MARGARET FOUND

 I had been in Georgia with life tenure as assistant professor in charge of the creative writing programme at the State University when the letter from Leeds arrived with the offer of the Hunter Fellowship.  I knew there was some risk involved if I accepted.  It was for one year with the possibility of just one renewal and after that I would be back in the scramble for the short-term fellowships which was the best England has ever offered its writers. It was the cuts in higher education in the seventies that sent me to the States in the first place.  I thought that the land of Whitman and Lowell might be a good idea even if I never joined 'that great white company of shining souls that gave their youth that the world might grow old in peace'.  My work was always better reviewed there and chairs of creative writing were common.

If the offer had come from anywhere but Leeds I might well have declined but the chance to return to the place where so much had gone on in the sixties was, as they say, 'an offer I couldn't refuse.' I handed in my resignation and arranged to have my books shipped back.  The Head of Department was in the process of a major re-organisation and he graciously gave me leave to go forthwith and allow my successor to take over for the last half of the summer semester.

A week later I flew to England and caught the Inter-City from King's Cross to Leeds.  I disliked the train as soon as I saw it.  Gone were the comfortable compartments with seats in maroon velvet and sepia photographs of pre-war Bognor and Bournemouth under the luggage racks.  The carriages-if even the name survived-were a set of steel and plastic capsules, filled for the most part with yuppies with laptops and buzzing mobile phones.

City Station had changed beyond recognition.  The exquisite main concourse had become a leaking dereliction of peeling paint, steel bars and parked cars.  When I peered through the slats of boarding the gem of twenties architecture had become a sullen sodden mess.

There was no 'left luggage', just racks of lockers with plastic keys dangling from the inside.   I tried to find a locker large enough to take my grips and by bending one almost double and wedging the other against it I just managed. Outside the station entrance a row of black and whites curved round the bend, over the hump of the bridge and down towards Vicar Lane but with my hands free at last I decided to catch a bus.  The 'Queens' was undergoing one of its periodic facelifts with scaffolding and plastic sheets tacked to various sections of its anatomy.  In spite of my sojourn in the States and my success, such as it was, I kept the awe I had since childhood.  The windows were at head height but by standing on tiptoe I could peer into the dining room and see the starched linen cloths and the gleaming silverware. There was a side door with 'brasserie' stencilled in gold on the glass and the main entrance had a heavy crimson carpet covering the wide entrance where a flunkey in a double-breasted morning coat with great brass buttons raised his top hat as the residents wandered in and out.  I stood with my hands in my pockets on the corner like some fictional 'lounger' or a tout for unlicensed taxis waiting for a chance to catch an unwary fare.  Try as I might I had never been able to master enough courage to cross that carpet.  Even in the unlikely event of my passing the doorman I felt some other minion stationed behind the gleam and flash of the revolving doors would instantly pounce and eject me.  Even though I had a bulging wad of dollars in my pocket I felt it would not be sufficient to gain me entry.  My denim jacket, worn jeans and scuffed shoes would label me an untouchable trying to cross a barrier of caste.  Ever since I was a child I had looked and wondered and wished I had the courage to enter but I realized I was as unacceptable as ever.  I crossed over to the flagged central plaza of City Square where the Black Prince raised his sword and the attendant art deco nymphs held their torches in swathed glory and I found every bench unoccupied save for the pigeons, waddling and squawking angrily, searching crevices between the raised cobbles and not finding as much as a single crumb.  I wondered if this was an omen and my hope of inspiration was some wild fantasy, engendered by too long an absence.  Just then I saw a number one stuck at the traffic lights at the junction with Boar Lane.  I crossed in front of the General Post Office with its elegant imperial façade muffled by an array of pigeon nets.  I waited by the stop round the corner for the bus to negotiate the one-way system which enveloped the whole of the city centre.  I was the only passenger on the upper deck and when I looked at the people on the pavements there seemed very few.  Perhaps everyone had taken to cars in my absence and it was only the resolute boom of the town hall clock striking the hour that began to stir memories of Margaret, how I used to stand with her on the flagged plaza with the carved lions on each side and she'd ask me to give her a leg up and scramble onto the lion's back and give me two fingers from the top.

2

The School of English was still housed in the same block.  A van marked 'Headingley Wines' was parked outside and a delivery-man wearing brown overalls came out of the swing doors just before I went in.  In the hall outside the office door stood a row of brown paper parcels and when I touched them I was rewarded with the clink of glass.  I pushed open the office door and saw in the far corner, over the counter, a solitary girl typing.

"I think you've had a delivery", I said but she carried on.  I noticed she was wearing earphones so I repeated the words more loudly.  The girl turned and looked at me quizzically, removing the earphones.

"What love?"

"There's a lot of parcels outside, wine bottles I think."

"Oh Christ, they're for Professor Dawson.  He'll go off his trolley if he sees them left out there, anybody could just come along and nick them."

"I know, I was tempted.  Shall I pass them over?"

"Oh would you?  Thanks ever so."

When the wine-sacks were safely stacked on the business side of the counter I told the girl who I was and asked if she knew where I might find a place to stay.

"There's a staff flat vacant over the shop.  They've been doing it up".  She pointed a carmine-nailed forefinger at the ceiling. "There were a couple of others interested but the contractors got so far behind they signed up to share a house.  D'you want the keys to have a look?"

"I'll take it 'sight unseen', I'm sure it'll be fine!"

