THREE

The garden was dug; he planted flowers, vegetables and, in the lower half, he set a lawn: another he shaped out in the plot at the front. Workmen came and erected fences; a privet hedge was planted and a gate put up. Within a month most of the houses in the road were occupied.

The noise of the builders’ lorries faded. In the house next to the Morleys’ a policeman came to live; his wife was young: they had a daughter, the same age as Alan, and in the evenings, when the policeman came home from work, he would sit in the porch, the girl on his knee, bouncing her up and down and, laughing, throw a ball for a dog to fetch. A tall, bald-headed man, with dark-brown eyes and a flushed, thick-featured face, he would come out at these intervals between his shifts and dig the garden; soon he had overtaken Morley, and Patterson, and the MacMasters: he laid paths, erected a walk, planted roses, arranged a trellis, a rockery and a stepped terrace which led up to the top half of the garden. His name was Foster; occasionally he would come into the Morleys’ house, tapping on the door – for the girl, nicknamed ‘Pretty’ by him, and called Alison, would often wander across the footpath between the houses and come into the scullery to play with Alan – ‘Pretty?’ he would call, his tall figure, with its gleaming, dome-shaped head, thrust round the door and, hearing the child’s voice, he would add, ‘Come to visit her boyfriend, has she? You can see where her thoughts will turn in two or three years’ time.’

‘Oh, a bit longer than that,’ Mrs Morley would say, looking up from her washing, or from where she was cooking, shy at first with the uniformed figure, standing there, invariably without his tunic, blue-shirted, dark-tied, dark-bracered, big-booted, the geniality of the bald-headed man, and the way he strode through the house to retrieve his daughter, setting her on his shoulder, or thrusting her with her blonde-coloured, dancing curls across his back, soon putting Mrs Morley at her ease: he would sit at the table and take a cup of tea. ‘She’s too much like her mother for me not to know: an eye for the lads from the age of dot.’

The girl would laugh; he would bounce her up and down: Alan, dark-eyed, would gaze up at the uniformed figure, with its heavy, laughing, red-cheeked face, at the laughing figure of the girl set on his knee and, scowling, tip one foot on its side, or, speculatively, put out a hand and endeavour to join in the bouncing up and down, and the laughter and the rolling of the blonde-haired girl from side to side in the policeman’s heavy hands. Soon, the two of them would be bouncing up and down together, their shrieks and laughter filling the house, the policeman’s wife, if the activity continued long enough, tapping on the woodwork at the side of the door and saying, ‘This is where he’s got to? Send him on an errand and it’s another two hours before I see him.’

‘Like mine,’ Mrs Morley would say, offering her neighbour a cup of tea, the two women chatting at the side of the table while the tall, blue-shirted figure, set on a stool, bounced the children up and down, tickled one and then the other, slid one down then pulled it up, scratched the one’s head and then the other’s, and, still jogging, would sing, ‘Here’s two rabbits, fit for a stew; which shall we have: this ’un, or you!’ chasing them finally into the other room, or up the stairs, Mrs Foster calling, ‘Now, that’s enough,’ and, ‘He never knows when to stop,’ still chastising the blue-shirted figure, who was almost twice her size, as they returned to the house, the tiny figure of the girl set up on the policeman’s shoulder where she shouted and laughed and tapped the tall man’s head as, finally, swinging her down, he carried her inside their door.

‘At least they’re happy,’ Mrs Morley would say when Morley, returning home, came upon these scenes.

‘Why shouldn’t they be happy? He’s got a good job.’

‘You could have one.’

‘Nay, I’ve been in a uniform half my life, I’m damned if I’ll step in another. Any road, I’m not the right man.’

‘You’re not a criminal, are you?’ Mrs Morley would ask.

‘I’m just not cut out for a bobby. You’ve to be the right sort of man for a job like that.’

‘You don’t begrudge him it?’ Mrs Morley would ask.

‘I begrudge him nought. I begrudge no one nothing,’ Mr Morley would add. ‘All I’m saying is, it’s a damned easy job compared to some. You retire,’ he would conclude, ‘afore you’re fifty.’

‘Only if you’ve been in long enough.’

‘He’ll have been in long enough. He’s been a bobby, I should think, since afore he wa’ two year old.’

