Enid had had twin girls that winter. Mrs Harton had not been very pleased and had confided to Lizzie that it would have been bad enough if she had produced one girl at once, but two. Enid was just like her mother. Was that all she could turn out? Girls were to keep. Now if just one of them had been a boy their Harold would have been better pleased. As it was he went on just like he had. If the babies woke in the night he never heard them, he was always full of beer.
Lizzie said nothing. She knew what was coming next. Enquiries about whether she was feeling all right. After six months of marriage Lizzie was not pregnant. She knew very well what this meant, that the other lads at the pit would tease Eddie and ask whether he needed any help, and she would have to put up with persistent enquiries from her mother and friends. Eddie had come home with a black eye the week before, evidence that he was not taking the teasing very well, and she was not pleased to think that he might be fighting. Was this Jon’s influence?
She was doing her best. She never mentioned Jon’s name. Not once since the day of the wedding had it crossed her lips and Eddie had nothing to complain about. His house was spotless, the sheets smelled of lavender. The place shone, the meals were perfect, the baking was light. She didn’t waste a penny. She didn’t argue with him. She was always there when he went out and when he came home. She never complained or crossed him and never once denied him her body. She could not understand why he had become so tightlipped and awkward.
One cold day in November Eddie came home to his neat house where the brasses shone and the water was ready and the dinner was timed to perfection, and his neatly dressed wife made the usual polite enquiries about his day. He was going to a meeting at the chapel. Lizzie would stay at home and sew or read.
He was quiet. He answered her enquiries with either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. When he was washed and changed and as clean and tidy as the house, he sat down and waited for her to bring the dinner from the oven. The potatoes and vegetables were already on the table, it was only the meat which had been done slowly in the oven and was now producing the most wonderful smell of onions and gravy. Somehow between the oven and the table Lizzie managed to slip and the best part of Eddie’s dinner went up into the air, parted company with its dish and then both lay in ruins on the floor. It was a mess. The dish clattered, bounced, turned over. The meat and gravy and onions spattered everywhere.
Eddie pushed back his chair and got up. He didn’t even give her a chance to say anything. He went to her. He said, ‘You clumsy little bitch!’ and smacked her hard round the ear.
For a few moments Lizzie was too shocked to do anything, she just stared at him, and then she burst into tears and ran for the stairs. She sat down on the edge of the bed and cried and cried. Seconds later Eddie came into the room and Lizzie, who was no longer sure who she was dealing with, looked at him to see whether there was more to come. He didn’t move any nearer than the door.
‘I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?’
‘No.’
‘You’d forgive me if I was Jon though, wouldn’t you?’
‘Jon wouldn’t do such a thing.’
‘Wouldn’t he? With a temper like his? Jon wouldn’t have put up with the half! I’m sick of this. I’m sick of coming home to a perfect house and a wife who thinks that Jon Armstrong’s name is a sacred thing. I should give you a bloody good hiding and then you could hate me properly.’
‘I don’t hate you,’ Lizzie managed between sobs.
‘And am I supposed to be glad about that? If I broke my neck down that pit tomorrow you’d say, “Oh, dear. What a pity. Now I’ll have to marry somebody else.’”
‘That’s not fair. I do everything.’
Eddie came over to the bed and turned her to face him.
‘You never make a sound. Never. Even when I know from the way your body reacts that you want me, you never tell me. You never tell me anything, no matter what I do or how much I give. You never touch me first or kiss me and you turn your face away. All the time that you’re here I’m just not Jon to you. You’re like a little machine that never breaks down and never feels anything.’
Lizzie’s whole body shook with fright, and her cheek burned where he had hit her. He let her go and he went out. He went, she presumed, to his meeting though how he could she didn’t know. Eddie was a changed man. He had had a fight last week, he had sworn at her tonight and now he had hit her. She just hoped that he had gone to his meeting and not drinking as she suspected.