By then another assistant had returned to the counter and Moira, the typist, asked her to 'mind the shop' for a few minutes.  She took two keys from a rack and led me back into the hall up a flight of concrete steps and along a corridor to where a door newly painted in Wedgewood blue bore the inscription 'Staff Flat 1B'.  It was very functional with a bed in a bay, sliding windows and a built-in wardrobe.  The view was of several more concrete blocks and the clock on the white tower of the Brotherton was just visible.  When Moira saw I was happy with the flat she handed over the keys and promised to send the porter to sort out my luggage. He arrived a few minutes later, wearing a Dickensian uniform and in exchange for a ten-pound note he agreed to collect my bags.

He was back with them half an hour later but I was too tired to face unpacking so I pushed them into a corner and sank fully-clothed onto the bed and fell into a deep instantaneous sleep.  I dreamed of the sea, gold and shimmering like a Whistler nocturne.  When at last I awoke it was Saturday morning and with the students away I seemed to have the building to myself.  The communal kitchen was of little use as I'd bought no food so I locked my room, let myself out by the side entrance and caught a bus into town.

5

I must have sat there for a couple of hours.  The late afternoon sky went from blue to pink and finally purple.  Dusk on the Hollows was the time I remembered best when the younger children would have been called in and the older ones gone to the pictures.  That was when I would be alone with Margaret and she would tease me for my ignorance and gauchness but always gently, so gently. This was the time I tried hardest to recollect but her face with its wan beauty I could never quite picture, not even when we had spent a whole day together.  I tried in vain to evoke it in my mind's eye as I lay in bed ready for sleep.  So many years later I remembered how desperately I had struggled, hour after hour, my eyes closed, my hands gripping the knotted tassels of the emerald bedspread, to bring to mind her face with its pale pre-Raphaelite beauty but never once did I succeed.  Her voice I could somehow conjure and remember again the words she had spoken in the dream, "I am here, I am waiting". The echo returned as I sat with my back propped against a hillock on the Hollows until darkness descended and I saw the lights of the 'Crossgreen'.

I had the outline of two more chapters in my head and I thought I'd sit in the snug and get them down on paper.  The glass in the swing doors was ribbed with the original brass rails worn almost away.  Only the snug was as I remembered, the lounge housed a huge screen where Sky Sport droned and in the bar a karaoke machine blared the manic ravings of 'Oasis'.  When I asked for a lager and lime the tattooed barman looked at me as strangely, as if I had demanded a pint of porter.  When I got my drink I settled at a table beneath a set of prints by Atkinson Grimshaw, who had briefly lived in Knostrop Hall which we had passed hundreds of times as children on our way past the tusky fields and the ruined cottages with bulbous red-hot pokers in the gardens.

In half an hour I managed to get as much down on paper as I needed.  My notebook was zipped away in a side-pocket of my bag and I was about to drain my glass when I felt a touch on my shoulder.

"Did you used to live round 'ere?"

The speaker was a woman about my own age.  Her cheeks were red and she had ginger hair, She was wearing a flared white skirt with matching sandals, a low-cut black silk blouse and a gold chain round her neck.

"Barry, innit Barry Tebb?"

Then I remembered the voice.

"Nancy, Nancy Turner."

"Aye it still is, just the same as allus", she smiled and gave me a sly wink.

"Come on over and 'ave a drink wi me an' mi ubby an' a couple o' mi mates.”

She put her arm round my waist and gently pulled me into the Karaoke bar.  Something had gone wrong with the electronics and only a doleful hum emanated from the oversized loudspeakers.  A dozen or so customers were scattered round, a few perched on high, over-glossed stools while the rest filled a couple of ancient iron-legged tables.

Before she said a word Nancy threw back her head and laughed uproariously.

"What did a tell ye about mi 'oroscope comin' true? 'A big surprise from the distant past'-weren't them very words? I an't seen Barry 'ere for, well not since we were kids in't Falmouths.  A don't know 'ow a recognised 'im to tell ye't truth.  Barry, this is mi 'usband, John, an' mi mates from work, Eileen and Dora."

John seemed considerably older than Nancy, in his late fifties at least, tall and gangling, wearing the uniform of a security guard with yellow epaulettes on his sleeves and 'YR Security' on the breast pocket. An alsatian at his feet opened its eyes, blinked and yawned. John shook my hand.

"'Ang on, are Nancy's mentioned yer name at 'ome often enough. Ye't lad as went to grammar school and moved over Cookridge that wor sweet on Maggie Opwood."

Nancy reddened.

"'Ang on yersel. Perhaps a did say 'ee wor a bit but only so's ye'd not be jealous like:"

Everybody started to laugh, Nancy hadn't changed one little bit.  The dog stretched and got to its feet and looked at me.  Then it wagged its tail and licked my hand.

"By gow, Rambo dun't usually tek to strangers, 'ee nearly 'ad 'and off last lad's tried to pat 'im!"

I stroked Rambo's head.  He uttered a short bark and settled at my feet, his head resting on one of my worn trainers.  Nancy held her empty glass between her hands.

"Animals know things we don't.  'Ee knows its destiny or summat ye can't argue wi', like mi 'oroscope said, an' ye can't argue wi fate!"

Just then a voice called from the door, "John, John, gaffer's on't radio, 'ee wants us to do an extra 'alf shift, do you want it, yes or no?"

"Alright Bri, a'm on mi way."

