It was in Cumberland that Natasha understood how different Joseph was. It was there that was planted the seed of what would become her intense study of him.
When the train passed Watford Joe said,
‘This is further north than you have ever been.’
Natasha looked out of the window, indifferent to what she thought of as the indifferent landscape. She was insulating herself in fiction. The Stevenses had sent her A Severed Head for Christmas, written, they said, by a good friend of theirs, and she had just got round to reading it. The story in the book happily blanked out the story of their journey into Joseph’s birthland.
When the train pulled into the metropolis of steam called Crewe Station, he said,
‘We are now entering Another World. The North.’
They were lucky, he thought, to be sharing their second-class compartment with just two others, respectable middle-aged women travelling together but mercifully, Joe thought, as absorbed in their books as Natasha and himself. One of them was reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the only semblance of a conversation they had had was when she passed the book over to her friend with her index finger on what was probably a particularly felicitous paragraph. This was read silently; a smile was enough to convey appreciation and approval. Joe was determined to finish Catch-22 before Carlisle. He had bought it for his father.
When the train stopped in Wigan and overlooked the town, Joe said, fiercely, ‘That is as fine a townscape as I’ve seen. Not just the look of it. What it’s been through.’
This time Natasha looked with interest. She saw from the height of the train a forest floor of chimney pots, every one streaming with smoke; she saw what seemed to be miles of identical terraces, small brick houses with small back yards and small front doors opening directly onto ugly narrow streets. The late winter light was already waning and she saw it through gloom and greyness. She saw no one on the streets. It was poor, uniform, dull and, she thought, beyond all aesthetic redemption. What did he mean by ‘fine’? But when she glanced at him she observed that he was as wrapped up in it as she had been and there was no irony in him. His voice had been fierce; his look was affectionate. Natasha kept her reservations to herself and plunged back into the more familiar world of Iris Murdoch.
As the train left Carnforth after a brief stop, Joe put aside Joseph Heller’s novel, unable to resist the landscape. It was near dark but the big skies and the bare-pelted hills held onto the light and to Joe the slow chug of the train, as it went up the mountain which fortified his home county against the South, was like the overture to a magnificent performance. Seeing how absorbed he was, Natasha tried to see it through Joe’s expression which was rapt, as if he were at a film. The hills were smooth, shapely, she thought, but very bare. Now and then a fast-running silver stream slashed through a slender ghyll. There were only a handful of farms, down in the valleys. The sky was cloud-steely, taking no colour from the masked setting sun, but adding, she could see, to the wholeness of this scene, the sense of sombre grandeur, of outpost. He looked at her, and broke into a grin and reached for her thigh, touching it only for a moment so as not to offend the two ladies travelling together to Glasgow.
At the top of Shap Fell, Joe said,
‘Cumberland ahoy. Sit back!’
The tons of steel were pointed due north and went steeply down at over a hundred miles an hour as the engine swooped to the plain, swerved on the curved lines through Penrith and full speed across the flatlands to Carlisle.
‘I was born here,’ Joe said as they stepped onto the platform.
‘Home.’
‘No. Wigton’s home.’
They had less than an hour to wait for the country train to complete the last ten miles of the weary three-hundred-mile journey. From Wigton Station they walked up into the town, in the dusk, passing muffled figures, every one of whom greeted them without breaking step.
Natasha’s first impressions of Wigton were polarised.
‘You are like a hunting dog, Joseph,’ she said, ‘one who has picked up a scent and becomes more frenzied the stronger the scent grows.’
True. He was alight.
On Station Road they were passed by a small marching band singing ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ as they returned to the Salvation Rooms after their Saturday night missionary work at the end of Water Street. The main street was poorly lit and all the shops were shut. When they finally heaved their luggage through the door of the as yet unbusy pub, Natasha was met by a flurry of embarrassment, over-attention and offers of provision. They went into the kitchen where an early customer was drinking a pint of bitter. Joseph went into the bar to talk arrangements with Sam. The kitchen, the stranger later explained to Natasha, was the best room in the house; beer a penny dearer, but more of a homely room than a pub. There was also a darts room and a singing room.
