The Old House on the Corner (8 page)

He turned into her house, noticed it had a name on a board tacked to a tree: Threshers’ End. He was wondering where the name had come from, half expecting to see a couple of dead threshers lying amongst the trees, when he arrived at the front door, got out of the car, and rang the bell.

It was quite a while before she answered, wearing a bathrobe and a towel tied around her hair. ‘You’re quarter of an hour early,’ she said shortly. ‘I thought we’d agreed you’d come at three.’

He hadn’t thought that time mattered all that much. ‘Sorry,’ he said humbly. ‘Me watch needs a battery and the clock in the car don’t work.’

She stood aside to let him in. Their arms touched as he brushed past. She closed the door, stood with her back to it, looked at him. There was longing in her grey eyes and she was breathing heavily, as was Steve himself. He reached for her, rested his big hands on her waist, and pulled her towards him. She came willingly and didn’t
protest when he undid the belt of the robe and began to caress her damp, naked body. Nor did she protest, when he picked her up and carried her upstairs, as he had done so many times over the last few days in his imagination.

But making love to a flesh and blood Kathleen Quinn was immeasurably, indescribably better than it had been in his dreams. He touched, and kissed, every intimate part of her, while she did things to him that Jean wouldn’t have countenanced in the days when they used to make love. Not that he gave much thought to Jean that afternoon in Threshers’ End.

When it was over and they lay naked on the bed, side by side, utterly sated, she said shyly, ‘That was wonderful, thank you.’

‘It were bloody marvellous. Thank
you
.’ He’d just shared something that could only be described as magnificent with a woman he hardly knew.

‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ she whispered, ‘ever since last week, wanting us to do … what we’ve just done. When I phoned, I was dreading you’d tell me to have the cleaning delivered.’

‘No way.’ He turned on to his side and stroked her hair, dry now, and all mussed. Her lips were swollen from their lovemaking and there was a bruise on her shoulder. ‘What would your husband say if he knew?’

‘He’d be upset. What about your wife?’

‘She’d bloody kill me and if she didn’t manage it, me daughters would pitch in and finish me off.’

‘How many daughters do you have?’

‘Four.’ He didn’t mention his seven grandchildren. Right now, he felt too young to be a granddad. ‘Have you got any kids?’

‘A son, Conrad. He’s twenty-one and lives in Denmark.’

‘You don’t look old enough to have a son of twenty-one.’ He’d thought her in her mid-thirties.

‘I’m forty-two,’ she said surprisingly. ‘The reason I was so upset last week was because Con had rung that morning to say he’d just got married. I felt gutted, not being there, the mother of the groom, that sort of thing. He’s emailed since and it turns out that no one else was there, just him and Lydia. They did it on impulse. Mind you, it still hurts a bit.’ She sniffed. ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He liked the idea of being with her in the kitchen, knowing her as he did now. He got out of bed and began to pull on his clothes. Kathleen lit a cigarette and watched. ‘Is this where you sleep with your husband?’ he asked, and wasn’t surprised when she said the room was a spare. There were no clothes around, no bits and pieces on the dressing table, just a glass tray on a lace mat. It reminded him of a room in a hotel, dull and unlived in. While he buttoned his shirt, she stubbed out the cigarette, reached for the robe and slipped it around her narrow shoulders. She stood in front of the mirror and tried to calm her untidy hair with her fingers.

‘When can I see you again?’ he asked. ‘Tomorrow?’

She looked at him through the mirror and they shared another of those inexplicable moments. ‘I’m on duty tomorrow. I run the Well Women Clinic in the Merryvale surgery every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I’m in court and Saturday, my husband will be home, but he plays golf on Sunday afternoons. Can you come then?’

He and Jean usually went to tea with one of the girls on Sunday. He’d make an excuse, he’d lie, cheat, do anything if it meant seeing Kathleen Quinn again. ‘Sunday it is,’ he said.

‘Come after lunch.’ Her eyes glowed, as if she could already imagine them in bed together. ‘If the garage door is closed, it means Michael’s still here, but I’ll phone if he’s not going – it would take something like an earthquake to make him miss his golf.’

