After enduring her sister in law’s weekly phone call, Betty Wright calmed her jangled nerves with a brisk walk around the colliery. Its humdrum regularity comforted her. The rows of modest, red brick houses spoke of an egalitarian world where no one was better or worse than his neighbour. After half an hour of Rose’s boastful tittering, Betty luxuriated in the unassuming commonality of the streets around her: sun-bleached net curtains stirring in the breeze, children playing in the angular shadows of a backyard, faded handwritten signs advertising arctic rolls at Thompson’s corner shop. She loved the mundanity of colliery life. Had Queen Elizabeth herself offered Betty a ritzy palace on the Thames, she most certainly would have declined. The Welfare Hall, with its tea dances, bingo and indoor bowls, was a real boon. The Co Op’s pease pudding was second to none, and Rene’s was the only haberdashery in the area that stocked support tights in Betty’s favoured shade of Parisian Polecat. No. Queen Elizabeth could keep her corgis and her coronets. This was Betty’s home; she loved the distant roar and tang of the North Sea and the ribald cry of the gulls. She loved the anchoring feeling of permanence and tradition. Although many disagreed, citing the big strike, the closure of the pit and the boarded-up shops which multiplied like cancerous cells, Betty believed the community would hold firm, it would not be unmoored by fleeting squalls and storms.
As she marched furiously down the narrow streets, she bridled at the memory of Rose’s sugar-dusted snarls. The sharp rat-a-tat-tat of Betty’s brogues on cobbles ricocheted off red-brick walls. The sound brought to mind comforting images: machine gun fire, execution squads. She smiled at her wickedness and tried to steer her thoughts to more godly matters. But when her scarf fluttered and snapped in the crystalline breeze, her wayward mind lurched again. Betty imagined herself balling up Rose’s barbed comments and stuffing them down her swan-like throat, like a scarf in the mouth of a hostage. She’d seen such a thing on Starsky and Hutch just that Saturday night. The intention, she imagined was to muffle the screams of the victim. On reflection, she thought, she might enjoy hearing the odd scream from Rose. A wan whimper, at the very least. The angry clatter of her steps began to slow and soften. The colliery had worked its benign magic; it had warmed the iciness of her fury like a cold spoon left in a cup of tea.
The Phone Call of Dread was an honour bestowed weekly upon ‘Dear Betty’ at great personal sacrifice and discomfort by her sister in law. The enormity of this sacrifice was wordlessly communicated to Betty throughout the Phone Call of Dread by Rose’s repertoire of sighs, whispers and tremulous silences. All her life, Rose had enjoyed delicate ill-health. It was the stage upon which she toiled and languished. Not that she liked to speak of her fragility, you understand. Yet somehow, the whole colliery knew of her ‘delicacy’.
‘She’s seen too many of those bloody bonnety films at the Rialto. She never got over the shame of being brought up in a house with an outside lavvy and nee chaise longue,’ Arthur would joke. Dear gruff and tender Arthur. How Betty missed him.
The Phone Call of Dread took place at 2 o’clock, on the dot, every Friday afternoon. Betty could picture the scene: Rose lolling on the sofa, propped up with a thousand tasselled cushions like a ripening Scarlet O’Hara. ‘Bring me the telephone, Duncan,’ she would weakly simper, ‘I simply must call Dear Betty. She has no one, after all. She relies on me so.’
It had taken Rose almost forty years to snare a husband. From what Betty observed, Rose was determined that Duncan make up for every second not spent ministering to her boundless needs.
Betty chuckled at the thought of Betty ‘snaring’ Poor Duncan. The retired TSB manager with a penchant for cagoules, bird-watching and brass rubbing hadn’t stood a chance against Rose. As soon as his beloved Kitty passed, Rose had set her flinty eye upon him. Anesthetised by a miasma of Elnett hairspray and pan haggerty and ensnared in the net of her Christian selflessness, all Poor Duncan knew is that one minute he was standing by Kitty’s grave, feeling as brittle and hollow as a husk of October grass, the next he was upgrading his Vauxhall Nova for a silver BMW and sharing his fondant fancies with the colliery’s very own Marie Antoinette.
‘He’s a Liberal Democrat. But I don’t hold that against him,’ Rose would joke. ‘I’ve upgraded him. All his jumpers are now 100% lambswool from M&S. That Kitty may have been a regular church-goer, but the state of his knitwear would have made the Virgin Mary smart.’
In reality, it was Duncan who ‘upgraded’ Rose by rescuing her from the ignominy of living in a colliery ‘two-up, two-down’. Her new residence was a pebble-dashed semi in the village with a blousy hanging baskets and ‘room for a conservatory’. She had her indoor toilet. Maybe she even had her chaise longue (chassay long-you, as Arthur would have said). Betty could not be sure as she vowed to never take one brogued step over the threshold. As far as Betty was concerned, Rose could have moved to Timbuktu, wherever that was. Good riddance. However, she still had to endure the weekly Phone Call of Dread and worse still, the weekly visit. ‘I shall say goodbye now, Dear Betty. Duncan and I shall pootle down in the BMW on Monday, as per.’
Returning from her walk, Betty pulled off her coat and scarf and hung them hook by the door. Next to them, Napoleon’s lead dangled forlornly, like a string mourning the loss of its helium balloon. She could not throw it away. Her hand still reached for it before taking one of her walks. It was the same when Arthur had died. For months, her hand automatically reached for his cup every morning, automatically switched on the news at 6 o’clock, her body automatically curled itself into her own side of the bed, leaving his side cool and untouched. She choked back a sob. Even after all these years thoughts of serious, kind Arthur could turn her world to water. There was no one to hear her weep. Not even little Napoleon now. But she would not allow herself such weaknesses. Arthur would have forbidden it, not have approved. ‘Betsy, you dry your eyes. Don’t you give that sister of mine another thought. You’re worth a hundred of that painted, feckless flibbertigibbet. Always will be.’
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