‘Just for singing?’ she asked.
‘That’s the idea.’
And then a bar – men only. The stranger asked her if she would like a drink but she refused and then felt she had been impolite but could find no words to retrieve the situation.
Others came in over the next hour or so while she tried to eat a meal prepared in the scullery by Ellen. Natasha experienced a rather fearful shyness. The accents were warm, the expressions on the faces were tolerant and cheerful, there was nothing but kindness and yet she felt she was on shifting sands. The very kitchen became macabre, so many smiling faces, how could she judge them? So many kind questions, how could she answer them? So much food to be publicly consumed while others watched, how could she eat? How could she not eat? Joseph seemed oblivious to this public feeding. Natasha saw only certainties, a solidity, a deep foundation for Joseph, a good childhood, she thought, one which was firm, one which she had never had. By contrast it sent her back to her own childhood uncertainties, the unsmiling faces, the lack of solidity. Who was she here, and why?
‘I feel awful about it.’
Ellen had ushered Joe upstairs. They stood on the landing.
‘Your dad and me thought of giving up our bed,’ she said.
Joe was impatient. The Saturday evening hubbub was building up and Natasha was abandoned for the second time; he had seen the worry in her when he had been called out of the kitchen.
‘It’s terrible.’ Ellen’s distressed tone commanded Joe’s full attention. He looked closely at his mother. Her eyes were strained as if threatening tears. ‘Your own son comes to see you with his new wife and you can’t put them up. What sort of life is that?’
‘It’s fine. Honestly. Natasha doesn’t mind.’
‘How could we put you in the two single rooms?’
‘You couldn’t. We understand.’
‘But, Joe,’ she said and reached out to touch his arm as if pleading with him, a gesture he had never before encountered, a gesture which moved him to stillness, to hope it would pass, ‘we ought to be able to put up you and your wife and maybe all four of us spend the evening together.’
‘You will. We will. We’re here for a few days.’
‘I’m sorry.’
His eagerness to assuage her pain was the reassurance she had sought.
‘Of course we will.’
‘There’s a lot to catch up on,’ he said.
‘There is. I’ll follow you down. You go back to Natasha.’
‘She’s been looking forward to this.’
‘Yes. You go to her now. You go.’
And still obedient to the commands of childhood, he went down the stairs. Ellen took a few deep breaths. In the bathroom she splashed water on her face. In the mirror she told herself not to be a fool. In her heart she could not stop the burn – of shame? Of loss? It was too hard to distinguish.
Joe and Natasha set off soon afterwards, another journey, this time by car, driven by Joe’s Uncle Leonard, now retired, a wise man who saw they needed some peace and saw that they had it as he motored with exemplary caution out of the town, south, and into the hills, to the pitch-black village of Caldbeck in which they had rented a terraced cottage for the week. Joe’s polite invitation to stay for a cup of tea was as politely refused and Leonard drove back even more slowly, wanting to draw every nuance possible from their meeting. She was, he thought, difficult to weigh up.
Though Joe lit the fire, already laid, and brought down a side light from the bedroom to replace the glare of the central bulb, though stores had been brought up earlier in the day from Wigton and half a dozen bottles of beer were part of the reception committee, though the radio played Chopin and the room was a haven, Natasha felt depressed. ‘I may have caught a cold,’ she said, ‘what do you say? Nursing? I may be nursing a cold.’
She slept badly and was troubled by dreams and felt out of the reach of Joseph. She tried to find her bearings, with a husband becoming strange to her in this place.
Natasha awoke to the sounds of ducks. She stretched out her hands; his side of the bed was already cold. She felt heavy-limbed but the bustle of sounds coming up the stairs levered her out of bed. She parted the curtains and saw, across the little path which ran by a fast stream, the village duck pond and two small children dressed, she assumed, for church, a boy and a girl, carefully feeding morsels of bread to the strutting, quacking colony of Caldbeck ducks. The boy was nervous; the girl – it must have been his sister – far bolder, taking him by the hand, leading him towards the fat and noisy ducks. Natasha looked on until the father arrival in a dark coat and dark hat and called for the children who came, the boy running, the girl dragging, and went across to a further road which, Natasha guessed, would take them to the tinny peal of the church bell. She wove happy threads of domestic contentment around them. Soon the ducks ceased to quack. A lady sped down the last lap of the hill guiding her bicycle with one hand, the other holding onto her hat. Natasha’s eyes pricked and she felt a rise of enveloping unaccountable happiness as the darkness began to lift. Joseph called for her.