Yet, despite his misgivings, Mr Morley would talk to the taller man in the evenings across the fence and would sometimes cross over to his garden, examine his trellis, his crazy-paving, his bedding roses and his climbers, his border plants, the grass he had planted, the neat rows of vegetables already showing green, and would crouch down, too, and smoke a cigarette while the blue-shirted figure sat beside him in the porch, smoking a pipe, Morley returning later to report, ‘His father wa’re a policeman, tha knows,’ or, ‘He used to lake football for the City’ or, ‘He wa’ telling me o’ one chap they copped who’d had one hundred previous convictions. It makes you wonder what the world is coming to,’ his manner deferential in the presence of the taller man, his head upraised, his face inflamed, as if, in courting the attention of Mr Foster, he were seeking ways to ingratiate himself with the law itself. ‘You never know what they might pinch you for: a man like that can come in useful.’

‘You haven’t done anything you shouldn’t, have you?’ Mrs Morley inquired, this side of her husband’s character a mystery to her.

‘You never know if I shall.’

‘I doubt if you’d get special privilege by knowing Mr Foster,’ Mrs Morley said. ‘They’re not allowed to use the law like that.’

As it was, in the evenings and at weekends, Morley scavenged the half-completed houses for odd bricks and lengths of wood and shovefuls of cement, which he brought back to the house in buckets, making paths, building a trellis himself, erecting a barrier to keep back the coal in the coal-house outside the back door.

‘He’ll not pinch me for that,’ he would say whenever Mrs Morley complained about the amount of material he did bring back. ‘It’s stuff they’ve thrown away, for one thing, and I gave him a bit of the wood, for another.’

‘You didn’t tell him where it came from,’ his wife replied.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But he’s a good idea.’

Mr Foster never accompanied Mr Morley and Mr Patterson to the Spinney Moor Hotel and, largely because of this, Mrs Morley saw his influence as a more wholesome one on her husband than that of their other neighbour.

‘He never drinks,’ she would say. ‘Yet he’s perfectly happy.’

‘His father wa’re a great tippler,’ Mr Morley said.

‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

‘He told me.’

‘At least he’s learnt his lesson. Like Alan will, no doubt.’

‘He’s nought to be afeared of in me,’ Mr Morley said.

‘The amount you drink at times,’ she said, ‘he’ll be bound to notice as soon as he gets older.’

Yet Morley had gone to some lengths to curtail his drinking; for one thing, once the household bills were settled, and their way of living more certain, he had very little money left to spend at the Spinney Moor, or at the Three Bells on his way home from work. Most weeks, from the Wednesday morning until the Friday evening, there was no money in the house, save a shilling for the electric meter and three pennies for the gas. ‘Maybe I should have been a bobby,’ he would say, looking over at the contented household on the other side of the garden fence. ‘They’re set, you can see, for a happy life.’

‘At least, he saves his money. We never save a penny,’ Mrs Morley said.

‘What’s the point o’ saving?’ Morley would inquire. ‘Are you going to be happier in a fortnight than you are today by saving a couple of bob each week?’

‘At least you’ll know where you stand and you’re not worrying from Monday till Friday that you’ll have enough to see you through.’

‘We’ll have enough,’ he replied, yet, at the end of the week, when he received his wage, he would be working out new ways of siphoning off a coin, if only a shilling, so that his evenings at the Spinney Moor should not be further curtailed.

‘You’re a family man. Not like Patterson. He has no children.’

‘He’ll be having some. Don’t worry. Then he’ll complain.’

‘Are you complaining because you have a child?’

‘I’m complaining about nought,’ Mr Morley said. ‘All I’m saying is, he’ll get fastened up.’

‘Is Mr Foster fastened up?’ she asked.

‘He has no need to be. He’s content with what he has.’

‘Aren’t you content?’

‘It’s that I can’t see the logic of waiting for tomorrow to enjoy what you can just as easily enjoy today.’

‘It makes nothing of life,’ Mrs Morley said. ‘It makes it all spending, without thought and reason.’

‘To me, it makes common sense,’ Mr Morley replied. ‘A second wasted is a second lost.’

‘A penny saved is a penny wiser.’

‘You’ll be saying the same at eighty, if we live that long.’

