The Tenants

Slate

The slate went in February, in the gale that took two chimney pots off the Hartleys' across the road and laid them in the gutter like windfalls. After that the wet came in at the top corner, under the slope where the roof bows down to meet the wall, and left a mark the colour of weak tea. By Easter it had spread. It had a shape to it now, a coast and a headland, a country I would not be going to. Nights, I set the enamel bowl beneath it and listened to the slow arithmetic of the drip. I never wrote to Mr. Pollard about it. Let the next ones see. I was leaving.

Edith had found me a room at last, at Cleethorpes, the sea three streets off and a rail her George had screwed to the stairs before the heart took him. Come while you can still get in the car, she wrote. You have mourned that flat long enough. As though grief were a thing you could give a quarter's notice on and hand back with the key.

Thirty-five years. We took the flat in the August before the war, Tom and I, when Brunswick Street still had its limes and the mill ran three shifts and the whole street smelled of dye and yeast and hot iron. Three pound twelve a month, and the agent thick about the climb — top floor, mind, it's a fair pull — and Tom carried me up the last flight with my shoes in his hand, the both of us laughing, to christen the place proper. We were twenty-two. We thought the stairs were nothing. We thought we had the whole long field of our lives in front of us, and all the daylight in the world to cross it.

In the larder, low on the door where you have to crouch, he cut our names with his pocket-knife that first night. ADA & TOM 1939. The paint has gone to butter over it, but the letters hold. This morning I crouched and put my thumb in the grooves the way you read a face in the dark. He pressed too hard on the T and the blade jumped; there's a little scar where it skidded into the wood. I have known that scar longer than I knew his living hand.

We had the boy in the second winter. Eleven weeks we had him. I'll not set down what carried him off, only that it was quick, and it was January, and the doctor came up the stairs too slow. I had knitted him bootees from the wool of my green cardigan, two of them, the size of plums, and after, when I went looking, I could find but the one. I have kept it in the tea-caddy thirty years and never told a soul, not even Edith. You learn to carry a thing by not naming it. You learn there are words you can set down on a table and words you must hold in your two hands all your life or they will spill.

Then the war took Tom. Merchant navy — he would not wait on the call-up, said he'd sooner choose his own deck than have one chosen for him. The Atlantic took his ship in the March of forty-three and gave nothing back, no box, no grave, only a telegram a boy brought up on a bicycle. And the cruelty of it, the thing I have never forgiven the world: the letters kept coming after. Three of them, after. The post being what it was in the war, his hand arriving warm and full of plans for a man three weeks already in the cold water. Kiss the cold off your feet for me, the last one says. When this lot's done we'll have the years back, every one of them.

I have kept those too. And the photograph from Whitby, the one with the wind at my skirt and Tom squinting into the sun, the boarding-houses just behind us up the cliff. We had one whole week there, the summer before the boy. One week of our whole lives by the sea, and now I am going to live the rest beside it, which is a joke God has been a long time setting up and will not, I think, find as funny as He hoped.

This morning, before the taxi, I did a thing I had planned a long while. By the hearth there's a board come loose, the third from the wall, that lifts if you know its temper. I have known its temper twenty years and never had it mended, and now I am glad. I wrapped them in the oilcloth — the three letters, the Whitby photograph, the one small bootee — and I laid them under, in the dark and the brick-dust where the warmth of the chimney still reaches, and I set the board back and trod it down with my heel.

Some would call it morbid. Edith would. But I will not have them in a drawer at the seaside for a district nurse to find and pity, and I will not burn them, I tried once and could not, the match shook itself out. So I have buried my dead where we were happy, under the floor of the only rooms that ever held the three of us at the one time. Let the house keep them. The house has kept everything else — the climb in Tom's arms, the boy's cough in the night, the wireless, the dancing, the long quiet after. A house holds more than ever shows in the rent book.

For thirty years I have lived up here alone, and I will tell you a true thing about being widowed young: the worst is not the first year, when the whole street brings you pies and the vicar comes and your grief is a thing people can see and feed. The worst is the twentieth year, when you have become that nice Mrs Brearley on the top floor and not a living soul is left who remembers the sound of Tom on the stairs but you, and you keep it going alone, the remembering, like a fire you must not let out, because if you forget the particular weight of him then he is gone the second time, and that one is for good. On VE night the whole street was out and dancing under the bunting, and I stood at this window with the boy's bootee shut in my fist and could not go down. Could not. To dance at the end of the war that had eaten both my men. Mrs Hartley looked up and saw me there and did not wave, only nodded, which was the kindest thing anybody did me that whole loud year.

The red geranium I'll leave on the sill in its pot. It wants nothing but a thimble of water and the morning sun, and perhaps whoever comes will be the sort to give it that, and perhaps not, but I will not be the one to throw a living thing on the tip. The pot was my mother's. There's a chip out of the rim the shape of a thumbnail; she did it slamming it down at my father once, the year before he went, and laughed, and they were all right after.

Out the back the tree has got away with itself again. No one planted it. It came up from a seed in the yard wall the same year as the boy, a sycamore, a weed really, and every spring some man or other has stood in the yard and said he'll have it down before it lifts the flags, and not one of them ever has, and now it stands taller than the gutter and the wind goes through it like the sea coming in. I have watched fifty seasons turn in that tree from this window. When the cut is still of an evening, it throws the water's light up onto the ceiling, onto the stain even, and the whole brown country of it swims and ripples as if the sea had found me out at last and come up three flights to fetch me.

The window won't open above a hand's breadth now; the paint has grown into the frame, year on year, my paint and the paint before mine, until the sash and the sill are one thing. I gave it up long since. You learn to live with the air you are given.

I have walked the two rooms this morning saying my goodbyes like a fool, out loud, to a cooker and a sink. Here is where the cradle stood, by the chimney for the warmth; you can still see, if you know to look, the four small dents the feet of it pressed into the boards, and I have never once in thirty years let the furniture cover them, I have arranged a whole life around four marks no bigger than thumbprints. Here is the bit of wall where Tom scored his own height for a joke the week we wed — so we'll know if the rent's stretching us thin, he said — and there he is yet, a pencil line at a man's height with TOM and an arrow, and I have not the heart to take a cloth to it. So I shall leave him on the wall for the next ones to paint over without ever knowing they are painting over a young man laughing.

The taxi is at the door. The buzzer's still not mended — the woman from 2A had to climb up and knock — and on the panel downstairs my name has gone grey in its little window, A. BREARLEY, and someone will scratch it out within the month and write their own over it, and that is right, that is the way of it. The names go down like the marks on a tide-post, and the water keeps no count.

I'll not look back at the stain. I have made my peace with the country I am not going to. I will carry down what I can lift, and leave the rest to the keeping of the rooms, and go to my sister by the sea, and learn, at fifty-eight, to live somewhere that holds nothing of mine.

The geranium wants water. I'll do that last, and then I'll go down.