‘Thought you’d never get up,’ he said and the sight of him blew away any remaining shadows. White shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbow, smuts of coal on his forearms from where he had re-laid and relit the fire, face smiling and ruddy from the fresh air in the handkerchief back garden, hair flopping over his brow, and accent, she noticed, rather broader and warmer. ‘Boiled eggs. Toast. Marmalade. You won’t want cornflakes. Water on the go for tea. Would madam come this way?’
Still in her black dressing gown, Natasha edged her way around the cluttered furniture in what in daylight seemed an even smaller room than she remembered, and through to a yet smaller space, the kitchen, which with the recently added bathroom constituted the whole of the ground floor.
The table was laid. Joe held out a chair for her and then put a white paper napkin across her knees.
‘I do hope the eggs – farmyard fresh and brown to boot – are to madam’s liking,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a little harder on account of the wait while madam proceeded at her leisure down the grand staircase. Shall I butter your toast?’
‘There are ducks,’ she said, ‘out there.’
‘I’m very pleased they turned up, madam. Quite expensive, ducks, especially Caldbeck ducks, and not always reliable, but I did want you to start your day with a Cumbrian duck. I owe them half a loaf of bread.’
‘It looks a very pretty village – from the window.’
‘Positioned for the purpose,’ he said. ‘Caldbeck is, in my view, the gem of the Northern fells. Once a thriving town, with several grand houses, not least the vicarage, formerly a house for lepers. When we take the air – after madam has performed her toilet, or rather concluded her toilet – she will see the village set in a bowl of hills, an unpoetic soul would call it a pudding basin with Caldbeck happily settled in the bottom of the bowl.’
‘What else?’ She could not resist his delight in showing and telling her of this place.
‘Cald-beck, you ask? Beck is a local word for stream. Cald must mean cold, the Scots, our deadly neighbours, pronounce cold as cald and so do we Cumbrians and moreover it is true, the water is cold, pure from the hills.’
‘Joseph!’
‘Did you call me?’ He held his toast as if it were a baton, waiting to beat out the decisive chord. But Natasha just shook her head. She loved it when he played the fool.
‘I thought it would be like Wigan,’ she said, ‘that smoke, those terraced houses.’
‘Knock not Wigan,’ said Joe. ‘Wigan works for the world we live in.’
They strolled alongside the river which went past the east end of the church. There was sun, weak but sufficient to give Natasha a holiday feeling. She held his arm rather tightly and she could feel a physical uncoiling of tensions in her stomach on this placid early spring Sunday morning, buds just beginning to show, Joseph earthed.
‘It is not England here,’ she said, ‘the mountains are like a fortress.’
‘That’s what we all like to think,’ he said, as he stopped to scoop a few smooth pebbles out of the shallow sparkling stream. ‘But it only works for some of the time.’
‘It’s like Provence,’ she said, ‘where the peasants never want to leave.’
‘You’ve caught it on a good day,’ said Joseph, selecting the smoothest of the pebbles. ‘Our biggest export is people.’
‘I’ll give you Jean Giono’s novels,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. He is the great novelist of Provence.’
‘Of the peasants?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like us peasants?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled and he acknowledged the tease.
He skimmed a stone across the surface of the water.
‘Two,’ he said, ‘not much cop.’ He tried again. The stone plopped. ‘You try.’
‘I can’t throw stones.’
‘We used to fight with stones like these when we were kids,’ Joe said. ‘One gang on one bank, another on the other. We would agree a time for a stone fight and turn up and just pelt each other.’ He smiled. ‘That’s where I got this.’ He pointed to the small scar trace beside his left eye.
‘Fight with stones?’
For a moment Joe felt foolishly heroic. Natasha shook her head.