He picked up a small haversack, the kind army surplus stores used to sell, khaki-coloured and with brass-tipped fasteners to close the wide flap.  Rambo whined and when John tugged his lead he lurched to his feet.  At the door John turned and waved, "See y'all" and the dog barked furiously as they disappeared.

I offered a round but Nancy's mates said they had to be off.  Nancy asked for a port n' lemon and I got the same for myself.  She took the sliver of lemon from the sharp skewer that suspended it from the rim of the glass and sucked on it meditatively.  She gave me a straight look.

"Na then, whatcher doin' slummin 'ere, are ye writin' a book or summat? A'll bet that's it, that's what you was up to in't snug, innit, writin? A knew it!"

"I've been away in America for twelve years, then the university offered me a job back in Leeds.  I'm a poet and now a novelist of sorts and I'm going to write about my childhood and Margaret's and your’s, too, if you don't mind."

"Well a'll be blowed ye cheeky bugger, least ye can do is get yor facts right, innit? A mean that's what writin's about, tellin' truth. Or1 right are Barry, when d'ye want mi to start? D'ye wanna know 'oo I 'ad it off wi first, wheer and when?"

Nancy gave me a broad grin and put her hands on mine.

"A've allus fancied bein' written about, ye'll 'ave to change mi name cos o John an' t' kids burram all your's!"

She gave me another of her winks, the kind she used to give when we played catch n' kiss round the binyards in winter and always waited for me round the first corner.

6

Nancy gathered her cigarettes, dropped them into her white pleated plastic handbag and snapped shut the gold clasp.

“Are ye flush?"

I showed her my roll of dollars in the ivory clip Laura had bought me as a parting gift.

"A believe yer!  All a meant was a fancy some fish n' chips. Christ, ye've enough there to buy t' bleedin' fish oil!"

When we got out onto Cross Green Lane I made to turn right but Nancy put her hand on my arm.

"Ye're jokin', that un’s been shut years, 'ole street were knocked down, nearest now's up Easy Road."

Nancy linked her arm in mine; as it seemed not to contravene the proprieties of her marriage I made no objection and we set off up the slight incline in the direction of the smell of frying fish.  We were the only customers and the middle-aged woman in a white smock yawned as we went in.

"A were just gunna close up, Nancy, 'ose your friend then?"

"This is Barry Tebb, 'ee grew up wi me an' Maggie in't Falmouths.  Ee's bin livin' in't States a long while an 'ee's just come back to live in Leeds.  It wor total chance 'ee dropped into t' Cross Green an' I recognised 'im."

"Eeh, lad, ye'll not find things same round 'ere, nearly everythin's gone one way an' another. Easy Road pictures burned down an' Princess were pulled down.  Ye can't even tell wheer Co-op wor, th' iv even altered bend o' t road.  Most o't 'ouses got bulldozed, all there is is old folks' flats and a few corporation 'ouses like what me an' Nancy's got.  What'll ye be 'avin?"

"Twice wi scraps please Marge."     

We ate our fish and chips as we wandered up Accommodation Road to the junction where the Maypole and the Co-op had once stood on opposite corners competing for the trade of the hundreds of families that lived in the surrounding streets.  The pavements had always been crowded and the roads almost empty but now we seemed the only pedestrians while the road hosted a constant traffic flow.

"Is it always as busy as this?"

"It nivver stops, not folk from round 'ere, cars off motorway mostly and lorries wi stuff for motorway extension."

Finally there was a gap in the traffic and Nancy pointed to the end house in a row of red-brick semi's.

"That's are 'ouse, a'll mek a pot o' tea an' wi can 'ave a good natter. Give us yer paper."

Nancy screwed the wrappings into a ball and dropped it in a plastic wheelie-bin as she opened the front door.  The hall light revealed white glossed walls, a green floral carpet and a flight of stairs.  She drew the curtains as I followed her into the lounge and dropped my anorak into a vacant chair.  Nancy switched on the electric fire, the kind with imitation logs and a cosy rosy glow.

"Come 'ere, are Barry!"

Nancy put her arms round me and gave me a kiss, a real smackeroo that seemed to go on for ever.

"A missed yer."

"I missed you, too."

"Sit thissen down and mek yerself at 'ome."

Suddenly I felt very tired, the jet lag had caught up with me.  I stretched out on the settee and I must have dozed off.  The next thing I knew was a cool hand on my forehead and when I opened my eyes I saw Nancy had brought a tray with two mugs and a plate of biscuits.  She set it on the low table in front of the fire while she sat and stroked my hair.

“Ye'r right knackered, y'allus were one fer goin' at things but in't' end a'll bet yer right glad to be 'ome."

She snuggled down next to me on the couch.

"Comfy for a kiss 'n a cuddle, innit?  That's why a bought it!"

Her hands moved all over me and deftly she undressed me then herself.

"If y' ant moved away a'd a showed yer a thing o' two, still it ain't nivver too late to learn".

With Nancy as a teacher I soon realized it wasn't and it was two in the morning before she called me a taxi and gave me her phone number.

12

‘Jane Hopwood.  Aged eighty-three.  Peacefully at home. Cremation

Lawnswood. 2.30 Thursday. Family and friends welcome, ‘The Wellington,’ Seacroft Town Centre 3.30 onwards.’

Serendipity, I supposed.  Death notices weren’t things I ever looked at, the province of widows, sandwiched between the end of ‘Calendar’ and the beginning of ‘Coronation Street.  It was the only time I’d bought a paper since Blair won the election for the Tories and I’d given up politics for life.

