded treasure of sorts; I couldn’t believe that any attic of Ruth’s would harbour secrets, not of any priceless or desperate kind, anyway. Probably there was just the usual junk: broken furniture, pictures and ornaments out of favour, and the props of outgrown