‘We used to bike here from Wigton and go up into these woods,’ he waved towards the adjacent hillside, ‘the trees were so bushy and close together we could go from tree to tree.’
‘Like monkeys?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you had battles there as well?’
‘We built stockades, yes. You would use branches as lances and dig pits and put pointed sticks in them.’
‘To maim your friends?’
‘We didn’t think of it like that.’
‘I suppose you did bare-fist fighting?’
‘We did. I did. I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t like it.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘You did.’ Joe slung another pebble at the water. A flash of memory, of the sickening fear of bare-fist fights came over him. ‘You just did.’
‘For honour?’
‘That’s laying it on a bit thick.’
‘It was,’ said Natasha, thoughtfully. ‘It was for honour. Wasn’t it? Just as you were disappointed with yourself when you did not hit Robert after he had insulted you.’
‘I should have clocked him one, yes.’
‘Clocked?’
‘Hit.’
‘Why?’
He stopped. He did not want to be reminded of Robert. Even retrospective jealousy was disturbing.
‘We are in Sicily,’ said Natasha. ‘Honour.’
‘Corsica!’ Joe said. ‘The Corsican Brothers.’
‘I begin to understand. There is no café in Caldbeck of course.’
‘Of course not.’
‘And if there were, women would be banned.’
‘Come on!’
‘Ceaseless childbearing and the church and enslaved to the house.’
‘Tradition.’
‘While the men drink in the pubs.’
‘Or work in the fields or work in the mines.’
‘But later they drink in the pubs.’
‘Some of them. There are many nonconformist teetotallers in these fells.’
‘I am trying,’ said Natasha sternly, ‘to build up a picture of your background. This is important for our future.’
‘Then we’d best go to Wigton immediately!’
They laughed, and after Joe had made a quick survey, they kissed each other, in public, far too closely, Joe thought, and at far too great a length for a Caldbeck Sunday morning.
‘First we must pay the ducks,’ said Natasha.
They went to Wigton three times.
Natasha’s memories of Wigton from that visit were as of a triptych. The single figure of Joseph dominated one panel; the single figure of Sam the other; and between them, like a crowd moving in procession towards a shrine, the faces and voices of her new husband’s old home. It was not unlike a Breughel, she thought.
Once in the town Joseph was like a hound off a leash. He took her into Church Street and pointed out the marvel of a street shaped like a crooked leg and little yards and even smaller alleys off; the pig market in the middle of it where they had stolen in to play hounds and hares and the runnels down to the High Street where they had hidden when the Chair-leg Gang swept down from Bridlefield, running hard and looking for a fight; the slaughterhouse where he had watched the sudden sickening buckle of knees as the gun to the head was fired, and the West Cumberland Farmers’ Warehouse out of which came a smell of grain so thick it could have been eaten. And above Eddie Bell’s father’s shop Eddie had made a gym, he had weights and chest expanders and photographs of Mr Universe papering the wall; Blob lived in this house, Mazza in that, next to Mr Routledge who had led the union at the factory and then notoriously, unforgivably, switched to the management, and Peter Donnelly who had to sleep with all the windows open because of his TB had set up as a photographer at the top of those stone stairs. This was just part of what he told her about one street.
He took her to the bottom of Meeting House Lane to see the Salvation Army Hall whose youth club he had patronised, as he had those of the Methodists, for the table tennis; the Roman Catholics, for the dances; and of course his own church, the Church of England, for the Anglican Young People’s Association and the socials. Also in Meeting House Lane under one of the many arches that led off the two main streets was the Palace Picture House in which he had seen hundreds of films.
She was marched the length of slumland Water Street whose heroes and villains and crowded histories of war and peace were unrolled, a scroll of battle and survival. He took her along the Crofts which dated, he told her proudly, from the eighth century and squirrelled her around the wriggling tentacles which stretched out from Market Hill, Birdcage Walk, down Burnfoot, up Plaskett’s Lane, and wove her back to the network behind the Parish Rooms. He did not go into the churches and the many chapels but pointed them out, insisting she be impressed by their number and variety.
