old game, not knowing it was years ago and I’ve outgrown it, for the dead have no idea how long they’ve been gone.
But the sheets hang still after all, and so it was, of course, just a fancy to imagine she was there. And if we don’t believe in ghosts, how can we trust their opposites, real people with their loud voices and certainties, their intentions for the day, ideas about their future and their happiness, to possess the same reluctance to relinquish this life, to be any more fleetingly present than they? And so the world proves itself as shadowy, as unreliable as anything glimpsed and dismissed as a trick of the light, and people pass over the surface of it the way they tiptoe out across the edges of a memory, or a dream.
And in the instant the dreamer wakes, already the separation is beginning from even the worst and strangest of nightmares, and the infinitesimal moment has passed when the dream’s fragments might have all come together into something complete, albeit terrible. Revelation eludes us; even as our eyes are opening, the knife falls from the hand and voices expire on the shore of sleep. We are awake after all and alive in the solid world, and it seems so understandable and constant, and the time remaining to us so unwearyingly long. There are trees and fields all the way to the horizon and a pebble-sized heart beats in every flying bird. Yet we take only a moment to perish. We vanish under the surface the way a drop of water flicks from the tail of a fish, sparkles, and falls back into a river. Once you know that, you know that the will of a body to remain unbroken is itself piteously breakable.
Perhaps the woman on the road measured the last minute of her life in a calculation of how long it would take her to pedal to the top of the rise. Perhaps there was no more than a minute between the thought that soon she would stop to rest and the moment she became carrion. Perhaps this is what an accident is.
Dear Ruth
Arthur
THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK
Chapter 1: Beats Working In’t Mill, or So They Say
At six a.m. on the 18th of January 1932, the blast of a dozen factory sirens over the roofs of Aldbury in Lancashire signalled the end of the night shift. A few moments later a crowd of chattering women and girls poured out from the Brightaglow Electric Apparatus factory into the raw winter morning. Among them was Evelyn Leigh. Slightly built, her girlish dimples and rosy complexion were offset by abundant dark curls that belied her twenty- nine years. She moved as if she were afraid of being jostled and her shoulders stooped with tiredness. But these days her dimples came and went more often, in private half-smiles. As the two hundred night workers clattered through the gates, their scarved and shawled heads bowed under the icy rain, Evelyn drew herself away from the tide and paused, looking up at the sky and letting her eyes adjust to the daylight.
It’s like a dirty leaky ceiling up there, she thought to herself, trying to focus. It did seem to be raining grey, as if an upstairs pipe had burst and the clouds were wads of wet newspaper stuffed into the dripping cracks. She screwed up her eyes but still she couldn’t make out anything clearly. The dirty rain just went on dripping down all around her, mucking everything it landed on. The walls of the factory were a wet dark blur, and beyond the gates nothing could be seen except for the mass of people moving through the street. Evelyn turned up the collar of her coat and walked slowly on towards the tram stop, blinking through the rain. She was tired and already her headscarf was soaked through.
Her eyes were stinging as they always did following the nine-hour shift in the Testing Division as a bulb checker, making sure that all sets of fancy lightbulbs were in working order before they were packed. It wasn’t onerous work but in the eighteen months she had been there Evelyn had found it increasingly exhausting. Still, there was no choice, you worked where there was work, and at least it was quieter than the weaving sheds in the mills, and you didn’t choke on the cotton dust.
The work wasn’t heavy. First she had to assemble a box from the pile of flat cardboard sheets at her feet, folding and fitting the tabs in a matter of seconds. Then she would take a set of lights from the never-ending supply, regularly topped up by the lads from Assembly, in a carton on the floor at her side. She would hold the bare end of the brown snake of flex and touch it against the socket on the bench, and as long as the whole string of bulbs flared in a blaze of coloured light, she would wind it around her crooked arm as she had been taught and pack it neatly in the box. The duds went into another carton for adjustments and retesting.
Every half hour, another lad from Dispatch would come along wheeling a deep basket on castors, and take the stack of packed boxes from the other side of her bench. A note would be made on her work sheet of the number of packed boxes she achieved and the supervisor’s beady eye would peruse those sheets at the end of each shift, so it was just as well she had mastered the folding and packing quickly so that she could do it without really looking. Dazzled by each flash, she could see nothing for several moments afterward, except a starry afterimage.
Not until the end of her shift would Evelyn look up from her work and notice the shimmering, glassy air of the Testing shed and the strange, hard, salty smell of electricity. The space above her head seemed laden with tiny shocks that sparked against the white glazed bricks lining the walls and glanced back like arrows. Like a headache waiting to happen, Evelyn thought. Then she would rub her eyes and long for the fresh air. Every one of the hundreds of bulb flashes would smoulder on in her vision for hours afterward, erasing detail as if they had made ragged red and grey holes like cigarette burns across the surface of her eyes.
Today, out in the freezing rain, she marched on briskly. She had more important things to think about than sore eyes. She would not let even the most dismal January she could remember interfere with her good spirits. After all, it would soon be spring, and she would be getting married. Then there would be the baby and so what if a few people talked? It wasn’t unheard of, a honeymoon baby coming early, most folk wouldn’t probe. The fuss wouldn’t last. It would be a shock for Mam, and Evelyn hated the thought of upsetting her, but she would make her understand and she’d come round in time. Stan would settle down fine and there would be nothing more to worry about.
As she walked, a voice from behind interrupted her thoughts. “Oy, Evelyn Leigh, hang on, can’t yer!” She turned and waited for her friend, Daphne Baker, to catch up. “Heck, you’re in a hurry!” she puffed. “Where’s the fire?”
A grinning Daphne came lumbering towards her in her shapeless coat and tight stockings, careless as always