‘Everything we’ve got here is what I’ve saved,’ she said.

‘I’ve asked Spencer for more,’ he told her for, prior to moving to the new house, he had asked Spencer for a rise, only to be refused, and to be offered, in recompense, the loan of the cart.

‘Perhaps you should get another job.’

‘What other job?’

‘At Chatterton’s: sheet-metal working. Engineering.’

‘I could never work indoors,’ he said. ‘I’m used to being in the open. I’ve alus been in the open. I don’t think there’s ten week I’ve lived in barracks, for example, in the army: nearly all the time I wa’re under canvas.’

‘You’ll get no money at Spencer’s. There’s no money in farm-work,’ Sarah said.

‘Maybe I’ll look round for another farm.’

‘No farm pays more than another. They have it settled,’ she said, ‘between them.’

‘I’ll think of something, don’t worry,’ he told her.

Yet it wasn’t Mr Morley’s nature to worry long, and it wasn’t his nature to hold a grudge, or to remember the conclusion of an argument for more than twenty-four hours. By the end of the same week he was looking at his wage packet again and thinking of what excuse he could make to open it and extract a shilling.

Beyond Mr and Mrs Foster lived the Shawcrofts: a father and a mother and a baby in a pram, together with a second child a little older than Alan. Shawcroft worked at the coke ovens at the edge of the town, a slim, thin-featured man, dark-haired, his wife even smaller and darker than himself. The garden at the back was left unattended, weeds growing in profusion as far as the fence. In the evenings the couple often quarrelled, the child crying in the pram, the other child screaming, the voices of the father and the mother calling from the open door.

‘At least we haven’t reached that stage,’ Morley would say, picking up Alan.

‘Nor are we likely to,’ Mrs Morley said.

‘I suppose one morning we’ll find he’s killed her,’ Morley said.

‘Or she’s killed him.’

‘More than likely.’

Yet the unease caused by the Shawcrofts’ arguments was absorbed by the greater feeling of confederacy which united the tenants of the estate, neighbours calling to neighbours once the first few days of strangeness had passed, a sense not only of being pioneers, occupying land which had never been lived on before, but the feeling that theirs was a common venture, uniting people who had never been drawn together before. Beyond the Shawcrofts came the O’Donalds, who owned a cycle shop, and, beyond the O’Donalds, with their two young children, were the childless Harrisons, of whom the wife worked in an office and the husband as a postman. Beyond the postman lived a cobbler and, next door to the cobbler, the Barracloughs, with four young children, the husband employed as a painter by the Corporation.

The houses, on completion, were steadily filled; the gardens were dug; children played in the field and brought back news to their parents. Sheds were built, hens appeared, a motor bike was tested in one of the gardens. At the bottom of Spinney Moor Avenue the row of shops was finally completed and, in the space between the shops and the Spinney Moor Hotel, the foundations of a cinema were being laid out. On Sundays the bell tolled from the church and each weekday morning crowds of children ran up the narrow roads to the school and in the evening came running down again: the sounds of their voices, calling, came out across the slope each playtime, the flood of sound, ebbing and rising, marking the intervals of the day for the women in the houses.

Over the summer Morley was late home each evening as Spencer took in the harvest; he worked Saturdays and Sundays and, when he did come home, he would sit on the step and chide the tall figure digging in the adjoining garden, ‘By go, I could be a bobby myself, the hours they have to work.’

‘It’s the responsibility, Arthur,’ came Mr Foster’s reply.

‘I could have the responsibility as well, walking about all day wi’ nought to do.’

‘You’ll soon be sitting back when you’ve done your stooking,’ Mr Foster would add.

‘It’s threshing after that. Then ploughing. Then sowing. There’s ne’er a day left free from now till Christmas. Aye,’ he would call into the open back door, ‘I think I’ve missed my profession, love.’

‘Oh, he’s always complaining, Sam,’ Mrs Morley would call, more familiar with Mr Foster on these occasions than was her husband.

‘Sam, is it, now?’ Mr Morley would call. ‘I can see I’ve been spending too much time away from home,’ Mr Foster laughing, leaning on his spade, and adding, ‘He’s caught us out, Sarah. Might as well admit it.’