It was something of a fever, she thought, and puzzled over its intensity. What she saw was a plain little town, not flattered by the drizzle, a place of little colour and animation, dead on the first day they visited, admittedly a Sunday, Natasha thought at first that the deadness revealed its true character.
Until the next day when, shyly, he led her into a yard off Water Street. The cloud was high, light pearl grey, the yard small, empty and surely condemned, Natasha thought, as they emerged into it through a short tunnel. It was, she thought, a pitiful hovel. She felt love for the small boy who had lived in this awful place. Joseph had told her with some regret that it was about to be demolished.
‘Four houses,’ he announced, looking at her proudly, she thought, and a little fiercely, ‘one up, one down, one wash house and one shared WC over there.’ He let it sink in for a while. He had discovered that she was as impressed and intrigued by the context of his past as he had been with hers. This both moved and surprised him. Her sense of the equality of their lives had never struck him so strongly and he was grateful. He had never been ashamed of his past but he had never thought he could boast about it. Natasha licensed him to do so and he leaped at the chance. And this hovel, as he saw it through her eyes, this sanctuary as he himself remembered it from the time his father had returned from the war, this place now abandoned was not to be hidden away.
‘There was a man called Kettler lived in that house,’ he pointed. ‘He lived on tripe and beer and never did a day’s work. He cadged and odd-jobbed at the cattle and pig auctions and once he drowned some kittens just there. I saved one!’
Natasha smiled.
‘There was a girl lived next to us who loved that kitten but I rationed her helpings with it. Why was I so mean? I went to see her with Mam and the cat just before she died. She was only about eight. In a sanatorium. She had TB. There was an epidemic of TB in Wigton just after the war. My mother had it. And though I didn’t find this out until I had glandular fever, they told me at the hospital that I’d had it, in 1945. It can’t have been much of a dose. My mother never told me and I can’t remember a thing about it. But I can remember,’ rather reluctantly, ‘that WC stank. My mother used to try to keep it fresh. But it stank. There was another girl . . . she went to Germany with her mother. The town was made up of yards like this. We thought they were just great.’ He looked around and she lost him for a few moments. The eye of love, she thought.
‘I used to have a dream,’ he said. ‘There was this girl buried in a field I used to play in. It was the girl with TB. I was convinced, in the dream, that I’d murdered her and one day she would be dug up.’
So much had happened here, she thought, so much had happened to Joseph here in this yard and in these mean streets and lanes and insignificant alleyways, so much that mattered so deeply to him . . .
He was infused by it, drunk on it, she thought. Yet it was not just this place, it was in Joseph himself. He had been just as swept up in France, she thought, though she had feared at first that he was merely over-impressed. He had been overwhelmed by the BBC, though that could have been no more than that he was suffering from a kind of vertigo having been rocketed beyond all expectation. And here, in Wigton, though fiercer, it was the same and she saw that he had the energy and the capacity to embrace whatever appealed strongly to him, an unembarrassed love for what moved him, a love, she thought, unafraid to express itself. This she had never before encountered. His almost shameless, certainly reckless, but wholly genuine embrace of life both puzzled and beguiled her.
‘He’s very loyal,’ said Sam.
‘Why do you say that?’
Sam smiled and let it drift. Both of them knew the answer. Joe had gone to spend time with Alan, his oldest friend, to whom Natasha had already been introduced. Ellen was making afternoon tea – lunch was impossible with the pub’s opening hours. She had shooed away Natasha’s offer of help and Sam was taking her for a walk ‘around the Backs’ – along Tenter’s Row, over the hill called Stoneybanks to the Swimming Baths, and back up a small hill into Proctor’s Row against St Mary’s Church.
Sam strolled where Joseph had marched. Sam was thoughtful and measured in contrast to Joseph’s gleam-eyed championing. Three times they were passed by men with dogs; on each occasion Sam was warmly greeted and Natasha was swiftly, slyly, appraised.
‘Is he like you?’
‘You ask some blunt questions, Natasha. Is he like me?’
‘Is he?’
‘We had very different “bringings-up”. Life was just harder in my time. Not that Joe – well, not that Joe didn’t have his problems.’
‘What problems? Was it to do with being different?’
‘Do you think he is different?’
