Lizzie was sent home that summer. No explanations were given. She was told by the housekeeper that she wasn’t needed. She knew why. Charles was the reason. In fact she had done all that she could to discourage him but even she could see through the little cracked glass in her bedroom that she was now prettier than she had ever been and no uniform could disguise the fact that if she had regular good food she would be beautiful.
The young men who visited the house tried all ways to be alone with her but she avoided them. She also avoided Charles, but it was not enough. He wanted to be with her and since she could not be rude to him he did not understand her refusals. He wanted to spend her free Sundays with her when all the time she was longing to go home, and in the end his father and mother saw what was about and got rid of her.
She knew that she must look for another post and dreaded it. She could not believe that first day, waking up in her own house, small and shabby though it was. She turned over. The bed was clean and comfortable and her mother had gone downstairs and was singing hymns in the kitchen in a clear voice. Harold and Enid had the other room upstairs but no child was in evidence so nobody had accused her of being one too many mouths to feed or taking up room when there wasn’t any. And how could they, she thought, when she had kept them all winter? She told them earnestly that she would find work soon and Harold had smiled and her mother had told her that it was good to have her home.
She luxuriated in her bed for a moment or two longer. If she had still been at the house she would have been up hours earlier than this and would be toiling up the stairs with breakfast trays by now. She glanced out of the window. They sky was very blue and she thought of the sea and wondered whether her mother would allow her half an hour to go to the beach as she longed to do. She got up and poured water into the bowl and washed thoroughly - it was nice to have the time and the chance - and then she put on an old dress and ran down the stairs.
In the kitchen the fire was burning brightly and her mother was cooking eggs. Harold’s hens were laying well. Eggs for breakfast. There was fresh bread too and a big pot of tea. Lizzie smiled at her mother. Harold, who was on the backshift, was still in bed.
‘Our Harold’s different, you know, Mam,’ she said, in the knowledge that Enid was upstairs.
‘Aye, I know. Goes drinking now he does with that wrong one from next-door. Came back rolling the other night, and singing songs - and they weren’t hymns neither, I can tell you.’
‘Is Jon drinking a lot?’ Lizzie asked softly.
‘He’s swimming in it,’ her mother said. ‘Things aren’t right next-door, Lizzie. They haven’t been right since Greta lost that bairn.’
*
Lizzie’s mother encouraged her from the beginning to go out, not to places like the beach, walking, but to Bible classes and to the chapel teas and to chapel twice on Sundays, and she knew what her mother’s idea was. That she would marry. There were plenty of young pitmen looking for a wife and most of them looked at Lizzie. Unlike Greta, she had plenty of offers to walk her home. Lizzie felt sorry for Greta. Nobody but the minister looked her way - not even now that she was better and prettier than she had ever been. The minister sometimes walked Greta back from chapel. He was a fat bald little widower of forty with five unruly children.
The only lad that Lizzie took a slight fancy to was Eddie Bitten. Maybe, she thought, because he was Jon’s friend. Her mother had told her that they didn’t go around together much when Jon was drinking but Eddie would talk about Jon on the way back from Bible class - quite unwittingly, she thought, since he didn’t know that she and Jon had been almost married. To Eddie she was new to the village because she had been in service when he first arrived. He was a nice lad, if a bit keen on chapel goings-on. He was also respectable and hard-working and had his own house on the other side of Lizzie to Jon where he had once lodged with his aunty. The old woman had died recently and Lizzie knew that Eddie would have to go and lodge with somebody else soon if he didn’t marry. Single men weren’t allowed company houses. She didn’t go to his house, that wouldn’t have been right, but she knew that to the other village girls Eddie was a catch and it was always nice to be envied so sometimes she let him walk her home.
One evening after she had been at home for several weeks her mother sent her next-door to give Mrs Armstrong her eggs. Lizzie ventured in at the back door. It was a cool rainy evening. The firelight danced against the black fireplace in the kitchen and at first she thought that the house was empty. There was no noise. Only one lamp burned, hissing in the silence. And then she saw Jon. He was lying on the rug in front of the fire and he was asleep. The rug was all kinds of different coloured squares and Jon was in dark clean neat clothes. He was always better turned out than anybody else, Lizzie thought wryly. It came of having three women to look after him. He was lying on his side sound asleep, black hair shiny in the firelight, eyelashes as thickly fringed as the special tablecloth her mother used on Sunday afternoons when the white cloth had been taken off. He didn’t look very old like that. She ventured to the kitchen table and as she did so he stirred and opened his eyes.