‘Don’t phone,’ Steve said quickly. ‘Me wife always answers. No, I tell you what, let it ring twice, then put the receiver down. It’ll be a signal not to come.’

Kathleen sighed rapturously. ‘I can’t wait till Sunday.’

‘Neither can I.’

That was just the beginning of their life of deceit and lies.

He was working overtime, he told Jean, when he started coming home two or three hours late on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

‘I hope they’re paying you,’ she said sourly. He gave her an extra ten quid a week as proof, leaving himself seriously short.

Sundays were more difficult to explain away. There were only so many times he could say he didn’t feel up to it, that he had a headache, that there was something going on at the club. In the end, he just flatly refused to go, causing ructions. Tea with his daughters had become an institution. They took it in turns: Brenda was the first Sunday in the month, Maggie the second, and so on. Steve had never enjoyed them. His four sons-in-law, all in their twenties and with decent jobs, constantly offered him advice on how to turn his life around, make money, train for this and train for that, start up a business of his own, Jean nodding in the background, making derogatory remarks: ‘He’s just an old stick-in-the-mud. You’ll never get our Steve to change his ways.’

He was fed up being the object of so many people’s
attention, being told which way to jump. Kathleen liked him the way he was and she was the only one who mattered. Jean hardly spoke to him because of the Sunday tea business, but he didn’t care. He sang under his breath as he pushed trolleys up and down the hospital corridors, began to use aftershave, showered every night, wore his best shirt for work every Tuesday and Thursday. It might look suspicious, but he didn’t care about that, either.

‘Michael knows about us,’ Kathleen said on Easter Sunday afternoon after they’d made love. They’d been seeing each other for two months and it was getting better and better with each time.

‘How?’ Steve asked, startled.

‘He just guessed. He said I looked different, that he’d never known me look so happy.’ She nestled against him. ‘I am too, so happy I could cry.’

‘What’ll happen now?’ He’d die if he couldn’t see her again.

He felt her shrug against him. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing!’ The other way around, he would have killed the chap.

Her breath was warm on his shoulder when she spoke. ‘Michael’s upset, but he doesn’t object to me having an affair.’

‘Why not?’ He felt confused. ‘I don’t understand, luv.’

‘He’s impotent,’ she said flatly, ‘has been for years, since not long after Conrad was born.’

‘Flippin’ heck, Kathleen.’ He sat bolt upright on the bed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

She shrugged again. ‘There was no point. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. Michael loves me in his own way,
and I love him in mine, but he realizes he can’t complain if I sleep with another man.’

‘But you can still do things for him,’ he said awkwardly.

‘I know that and so does Michael, but it’s not the same. He’s too ashamed to accept second best.’ She gently squeezed his arm. ‘I’d sooner not go into detail, Steve, not right now. I just wanted to tell you that Michael knows and that he’s not likely to come barging in and play the injured husband.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t get divorced,’ Steve muttered.

‘It may surprise you even more to know that I’ve never met a man I loved as much as I love Michael, not until I met you. He said he’d divorce me if I want. I said I’d ask what you wanted first.’

‘This is getting beyond me.’ He got out of bed and began to drag on his clothes. ‘I don’t understand any of it. I don’t want any part of it. It’s unnatural.’

‘Where are you going?’ She was sitting up in bed, clutching her knees, as naked as the day she was born, her red-brown hair curled over her white shoulders and her grey eyes misted with love. She had never looked so desirable and he had never wanted her so much.

‘Downstairs,’ he gulped, resisting the urge to tear off his clothes and get back into bed. ‘I need to think.’

He sat on the padded bench in the kitchen, stared at his folded hands. What the hell had he got himself into? He began to dissect Kathleen’s words, split them up into ones and twos, until it eventually dawned on him that she’d just told him she loved him, that she would divorce her husband if that’s what he, Steve, wanted. His heart began to race.

Was
it what he wanted? Did he want to spend the rest of his life with Kathleen Quinn?

She was a strange woman, mysterious. He could never tell what she was thinking. She was different every time they met, warm and friendly one day, shy and diffident the next. Sometimes he found her in what he called her magistrate’s mode, brisk and efficient, or she might be withdrawn, uncommunicative, or as giggly as a schoolgirl. Perhaps she wasn’t sure who she was herself. Whatever her mood, when they made love, she was as passionate as ever.