‘How else could he have come out of here?’
‘More hard-working, I’d say, than different. And determined.’ He paused. ‘A bit different.’
‘What were these problems, Sam?’
Whenever she said his name, Sam felt a weakening. The more so in this case as she accompanied it by slipping her arm through his. She was a little taller than he was, but the reach of their stride was in perfect unison. There was that about her which touched Sam to a tenderness he must once have felt for Ellen, he told himself, but perhaps not even for her. There was some mixture of frailty and boldness in Natasha, as if there were no defences but no fear either and yet she called out for protection. She was a woman you could gladly spend a lifetime getting to know.
‘He found things a bit of a strain,’ he said, ‘at times.’
‘The examination work?’
‘Not so much that, more what it was leading to.’
‘Or leading from?’
Sam nodded. She was always onto it.
‘He was a good swimmer,’ Sam said, as they passed by the Public Baths, built, she noticed, in the warm sandstone which was, she thought, the best feature of the town’s architecture.
‘Have I married a hero?’
‘You don’t have to tackle anybody when you swim.’
‘I have not seen him confrontational.’
‘Both of you took a lot on trust.’
The drizzle strengthened. As if to shield her from it, he held her arm a little more tightly.
‘He often tells me that you could have done what he has done.’
‘Does he?’ Sam was almost stopped in his tracks. ‘Does he now?’
‘He says he thinks you’re cleverer than him. He also admires you for fighting in the war in the Far East. But he says you can’t talk about it.’
‘Does he?’
‘You seem amazed.’
Sam said nothing but pressed her arm gently; to stop.
‘Were you scarred by the war, Sam?’
‘Very likely.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I think Ellen and Joe had the worst of it.’
‘Why was that?’
‘You can probably work it out better than I can, Natasha. I haven’t got the psychology.’
‘You mean you don’t want to . . . He’s very confident,’ Natasha said, and waited to be challenged.
‘I’m glad you find him so,’ he said. ‘I can’t give him any maps for where he is or where he’s going. Mine ran out long ago. But he’ll need all the help going.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why, Natasha. He’s finding places he’s no idea of and . . .’
‘Yes?’ He’s about to say, ‘He’s weak,’ she thought.
‘He’s very lucky, to my mind,’ Sam said, most deliberately, eyes straight ahead, ‘to have you by his side.’
Natasha was moved. I have found another father, she said to herself. Or rather, I have found Sam, my father-in-law. Joe had to be rooted in Sam, hadn’t he? ‘Will you tell me about – Burma? It was terrible, wasn’t it?’
And Sam told her, freely, as he had never told Joe who, when he learned of it, was both proud of his wife’s drawing blood from that stone and envious of her closeness to his father.
A few days later on his people tour, Joe took Natasha to the cattle auction to witness the Tuesday Sale. They sat at the back of the crowded arena, a wooden structure, roof, walls and bare-board seats, a circular central sand-floored space for the display of the cattle. Here beasts turned into money following the chant of the high priest, Josh Benson, auctioneer. His rapid half-sung drone from the altar of his desk summoned the faithful to buy. ‘I have ten bid, ten bid, ten bid, ten bid ten, bid ten, eleven, twelve, twelve bid twelve and thirteen, I have thirteen bid, thirteen bid, thirteen bid, fourteen, fourteen bid, fourteen bid, over there fifteen, I have fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I have seventeen bid, seventeen bid, seventeen, I have . . .’
Natasha was entranced by the sound and Joe directed her to the faces, all topped by a flat cap, real Cumbrian faces, Joseph whispered, some concentrated, some cunning, some nursing pain, but strong faces, he pointed out to her afterwards, faces you saw again and again in the district, careful, world-worn, Northern, Norse, faces of farming men whose way of life had changed so little and stretched back unbroken beyond biblical years. Joseph, she thought, you are a fathomless romantic about your own past.
‘I’m his Uncle Colin.’ They were outside the Co-op: Joseph had paused there and for a moment Natasha had feared he might take her in to face more introductions. Instead Colin, to whom he had referred a little and guardedly, popped out, clad in black motorcycling leather. ‘I expect he’s been trying to avoid you and me meeting up.’
