Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Read online

  People were going and coming from the house, many of them unknown to the dogs, who hadn’t stopped barking and dragging their chains since early morning, despite Merton’s going out twice to them with the stick. She stood in the middle of the room, dressed now, unable to go downstairs, knowing that this was expected of her, yet unwilling to reconcile it with the fact that she had made up her mind not to get married. The stairfoot door opened: “Vera!” came her mother’s voice. “Are you ready? Don’t be too long, or we’s’ll keep Harold waiting at the church and that’d never do.” There was an intentional pause, giving her time to call out:

  “I’m not coming.”

  Another pause, from shock. Her mother ran up, and came into the bedroom with a worried end-of-the-world frown on her face. She leaned on the wash-stand to get her breath. “What do you mean?” was all she could ask for the moment.

  “I’m not getting married, mam. I don’t want him. I want to stay single.” She was afraid of saying this, and afraid above all of the silence downstairs, as if the whole house had stopped breathing to listen to her argument, even the dogs quiet at last.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said. She had wanted no trouble, hadn’t expected any after the tight-fitting locks of plans and arrangements had turned on her daughter’s life. Now she trembled and was upset because there looked like being a row.

  Vera’s face set hard, though she knew her determination to be only a thing of the minute, a fluctuating protest to try and save herself. “I mean what I say. I don’t want to go to church.”

  “But everything’s ready.”

  “Well, let it be.”

  “But don’t you love him?”

  “No,” Vera said. “I never did either.”

  Her mother felt a pain above the eyes. Merton also had thought she shouldn’t marry Seaton, but even he would agree it was too late to turn back now. Vera maintained a deadly silence in which time passed quickly, and her mother couldn’t stand such obstinacy. “Don’t you even like him then?” Vera began to say yes. “Well, come on down and get married. They’re waiting for you. Come on.”

  “Oh, I can’t, mam,” she cried. “I don’t want to.”

  Her mother’s voice was harder now: “For Jesus Christ’s sake, come on. Everything’s ready. If you let Harold down he’ll kill you.” She went to the stairdoor: “Ada, come up here a minute, will you?”

  Ada had travelled from Chesterfield especially for the wedding of her sister, and if it were called off, her disappointment would be almost as great as Seaton’s. She was nearly thirty and already on her second husband, the first having stopped a bullet in Flanders. Brawling bombardier Doddoe had been fresh out of that fiasco when she met him. Ada was in her weeds at the time—she made a big laughable issue of her story now to Vera—going back into servant work to feed herself and the only child of her first quick set-to, taking a slow train to Chesterfield up through the black pimplescapes of the industrial Pennines. She was blonde and fair-skinned, handsome and attractive with a tantalizing expression of cheek and sadness, so that Doddoe, who got into the opposite seat of the empty carriage at Codnor Park, was soon in conversation with her. At Chesterfield he carried her box to the tram stop, and when she was on the platform fifty yards away he bawled out through the bell and grinding wheels: “Will you marry me, duck?” After a week of courting she said yes, and now she had another child and, to judge by her stomach, a third one was due in a month or two.

  “How do you think most people get married?” she said to Vera. “You don’t want to bother that much about it. Just laugh and say yes and then the bad times you might ’ave now and again wain’t seem so bad. Come on, duck.”

  Vera was confused, pinned on to the flat spirit-level of indecision. Her mother pleaded and took her hand. Shall I go, or shan’t I? she asked herself. It was like throwing a penny and seeing on which side it landed. Maybe Ada was right, and it didn’t matter either way, because if it isn’t Harold Seaton it’ll be somebody else. She rubbed a handkerchief over her eyes, followed her mother and sister down the dark stairs, comforting noises from the kitchen once more filling up the desolate, companionless void of protest. She knew she wouldn’t even be late at the church as the cab trotted under the long tunnel and emerged into the Radford Woodhouse sun.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ascending stone steps to the railway bridge, a fine spring rain began to fall, hiding towers, wheels, and sheds of the colliery below as Vera fastened her coat and hurried towards the first streets of the city. When Seaton left for the tannery that morning she had been unable to face the empty day and had gone to visit her mother at the Nook, short-cutting it there and back across the fields.