Of course it might be another Hopwood, but I remembered the Christian name and the age would be about right and the place.  That was the whole trouble, the place, that’d was how we’d got separated, Margaret and me, Seacroft was where all the families got moved to, all except our’s, we had to be given a house in Cookridge and nobody we knew moved there. ‘All psychopathology is loss’.  I’d read that somewhere.  Most of what you read is wrong, it has to be.  If it was right there’d be no more need for anyone else to write anything. But usually you can guarantee it’s wrong, bent by self-interest or just plain ignorance but in this one instance I sensed whoever it was said it got it right, more or less.

When had I last seen Margaret’s mam? Nineteen fifty-four, one night in the summer holidays when we’d been playing out all day, just the two of us.  It was so hot the tar on the roads was melting.  You could pick it up and roll it between your fingers like plasticene and it had your palm prints grained into it.  Lying in a pool in the road it looked wet and glossy, like a pool of oil but thicker, like when it was spread fresh over the cobbles to give the road a smooth surface and not be uncomfortable for people in cars, bad for the springs, bad for the gears, bad for the gear-box. Fuck cars and all who drive in them.  Laid out in rows, washed and waxed, every one the price of a back-to-back.  That’s why we don’t have families anymore, that’s the real cost of the cars and the holidays at Benidorm.  No more families, not real families in Hunslet-over-the-bridge with uncles and aunts kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas and cousins who’d take down their knickers for me, with the excuse of having to wee.  Just cars and foreign holidays and bought council houses.  No more real families and no working class for them to belong to.

Get back to the tar on the road you could mould in your hands and make it matt all over.  Get the cobbles back and the tram track with the red trams and the cowcatchers. Let me sleep and die and be taken into heaven and be thrown out to fall and awaken on the cobbles of Hunslet and sob with tears of joy.  Like that day in summer when everybody else had gone away, Obbo’s fami1y to Blackpool for a week, the Wilcoxes potato-picking in the vale of Pickering, even Pat Murphy, who wore the same dirty rain-coat every day of the year had been sent to Silverdales, the corporation holiday camp for poor children on the North York moors.

A summer like no other. The only one I really remember.  The summer of my falling in love with Margaret Hopwood.  I called for her every morning as soon as I saw her mam go off to work at Redmond’s pork-butchers.  I used to sit on the cement wall at the end of the street and watch for Margaret’s mam to come out of Falmouth Terrace and cross the gravelled square in front of the goodsyard.  She was always in a hurry, always at the last minute with an old shopping bag folded under her arm.  She had long ash-blonde hair and if she saw me she’d give me a wave and a smile and there was a twinkle in her eye.  She knew full well what I was waiting for, for her to go so I could call for Margaret.

When I knocked it was usually her nan who came to the door, wearing a washed-out pinny with a tea-cloth under her arm.  Margaret’ s family had to move in with her nan and grandad when her dad went off with ‘another woman’. No one in the streets had ever seen Margaret’s dad and she never talked about him,

One day a green van had come to Falmouth Terrace, full of boxes and bags and parcels tied with string that kept coming apart before they could be carried into the house.  There seemed to be children all over but the only one I noticed was Margaret.  She was two years younger than I was so she still went to primary school while I went to a grammar over the other side of Leeds.  There was just me and mam n’dad and dad had an office job so we weren’t all that badly off.

Margaret’s grandad worked in the goods office at City Station, humping parcels.  Patricia, Margaret’s big sister, was sixteen.  She worked as a packer, counting cards of knicker-elastic into boxes of a hundred and stacking the boxes on trolleys that were chained together and rattled along the factory floor until they reached a loading bay where a mechanical arm reached out and pushed them down a chute.  Patricia was beautiful in the same way as her mam with the same ash-blonde hair but Margaret wasn’t like either of them.  Her hair was the colour of straw-gold.  She had a smile that knocked me for six all the way to the suspension bridge and back.  When she whispered a secret to me I thought I’d been let in on all the hidden mysteries of the universe and then some.  When she laughed it was as if she was saying life was one great big laugh that started in her eyes and ended in the stars.

13

Forty years later I was going to meet her again, unless she’d died or gone to live in Australia, I knew it when I saw that death notice, it could only be her, no other.  I’d had the Hunter Fellowship for a year, teaching creative writing to eager first years and evaluating tired finalist’ folios of would-be New Gen poems.  I had my flat in the concrete block that housed the School of English.  They were very particular about that, “Never, never say ‘Department’,” Miss Bowers, the departmental secretary told me at our first meeting, “Professor Dawson’s very particular about that, very.”  She was always precise, Norah Bowers, that was how she’d landed the job in the first place.  She didn’t approve of Fellows in Creative Writing, ‘Not genuine scholars” she sniffed to her favourite assistant when she thought I couldn’t hear.  I couldn’t, of course, but I knew how to lip-read, a skill I’d learned from my long-dead father who was deaf. It was a useful skill and one I kept to myself. 

I’d no clothes for a funeral.  I supposed you should wear a dark suit and a white shirt with a black tie.  I possessed nothing but jeans and worn tee-shirts.  I rummaged in the lost property box in Norah Bowers’ office while she was out at lunch and found a once-white shirt the wrong size and a Balliol tie that had seen better days.  I stuffed them into my shoulder-bag and zipped it up quickly in case someone came in. 