‘It’s just me,’ she said softly. ‘My mam sent your eggs.’
He sat up slowly and then stood up. It was the first time they had been together since she had come home. They had not even spoken.
‘Greta out?’ Lizzie said brightly because he didn’t talk to her and she didn’t know what to say to him.
‘Yes, they’re all out. Gossiping, I expect.’ He looked properly at her for the first time and smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, it didn’t reach his eyes. He stopped it before it got that far. Lizzie knew why that was; it was for Charles Nelson. There had been various rumours in the village as to why she had been sent home. Several women had looked hard at her slender waistline and flat stomach. As for Jon, she knew that he had thought she fancied a gentleman for herself.
‘I hear you’re going to Bible classes and study group,’ he said. ‘Getting religious, are you? They say the minister’s looking for a wife.’
Lizzie didn’t think he was funny.
‘Bible classes are all right,’ she said. ‘Eddie Bitten’s there. He’s a nice lad. He doesn’t drink his pay and he’s got a house all to himself.’
‘You mean to tell me that a pit lad’ll do after Charles Nelson?’
Lizzie glared at him.
‘Charles Nelson is a gentleman,’ she said, ‘and so’s Eddie. You wouldn’t understand, not being one yourself.’ This was such a good exit line that Lizzie started to leave but he got hold of her, something that nobody else in the whole world would have dared to do. He put one hand around her waist and the other around her shoulders and he pulled her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. Lizzie had been wanting him to do just that for so many months now that she got a shock and thumped him. When this had no effect she pulled her mouth free and said, ‘No, Jon, don’t.’
‘Why not? You did as much for Charles Nelson. More maybe.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘And Eddie?’
‘No. Nobody. Just that once, and never anybody else.’
Jon kissed her again. The kisses hadn’t changed, they were still exactly right. She pushed against him and Jon caught her hands behind her back, and he kissed her eyes and her cheeks and her throat and her neck. He slid one hand on to the buttons at the top of her dress and undid them and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat.
‘Stop it, Jon.’ This because he pulled her down with him on to the kitchen settle and kissed her until she didn’t know where she was.
She heard the sneck on the back door, though she hadn’t heard anybody come up the yard. When Greta walked into the room with Tommy in her arms Jon didn’t hear anything, Lizzie knew. He was far too absorbed in what he was doing. Lizzie pushed at him and spoke to him and when he could hear her she managed to disentangle herself from him but Greta’s eyes reflected the mess of her hair where the pins had come out, her bare neck where the buttons had been undone, and she realised for the first time as Greta’s face paled how Greta felt about Jon. Greta held the child up against her for a few seconds and then she went away up the dark stairs as quickly as she could with the child impeding her.
*
It was a joke in the village that the minister had asked Greta Armstrong to marry him. Lizzie didn’t think it was very funny. She was still looking for work. She had been to four different places to try out for the post of kitchenmaid but wasn’t taken on at any of them. All that time when Harold was on the foreshift he would go drinking every night. Lizzie thought that her mother was being less than kind to Jon because it was only Saturday nights when he and Harold were together, though she could see her mother’s point. On weekdays Harold had a couple of pints and came home. On Saturdays she would hear him from her bed, singing when he came down the back lane. Then he would stagger into the house, clashing the back door, and clatter about downstairs before either sleeping it off on the settee because he couldn’t reach the stairs or getting halfway up and shouting for Enid. He disturbed them all. Harold’s Sundays were spent in bed except for mealtimes.
Enid was, to her joy, expecting by this time and Lizzie was more desperate than ever. She had outstayed her welcome at home where Harold seemed to drink more and more of his pay each week and there was not enough work to keep three women busy.