  The novelty of decorating two unfurnished rooms had long since worn off, though it had been enjoyable while it lasted, had shown that Seaton, who had seemed too much of a numbskull to talk about anything (even his work had been described and forgotten in five minutes), had proved his worth of papering the walls and ceiling, painting doors and skirting boards, pinning down cheap lino from Sneinton Market. He set them both to making rugs from a pile of clippings and a couple of boiled-clean sackbags, using a sharpened piece of stick to thrust each sliver of coloured rag beneath and then pull it up above the rag-bag base. Plate-shelves and pot-shelves were plugged and bracketed on to the kitchen walls, covered with fancy paper and adorned with oddments unearthed from piles of penny junk. Even the tips yielded certain usable objects, such as screws and hinges, firebricks, and strips of wood that made a clumsy but effective clothes-horse.

  Vera was next to useless in these slow constructions, sat on a chair and watched, looked through a newspaper or hummed a tune, mashed Seaton’s tea, and marvelled at what the black-clocked numbskull was doing with his clever slow-moving fingers. When his hammer tried to take a bite out of his thumb he swore with such awful care and deliberation for five minutes that Vera went into the other room until his vocabulary gave under the passing of time. She looked across the road at the large windows of the lace factory, seeing the cheeky bedevilled girls working at looms and threading bobbins, slaving under the forewoman’s eye when they weren’t winking at the men-mechanics or cat-calling to each other above the noise of their machines. That was me, Vera thought, not so long ago, and now I’m married to Harold Seaton, though at times I can’t believe it except when we’re in bed together at night and he gets up to his dirty tricks, and often he don’t even wait until then. Yet strangely, it seemed to her, there was a compensation in that she was on a higher plane of respect at the Nook. She had never seen more sense in her mother or more kindness and deference in her father, and it often occurred to her that had this been the case all her life she would never have got married, at least not so soon. But that’s how it is, she said to herself. “You’ve made your bed, so lie on it,” her mother said when she first mentioned in a not complaining voice that Harold’s temper wasn’t all he had led her to believe it would be when they walked together over the Cherry Orchard. Her eyes were drawn out and back to the bobbinating girls, across the road that widened the more she thought how wide it was. I was earning a quid a week then, and now Harold’s bringing thirty-eight bob home, so it’s no wonder we can hardly manage.

  They did for a while, because Seaton was never a boozer, though the tuppences doled out for fags made holes enough in what his wages came to. But he picked up a decrepit pair of shoes for next to nothing in the market and cobbled them into good enough condition for work. He sometimes spent an evening at his father’s shop, pushed a loaded barrow to some pub or house and planted a half-crown in Vera’s palm when he came home. Nevertheless, she thought, hurrying through the Hartley Road traffic, he’s a sod to me when he loses his temper like he does. I wonder if he found the note I left telling him what to have for his tea? A red sky at evening settled over the fields behind as she walked into the house and climbed the stairs.

  Seaton sat in his cap and coat, smoking a cigarette by the empty fireplace. One hand shaded his e
yes as if sun still shone into the room, and he held himself from looking up at her, which told her he must be angry about something. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Mam’s,” she told him, hanging up her coat behind the door. “I got fed up, so I went this morning. I’ve just got back.” He said nothing, and Vera, feeling his hateful silence, asked: “What time did you come home?” He wouldn’t answer. “What’s the matter, then?”

  “Nowt.”

  She looked round the room. Clean. Tidy. Little to complain about there. The table had been set for the bare event of a meal since morning, and the note she’d left for him was still on the shelf, fastened down by the clock. “What time did you come home?”

  “Five,” he muttered.

  She remained standing, intrigued by the reason for his unbending anger, yet also afraid of it. “Why didn’t you cook summat for your tea?”