‘That’s the way the flag is flying, and I never saw it,’ Mr Morley would add. ‘By go, no wonder he’s alus home. Hear that?’ he would call to Mrs Foster. ‘Never mind his stripes and his policeman’s collar: just see which way his boots are turned.’

Yet, if the bantering scarcely concealed Morley’s resentment, once inside the house and the door closed he would complain more vehemently about the hours he worked. Sometimes he wasn’t home until after dark and, if not stopping at the Three Bells, by the time he reached the Spinney Moor he would be too tired to resist the temptation and, once inside, he would empty his pockets across the counter, arriving home to find his supper cold, and with scarcely enough energy to go to bed. One night he lay till morning in the chair by the fire and another morning he slept so late that by the time he got to work he had to feign an illness. He was back at the bar the following night.

One evening he arrived home to find the house in darkness. Assuming Sarah to have gone to bed, he stepped into the scullery and took off his boots and looked round for his supper. There was nothing in the oven and the fire was out: all the pans were on the shelf.

He went upstairs, surprised to see the bedroom door still open.

The door to Alan’s room was also ajar: he looked inside; the cot was empty.

The double bed in the front bedroom was still unmade.

He looked in the bathroom, in the spare bedroom at the back, returned downstairs, put on the lights, looked at the mantelpiece, the sideboard and the table, examined the cupboard in the scullery, re-opened the back door and looked out at the garden.

He knocked on the Fosters’ door.

After an interval the lock was turned and the bolt drawn back.

Mr Foster appeared in his pyjamas, a raincoat over the top.

‘You haven’t seen Sarah?’ Morley asked.

‘I haven’t, Arthur,’ Foster said. ‘I’ll ask the missis.’

Mrs Foster came down; Alan and Mrs Morley had not been seen that afternoon.

‘She must have gone to her mother’s, or one of her brothers’, and missed the last bus,’ Morley said. ‘I’m sorry to have got you up.’

‘That’s all right, Arthur,’ Foster said, and gazed out at him as he went back to the house.

After waiting an interval he locked the back door and wheeled out his bike.

He rode slowly along Town Road, the street lamps lit above his head.

Close to the town, before the last steep rise to the central hill, he turned to his right along a thoroughfare which led, narrowly winding, between mills and factories, to come out by the river; the gas lamps here were more dimly lit. Passing the ends of several narrow streets he turned into one adjacent to the unlit structure of a mill and, propping his bike against one of the lamps, he knocked at a door.

A light showed in a window overhead.

A tousled head leaned out.

‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Arthur.’

The window was lowered.

As he stood by the door to knock again a bolt was drawn and the door pulled back.

His mother-in-law, a small, grey-haired figure with, in the darkness, a grizzled face, gazed out. She hadn’t put in her teeth and stood with one hand on the doorpost, barring his way.

‘She doesn’t want to see you.’

‘Is she here?’

‘She’s asleep.’

‘Is Alan here?’

‘He’s been in bed for three or four hours. So have I,’ she added.

Below her shawl was a night-gown and, below the night-gown, a pair of slippers.

‘She came because she’s fed up with your drinking. I told her afore she wed but she never listened.’

‘Nay, I’ll come in,’ Morley said, making to force his way in the door.

‘You’ll never,’ the mother said. ‘I’ll call the bobby.’

‘Call him,’ Morley said and forced his way through his mother-in-law’s arm. ‘Where is she?’ he added. ‘In the room at the back?’

But already a figure had appeared on the stairs: she was in her night-gown and had evidently come prepared. Only her silhouette was visible, for the lights had not been put on in the kitchen into which the door of the house directly opened.

‘I don’t want to see you,’ she said.

‘You left no message,’ Morley said. ‘What am I supposed to think, wi’ you and Alan gone?’

‘You can think what you like.’

‘I wa’ never drunk.’

‘As close as makes no difference.’

The door to the street had been closed by the mother. She said, ‘I want him out of here, or you both go back together,’ passing her daughter on the stairs and closing the door on the landing.

‘Are you coming back?’ Morley asked.

‘I’m staying here.’

‘In that case, I’ll take Alan,’ he said.

‘You’ll do no such thing.’

‘I’m having him,’ he said, yet he stayed on the stairs, craning up at his wife whom, in the greater darkness, he could scarcely see.