The day of the funeral I caught the ninety-three on Otley Road just before two.  I got off opposite the crematorium gates where there was a huge flower-shop.  On one side was a display of headstones and a wooden booth with the sign ‘Flora Monumental Masons’.  The stones ranged from the small and simple with only the name and the date to the huge and flamboyant with florid eloquence chiselled in gold on Carrara marble which flowed into fluted angels’ wings.

There was the crunch of car tyres on the gravel behind me and I stood back as an empty hearse drove out, loose petals strewn over the metal ridges where the coffin had rested.  Released from its burden the hearse lost its mournful majesty and became just another van hurrying back to the yard for the next load.

I followed the winding tree-bordered road to the anonymous chapel.  Beneath the pillared portico the mourners for Jane Hopwood’s funeral awaited the cortege in small groups.  Not more than twenty in all, from small children to very old women, all dressed in their Sunday best.  I worked out that Margaret would be in her early fifties but I still could not be absolutely sure, the name was not uncommon and Seacroft was vast, an ocean of possibility and happenstance.  Certainly she was not one of those already gathered but when the cortege finally came and a woman climbed out of the first car I knew at once it was her.  I did not see the see the woman in her early fifties but the girl of ten in the clothes she had worn then.  The lifetime of continuities and disjunctions was suspended and she too knew who I was and what I had been always.  How I had come there and why at that of all times was not the point, only that we had met and recognised each other and that for both of us that moment was the summation of all that had gone before and the spring-board of whatever might follow.  From her look I understood the shock of my presence and how it had occurred at the exact moment when a public persona is most expected merely added to the surprise she showed in her face, in the way she held herself, in the suddenness with which she stopped and stared at me in insuppressible surprise at the inexplicable inappropriateness of such a moment and such a mode of our meeting.

So great was the shock we could not speak.  We filed into the chapel, Margaret at the front with the chief mourners while I kept to the back, alone save for the funeral director in his grey pin-stripes and black jacket.  The clergyman was nondescript, vaguely nonconformist in a dark suit and a clerical collar.  He read a prepared script and seemed to have no knowledge of Margaret’s mother beyond the words on the page he read from.  I caught the mention of sons-in-law but however I craned my neck I could not make out if Margaret had a man in tow.

When the brief obituary was over the coffin slid through the curtained aperture. ‘Abide With Me’ filtered through the loudspeakers on the chapel walls.  The words were almost indistinguishable, blurred as though the tape was worn from a thousand playings and the tape head left to gather dust from the ashes before they were cool enough to be raked through and gathered into an urn, a fine grey powder to be scattered over the smooth lawns of the crematorium or stay forever in a niche on a marble shelf of the columbarium.

Once, as a child, I had put my head round the great bronze doors, perpetually open, and I had seen hundreds of copper urns, ranged along walls that stretched high into the darkness and far into the distance where only a grey glimmer of light filtered through thick unwashed panes.  The mottled marble and the greening grey seemed to merge and mingle in terrifying silence where, instead of sleeping in the earth to the accompaniment of a choir of birds on green branches, the dead lay in some dark, abandoned corner.

14

We filed out of the chapel and Margaret came towards me.  When I put my hands out she held them and I marvelled at the lightness of her touch, at the warmth and how there had been no detectable change over the years.  Her eyes shone as they had always done and it was that quality, a luminosity, that so many years before had drawn me to her.  I have read that the eyes are the mirror of the soul and sometimes in our childhood she had looked into my eyes and I had looked into her’s.  The secrets we read we had buried deep and stored away in some uttermost reach.  Only through my dreams, little by little, had I gathered some sense of the interweaving of her being with mine, some hidden bond that could never be broken.

Through four decades I had remained unaware until the dreams began.  It was always the same dream in the same Monet-like setting, smooth lawns with box-hedges and the sense of an imminent royal presence. ‘My Princess Margaret Dreams’ I called them but even with that name, so broad and deep was the chasm between these repressed areas of my being that it took the one final dream to bring me to my senses.  This last dream was more a mystical vision, set by the suspension bridge over the Aire where the steps wind down to the tow-path. Rainbows and stars were everywhere and the scene was suffused in silvery lights under the arc of a double rainbow.  Margaret and I were playing together, just the two of us.  We were dressed in torn, shabby clothes, rather like the ragged urchins of Murillo.  Ostensibly it was a summer evening but somehow I knew it was heaven.  Margaret’s voice came to me, her’s unmistakably, calling over the void of the years, “I am here, I am waiting.” 

Love came in a rush, like the sudden alighting of birds, their wing beat so fast it might have been invisible.  Now in this very real and often painful world her arms reached out and held me.  I felt the tremor of her slight body, the beat of her heart beside mine, an incandescent flame as our souls merged.

15

“A don’t understand ‘ow but a know oo y’ are.  I allus knew a’d see yer again. Mi sister said ‘er next-door neighbour’d seen a poetry book in a library where she wor cleanin’.  Sh’ in’t much into books but she said it wor called ‘Margaret in Summer’, summat like that and on’t front were a map o ‘t streets. It wan’t library she usually cleans, gaffer teks ‘em in a minibus and this lass wor fillin’ in for a mate ‘oo knocked sick.  She cun’t even say which library it wor where she’d seen t’ book.  I asked are Pat to find out ‘ow many libraries there are and she told me nigh on sixty.  But that title did it! A knew it must be summat ye’d written about me, then a got to thinkin’ a must be goin’ off mi ‘ead, oo’d want to write about me?  But there cun’t be two people wi’ your name an’ I allus knew ‘ow yer fancied me when we were kids, a knew it more ’n you did.  A remembered ‘ow yer used to mek up stories wi’ me sat on t’ pavement for ‘ours listenin.  I allus wondered if ye’d turn out to be some kind o’ writer an’ a were right an ‘ere y’are”

She started to tremble, as if she had made the longest speech in her life.

