The Undertow by Jo Baker Page B

won’t.”
    “Right.”
    She grabs him by the arm and yanks, clatters him up the stairs. He stumbles, his feet barely touching the treads; his shin bangs against a wooden edge. She pulls him to his room and opens the door, then pushes him in. He stumbles to a halt. It’s angry crying, not sad.
    “Don’t let him stay, Ma,” Billy says. “Please. Don’t.”
    She slams the door.
    Amelia puts on her hat and goes out of the front door and walks to Cheeseman’s through the evening dark. Her breath plumes in front of her. Her feet clip on the paving slabs and the cold air cools her cheeks. Her palm stings. It will freeze tonight, she thinks: when she gets into bed later, the sheets will have that faint slick of dampness about them, which never seems to go away no matter how she washes and dries and airs the bedding.
    The words worm through her head:
He’s got nowhere else to go
. She can see him, in her mind’s eye, standing in the lamplight, with his suitcase and his broken boots.
    One night, you’ll let him stay
. His suitcase tucked in beside the card table. His hat dropped on top of the picture book. Without a thought, without a word of apology.
    When she goes into the shop, with its warm familiar smell of ham and tea and brown paper, Mr. Cheeseman is at the door, just twisting the cardboard sign round to
Closed
. But when he sees her there he letsgo of the sign and stands back and opens the door to let her in. He smiles, his face dimpling and folding, and rubs his hands together, and greets her and asks after her health and what he can do for her, and she replies without even knowing what she’s saying, and comes into the shop, and watches as he moves back behind his counter and stands there, smiling at her expectantly, and she should ask him for the wages, for cheese and bread and maybe a pie, but instead she’s marooned in the middle of the polished floor, not quite knowing what to do with herself.
    He’s a liar, though. Bet he is
.
    Billy couldn’t know what it would mean, not the adult bedroom things that it would mean, that one night she would let him stay. But really, might she have done that, if it would have meant she didn’t have to face the years ahead alone? What exactly is she capable of?
    Mr. Cheeseman is speaking.
    “Sorry?”
    “That boy of yours,” he says, and shakes his head in admiration. “Legs on him like pistons, that boy has.”
    She nods. Her head is full of twisting tangled threads, of postcards drifting across a bright blue sea, of a row of steady, solid suitors parading past for her to choose from; of Sully lying between her cold sheets, his pale freckled arms reaching out for her.
    longing to see you, and the child
    Her palm still stings. She hit Billy. She feels a jolt of shame: she never hits him; she never has to. Billy bounds through her days, bringing a cloud of cool outdoors; his skin is barley sugar and fog and soap.
    “You must be very proud of him,” Mr. Cheeseman says.
    “I am,” she says. “I’m very proud.”
    “He’ll go far, that lad, you mark my words.”
    She smiles carefully at him. Edwin Cheeseman, who had been in love with her all those years ago. She wonders if he still is, a little bit. “Thank you.”
    “A great consolation to you, he must be.”
    He nods complacently, rubs his fat hands together again. Maybe he thinks she regrets it, choosing William over him. Maybe he thinks, given a second chance, she’d do differently. But it is only William, always William. That’s what she should remember. It’s the words he sent that matter, not the man who brings them.
    She has been such a fool.
    “So,” he says. “What can I get for you?”
    She glances round at the shelves, the jars and tins and packets. She realises that there is nothing here that she wants at all.
    Back home, she drops the packet of tea onto the hall stand while she sheds her coat and hat. She had to get something, couldn’t ask for Billy’s wages of course, and an ounce of tea