A Kind Man Read Free

grow on trees.’
    ‘He maybe won’t ask and even if he did …’
    But he asked soon enough, as Eve had known that he would, known, she realised, from the moment he had helped her unwrap the waterlogged parcel on the canal bank. To see so clearly and without possibility of choice into her own future was terrifying.
    It had been the last time, it occurred to her now, that she was seriously afraid of anything, anything at all, for when she married Tommy Carr she moved into a protected circle. She had even thought that nothing could ever hurt her again, but that had not been true, nor should it have been. Pain and hurt were not his to prevent, or so it had seemed, but what he gave her was peace of mind and a reassurance about life, a steadiness. She could even face small things that had once terrified her – large spiders and lightning storms, stray dogs and things people did that she had been brought up to believe were unlucky. Now, if shoes were put on the table or lilac brought into the house, she simply removed the shoes because they belonged on the floor and found a jug for the blossom.
    Living with Tommy affected everything about her, changed and strengthened and calmed her, and led her quietly out of childhood and girlhood into adultlife. Her mother had been right. The question of whether Eve loved him did not arise for a long time, simply because there were so many other benefits to her marriage. Miriam had talked about love endlessly, before John Bullard and after they met. Eve did not. Only one day, after they had been married for a year, she had unpegged his shirt from the line and suddenly put it to her face to smell the cleanness and been suffused with the sense that it was his shirt and therefore important because of love. She loved. It was as obvious as the blueness of the sky and her state of plain contentment had become one of happiness in a single moment.

4
     
    SHE OPENED the door and looked across to the peak. The early sun had risen higher and was bathing the garden. The hens clucked.
    Why did she feel it would be any better if the sky turned curded grey and the rain came on? It had sometimes been like that, or else a bitter wind had cut round her head as she had walked, but it had made no difference, any more than the spring sun and warmth.
    How could it? It scarcely mattered.
    That day had been fine, with this lapis sky above the peak and the sun warm on her face.
    That day.
    She filled the kettle and left it on the back of the range for her return and then took the sprays of plum blossom out of the jug, shook the water off the stemsand wrapped them tightly in a couple of sheets of newspaper.
    There was no one about. By this time in the morning those who went to work had gone and children to school, those who stayed at home were washing and cooking and scrubbing the floors, changing the beds, shaking out dusters, setting the bones and the veg in a pan for stock. Later, they would be out, pegging washing, taking a moment to sit at the open back door in the sun. You always took the moment.
    There were six in a row, called cottages but really just small brick houses like the brick houses in the town, the brick houses she and Tommy had been born and brought up in. But someone had thought to set a row out here on the edge of the fields and looking towards the peak. From the back, you could see the smoke from the factory chimneys, and if the wind was this way, hear the faint roar of the furnaces and the thump of the machines. But from the front it was the field and the track across it to the peak. Beyond the peak was another world to which they went sometimes on Sundays, walking over the soft mounded hills. None of them was like the peak, which stood alone as an outcrop, jagged and steep. The peak, marked the change between the two worlds.
    * * *
     
    She did not lock the door. No one ever did. A locked door was an insult to a visitor who, if there was no reply, might try the handle and put a head round,