“I wanted you to know I was writing about you.  It was you who first started me off, asking me to make up stories when we lived in the streets.  There was one period –of about twenty five years- when I couldn’t write anything -then I started to have dreams about you, my ‘Princess Margaret Dreams’ I called them, there were scenes set in beautiful gardens and the phrase ‘Princess Margaret’ always came at the end of them but the penny didn’t drop until I had this one last dream, more like a vision than a dream.  It came at the worst period of my life when nothing I planned worked out and I couldn’t see any way forward.  The dream was set on the steps leading down from the suspension bridge where we were playing together.  Everything was covered in silvery light and then I heard you say “I am here, I am waiting.” I started to write again, an unending flow of poems including one enormous poem about our childhood called ‘The Bridge Over the Aire’.  Then I wrote two novellas, ‘Margaret’ and ‘Margaret Gone’, you became my muse, you know the beautiful girl, half-human, half-angel, who inspires a poet.”

“A knew it must be summat like that, a don’t know ow a gorrit worked out burra did some ‘ow.”

While we were speaking the others mourners held back, wondering who I might be.  Margaret suddenly reacted to their presence and woke from her reverie.

“This is Barry, a friend from way back.  ‘Ee saw mi mam’s notice in t’ paper.”

She turned back to me.

“Its just too much ‘ere an’ all.  ‘Ave yer a pen an’ paper?” She scribbled in my notebook for a few seconds.

“That’s mi address, a’ll be ‘ome at eight.”

16

She stood at the door, wearing an electric blue silk dress with sea urchins and cloud forms in undulating waves.  As I got off the bus she waved and I waved back with my free hand, the other holding my shoulder bag filled with the books I’d written about her during the years of separation and now came our meeting in the light rain of summer and the shadows of early evening.

Over the gate was an arch of dog roses in full bloom.  When I passed underneath the branches trembled and shook a myriad of drops onto my face and hair and my, beard.  Margaret laughed and her laughter rippled across the space between us and the years parted like the Red Sea and like Moses I came safe on the other side.  Suddenly she was holding a towel and drying my hair.  Then she dropped the towel on the windowsill and pulled the door shut.  She trembled slightly, her whole body in some involuntary shock then she was calm but stayed silent.  She pressed her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes and smiled.

“Barry”, she said, “Barry”.

She took my hand and led me through the hall, empty but for a telephone on the windowsill and a small table holding a blue-glazed vase with a pattern of yellow diamonds that by their very uneveness made them special to that moment.

We walked into the lounge, which spanned the house with windows at both ends.

“Are you on your own?”

I had to ask.

“I am an’ I aren’t, so to speak.  What a mean is a’m still legally wed but ‘ee don’t live ‘ere any more, ‘ee an’t for a year to be exact.”

“You’ve children?”

“Aye but grown up an’ married an’ a’ve even two grankids.  It weren’t ever what ye’d call ‘appy marriage’.  ‘Ow about you?”

“I’m on my own, I have been for a long time.”

I moved to be closer to her.

“That dress you’re wearing, its beautiful, airy and majestic, how I used to see you in my dreams!”

I reached and touched the fold of her collar and held it between my fingers, then I touched the tiny hairs on the back of her neck.

“I could never fix your face in my mind when we were children.  I used to lay in bed at night and try to picture it but I never could, my feelings got in the way I suppose.  Then that one special dream brought it all back, like a whirlwind turning everything topsey-turvey, I’ve never been the same since.”

Margaret reddened and put her hand to her mouth.

“Ye’re a lot to cope with, I allus thought yer might be but not in’ t’way lads av’e known, daft about booze and goin’ after other lasses!  But a dare say a’ll manage.  Mi mam an’ are Pat allus liked yer.  Mi mam ‘ated Jake, that’s mi ‘usband, she said ‘ee wor rough like mi dad an’ a should’ve learned from ‘er mistakes.”

I opened my bag and poured the books and   magazines on the table.

“Nearly all my poems are about you, they’ve been in magazines for years on and off, here and in the States.”

I showed her one poetry magazine with its glossy cover and opened it where ‘Memories of Margaret’ was printed with a line drawing.

“Is that supposed to be me?”

“Whoever drew it took the idea of what you might look like from the poem.”

She sat and read it, utterly absorbed, then she spoke some lines aloud, slowly and deliberately.

‘Half a century later

I cry at my realization,

My first, my only love.’

“I think I got you just about right there but its always been a problem, either I make you too earthy or too spiritual, either too much like an angel or too physical and forward.”

“Yer mean y’ ave me strippin’ off?”

“Not quite but well, you were more knowledgeable than I was.”

“That a were alright!  Ye knew nowt about life, a suppose that’s wor a liked about yer, ye were so innocent, ye nivver tried ‘owt on wi mi!”

“I’ve spent all these years regretting I never did. If I had perhaps our lives would have been very different.”

“Mebbe, mebbe not.  Life’s a bugger, whichever way ye look at it.”

Margaret picked up ‘Bridge Over the Aire’, running her fingers over thecover.

