The glow he’d felt in talking to Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Riley faded. He slipped down the back alley between Marsh Street and Gladstone Terrace, making for Tite Street and Beattie Roper’s shop, a journey he must have taken thousands of times as a child, a boy, a young man, but now he moved silently across the cobbles, feeling almost invisible. He was no more part of the life around him than one of those returning ghosts.
He came out at the top of Hope Street and started to walk down it. Hope Street ran parallel with the canal and was known, predictably, as No-Hope Street, because of the alacrity with which its inhabitants transferred themselves from one to the other. At least before the war they did. Suicides were rare now. The war had cheered everybody up.
Half way down, on the corner of Hope Street and Tite Street, was Beattie’s shop, its windows boarded up. He knocked loudly on the door.
‘You’ll not get an answer there, love,’ a woman said, passing by. He waited until she’d turned the corner, then knelt and peered through the letter-box. The counters were cleared, the floor swept clean. He called, ‘Hettie. It’s me, Billy.’ The door into the living-room stood open. He felt her listening. ‘Hettie, it’s me.’
She came at last, kneeling on her side of the door to check he was alone. There was a great rattling of bolts and chains, and she stood there, a thin, dark, intense woman, older than he remembered. No longer pretty.
‘Billy.’
‘I’ve been to see your mother.’
‘Yes. She wrote.’
A long hesitation, which told him immediately what he wanted to know. He took off his cap and stepped forward. Almost simultaneously, she stood aside and said, ‘Come in.’
The living-room was empty. Both doors, one to the scullery, the other to the stairs, were closed. He looked round the room, taking his time. A fire blazed in the grate. The kettle stood on the hob beside it. The table, with its green cloth, still took up most of the space, six empty chairs ranged neatly round it. Hettie followed his gaze, and he could see how changes she’d become accustomed to — the empty chairs — became strange again, and unbearable as she saw them through his eyes. ‘Oh, Billy,’ she said, and then she was in his arms and crying.
He cuddled her, lifting her off her feet, rocking her from side to side. Only when the sobs subsided did he loosen his grip, and let her slide to the ground. Her spread fingers encountered belt, buckles, buttons, tabs, stars: the whole hated paraphernalia. He said quickly, ‘I see you’ve still got Tibbs.’
A fat tabby cat lay coiled on the rug, the pale underside of his chin exposed. Ghost smells of cat pee and creosote drifted in from the shop.
‘Yes,’ she said, laughing and sniffing. ‘Pees on everything now.’
Her laughter acknowledged the fund of shared memories. Thank God, Prior thought, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
She fetched the tea-pot and started making tea. ‘How’s me mam? She says she’s all right.’
‘Thin. But she’s eating. She’s come off the strike.’
‘Hmm. How long for? I tell her she shouldn’t do it, but she says, “How else can I convince them?”’
‘Have you been to see her?’
‘I’m going next week. I gather we’ve got you to thank for that?’
‘I put in a word.’
She poured the tea. ‘How come you’re in a position to put in a word?’
‘Got a job in the Ministry, that’s all. They’re not sending me back ‘cause of the asthma.’
‘But what do you do?’
He laughed. ‘Exactly what I did before the war. Push pieces of paper across a desk. But I managed to get me hands on your mam’s file — via a young lady in the filing department — and then I thought I’d go and see her.’
‘And you just bluffed your way in?’
‘Well, not exactly, I had Ministry of Munitions headed notepaper. That gets you anywhere.’
‘Huh! I wish we had some.’
She believed him. Just as once her mother had believed Spragge. She was sitting at the head of the table, in her mother’s chair, no doubt because that made her mother’s absence seem less glaring, and he was sitting, almost certainly, where Spragge had sat. He looked across to the dresser, and there sure enough was the photograph of William.
Hettie saw him looking at it, and reached behind her. ‘I don’t think you’ve seen this one, have you?’ she said, and handed it across.
William was leaning against a stone wall, his arms loosely folded, and he was smiling, though the smile had become strained as the photographer fiddled with his camera. He was wearing bicycle clips. A pencilled date on the back said ‘May 1913’. Prior thought he knew the place, they’d gone there together, the three of them. Behind the wall, not visible in the photograph, a steep bank shelved away, covered with brambles and bracken, full of rabbits whose shiny round droppings lay everywhere.
‘Why does it look so long ago?’ he said, holding the photograph out in front of him. Without conscious duplicity (though not without awareness), he was groping for the tone of their pre-war friendship.
She laughed, a harsh yelp that didn’t sound like Hettie.
‘No, but it does, doesn’t it?’ he persisted. ‘I mean, it looks longer than it is. You know, I was thinking about that on the way over. About…’ He took a deep breath. ‘You know if you were writing about something like… oh, I don’t know, enclosures, or the coming of the railways, you wouldn’t have people standing round saying…’ He put a theatrical hand to his brow. ‘“Oh, dear me, we are living through a period of terribly rapid social change, aren’t we?” Because nobody’d believe people would be so… aware. But here we are, living through just such a period, and everybody’s bloody well aware of it. I’ve heard nothing else since I came home. Not the words, of course, but the awareness. And I just wondered whether there aren’t periods when people do become aware of what’s happening, and they look back on their previous unconscious selves and it seems like decades ago. Another life.’
‘Yes, I think you’re right.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I went to London a couple of months ago, to see one of the few suffragette friends who still wants to know me. And we were sitting in her house, and there was a raid, and we actually heard shrapnel falling on the trees, and do you know it sounded exactly like rain. And she was … full of herself. Short hair, breeches, driving an ambulance, all things she’d never’ve been allowed to do in a million years. And suddenly she grabbed hold of me and she said, “Hettie, for women, this is the first day in the history of the world.”’
‘And the last for a lot of men.’
Her face darkened. ‘Don’t beat me over the head with that, Billy. I’m the pacifist, remember.’
‘At least you’ve got the vote.’
‘No, I haven’t. I’m not thirty. Mam hasn’t, she’s in prison. Winnie hasn’t, same reason. William hasn’t, he’s had his vote taken away ‘cause he’s a conchie. So as far as votes go this family’s one down on before the war.’