One late-autumn night Harold drank so much that he couldn’t walk and Jon had to support him all the way down the back lane and up the yard into the house. Lizzie had waited up. She thought it was time that somebody had a word with Harold but it became obvious to her that she would have no word with him tonight. Jon let him slide on to the settee in the front room and then he went back into the kitchen with her. She thought that he looked remarkably sober for somebody who’d spent the entire evening in some stuffy little room, drinking beer.
‘What do you mean, bringing him back like that?’
‘It’s nowt to do with me,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t even with him. I just picked him up on the way out.’
‘Likely,’ Lizzie said. ‘He’s a changed lad is our Harold since he started going drinking with you.’
‘Yes, well, he’s got three women in the house and a bairn on the way. It’s enough to get anybody like that.’
Lizzie tried to control her temper. She could see now that Jon was not drunk and neither was he sober, he had had just enough to argue. His eyes were clear and there was a gleam of anger in them. They were dark too by the one lamp and the glow of the fire which she stood with her back to. The kitchen was in shadow. Harold didn’t move in the front room and there was not a sound from upstairs.
‘There’s hardly enough for us to live on, what with the cut and all, and now thanks to you he’s drinking most of it. We’re worse off that we’ve ever been. I don’t understand why you do it. You sit there, the lot of you, telling tales about how clever you are, drinking your fortnight’s pay, all that mucky smoke and beer fumes—’
Jon’s eyes were narrowed and almost black.
‘We’ve been down the pit all week, that’s why, and it gets us away from the likes of you whose gobs never stop!’
Lizzie would have hit him if she had been a bit quicker but he got hold of her before she managed to and then he got her chin in his fingers and kissed her. He kissed all the temper out of her and the beer tasted good, warm and nutty on his breath.
‘Is that better?’ he asked eventually.
Lizzie would have given anything not to let go. She buried her face in his shoulder and closed her eyes and wondered like she had never wondered in her life why you could never relive the best moments like this one whereas the horrible things that had happened were replayed over and over again to you, sleeping and waking.
‘I’m sorry, Jon, I didn’t mean to shout at you.’
‘It’s all right.’
Lizzie smiled weakly against him, she was so relieved to be there.
‘I even wish Greta had married the minister. Isn’t that awful of me?’
‘She would have too,’ Jon said. ‘That mucky little bugger. I wouldn’t let him marry Greta’s mother.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I would say they’re a matched pair.’
Jon laughed and she looked into his eyes while trying not to let go even an inch, one hand in the thickness of his hair. But then the laughter went from his eyes and he said, ‘We’re never going to be able to get married. You do know that, don’t you? It isn’t going to make any difference that we want things otherwise. It’s not going to be.’
She went back to hiding at his shoulder.
‘That’s not true,’ she said.
‘Look at me.’
‘No. Something will happen. We’re going to get married.’
‘Nobody is ever going to marry Greta,’ Jon said slowly as though trying to make himself believe it.
‘I hate Greta.’
‘No, you don’t. It’s not her fault.’
‘Yes, it is.’ Lizzie could hear her own voice, much too loud, but only the anger was keeping her from crying now. ‘If she hadn’t been so daft in the first place none of this would have happened. Greta and your Sam—’
‘He’s dead,’ Jon said shortly. ‘Is that how you want her?’
‘No, but … no.’ Her fingers were crushing the front of his jacket. ‘It isn’t right. There’s no reason why we should pay for their mistakes, for their daftness. I can’t manage any longer without you, Jon. I love you.’
‘We can’t get married. You know we can’t. And it’s time for you to have a house of your own and some bairns.’
Lizzie was so horrified at the idea that she let go completely and moved back.
‘No. No.’
Jon got hold of her by both arms as though he was going to shake her, but he didn’t. He just stood there and closed his eyes for a second and then looked at her.
‘You don’t have any choice. You can’t find work, your Harold can’t go on keeping you. What are you going to do?’
‘I can’t marry somebody else, Jon.’
‘You have to. Do you think I want you to waste your life waiting around when I’m never going to be able to marry you?’
‘I want you. I’m never going to want anybody else as long as I live. How can you think so?’