‘I want you out of here,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forgive you if you wake him.’

‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’ Morley said, seeing no way out of the dilemma except by using force.

‘No.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘I’m not coming back.’

‘What have I done, Sarah?’ he asked.

‘I’ve warned you. I’ve begged you. You drink every last penny you can get. You leave us with nothing. I’m not having it any longer.’

‘I’ll give it up.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘I’ll give it up definitely.’

‘I’m not going to argue about it any more. If you try and take Alan I’ll go to the police. Mrs Patterson knows how much you drink.’

‘You’ve been talking to her about your husband, have you?’

‘She can see enough as it is.’

‘Aye, and I thought Patterson wa’re a friend,’ he added.

‘He is. But he drinks in moderation, and only once a week.’

‘Aye, we can’t all be angels,’ Morley said.

He turned to the door.

‘In that case, I s’ll go back home.’

He thought, ‘I can go and join the army tomorrow and be damned to all of them. No more Spencer, no more wukking, no more nagging. I can drink as much as I like, for as long as I like wi’out anybody nor nobody butting in.’

Yet, once in the street, the smell of the malt-kilns and of the dark presence of the mill soon brought to him the realization that he couldn’t go back: the army was a young man’s game and, towards the end of it, he’d got sick of it and, Sarah apart, he’d wanted something settled.

In any case, he concluded, there was Alan: he couldn’t leave someone, bearing his name, who was all the world to him, in a place like that.

He couldn’t leave Sarah, either, for, as he got on the bike and looked back at the house, he thought of all the things he might have said: ‘Haven’t I done everything for her? Haven’t I kept a job? Haven’t we got a home? Haven’t I looked after her like a husband should?’

He got back to the house and made some food, set the alarm and went to bed.

Yet he scarcely slept. He was up again at six and already on his bike by half-past, pedalling back once more towards the river, knocking on the door in Hasleden Street, waiting for it to be opened, this time by his father-in-law, a tall, willowy man who stepped aside and said, ‘Nay, it’s nought to do wi’ me. She wa’ warned afore she wed,’ his overalls already on and his snap-bag packed, leaving the house for the mill only moments after Morley had entered.

He strode up to his wife’s bedroom at the back and could hear her talking already to Alan.

When he opened the door she looked up in surprise: she was still in bed and Alan, in pyjamas, was sitting on the cover.

‘Are you coming, or do I carry you?’ Morley said, antagonized by the sight of the two of them together and by the cup of tea which, steaming, he saw had been placed on a chair by the bed.

‘I’m not coming back, and you won’t carry me,’ she said. ‘I’ll report anything you do to the authorities,’ she added.

But for the child, he might have grabbed her.

‘Come on, Alan,’ he said. ‘We’re going home.’

Yet the child continued to cling to its mother.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s lift you.’ He tugged the child and it cried in terror.

He heard his mother-in-law in the door behind. ‘You’ll kill her.’ He felt the woman’s fist across his back.

He went back to the door.

He wiped his face, watching his wife bowed over the child, she crying, the boy screaming.

‘Tha s’ll be home tonight, or I’ll come again.’

He went to the stairs.

‘You can tek him where you like. I’ll find you.’

His legs tremored: he could scarcely mount the bike. He stopped at the end of the street and held his head. ‘What have I done now?’ he thought. ‘Does she want me to be like Patterson next door, or Foster? Nothing but a woman’s man?’

His eyes full of tears he cycled from the town.

‘What’s up, Arthur?’ the farmer called, seeing him enter the farmyard early. ‘Clock got stuck?’

‘Aye, Mr Spencer,’ Morley said. ‘Just about.’

In the evening he delayed returning home until it was almost dark. ‘The light’ll either be on or it won’t,’ he thought. He didn’t raise his head until he’d dismounted at the gate.

The curtains were undrawn. No smoke came from the chimney: the scullery and the living-room were as he’d left them.

He made some supper and thought about going down to the Spinney Moor.

Finally, he went up to bed and lay in the darkness, gazing at the pattern of the street light on the ceiling.

He heard a knock on the door and when he went down he found his neighbour, Foster, standing there.

‘Everything all right?’ the policeman said. He was in uniform and had either just come off or was about to go on duty.