‘Have I shocked you?’ She came into the kitchen fully dressed, face made up, hair combed.

‘Yes,’ he said bluntly.

‘Not every family is as simple and straightforward as yours,’ she said in her prim and proper voice. ‘Same wife after thirty years, children grown up and living on the doorstep, in and out of each other’s houses by the minute. Other families have stresses and strains you couldn’t even guess about.’

‘D’you think it wasn’t stressful when I lost me job as a miner?’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re talking like a bloody judge again, passing opinions on things you know nothing about.’ He hadn’t told her that he hadn’t touched his wife for twenty-four whole years, not since Alice, the youngest, was born. Jean had had four children and that was enough. She didn’t want another. For a while, she took the pill, but it made her sick and it could give you cancer, she said. Other sorts of birth control she didn’t trust – lots of women she knew had got pregnant despite their men using condoms, so they were out, and she didn’t fancy a cap, it was too messy.

‘Anyroad, Steve, I was never very keen on that side of
things.’ Although she’d been keen enough when they were courting, he remembered.

They’d slept in the same bed ever since, each on their own side, never trespassing on the other’s territory. But, there you go, that was Jean for you. In her own way, she was ten times more complicated than Kathleen and his own life was hardly what you’d call normal.

‘I’m sorry.’ Kathleen sat down and laid her hands on his. They felt cool and soothing. ‘Were you shocked when I told you I loved you? I didn’t realize it had slipped out until after you’d gone. And it was stupid of me to talk about divorce, lay it on you so suddenly, without warning. You might only be coming for the sex – lots of men would. Love might be the furthest thing from your mind. I just hope I haven’t frightened you off. I’d hate to lose you.’

‘You’ll never lose me.’ He was conscious of his voice breaking slightly. He wrapped her small hands in his large, broad ones, and said huskily, ‘I’d like us to be together,
living
together, though I don’t know how we’ll manage it. Come July, I’ll be out of a job, me bank balance is in the red since I paid your bloody fine, and Jean’s engagement ring’s still in the pawnshop.’ The whipround in the club had hardly raised a quarter.

‘You’ll soon find another job,’ she said, grinning, ‘a big, strong man like you. And I have plenty of money. I own half the house and Michael can well afford to give me my share. We’ll be a partnership,’ she said encouragingly when she saw him frown. ‘Please don’t be old-fashioned and say you can’t live with a woman who earns more than you. This is the twenty-first century. Things like that don’t matter any more.’

Steve felt as if he’d entered another, quite different,
world. His wife, his daughters, everyone apart from Kathleen, seemed to be speaking to him from somewhere else, their voices muffled and unreal. The things in his house, once so familiar, looked strange, as if he’d never seen them before. He no longer knew where the things were kept, and kept looking for them in the wrong places.

His relationship with Jean had sunk to its very lowest when the pit closed and hadn’t improved since. Yet never once had he even faintly considered leaving. She was his wife and would stay his wife until death did them part.

But now everything had changed and it both excited and terrified him, the idea of leaving all the certainties behind and treading into the unknown with a woman he’d met only a few months ago.

He felt confident that Jean would never agree to a divorce, but that wasn’t the end of the world. More importantly, his girls would never speak to him again, and he would lose all contact with his grandchildren. It was something he’d just have to put up with if it meant being with Kathleen.

They decided to leave things as they were until July when his job came to an end and he’d get his redundancy money. He’d give the lot to Jean. He didn’t want to walk out and leave her penniless.

One Sunday afternoon in June, they went to Huddersfield in the Mercedes to view a site in the city centre where a block of flats was being built. It was a warm, summery day, the first time he and Kathleen had been out together. She wore a cream flowered frock and a pink velvet jacket that made her look more like a girl than a 42-year-old woman. He found her more desirable than ever.

‘Would you like to live in a flat?’ she asked. The car parked, they walked to the site that was partially hidden behind a high wooden fence. The builders had reached the third floor. There would be six by the time it was finished, Kathleen said.

‘I dunno,’ he said cautiously.