*
After the night that Eddie hit his wife there was silence. They spoke to one another only about ordinary things but everything changed. The first thing was that Eddie turned away from her in bed and didn’t turn back, and the days became a week and two weeks and a month. The year turned, the spring came, the weather warmed and Lizzie gave up trying to be any kind of wife because Eddie rarely came home. As the weather warmed she began to go out. She spent a lot of time at the beach. She got books from anywhere she could and spent full days down there as the summer advanced. She lay in her sand dune and considered the blue sky. She took a sandwich and a drink and had solitary picnics, and there she sometimes met Kate who would get down from her horse and stop to chat.
It was the only time they saw one another. Kate had stopped coming to the village on Sunday afternoons. For one thing the Armstrongs had made it plain she was not wanted and her aunt often had visitors on Sunday. Also Charles Nelson occasionally came to call so her aunt had forbidden her to go further than the garden.
‘Does he fancy you, Kate?’ Lizzie asked her one day when she was paddling at the water’s edge and Kate was walking Dolly through the waves.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘He’ll own the pits one day and have lots of money.’
‘I don’t care about things like that. I don’t like him,’ Kate said.
‘I don’t like him much myself,’ Lizzie might have added or anybody else but she didn’t. Her house had become dusty and neglected. She didn’t cook. They lived on bread and cheese and jam. Eddie ventured to the pub on Saturday nights. Lizzie tried never to get home first but it was a contest since neither of them wanted to be there. She was not home until dark and would come in tanned and tired. She rarely went to her mother’s since she was always asking things Lizzie didn’t want to talk about. She couldn’t tell her mother that there was no likelihood of her conceiving since her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with her.
One Sunday afternoon she went for a long walk on the beach and then climbed up the dunes and lay down on the top. The beach was deserted. She lay there with her eyes closed against the sun and after a little while she heard voices from the beach. They sounded familiar and they were laughing. Lizzie turned on to her stomach and lifted her head just a little way so that they couldn’t see her and then she opened her eyes wide. It was Jon and Greta. They were facing one another; Greta was walking backwards, almost dancing, and she was giggling. Then he caught hold of her with both hands around her waist and she stopped.
To Lizzie’s horror he brought her to him and started to kiss her and it was obviously not the first time and it was not brief. Greta stood on tiptoe and linked her arms up behind his neck. She lifted her face and he held her against him so that there wasn’t an inch of space between their bodies.
Lizzie’s first instinct was to run away but she couldn’t. There was no road behind the dunes here and no way through the tall grass. The only way back was by the beach and they would see her. She lay down and closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears and when she looked up again after a long time they were walking on even further away from the village. She waited until they were out of sight around the corner and then she got up and ran.
Eddie wasn’t at their house. He didn’t come back. When it was very late and she was worried there was a banging on the back door and to Lizzie’s amazement Jon was standing there, propping up Eddie. She didn’t say a word.
‘He can’t be drunk,’ she said finally as Jon helped him up the stairs. ‘He’s too heavy, Jon, don’t take him up there.’
‘It’s all right.’
Jon dumped Eddie on the bed and Lizzie took off his shoes and they left him.
‘He’s unconscious. Will he be all right?’
‘In the morning.’
‘But he’s on the foreshift.’
‘He can’t go to work in that state. Nobody’ll say anything. Half the place is missing on a Monday.’
Lizzie followed him down the stairs.
‘Eddie’s never missed a day.’
‘Well, he’s going to now. When did he start drinking?’
‘Months since. Didn’t you know?’
‘Haven’t seen him. If you must know he turned up at my door trying to tell me that something was all my fault.’
Lizzie went off into the kitchen and when he went after her she said, ‘I saw you today.’
‘Is that summat fresh?’
‘With Greta along the beach. You were kissing her, just like you used to kiss me.’
‘So?’
‘Oh, Jon, you mustn’t. It’s not right. You know it isn’t. She’s your sister-in-law.’
‘Don’t you kiss Eddie?’
Lizzie stared at him.
‘I’m married to Eddie. Besides … Eddie and I…’
‘What’s Eddie drinking for?’
‘We had an argument. He said that the house was too clean.’
Jon glanced around distastefully.
‘If my house was as dirty as this there’d be some sorting out done.’
‘Awful, isn’t it?’
‘What did he do?’
‘He hit me.’
‘Did he? What for?’
‘Because … I dropped the dinner all over the floor. He’s not you.’
