Highgate, 1948
Winnie is filling a bucket with coal at the Hollingworths’ brick bunker one evening later that summer when she sees Alf come into the yard from the backings. He has been on earlies and his skin is lightly tanned from being out on the allotment in the sun. He smiles at her. ‘Let me carry that for thee, Win.’
She tips a final shovelful of black cobbles into the bucket, closes the bunker, and smiles back. ‘Thank you, love. What’ve you done to your hand?’
His right hand and wrist are heavily bandaged.
‘I broke me thumb at t’ pit, trapped it in some belting. It’s nowt.’
Win takes the hand in hers. ‘It doesn’t look like nowt.’
‘It’s alright. They strapped it up for me.’ He reaches for the bucket handle and they stand for a moment. ‘You’d better come in for a cup of tea,’ she says.
The house is empty: Harry at the club, Roy out cycling, Pauline playing in the backings. Alf places the coal by the hearth and goes over to her as she fills the kettle in the kitchen. He does not touch her, and she does not speak.
‘Is tha alright, Winnie?’
She stares into the sink. He seems to know before she says it.
After she tells him they are quiet, silent as the knives in the sideboard.
‘Is tha sure it’s . . .’
‘No. I think so, but I don’t know.’
She doesn’t know, and she never will. The child she is carrying could be Harry’s. But she wants it to be Alf’s.
‘Well, that’s good enough for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I love you, Winnie. I want us to go away and get married.’
She does not cry. Her experience and her nature have made her almost vain about her endurance in the way that some women can be vain about beauty. She had borne her father’s belt across her bare back, and she would bear this.
‘Come away with me, Win.’ He seems almost excited.
‘How could I do that?’
‘We could, couldn’t we? We could go to t’ coast, or go and get a little house in Nottingham. Our Harry doesn’t deserve thee, so why should tha have to stay?’
‘What about our Roy and Pauline?’
‘You’d still see them. We could come back.’
There it is: just leave your kids, and we’ll come back to visit them. He is, she thinks, a young man, twenty-six to her thirty-nine years. He has a childishness that she both pities and covets.
‘I can’t leave my kids. It doesn’t matter what Harry’s like. You can’t ask me to do that, love.’ She says she loves him; she says she would like to go with him, but not now. ‘One day, when they’re grown up. Come back and fetch me.’
‘I will.’
‘Will you?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will. I promise.’
They reach the end of the conversation sooner than either would have guessed. Moving away from the window they embrace. It is ending so quickly, far more quickly than it would in one of Winnie’s novels.
‘I shall go and tell Harry now,’ he says. ‘And then I shall go away until I come to get you.’
Harry: she had wondered how to tell him. But now, right at the end, Alf is looking after her again. She feels grateful, and afraid.
*
Alf pushes through the club doors into roaring noise, heat and smoke. Men call greetings to him as he passes them, but he barely acknowledges them. He finds Harry at the bar, performing to a small, laughing crowd. His face still has fading bruises and red marks from the explosion, and there is the blue scar in his hairline. He delivers a punchline, and then looks up. ‘Ayup, it’s our Alf! Does tha want a drink, sirree?’
‘Aye, alright –’
‘That’s a pity, cos if tha’d been here five minutes since, I were buying a round.’
The men laugh. The steward asks Alf what he’s having, but Alf ignores him.
‘Can I have a word with thee, Harry?’
‘Is tha cadging money again?’ The men listen for the punchline, but Alf leans in and then says, ‘I need a word, Harry, serious.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Harry. ‘Wait here, lads, I’m just going to consult my stockbroker.’
They move away from the bar to a less crowded area near the billiard table. Harry looks bemused. Alf lowers his voice and says, ‘Harry. Winnie’s pregnant, and it’s mine.’
Harry places his pint glass on a table and wipes his mouth. He says nothing. It is Alf who cracks first. ‘What’s tha got to say then?’
‘I think tha’s got a bloody cheek coming in here to tell me that, that’s what,’ he says. ‘But never mind what I’ve got to say. I’d say it’s thee that’s got t’ explaining to do.’
Alf confesses: the attraction, the conversations, the mornings when Harry was at work and the kids were at school. He tries to bring the exchange to a climax. ‘Look, I’ve a broken thumb. If tha wants to go outside, I’ll fight thee with one hand behind my back. That’s fair because it’s what I deserve.’
Harry studies his young cousin as someone might study a small child threatening to fight an adult.
‘I don’t want to go outside, Alf. What I want is for thee to get out my sight.’
‘Well, I will then. But I’ll tell thee one more thing: I’ve asked her to come away with me, but she won’t come because of t’ kids. So I’ll go away from her, and you won’t see me again, and I shan’t tell anyone about any of it.’
‘That’s right big of you, cousin . . .’
‘But there’s one more thing, Harry. If you lay one finger on her, or them kids, I shall find out and I shall come back and I shall kill thee. I mean it.’
‘Get out.’
‘I mean it, Harry.’
‘Out!’
*
Later that night, muffled bangs and shouting downstairs at Number 34 wake Pauline and Roy Hollingworth in their beds. Their dad accuses, their mam counter-accuses. A glass smashes against a wall, there is a lull, then the shouting begins again. Pauline gingerly comes downstairs and eases open the door. Her mam is shouting at her dad, something about his other women.
‘Please stop it, Mam.’
Win glares at her. ‘I should have known you’d take his side.’
‘I’m not on anybody’s side. I just don’t want you to fall out.’
Harry stands by the fireplace, swaying. He stares at Pauline. Winnie effortlessly retakes control, sends Pauline back to bed, and then goes upstairs herself. For the next two weeks she and Harry do not speak to each other, addressing the other through either Roy or Pauline.
Alf leaves the Dearne Valley, taking the spirit rosary with him. Knowing the baby may be his, Harry accepts it as his own. Winnie believes Alf will come back; his vow is a promise of salvation, the child an embodiment of that promise. She tells this to no one until 1958, when she confesses to a new friend that, whatever Harry thinks, she has for ten years been thinking of the day in the far-off future when Alf will return to rescue her.