‘Aye. All right,’ Morley said.

‘The wife all right?’

‘Champion.’ The policeman glanced past him into the scullery. ‘She’s staying at her mother’s.’

‘We thought she might.’

‘Wi’ the harvesting I’ve scarce time to go back’ard or forr’ad,’ Morley said.

‘Aye.’

The policeman stepped back from the porch.

‘If there’s anything we can do you’ll let us know.’

‘Oh, I’ll let you know,’ Morley said, nodding at Foster then closing the door.

He stood listening to the policeman’s steps as they crossed to the adjoining house.

‘Nay, he’ll twig it,’ he thought. ‘But I s’ll not care.’

Yet he lay in bed, his body curled to the shape of his wife.

He imagined her lying in bed by the river. ‘Two more nights down theer, and she’ll come crawling back,’ he thought. ‘I shall be the winner.’

But Sarah didn’t come back the next day or the next; Morley, on the fourth night, called in at the Spinney Moor and stayed till closing time, coming home on the arm of a man he had never seen before.

‘Can you see your way on from here?’ the stranger asked.

‘Let me tell you a secret,’ Morley said. ‘Never get wed.’

‘Never,’ the man acknowledged.

‘Not ever.’

‘Never.’

‘Word from a wise man.’

‘Correct.’

‘Which way am I?’

‘Uphill, Arthur.’

‘See you tomorrow.’

‘All being well.’

‘May the sun always shine.’

Lurching from side to side he set off up the road.

The street lights reeled above his head and, when he reached his gate, he fell against the hedge.

For several seconds he struggled to pull himself upright and finally fell through the thin sheaf of privet and knelt for a while on the halfgrown grass the other side.

‘All for nothing,’ he thought. ‘All for nothing-othing-o!’

He pulled himself up, found the path, went round the side of the house then hunted for several minutes in his pockets to find the key.

He looked about him; he retraced his steps: he got down on his knees and finally found the key beneath the hedge.

He returned to the door, unlocked it and, having staggered inside, collapsed in a chair and, thinking some time later he might get up, he turned, collapsed and lay there oblivious until the sunlight, streaming through the window, finally woke him.

He cycled to work with no money in his pocket and, on arriving at Spencer’s, he went directly to the door of the house. The barking of dogs came from inside and Spencer himself looked out.

‘I thought tha wa’ poorly,’ the farmer said, indicating that, whatever Morley might make of the rest of the day, he wouldn’t count it as a full one.

‘My wife’s left me,’ Morley said. ‘I’m in a bit of a fix.’

It was the first mention he’d made of his private life, beyond the fact that he was married and had had a baby and had got a new house, and the farmer stood in the doorway uncertain what to make of it.

‘Come in, Arthur.’ He pulled the door wider and Morley stepped into the stone-flagged kitchen. Rabbits were strung up from hooks on the low-beamed ceiling: a fire burned in a black-enamelled grate.

The dogs, barking, ran into the yard.

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Morley said.

‘How long ago has she gone?’

‘A week.’

‘A stiff ’un is it?’

‘I think so,’ Morley said. He sat at the large farmhouse table, at which he had only rarely sat before and, for no reason he could account for, began to cry: there was something enclosed about the gesture so that when the farmer’s wife, a slender, delicately-featured woman with thin, fair hair swept sharply back, paused at the door she glanced in with consternation, gazing at the robust figure standing by the table who, shrugging, merely shook his head.

‘Here go, Arthur,’ the farmer said. ‘Let’s have a cup o’ summat stronger.’

‘Nay, I s’ll never touch drink again,’ Morley said. ‘She left me for I could never ge’ past the Spinney Moor without stopping off.’

Aware of Mrs Spencer, he dried his eyes, turning away, pulling out a handkerchief.

‘I’m sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Nay, it’s no trouble to me, lad,’ the farmer said, yet content to stand there, waiting for his wife to take command.

‘I shall make a cup of tea, Arthur,’ she said and Morley turned, blinking, rubbing his eyes. ‘I tell Mr Spencer, but he never listens.’ She gestured to the farmer as she made the tea. ‘He’s a Three Bells man, if ever there was one.’

‘In moderation.’

‘That’s not how a wife must see it,’ his wife replied.