  “What tea?”

  “It’s all ready. In the cupboard. Bacon and potatoes. You only needed to fry ’em.”

  His hand fell, and he looked up at last: “How the bloody hell was I to know that? Are you tryin’ to clamb me?” he shouted. “Where’ve you bin all day?”

  She was unable to counter such blind unreason with swift arguments of her own because it blamed her too much for something she couldn’t quite prove was undeserved. “I’ve been to my mother’s. I’ve already towd you.”

  “Well, you should be at ’ome cooking my tea. If I work all day, I want to come ’ome to some snap at night.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be in as early as this,” she countered, thinking he was angry because she’d been to the Nook. He wasn’t fond of her parents, often referring to them as “that bloody lot.”

  “I’m not a prisoner, am I?” she exclaimed righteously.

  “And I can’t work if I’ve got no grub,” he contended.

  “It was all ready for you.”

  “How was I to know that then?” he went on.

  “Because I left a note,” she protested, “to tell you what to have.”

  His voice became calmer. “What note?” She took it from the shelf and handed it to him. “Here it is, plain as black and white.”

  He looked at it meaninglessly while Vera lit the stove and set the table. Seaton screwed the note into a pellet and threw it into the fireplace, stood to take off his cap and coat.

  “Didn’t you see it, then?” she said, in a pleasant voice.

  “Yes, I did see it.”

  “Then why didn’t you cook the dinner?”

  He looked to where he had thrown the note: “I’m not much of a scholar, duck.”

  “Neither am I,” she said, not quite understanding. “Only I felt like going to the Nook for a change. You didn’t mind that, did you?”

  He burst into a vivid flower of swearing: “No, but I like to fucking-well come home to a bleeding meal.”

  He merely glared at her request that he use less dirty talk, seating himself again by the fireless grate. She detested him for making her miserable, though she felt guilty at not having cooked his meal. “I left everything for you,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I left a note to tell you as well.”

  But he’d had enough of quarrelling: “You bloody fool,” he said calmly, almost laughing, yet a little ashamed that she hadn’t quite understood, “don’t you know I’m not much of a scholar?”

  It seemed at times she was still a girl of sixteen, single, back at the Nook helping Farmer Taylor with haymaking in the summer; and an hour later, involved with shopping or cleaning the rooms, she was married so firmly that she had never been anything else, had been so for a century, with the Nook (whose years she now looked on as wide with gaiety and freedom) a dream-house lingering in the sunlit outskirts of her mind. At times she wished she’d never set eyes on Seaton, often hoped he’d step out of the house one fine morning and never come back, that someone would rush to her from the skinyard to say he’d been run over or crushed by some fatal weight of bales.

  Many quarrels centred on cigarettes. He came home from work one day:

  “Any fags?”

  She’d been dreading this question. “I ain’t got one. Have you?”

  Young, stocky, and dark, he took off his coat, showing rolled-up sleeves and heavily muscled arms. “What do you think I’m asking yo’ for, then?”

  “Can’t you go without ’em for one day?” she reasoned. “You get paid tomorrow.”

  He couldn’t, swore and spat into the fire. The coal flames killed his spit, almost threw it back, they killed it with such speed. She faced him with eyes averted, arms folded over her breasts, unable to look when he was like this. “Can’t you get any?” he asked after a long silence.

  “How?” she cried. “Shall I cadge some on the street? Pinch some?”

  Such absolute logic could in no way stop the quarrel, made it worse in fact. “What about the corner shop?”

  “We owe them ten bob already.”

  He cursed under his breath. She saw the shape of the well-formed words. “You dirty beast. Why don’t you stop swearing?”

  It was finished in a second, as she had guessed it would be. He stood up, took his steaming dinner from the table, and threw it against the burning soot of the fire-back. “That’s what your effing dinner’s worth.”