‘There’s nothing else to do,’ he said slowly. ‘If we don’t do something about this, one of these days we’re going to ruin everything. We can’t stay here and go on like this.’
Lizzie was suddenly so angry that she pushed away from him.
‘I suppose you’re going to come to my wedding,’ she said bitterly.
‘It’s all there is.’
‘All right then. You’ll come and watch me marry Eddie?’
‘Eddie?’ Jon stared at her.
‘Yes, Eddie.’ Lizzie tossed her head. ‘He likes me. He’s nice is Eddie. He has his own house, he doesn’t drink. You’ll come and watch me marry him then?’
‘Liar, Jon Armstrong.’
Jon didn’t say anything for a few moments and then he looked down at his hands.
‘Eddie’s like Alf,’ he said. ‘I miss Alf.’
He looked up and Lizzie didn’t know how it happened but one minute she felt like she was going to start and cry and the next she was in his arms being held so close that she couldn’t breathe and didn’t want to. She didn’t know how she had got there, whether Jon had grabbed hold of her or she had gone to him, but she had her arms around his neck and her eyes closed against him.
‘There’s only you. There’s only ever been you. Please, Jon, you must know it.’
‘I thought after all this time that maybe those feelings had changed?’
‘They haven’t, and they won’t.’
Jon hesitated and then eased her from him.
‘I love you. I’m always going to love you. But it isn’t any good me wishing things differently and getting myself worked up when. I see you with another lad, never mind who it is. Just tell me again that you care about me and I’ll go.’
‘There’s only you,’ she said, ‘there only ever will be you I love. Whatever happens, remember it.’
‘I will,’ Jon said, and he kissed her and went home.
*
After that, for days and days, Lizzie scarcely went beyond the doors fearing that something incomprehensible might happen. She tried to make herself invaluable around the house but the truth was that her mother and Enid could do everything more than adequately. Enid got on with her mother far better than she herself had ever done, and Enid was a good cook. This endeared her to Lizzie’s mother more than she could have known. There was nothing Lizzie’s mother admired quite so much as the ability to make perfect bread, pastries, cakes, and a good meal for a man coming in hungry from work. Enid did not sneak off to read. She was always there to chat. She had a good nose for gossip, and most of all she cared deeply for Harold. Lizzie thought that she must be blind. Apart from the fact that he never fought, Harold was now as bad as any man in the village for drinking and neglecting his wife. Enid didn’t seem to notice or care. She helped with the cleaning and the polishing and was like Greta for singing as she hung out the clothes. Lizzie hated Greta. She now looked happier than ever before and more beautiful. Greta with her so pretty clothes and her perfect face, her shining eyes and smiling mouth. Greta who had so little to do and was so well kept.
Lizzie’s mother began to make plain to her in many ways that her help was not needed. She encouraged her even more to go out. She talked of how little money there would be when the baby was born. After a month of almost begging to be given work in the house so that she could feel less uncomfortable, after days and days of wanting so badly to see Jon that she cried herself to sleep every night, Lizzie went out as her mother wanted her to. Outside Jon’s house she listened hard for the sound of his voice. She had nightly, with her tears, hugged to her the remembrance of his kisses, his body, his words.
At the modest social events the village allowed Lizzie was quietly swamped with young men. There she found herself ticking them off mentally. One had lots of sisters, another a bad-tempered mother or no father to help bring in money. She whittled them down to the ones who had no obvious faults or problems, to those who could afford to keep her, and then she whittled them down even further past stupid, fat, ugly, hardly-ever-takes-a-bath, doesn’t read, drinks heavily, has an awful laugh and so on. Even then there were half a dozen or so very nice lads in the village, lads who were hard workers and good fun. She felt nothing for any of them except the one she couldn’t have.
Eddie Bitten went on walking her home on Thursday nights. She knew and liked him. He was built rather like Jon and was a year or two older. She could find little in Eddie to object to. He was religious but didn’t talk about it, he worked hard but didn’t moan. He wasn’t boring or stupid or ugly. Eddie liked her a lot. She knew he did.