‘No I haven’t!’
Colin did not take his eyes off Natasha. Always hit them right between the eyes, that was his tactic. He transferred the brown carrier bag to his left hand. ‘Stores,’ he explained, and held out his right. ‘Bonjour, anyway. Parlez-vous. I expect you think Wigton’s a dump.’
‘Not at all.’
‘It isn’t a dump!’ Joe was indignant.
‘Joe always defends the little place,’ said Colin, his eyes still ‘fixing’ Natasha, unaware that this amused her. ‘But then he doesn’t live here any more.’
‘There are very nice people here,’ said Natasha and looked at Joseph to release herself from Colin’s absurd attempt at a ‘spell’.
‘They’ll be nice to you,’ said Colin, ‘they know you’re here today, gone tomorrow. They can afford to be nice to you.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Look at me,’ said Colin. ‘I’ve got a lifestyle that’s a bit different. Most of them wouldn’t know a lifestyle from a turnip. I like soul music. Glenn Miller’s the limit for this lot. And television game shows. It’s desperate here, mademoiselle, and I bet you won’t come back in a hurry.’
‘We are in Caldbeck,’ Natasha said, helplessly.
‘Good God! Has he taken you to Caldbeck?’
‘It’s a grand little place.’
‘You,’ jabbed out Colin, at last turning his full-frontal attention to his nephew, ‘have sent me neither a letter nor a postcard in more than a year. You’ve got above yourself, Joe Richardson, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. You’ve lost yourself. Au revoir, missus, and all the very best.’
He was gone.
‘He was looking for a door,’ Natasha said, as they watched him go, ‘so that he could slam it.’
‘He has his bad times,’ said Joe anxiously, a little shaken. Colin could still shake him.
‘It can’t be easy being a homosexual in Wigton,’ she said.
Joe’s head seemed to turn in slow motion. To his knowledge, nobody had ever called Colin homosexual. If he himself had ever suspected it, the prospect of his mother’s anger, and the iron-bound hoops of Victorian small-town hypocrisy, would have forbidden it to be articulated into thought, let alone spoken out loud, and on the streets and by a stranger to the place.
‘Yes.’ He swallowed very hard. ‘Perhaps you’re right but maybe, my mother, her half-brother . . .’
‘I won’t say anything to Ellen. Sam will know everything of course.’
There began in Joe a slow unravelling and recovering, a path to be followed deep into his childhood, words, looks, actions, suggestions, promises, invitations, to be reviewed: the whole jigsaw to be remade. For years he had denied that Colin, who had tickled him to hysteria and thrown him in the air until he was exhausted, who had sulked over card games and used his superior years and his status as Ellen’s half-brother to dominate Joe, had any mark of homosexuality about him. When Natasha said, later and helpfully as she thought, that there must have been both fear and obligatory kinship warmth in his relationship with Colin and that must have shaped some of his dealings with men subsequently, Joseph refused to consider it and she let it pass. He had his own hidden cellars as she had and the doors were best not forced.
There were other shops to go into to meet friends of his who had taken up their family business, Johnston’s Shoes, Saunderson’s Hardware, Alan at the paper shop, William in the café. Then there arrived a memorable encounter, just before six, with the shops shutting down and the thirteen pubs opening up, Diddler arrived, zigzagging over the pavement, tipsy, from the tips from his jobs around the busy auctions, without his teeth as it was a working day, dressed like the gypsy he was, and one whose day had gone too well, but his gummy smile a beam of joy to Joe.
‘Joseph!’ He managed to come to a halt beside the Old Vic and used the wall as a prop. His hands had not moved from his pockets. ‘Is this the lucky lady, Joseph?’
‘It is. Natasha, this is Diddler. Diddler, Natasha. My wife.’
‘Well now,’ the old man heaved himself away from the wall and appeared to consider which hand to take out of the pocket. The left emerged. ‘Congratulations now, missus. There we are. Another Mrs Richardson and may I say if you live up to the boy’s mother you’ll have nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Diddler and my father were brought up in the same buildings.’