‘That’s a fact.’ Spencer glanced at Morley and winked ‘Would you like the missis to have a word, and see if she can pull it through?’ he added.

‘If she won’t listen to me she’ll listen to no one,’ Morley said.

‘She might listen to another woman. Send a heifer in to butter another heifer up, but ne’er put in a bull,’ he added, laughing and finally sitting as his wife, protesting, came up to the table.

‘That’s no way to talk about it,’ she said when a child, crying, called from another room.

‘She’ll sort it. She can thread a needle from a tangle if you leave her long enough,’ the farmer said, pouring the tea himself. ‘Give her five minutes, and she’ll soon have the wife back home.’

A child, scarcely more than eighteen months, was carried into the room: its pale-blue eyes, like those of Spencer himself, examined Morley gravely.

‘Here’s Margaret, fit for no one and nothing,’ the farmer said, leaning over to squeeze the chubby leg and then the chubby cheek and running his hand finally over the mop of light-coloured hair. He laughed, leaning back, adding, ‘Ought to eat with that, then, Arthur? I bet thy hasn’t had a nibble. If the missis,’ he concluded, ‘’ll rustle summat up.’

That evening, when Morley got home, he could see from the angle of the curtains and the smoke from the chimney that the house was occupied, and as he came up the path at the side he could hear Alan playing in the garden and, rounding the corner, saw Sarah taking in washing from the line.

She said nothing, and he said nothing either, following her into the house, taking off his boots, hanging up his coat, avoiding the clothes, stooping to the sink and washing.

‘Ought to eat?’ he said.

‘It’s in the oven.’

He opened the oven door, getting out the plate, running with it, hot, to the table and thinking, ‘She believes she’s beaten me, and I suppose she has: nothing between us’ll ever be the same again.’

When the child came in Morley nodded his head.

‘How go, Alan?’ he said, the child standing at the door. ‘Ar’t coming in?’

Yet the boy, instead of answering, turned to the hall and from there called to his mother who, coming through, said, ‘Got everything you want?’

‘Yes,’ he said, for the table had been set.

‘Mrs Spencer came to see me.’

‘She said she would.’

‘Pity you have to go telling everyone about it.’

‘I’ve told nobody,’ he said, ‘apart from Spencer. I’ve told next door you were away for a while.’

He ate his food slowly, looking at the table, at the plate, at the window, occasionally glancing back at the boy.

‘I’ve given up the drink.’

‘So Mrs Spencer told me.’

‘I swore Spencer I would.’

‘I thought you said you had.’

‘I have.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘We should be all right.’

‘He’s upped me another two bob a week.’

‘Mr Spencer told me he had.’

‘I’d never have thought he’d play, but he has.’

‘It’s hardly more than a farthing an hour.’

‘Better than nought.’

‘Next to it, I’d say.’

He didn’t add anything further.

‘Is your supper all right?’

‘Champion.’

‘I’ll take your plate,’ she said, ‘if you’ve finished.’

He put out his arm to the boy and, after a moment, Alan came to him.

He lifted him to his knee; his hair smelled freshly from a recent bath.

‘Now, then, how are we?’ he said, and kissed his mouth.

The boy’s head turned, listening to the sounds from the scullery.

Mrs Morley, in tidying the kitchen, had begun, faintly, to hum a tune.

‘What did Mrs Spencer say?’ he asked when she came back in.

The boy, already, had slipped from his knee.

‘She said I’d done right.’

‘Did she?’

He waited, but she said no more.

‘Bed for you,’ finally, she told the boy and her feet a moment later came from the stairs, followed by the undressing in the bathroom.

‘Normally she undresses him down here, but now it’s suddenly i’ private,’ Morley thought, and for an instant the suspicion that perhaps she wouldn’t be sleeping in their bed had crossed his mind.

When he went up, however, he found the cover of the bed turned back: he went into the boy’s bedroom, kissed him in his cot, and drew the curtains, turning to him once again before he followed Sarah out.

‘What else did she say?’ he asked when the door was closed.

‘I’ve come back, haven’t I?’

‘Aye, you’ve come back, love,’ Morley said. ‘And I’m glad. Though I feel for some reason, more, it’s me that’s come back home to you,’ he added.