Road to Berry Edge, The Read Free Page A

horrified. She tried to save it but Sean wouldn’t let her near, and when she fought with him he just laughed and pulled her down on to the sofa. Her father was out and Nancy was immediately conscious of being alone in the house with Sean. He held her there and kissed her. When she wouldn’t let him have her mouth, he kissed her all over her face and neck and throat and put his hands on her. The touch of his fingers was a sweet shock.
    The fire burned even more brightly with the aid of the wooden horse and Sean held Nancy in his arms and his hands and mouth did disgraceful, magical things inside her clothing. Only later when the evening drew in, when she and Sean were sitting demurely on the sofa and her father came home, did she become aware of how far the fire had gone down, how dark the shadows were in the corners without its brightness. The wooden horse had burned away completely and was lost among the ashes under the grate.
    Nancy and Sean had been married the following spring.They lived with Nancy’s father and she looked after both men. At first it was easy but a few months later Nancy’s father died and after that Sean showed Nancy no love or respect. Things weren’t so bad until Nancy became pregnant, but she realised soon after William was born that Sean hated children, hated her getting fat, hated any kind of responsibility. It was all just a burden to him which he pushed from him with drink. Sean, Nancy thought savagely, was like a lot of the men she saw around her. He didn’t want a wife. He wanted a whore, a cook and a cleaner, not somebody to share time and children with, not somebody to be beside him. He wanted her to be dirt under his feet, and like one of those statues of the Holy Mother in the church, very far above him and well beneath him; but not a real woman, not a real person.
    The odd time that Nancy saw Michael in the street she was horrified and astonished to see how much like his brother he was. Michael was so big and goodlooking that the lasses threw themselves at him. Nancy heard the talk. Alice came to her sometimes crying because he might have got this lass or that lass into trouble. He became a union man and upset the bosses, and he drank and fought and swore. But he was never like that with Nancy. When they met he was polite and smiling, and he liked the bairns, she could tell that he did. He spoke softly to them and always gave William a shiny penny. He would have done more, much more, Nancy knew, if she had said but one word to him. But she didn’t, she couldn’t. She remembered when she had been a little lass and her father had been fond of saying, ‘You’ve made your bed Nancy, and now you must lie on it.’ That was what her marriage was like. Marriage was for life, it was for good, it was forever, it stretched out before her like one of those Roman roads they had built around her so long since. There was no turning from it, there was nowhere to hide, no corners, no way out. She could not tell anyone that she had made a mistake, shecould not complain because no one wanted to hear. She was married to Sean McFadden for always now, she could not leave because there was nowhere to go and she had no money. She could not be rescued in a town like this where a man’s word was law in his home. She had to endure the neglect, the beatings, the poverty, the pregnancies, the abuse and the humiliation of knowing that the money he made he spent on drink and other women. All Nancy had were her bairns, her house, her friend Vera, and the odd meal at Alice’s when Alice would have them there, she worried so much about them upsetting her tidy house. There were no longer carved wooden animals in Alice’s front room, and when she enquired about this Alice told her that Michael had stopped doing his carvings, that one night when drunk, out of temper he had thrown them all on the fire. It seemed the worst thing of all somehow to Nancy.
    â€˜They were