One evening in late-autumn he asked her to his house for a cup of tea after the class. She knew that she shouldn’t go and it wasn’t as if she wanted to but she felt that she would be safe with him. Eddie was kind and gentle. And when she saw his house everything changed.
Eddie’s aunty had had good taste in furniture and there was plenty of solid stuff, all brought to a high shine by the woman whom Eddie paid to do his housekeeping. The house smelled of polish. It was neat and tidy and the fire was on in the front room - much to Lizzie’s surprise because the front room in her house was kept for occasions. Or was it that Eddie considered this an occasion and had lit the fire on purpose? It had been banked down but he soon brought it back to a blaze. And there in the front room was a bookcase with four shelves packed with the kind of books she liked.
‘I didn’t know you read like that,’ she said, delighted.
‘Sometimes. Some of them belong to Jon. The others were either mine or my aunty’s.’
He made tea on a tray: biscuits, cake and teacups with fluted gold edgings. Lizzie listened to the silence of the house. There was nobody else, nobody to disturb them, no one to get in the way. Eddie, she knew, was the most fortunate young man in the village so far as the lasses were concerned. His house was all his.
‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, sighing. ‘All this to yourself.’
‘Not much longer, the way things are going.’
‘What for?’ Lizzie asked, searching Eddie’s kind face for clues.
‘They overlooked me for a while but now they’ve noticed I’m an unmarried man and there’s a shortage. I might have to give it up.’
‘But you’re used to this. You wouldn’t like lodging with other people.’
‘Like it or not…’ Eddie said, and offered her more tea.
‘But what would you do with the furniture?’
‘I don’t know.’
He asked if she would go for a walk with him on Sunday afternoon and Lizzie knew that she ought to ask him for Sunday dinner so she did. She told her mother the next day and thought that she had never looked more pleased. Everybody liked Eddie. The women liked him because he didn’t drink and went to chapel and was good-natured and honest, the men liked him because he was a good worker. Her mother also, she knew, thought of Eddie’s house and Eddie’s pay and Eddie’s lack of dependants. Her mother was so pleased that it was difficult for Lizzie to remain unmoved.
The dinner was one of the best they had ever had in spite of the lack of money. Eddie was more than courteous, he was entertaining. He talked to her mother and Enid, and so easily, as Jon had never bothered to do. Harold grudgingly said afterwards that she could do worse. Lizzie ignored him but when she went to bed that night the tears poured down her face. She catalogued to herself how tall and fine Eddie was, his lovely house and the books and the pretty furniture, thought about how he had no disgusting habits and would never come back drunk and start on her. And he cared. He looked at her a lot when he thought she didn’t see. Now he walked her home two nights a week when he was on the shift that allowed him, and he saw her on Sunday afternoons.
Every time they went out she wondered how it would be if they met Jon and then they did, one cold dull winter afternoon when Eddie had said that it was too frosty for a walk and she had insisted on some fresh air. She wondered then why it was that they had not met him before like that with Jon just next-door to her. Eddie presented Lizzie to Jon as his, just by a hand on her arm, a soft word, and Lizzie wondered whether their friends had deliberately said nothing to Eddie and made such mischief. When she ventured to look at Jon there was nothing in his face to give him away but she knew. His expression was the same as when he had told her mother that he could not marry her and she knew that only endurance was keeping him there with a half smile on his lips. As for Lizzie, she could have stood there for the rest of her life, looking into Jon Armstrong’s hard blue eyes. It didn’t have to be more than that and she didn’t think she could stand less. When Eddie urged her away she wanted to turn around and strain her eyes for a glimpse of Jon.
*
The following Thursday Eddie did not turn up for Bible class. Lizzie wondered whether he was ill. He had been on the foreshift with Harold but her brother had said nothing and she thought that he would have. When she came out, however, he was standing waiting for her. Lizzie went over to him. Eddie didn’t smile.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Will you come back to my house?’
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘We can’t talk any place else, it’s too cold outside, and this is private.’
They walked there in silence and Lizzie thought that she knew what it was about and her feet dragged. When they got there Eddie took off his coat but didn’t offer to take hers.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Jon?’
No front room this time, just Eddie’s clean kitchen with the shiny kitchen range.