“Are ‘ouse an’ your’s. Christ a see what yer mean about ‘earthy’.  I ‘ope mi gran’kids don’t ever see it.  What a don’t get is how ye could mek up so much about me, a’m no different from thousands of other Leeds lasses!”

“You are to me and that’s what I’ve been trying to say.  I wrote in the books all the things I wanted to say to you but never dared, like ‘Will you marry me?”

“Ye mean y’ actually asked me to marry ye in print?”

“Well, yes I did.”

“Shit, a din’t exactly mean that but what’ll folk say at work, mi family, kids an’ grankids!”

“Poetry doesn’t get much circulation, at most a few hundred but the novel might.”

“What novel?”

“Its called ‘Margaret of Leeds’, that’s the proof copy with the buff cover, it’ll be in the shops soon.  I did change your surname.”

She flicked through the pages.

“Bloody ‘ell its all about me, pages an’ bloody pages.”

She sat back on the couch, closing her eyes, resting her head on the plastic back of the settee.  She breathed deeply, opened her eyes and smiled.

“I nivver thought a’d be famous!”

“I never thought I’d meet you again!”

She took my hands in hers and we both started to laugh and neither of us could stop.

17

I rested my arms on her shoulders, fingering her blue dress, feeling the warmth of her skin.

“I never want to leave you.”

“Never?”

“Never”.

“Then tek off that bloody jacket sharpish!”

I was still wearing my anorak with its baggy pockets and frayed sleeves.  I took it off and emptied the pockets onto the table, piling pens, note books, key ring, a packet of Polos and two small reels of Sellotape.

“All ‘t right gear for a writer an’ all!” Margaret pulled out the linings of the pockets, gave the anorak a vigorous shake, rolled it into a ball and stuffed it into the washing machine.

She pressed a succession of buttons then with a sudden whirr and a whoosh the machine started off.  The kettle had boiled and she made a jug of aromatic coffee and set it on a tray with the mugs and a sugar bowl. I picked up the tray carried it into the lounge and laid it on the glass-topped table in front of the gas fire.  Margaret bent over to switch it on and smiled as I caught the movement of her breasts.

“Its nice to be noticed. That’s what a nivver ‘ad, bein’ tekken notice of, somebody pickin’ up a tray an’ carryin’ it fo’ me.  All Jake ever did wo’ sprawl in ‘is chair wi a pile ’o lager cans and watch football.  ’Ee wor so stuck to ’t screen if a walked naked in front of ‘im ‘eed nivver a’ve noticed!”

“Did you?”

She reddened.

“A might ’ave.  Ye know a remember when wi wor kids. When yer mam ‘ad to go to yer gran’s an’ ye stopped wi’ us and y’ ad nerve t’ ask if wi could gerrin t’ bath together!  A remember them great wooden bath lids y’ ad to lift back and fasten wi’ ‘ook or th’id topple on t’ ye!  An a let ye dry mi and we slept in t’ double bed in t’ attic.  A remember lookin’ up through t’ skylight and seein t’ stars and you tellin’ me about ‘em, ‘ow thi were in’t shape o’ animals and gods and whatnot.  Nobody else ever talked like that but thi wor a programme once on’t telly about it, it were a long time ago when ‘t ’kids were small an’ a suddenly started to cry an’ a din’t know why but a do now.

A din’t just forget about ye, Barry.  When a were married to Jake ‘ee treated me like a doormat, expected ‘is dinner on table when ‘ee came from t’ pub.  Then ‘ee slept it off in front o’ telly.  A used to say ‘Can’t y’ ever stay in?’ and all a got was ‘A man needs a drink wi’ ‘is mates’.

“And you stuck it and had children?”

“Wor else could a do?  All t’ lads a knew were t’ same, a few a bit better, some a lot worse.”

She took a cigarette from a pack on the table and I lit it for her.  Her eyes filled with tears and they coursed down her cheeks.  I cradled her head against my chest and stroked her hair until her sobs subsided and she lay in my arms.

“A feel right safe wi’ you.  I an’t felt like this since wi were kids.”

“I feel exactly the same.”

“But wi an’t got nowt in common!  A go to bingo, ‘ave a drink wi’ mi mates from work.  Sometimes mi  gran’kids get dumped on me.  Nowt artistic goes off ‘ere, ye’d be bored out o yer mind in a month, won’t ye’?”

“Life’s not like that.  Most of the time I’m wandering round getting inspiration or actually writing.  I loathe  ‘literary people’, just phoneys on the make. I get more inspiration sitting in casualty!  The last time I was there this wonderful drunk old Irishman staggered in and started reciting a poem in Gaelic, it was as though all the great Irish poets of the past were speaking at once.  My only close friend is my ex-wife, she’s a poet as well and a better one than me I’m afraid.  We spend hours on the phone reading our things aloud to see if they work. But apart from her there’s no one I’m close to.”

There was the sound knocking, of someone trying the door and then the rapping got louder and more insistent.

“Oo the ‘ell’s that?”

Margaret straightened her dress, ran her hand through her hair and went to the door.

“0 its you, Sall, come on in.  A’ve got company.”

“A’ve just brought back yer catalogue.  A found just blouse a want fo’ t’ club Saturday.  A slipped a bit o’ paper in’t right page.  D’ye think ye can gerrit me in time?”

“A suppose a might, just.”

“That’d be really good.  There’s this fella a’ve really tekken a fancy to and Marlene ‘eard ‘im tell a mate ‘ee fancies me a bit! Ooh!”

