arrived home after dark on that same day, to an ordered house, a nourishing meal on the table, and his offspring washed and ready for bed, he himself now sated. ‘I’m really grateful for you looking after them so well.’
Her hawkish face calm, yet still etched with the pain of losing too many children, Nora waved aside her role as she supervised the reluctant exodus to bed, then removed Niall’s empty plate. ‘It keeps me busy. Anyhow, I’ve got Hat and Dolly to help.’
Niall acknowledged this too as he accepted a cup of tea from the latter. ‘I know how hard it must have been for you all.’ Any denigrating opinion he might have of them was swept aside; no one could have been kinder to him.
‘It’s the least we can do for our Ellen’s husband,’ replied Harriet, touching his shoulder.
Niall felt himself blushing and thanked God they could not peer into his soul. But he simply nodded and to cover his awkwardness said, ‘Mrs Powers gave me some bacon as I was on me way to work this morning, and Gloria ran after me with a couple of buns.’
Dolly smirked. ‘You’ll be needing a new set of teeth then.’
‘She’s only trying to help,’ said her mother, more generously. ‘I’ve been glad of her and Mrs Lavelle meself, I can tell you.’
Niall agreed that everyone had been so good, many of the neighbours continuing to play their part in helping the bereaved husband, running after him in the street to offer some little bit of comfort. ‘But I wish they’d just leave off a bit now—’ He broke off abruptly as there came a tap, and the face of yet another neighbour appeared round the door.
‘I’ve not come to bother you, Mrs Beasty.’ In respectful manner, the monkey-like Mrs Hutchinson set a tin of peaches on the table. ‘I’ve just brought you these from town. It’s nice to have a little treat through the week, isn’t it?’
Niall saw his mother-in-law’s jaw twitch in anger. And though she managed to contain it under a veil of politeness, as she thanked the woman for her thoughtfulness, Mrs Hutchinson was sufficiently intimidated by that steely-eyed face to remove herself from it within seconds. ‘Well, let me know if you need anything else, dear!’
Immediately the door closed, Nora said of the peach tin – the kind that Ellen had gone to purchase on the day of her death – ‘Stick ’em in the cupboard, Dolly! I couldn’t stomach the blasted things if I was starving.’ Her tone was one of deep loathing. ‘You can’t say anything when they’re only showing concern but, by God, I don’t know how I stopped meself from crowning her with it.’
Niall’s eyes followed Dolly as she relegated the peaches to the back of a cupboard, his voice hollow. ‘Aye, I were just about to say, when she came in, I wish they’d just leave me to get on with it now. Every time I open the front door I can feel their eyes on me, brimming with pity.’
The women agreed that it was the same for them, Dolly voicing what all had experienced. ‘Whenever you see any of them gathered together they clam up – you can tell they’ve been talking about Nell.’
‘People love a tragedy,’ pronounced Nora, her eye and tone become bitter.
‘They make me sick,’ seethed Harriet, revisited by her own grief. ‘Acting all teary and concerned – it’s not their tragedy it’s ours.’
Niall chewed his lip, noting how quickly they turned, how they hated to be on the receiving end of the gossip. So did he.
‘And the worst thing is,’ declared Nora mournfully, ‘they’ll have got over it in a few weeks. We never will.’
Dreading Christmas, Niall found it even worse when it finally arrived not crisp and white but wet and miserable. Telling himself it was for the children’s sake, he tried to make the best of an overcast celebration, scrimped on his own pleasures to take them all to a pantomime, and to buy each the type of present they would normally not receive. Yet, at the end of a very testing day, there remained an empty bed and a sobering indictment: no gift he had bestowed could replace their mother.
The winter months of 1935 were tough. Battling his way up the line through flurries of January snow, he had never felt so desolate. The wolf was obviously finding it arduous too in these foot-high drifts, for the vulpine spoor that defaced the pristine blanket led investigators not to a savaged sheep but to the remains of tinier mammals. Despite these giveaway tracks, the predator continued to remain at large. Wishing he too was a lesser beast, so as not to think and to feel emotion, Niall tried to inject himself with hope; told himself that spring was just around the corner.
But even after the upland streams and tributaries had thawed and their icy contents came tumbling down from the hills to swell the Ouse and Foss and threaten the city, before mercifully receding, Niall was to remain swamped in desolation.
Is this it? he was often to ask during the months after Ellen’s funeral. Was this what he had wished upon himself? Why, he was even worse off than before. At least he had had a wife to cuddle up to on a night. However much she might nag him over his shortcomings, Ellen had been good at heart, knitting him jumpers and socks, making sure he was warm and well fed before setting off to work on winter mornings, treating him to his favourite sweets whenever she went into town. How could he have been so lacking in imagination, so perverse as to think he would not miss her as much as anyone else in this house? Steeped in melancholia, for months he had crucified himself over his last words to her. He had told her to bugger off, and she had. For good. And all over a tin of bloody peaches! Grief superseded by anger, he raged at the stupidity of it all. I told her I’d go for them! Why does she never listen? And then the anger had reverted to misery, for that was another thing: the habit of referring to her in the present tense; expecting her still to be there when he got home on a night, waiting to take his coat and to rub his cold hands with her warm ones, to steer him towards the fire …
But he had imagined her dead and now he had got his just deserts. Life held no further pleasure than to see his children become adults, and marry, and hopefully make better decisions than he himself had done. And isn’t that sufficiently worthwhile, a sudden, inner voice demanded at his lowest ebb. At least you can help to guide them, make up for your failure as a husband. And there would be grandchildren. Yes, yes, of course there were things that were still meaningful. And thereupon the tide of self-pity began to recede. Never even to contemplate re-marriage, Niall decided then that, with his mother-in-law willing to cook and to wash and to lay out his clean underwear for him, his children would be enough; must be enough. Accordingly, from that point of catharsis, it was to Nora he handed his wage packet, and she who took over from Ellen in the running of his life.
Despite the apparent return to normality, both for Niall and those who lived alongside him, there remained an air of emptiness in the house, and the women could not help but feel how unsatisfactory this was for a man.
‘He’s lonely, is the lad,’ Niall overheard his mother-in-law murmuring to her daughters one night in early March, with greater understanding than he gave her credit for. ‘God knows, I miss Nell, but her husband must miss her twice as much.’
Drying his hands in the scullery, he cringed and gripped the rough towel, listening to the three talking about him for a while, and taking a few moments to compose himself before hanging the towel on its hook and wandering in to join them.
The only one still draped in black, Nora glanced up sympathetically from her knitting as he entered. ‘All right, love?’
He nodded, his face pensive and his voice loaded with regret. ‘I shouldn’t have let her go on her own. If the bike had hit me it wouldn’t have done any damage …’
Stricken by a bolt of agony, she rebuked him, ‘Eh, now don’t start that!’
‘How can you be to blame?’ demanded Harriet and Dolly, both misty-eyed.
‘Here!’ Resting her knitting on her lap, full of bluster