‘Down on Vinegar Hill. The council’s destroyed them now. But I did well out of that one, Joe, and you and your da helped me with the slates and the lead and all. Still making money while it stays safe in the yard.’
‘Joseph has talked about you,’ Natasha said, remembering part of Joseph’s rhapsody the previous day about this old gypsy as proof of the living archaeology of the town, where ancient scavengers still roamed.
‘Has he now? What’s he want to talk about me for?’
‘He talked about having rides on your cart.’
‘The old flat cart. I’ve still got it, Joe. And I’ve still got the horses, never fear about that. His father was a little gamecock,’ said Diddler, ‘frightened of nothing and nobody, Sam Richardson.’
‘We went to the auction and into the Market Hall,’ said Joe.
‘Too dear, Joseph, too dear for ordinary folk. Now then. I know I should be offering you a present, but I made a bad move in the Lion and Lamb. The oldest trick in the world and I fell for it. A market fella out from Hexham way. You couldn’t sub me a couple of bob for a day or so?’
‘Yes. Here.’ Quits, Joe thought.
‘That was easily done, missus. If I’d known it was going to be that easy, I’d’ve asked for five. Never mind. So. Blessings on your house.’
And with a sidestep and a right swerve and a pinpoint forward lurch he left the damp, cold streets and toppled into the warm snug of the Old Vic.
‘Sadie will be sorry to have missed you,’ Ellen said, ‘but they took her into hospital last week.’
‘They can’t say.’
The three of them were in the kitchen, uninvaded at this hour. Three regulars kept Sam frustratingly trapped in the bar. In the darts room the Pearson brothers were practising for an evening of challenge games. The lights in the singing room were off, the fire unlit.
Ellen looked at them and saw they were happy. So why was there this tinge of sadness, too selfish to admit? When she and Sam talked at the end of the night, she said, ‘We could take a pub down South, Sam, to be near them. Especially when they have a family. We’ll be too far away then.’
Sam nodded – Ellen would never move – and went back to Catch-22.
They borrowed bicycles and strayed up into the bare hills whose blankness and grandeur, emptiness and splendour of shapes made them such a necessary landscape for Joe. When Natasha, more or less unprompted, also declared for them and admired them in much the same terms, it was as if a rare gift had been fully appreciated. And she sketched the hills, bold lines encompassing mass, a close-up of a stone wall, a tipple of fell tops running towards the horizon, and clouds. She became obsessed with clouds but never satisfied, even angry at herself, finally, to Joe’s consternation, tearing up every one of the cloud sketches.
On their last morning he took her up to the spectacular hidden waterfall on the southern rim of Caldbeck. It was called the Howk. It looked as if a particularly stubborn glacial finger had been so reluctant to be withdrawn north, to be called back by the Gods of the Arctic, that it had gouged out this great raw cleft now deep in woods.
The noise of the waterfall was as thrilling as the sight, Joseph said, and Natasha nodded, once again happy in his happiness. They walked up the narrow slippery path beside the fall and the force of water. At first Joe tried to tell her about other waterfalls described by Wordsworth and Southey and the gothic tales set around them. She nodded but did not encourage him. He understood: he too wanted to be alone on this cliff of fall.
Natasha was absorbed in this radiant sight: the white perpetually changing chutes of water, the spray sometimes catching the winter sun through the trees and sparkling with colours, the trees above them, bare-boughed, stripped of all leaves, in mourning. Words were no use, too certain for this unceasing motion of water and light, words would only hold back the flow of these sensations alchemising into imagination, into a dream of life. Did this represent the life she could have with Joseph?
At the top of the fall they looked down at the way they had come. The waterfall hit the black rocks and split into furious strands, foaming between those disruptive obstacles. Natasha put her arm around Joseph’s waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. Often enough when the chance arose, they had made love in the open, always instigated by Joseph. Now, having grown so much closer to him on his home ground, it was she who wanted the seal of sex.
But, though he put his arm around her, though he drew her close and kissed her, there was no more. A little later, when they were circling the village for the last time, she thought she understood why it was so. He must have made love to Rachel there.
By indirections, over patient months, she found out that had been the case and she was impressed that he had kept the place faithful to the girl of his youth.