‘No, he’s not,’ Jon said, with a touch of humour. ‘He was a nice lad when you got married. Now he’s nearly as bad as the rest.’
‘You can’t marry Greta so why do you kiss her?’
‘Did you think I was never going to kiss nobody again?’
‘But you shouldn’t. You don’t have any right to do it.’
‘That’s why I do it,’ Jon said with a grin. ‘It’s like drinking. If it was the right thing to do nobody would do it.’
‘But you can’t marry Greta, you can’t… you can’t touch her.’
‘Why can’t I?’
‘Because it’s a sin. Jon. You wouldn’t, you mustn’t.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said.
Lizzie shook her head.
‘No,’ she said.
‘What did you think I did the night you got married?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lizzie’s voice was down to a whisper.
‘Did you think about me?’
‘I didn’t think about anything else, that was the trouble. It wasn’t fair to Eddie but I couldn’t help it.’
‘And that was why he hit you, in the end?’
Lizzie put both hands over her face.
‘That was months and months ago and since then … It’s my fault, Jon.’
‘You could try and change it. He’s a nice lad is Eddie. If you—’
‘I don’t want a nice lad. I want you.’
Jon smiled a little bit over that even though she was almost in tears.
‘I can’t do that. Eddie would kill me.’
‘No, you’d rather do it to Greta. How could you? I hate you!’
‘Well, that’s a step up,’ he said.
The tears were running down Lizzie’s face now.
‘You said there’d only be us. Now there isn’t.’
‘You married him.’
‘I had to. I had to marry somebody. Eddie was the nicest lad in the village.’
‘Yes, was,’ Jon said. ‘Now he drinks, doesn’t go to chapel and hits you. It was only once, wasn’t it?’
‘He gets into fights too sometimes.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘With you?’
‘No, not with me. At least not yet. He’s good.’
‘At fighting?’ Lizzie stared through her tears.
‘Really good.’
‘I don’t understand it.’
‘You could try cleaning the house and making the odd meal and being nice to him. You never know.’
For a moment or two Lizzie did nothing. Then she extracted a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped the tears and blew her nose and said, ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘He didn’t hurt me. Do you love Greta?’
She heard him hesitate before he said, ‘Yes.’
‘I shall have to make the best of it then.’
‘If I thought she didn’t want me when I was doing my best, if I thought that she wanted somebody else, I don’t know what I would do. Something awful probably.’
‘Eddie hasn’t done nothing awful yet.’ Lizzie raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Unless he’s been sick upstairs on my good mat.’ And she managed a smile.
*
It was midday before Eddie ventured downstairs and by then the house was a much cleaner place and the washing was in progress. Lizzie had been up six hours. It was a warm blustery day, perfect for the job, and she was out the back hanging up the wet clothes. She came in to find her husband standing shame-faced in front of the fire.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Some pit lads do that every Saturday night. Some of them do it every night and with less cause. I’ve never met one that had never done it. Was that the first time?’
‘No, I used to get drunk a lot and fight too. I was good. Nearly as good as Armstrong.’
‘And then you started going to chapel?’
‘I had a brother. We went drinking on Saturday nights and one night some farm lads got hold of him and smashed his head in and he died. He was all I had.’
‘Didn’t you have any family?’ Lizzie said, wondering what on earth they had talked about before now.
‘No. There was a home. I don’t remember anything before that.’
‘Oh, Eddie, I didn’t know. I didn’t think. But you had your aunty.’
‘She wasn’t my aunty. I came down from Newcastle to find work the week they were going to put her out. We made a bargain.’
‘Eddie Bitten! Don’t you ever tell nobody owt?’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘I’m sorry. Was that where the girls were?’
‘What girls?’
‘The girls who taught you things.’
‘No. It was a boys’ home. There were women, then and later. Some women like boys.’
She put her arms around him and hugged him.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘Let’s have some dinner then. It isn’t much because it’s washing day but—’
‘What about the washing?’
‘It’s done. It’s all out on the line. We don’t all lie in bed, you know. I’ll just tidy up and then—’
As she started past him Eddie caught her around the waist with both hands and brought her back to him. When he leaned over and kissed her she put her hands up to his neck and gave him her mouth.