outgrow their strength. Maybe she could do with a rest.”
Aye, that’s the way to look at it. ’Course, goes wi’out saying I’d like for you to go with her, like, the both of you, treat yourselves.” Evelyn gasped with astonishment. “But another time, eh? With t’shop to mind,” Uncle Les went on, “it can’t be done.”
“Oh, well, no!” Evelyn exclaimed. “It’s right kind of you to treat our Grace. I’m ever so grateful, Uncle Les.”
Les took his leave soon afterward instead of staying on for tea. Evelyn was touched at how concerned he was about Grace and told herself again what a blessing he was. He continued to provide them with a home even when their shop earnings were, as he told them, the poorest of all his five concerns. It worried Evelyn that Grace seemed to resent his generosity. In fact, she couldn’t get a civil word out of the girl on the subject of Uncle Les. Her shyness of him had deepened into a kind of sullen dislike, if not actual fear. Evelyn would have to talk to her about it, when she was back from Blackpool and feeling better. Grace was becoming a young woman, far too old for such bad manners.
Evelyn knitted on alone by the fire, worrying about Grace and wishing she were the kind of mother to whom a young girl would bring her troubles, as she always had to her own dearly remembered Mam.
The following Saturday evening when Uncle Les called for the earnings, Grace was no less sullen but she was ready with her case packed. Evelyn hadn’t known what to put in, not that Grace owned anything in the way of clothes for a seaside holiday, anyway. Les bundled her into the car and reassured Evelyn that she needn’t worry, Grace wouldn’t want for anything. This place in Blackpool laid on everything and at the end of the week she’d be right as rain again.
The next night was quite different, cloudy but dry and calm. When I took out the muddy clothes and sheets I’d had to wash again and put them on the line, I heard some night bird croaking not far away, a round throaty call that opened out as if it were sounding across a long, empty lake, though there was no such expanse of water anywhere nearby. That’s how still it was.
The other difference was that I entered the house knowing that I was expected. I didn’t watch from the shed or garden and wait until he was occupied upstairs. That seemed an unnecessary formality now.Besides, I had a lot to do. There was enough washing and ironing to keep me occupied and of course I was behind with the general cleaning after my blitz on the laundry. Whenever I could, I paused at the foot of the stairs from time to time and caught sometimes a moving shadow from above. I longed to be shown more. Should I be afraid for him? All that talk in the letters about his legs, and the night before there had been something abject in the set of his shoulders as he walked in pain away from me. I was desperate to know he was all right.
But the darkness that surrounded us would, in time, open other channels by which I would learn all I needed to know. In darkness I was tuned to him in ways impossible in the light. As I went about my work, I detected echoes in the rest of the house; he, too, was allowing himself the wish to find out more, to see me again, even to pine a little. As the hours passed, this desire to understand each other formed itself into a certain shy and rhythmic etiquette. The creaking above me meant that Arthur was walking the floors with consideration for what I could hear. I hummed under my breath when he was within earshot and he sighed when he sensed I was listening. When I was tired from bending to unload the washing machine and paused to stretch for a moment, I could tell he was turning from a window and inclining his head towards me in a soft gesture of thanks.
I felt no need to hurry through my tasks, so when I came across the letters I stopped and re-read them carefully before tidying them into some order, which I knew would anyway be short-lived. They would be scattered everywhere again in no time, not that I minded. Parts of them seemed written by a different Arthur from mine, not my dreamy, considerate, placid Arthur. It was obvious that daylight made him crazy, too, and at the core of our night companionship was a silent agreement that all we were doing was taking sensible steps to avoid it.
Neither of us felt quite the same need for silence anymore. He was shutting and opening cupboards. If I closed a door, he closed one, too. When I started work in the hall I knew he would be loitering around the top of the stairs and picking up the forwards-backwards drone of the vacuum cleaner. Maybe he was able to imagine its little winking darts of green and red light sweeping across my feet, and the stiff to-and-fro reflection of my moving body, snipped into hundreds of diamonds breaking and merging in the pattern of the front door glass. Sometimes as I went about I sang, and I knew he would be catching the melody and trying to memorize it, so that one night soon he could whistle it back.
In this manner we passed through and around the house all night. He never came very close nor did I go upstairs to him, yet each of us knew the manoeuvres of the other. We had become partners in a dance that kept us wordlessly apart and yearning, yet we could not keep from its magnetically sad and restive oscillations. All those imagined movements of the other, turning and returning through every mesmeric step and measure though never joining, were part of us now.