She stopped in full flow as I entered the kitchen.

“Maggie, a’m ever so sorry, a though ye meant one o’ your kids wor ere” “Sal had a full figure, which she high-lighted with tight-fitting clothes, costume jewellery dangling from her wrists and a gold cross on a chain dipping into her cleavage.

“Oos this then?”

“A’ll introduce you.  Barry, this is Sal, a mate o’ mine from work, Sal, this, is Barry, wi grew up together in’t Falmouths, ‘ee saw mi mam’s notice in t’ Evening Post.

“Ello Barry”

Sal looked me up and down, appraisingly.  She had clear ‘bright eyes and a personality that fizzed like a glass of Tizer. 

“What do you do, the, ye don’t look much like a workin’ man to me!”

“I’m a poet.”

“Yer what?  Maggie, am I ‘earin’ things?”

“Right enough.  Barry writes books.  ‘Ee brought some to show me.  Ee writes stuff about when wi wer kids together.  A still can’t believe it misell!”

“Yer mean ‘ee writes about you?”

“Aye, a’ve been lookin’ through it, an’ about Nancy Turner, too! A’ll show it yer sometime.”

“Well its time a were off anyroad, two’s company an’ all that!”

Sal threw her head back and laughed as she closed the door behind

her.  Margaret turned the key, took it out and put it in her pocket.

“D’you want some coffee, real coffee, do ‘ave some”

“I can drink coffee all day long.”

She rummaged in the cupboards and came up with half a packet of ‘Blue Mountains’.

“A read somewhere ‘real coffee graces your table’ but nobody said ‘owt so a gave over botherin’.”

Margaret lit the gas and heaped two dessert spoonfuls into a grey glazed pot.  While the coffee was brewing she sat on the edge of the table and looked at me, expectantly.

“Am a what ye thought a’d be?”

“I never thought what you’d be.  I just wanted you to be alive and to remember.”

“Remember?”

“Remember the life we had, the streets in summer, playing catch ‘n kiss round the binyards in winter, the nights on the Hollows that went on for ever, the secrets we shared with Nancy, going chumping down Knostrop, taking you to confession at Mount St. Mary’s.”

“Course a remember!  Things like that ye nivver forget.  Come on, let me show ye round t’ house.”

18

She took my hand and led me into the hall.  At the bottom of the stairs she put her finger on my lips and rested it there.  Then she drew it back, bent forward and kissed me on the lips, slowly and deliberately.  It seemed the longest kiss of my life.

“That’s just to keep yer goin!”

“My dream wasn’t wrong?”

“A suppose not.  It’s funniest way to court a lass a’ve ever ‘eard but a will say that fo’ ye, y’ allus were one for surprises.”

 We went onto the landing.  It was a three-bedded semi with old-fashioned flowered wallpaper and the woodwork all in white, plain pale-green carpets and there were wall-lights with frosted-glass shades in the shape of petals.  In the main bedroom we sat on the bed.

“This husband of your’s, what happened?”

“Jake met me on t’ rebound.  ‘Is first wife left ‘im fo’ somebody else an’ ‘ee in’t sort to feel ‘ee looks silly in front o’ ‘is mates so ‘ee comes on strong to me, sayin’ ‘ee‘d allus fancied me on’t quiet an’ daft bugger me falls for it.  ‘Ee’s a few year older ’n me an’ a wor that busy bringin’ up kids a din’t seem to notice owt at first, ‘ee wor allus at work or at club or at match.  By ‘t time a realized ‘ee wor ‘opeless a din’t reckon there were much a could do, then to top it all a found the rotten bugger’d got somebody on’t side.  A mate at work told me she’d seen ‘em together at a club up Meanwood but when a tackled ‘im ‘ee just denied it flat, said ‘ee’d not been in any club except ‘is own on’t estate an’ mi mate must a just gorrit wrong! Next thing a know ‘ee ups an’ offs for a month wi’ norra word then back ‘ee comes an’ says ‘ow its ‘is ’ouse and ee’l come an’ go as ‘ee pleases.  A went to see solicitor an’ upshot wor Joke offs an’ sets up wi’ this lass an’ am on mi own wi’ kids.  A nivver got divorced or owt, there din’t seem any point.

“Has there been anyone since?”

“A’ve ’ad one o’ two boyfriends, one lasted a couple o’ year, t’ other only a couple o’ week.”

She looked at me in some state of perplexity, then burst out laughing.

“Ye’r jealous, Barry Tebb, a know it! Call it woman’s intuition but a know y’are, daft bugger.  A suppose its a compliment in a way, innit?” She stood up and went to the window and closed the curtains on the darkening street.  There was a table-lamp with a pink imitation parchment shade and Margaret bent to switch it on.  Then she unfastened her blouse in a strangely matter of fact way and unzipped her skirt and let it fall at her feet.

“Unhook mi bra” she said, turning her back to me.  Then she pushed off her knickers and smiled.

“Well, wor a worth waitin’ fo’?  Do a pass?”

Our lovemaking was soon over, as though we had been making love together all our lives.  She lit a cigarette and lay back, her hair straw-gold against the white of the pillow-case.

“Not jealous anymore?”

“Not jealous anymore.”

She laughed, a soft wonderful laugh like slight spring rain, turned on her side and put out the light.

“Now tell me all yer secrets an’ a’ll tell ye mine!”  she whispered, kissing the lobe of my ear.