  But the next day, all smiles and amiability, with a wage-packet in his pocket and a Woodbine fresh between his lips, nothing could shake his happiness. “Hello, Vera, my love,” he said as he came in, hoping she’d forgotten the previous evening. She knew he was sorry now, that he was trying to forget it and hoping hard that she’d already done so. He laughed as he sat down to his food. “Well, my duck, come on, talk to me.”

  She turned her head, almost weeping again, his exuberance bringing it back more than taking her mind from it. She had made the meal he had thrown away. The food she had collected and scraped for he had fed to the devil.

  “Now then, duck, now then!” he entreated, leaning across to touch her face. She pushed his hand off: it’s always the guilty who try to forget, she thought. But he looked into her eyes, and somehow it seemed foolish and unimportant to remember it, until she almost smiled at his clumsy attempts to reconcile her to his good humour, only wanting a few more endearing words and laughs to be won over. But:

  “Take your hands off me.”

  “Now then, Vera! Don’t get like that!” It wasn’t possible to rile him tonight. He drew back to begin his meal. “It’s pay-day,” he told her, in the same tone of endearment.

  “What if it is?”

  He laughed: “You want some money, don’t you?”

  “You want your meals next week as well, don’t you?” Her quick retort did as much as his gallantry to break down the memory of the burnt dinner.

  “I do,” he admitted, pouring a cup of tea. “Will you have one, duck?” The lure of peace was too attractive, and she relented. “All right. Pour me one in here”—pushing her cup across.

  “Have summat to eat, as well.”

  “No, I had summat before you came in. I eat bits and bobs all day and don’t feel like eating at dinner-time.” He pushed the empty plate aside and took out a cigarette, striking a match across the fender: “I drew thirty-two bob this week.”

  “Is that all?” she said, in an alarmed voice.

  “I was on short time Monday and Tuesday, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Never mind,” he soothed, “we’ll get on all right.” The Nook returned to her in a sudden blaze of reality, and she thought that if there were no food or money remaining in the two rooms she occupied with Seaton, then she had only to pack her few things and go back to the Nook, take up life as she had left it before the last outburst from her father. The Nook stood behind her as a refuge, still regarded more as home than her rooms in the city that had been given life only by Seaton’s ingenuity and a few bare promises in church, and therefore belonged more to him than to her. But the fatal phrase that she had made her bed and must lie on it sank the sol
id island of the Nook, left her feeling alone and hopeless in an empty sea, unable to commit herself entirely into the safekeeping of Seaton’s capabilities. No one had ever been out of work at the Nook. Her father and brothers had been blacksmiths either at the pit or in private forges where there had always been labour enough, and besides their small but regular wages there were pigs and chickens and a large garden, tangible amounts of food to be seen from any of the bedroom windows, besides a ton or two of pit coal standing in the yard because the coal-house was packed to its gills already. And the house itself, one of Lord Middleton’s cottages, cost practically nothing to rent. But Seaton, she told herself, was a duffer and a numbskull—sometimes reminding him of it to his face—pitted inside a city at a mere labouring job when thousands of such men were being sent home day after day because there was nothing for them to do, often to be laid off altogether.

  They owed rent, and Seaton decided it was time to leave. He found a house on a lonely lane near the city’s edge, closer to the Nook by half a mile, and costing less than the two rooms. Vera was fearful of moving, wanted to stay fixed in the rut they had made for themselves, hating to change the tenuous routine and walls that were familiar and therefore comfortable. To sally out and live on a new lane or street meant exposure to different faces, traffic, trees, and turnings to reach the town centre. Yet she knew Harold was right and that they must go.

  The flit was planned for a Saturday night, when Raglin the rent collector (who had a room off the entrance hall) would be boozing in his favourite pub at Canning Circus. Seaton looked on the prospect of a “moonlight” with elation: days beforehand he was taking down shelves and dismantling the furniture, was ready to rent a handcart from a nearby woodyard half an hour before they were due to move, time enough to carry everything downstairs on his broad, long-accustomed shoulders and rope it firmly on.

  Vera was nervous. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?”