‘What did you want to know?’ Lizzie said.
‘Well, it might not seem important to you but since you nearly married him I would have thought it was worth a mention.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Rob and Ken.’
Who else? Lizzie thought.
‘And what makes you think you have the right to know?’
‘I was going to ask you to marry me.’
Talk about to the point, she thought.
‘What is it that you want to know? What we said, what we did?’
‘I want to know whether you still care about him?’
Lizzie got stuck over that. Should she lie to Eddie and say that Jon didn’t matter to her now, because that way Eddie would probably ask her to marry him, or should she tell the truth - and if she did what would happen? She thought of her life at home where she wasn’t wanted, of her future as a servant, but when she looked into Eddie’s honest grey eyes she couldn’t lie to him.
‘I still care about him,’ she said.
‘And would you have told me that if I’d asked you to marry me?’
Lizzie went on looking steadily at him.
‘I wouldn’t hurt you on purpose. If I could change things I would. Jon can’t marry me and …’
‘You have to marry somebody?’ he guessed.
‘I don’t have any choice. I can’t stay at home with Enid pregnant and I’ve done my best to find work. I would have gone if I could have. There are plenty of lads in the village who’d take me and not care.’
‘I don’t want anybody in my bed who doesn’t want to be there.’
Lizzie blushed at his bluntness.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said. ‘And if that’s something else you’re worried about…’
‘It isn’t.’
‘No. Well. I think I ought to go unless there’s anything else you want to know?’
Eddie said nothing. Lizzie left. She didn’t go home. She didn’t want anybody to see her upset. The cold air was welcome. It dried the tears at first, but before she reached the end of the street there were too many of them and by then she couldn’t see where she was going and had to stop. She didn’t even know who they were for and was forced to conclude they were selfish. Eddie was never going to marry her now and perversely she wanted him. She didn’t want to go for the rest of her life never kissing anybody, never being held, never having a home of her own or a bairn. Eddie was the only man in the village other than Jon for whom she felt anything and when she examined the feeling it was affection. She didn’t want to hurt him, she should have told him before but she had been frightened that this would happen and now it had. Maybe if she had been honest with him and said something sooner it would have been all right. Now it would never be all right again. She stood against the end of the row and gave in to her tears and as she did so he found her.
‘There’s nothing to cry for.’
‘Yes, there is. I wanted to tell you but I didn’t want you to know.’
Eddie chuckled. Lizzie couldn’t think why it was funny.
‘I like you a lot,’ she said. ‘I know it isn’t the same thing, and now I’ll have to marry somebody fat who drinks or – or…’
Eddie seemed to think that was even funnier and when he had stopped laughing he drew her away from the wall and kissed her. Lizzie thought it must have been the saltiest kiss ever, she had cried so hard, and it was a shock too. Nobody, discounting the brief touch of Charles Nelson, had ever really kissed her except Jon, and kissing Eddie was so different. She had also thought that she would never want anybody else to kiss her, but that was not true either. She suspected that she had a need now to be kissed, that Jon had created that need and Eddie was supplying it, and thought that her mother was right. It was time for her to marry and Eddie’s timing was excellent, just like his kisses. When he stopped and released her it took her a moment or two to remember where they were and the circumstances, and he looked surprised and a lot more pleased than she had thought he could.
‘I want you to marry me,’ he said. ‘Will you?’
Lizzie looked hard at him.
‘Are you sure?’
‘No, but I’m prepared to take the risk. You were honest with me and it’s a start.’
‘I might not make you happy.’
‘I’m not very happy now and I can’t watch you marry another lad. If you’re willing to try and do the best you can, I think that’s good enough.’
Lizzie nodded. ‘There’s only one real problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I didn’t plan to live next-door to my mam when I married.’
That made Eddie laugh and Lizzie liked the sound. In fact it was what she had planned when she was younger, she and Sam. What a long time ago that seemed now, and how different. Whether she would ever be able to love Eddie was doubtful but he was her only real option. She would try hard to make him happy. She thought back to being in service in the big house. Eddie had saved her from that, and from the fate of being unwanted in her own home. She would have to be grateful and make the best of her opportunity.