The Potency of Loneliness

Saturday morning. Twenty-two-year-old Frankie Dunbar lay fully clothed on a single bed, staring at the nicotine-stained whitewash on the ceiling. His feet rested on the wooden footboard lest his boots marked the faded yellow counterpane and tested the temper of Mrs Haddaway. Old Podmore, the lodger in the next room, was seized by one of his regular coughing fits. The noise annoyed Frankie, who was listening for the sound of the postman.

The agitated young man was of slim build and stood five foot eight in his boots. A fringe of light ginger hair sat above a boyish face, freckled around the nose. Conscious of his youthful looks, he once tried to make himself appear older by cultivating facial hair, but the growth was less than robust. His attempt at a beard had been so feeble it was the cause of much ribbing from his colleagues at the office of a shipping company where he worked. While the beard was a work in progress, Frankie’s workmates gave him the ironic nickname Grace, after the famous cricketer. He abandoned the project, and he now has a threepenny shave twice a week.

When the coughing abated, the silence was broken by the clip-clop of horse hooves on the cobbled street outside. A shouted command from the driver caused the horses to halt, and the ensuing assortment of noises told Frankie it was a dray delivering to the Trafalgar, a pub across the road.

“Maybe this morning,” he said softly before closing his eyes and reflecting on his situation.

His marriage to nineteen-year-old Lydia had been a hurried affair, but not for the usual reason. Two years earlier, his mother collapsed on hearing the news that her husband, Reginald, had been killed in an accident at the steel rolling mill where he worked. He was forty-six.

While her three children gradually came to terms with the loss of their father, Mrs Dunbar never overcame her grief, and she became withdrawn, sullen, and disagreeable, even to her own kin. Frankie could barely tolerate being in the same room as his mother, as she cast a net of gloom over everyone with whom she engaged.

Frankie was trapped. With sisters Effie and Annie married, he felt obliged to stay with his mother. The only viable means of escape would be to follow his sisters down the path of matrimony, but he didn’t have a girlfriend, so the escape route stayed closed.

Then, he met Lydia at a summer fete held in the grounds of the local Methodist chapel. She smiled at him when they passed, and Frankie was so taken by the gesture that he followed her into the refreshments tent, where he bought tea for two.

They sat at a table, and when Frankie began talking to Lydia, he sensed she was embarrassed by her grimy and frayed clothes. The buttons were missing from her dark green jacket, and in their place, a piece of twisted wire held the two sides together.

Her awkwardness was such that she looked away every time she answered a question, and she nervously twisted a lock of her long black hair around a finger.

But Frankie’s natural affability soon put her at ease, and she smiled and called him a charmer as she took a cigarette from him. She told him she was a pitman’s daughter with four siblings who lived in a dilapidated area on the outskirts of the town called locally The Reeds.

Her impoverished status and worn-out attire had put off many men, but Frankie, aware that clothes are superficial and can be improved upon, saw that Lydia was a fine-looking woman.

The buttonless jacket hung on a delicate frame, and she stood half a foot shorter than Frankie. When Lydia lit a match and reached across the table to light Frankie’s cigarette, she showed a bony wrist.

Long dark hair enhanced the bright brown eyes that looked out from a pale face, besmirched by a tidemark on the left cheek. When she parted her full lips to smile, she bared good, even teeth with the narrowest gap between the front two.

The pair continued their conversation, and as Lydia came further out of her shell, Frankie was delighted to see a playful and coquettish side to his new friend. She called him my boy with exaggerated condescension, which Frankie found endearing.

Two days later, when he met her for the second time, Frankie gave Lydia a gift that almost moved her to tears. Oh! Thank you, thank you, she said repeatedly, holding the offering to her breast like it was the most precious thing in her life. It was a small rectangular card from a haberdashery with six jet buttons attached.

Over the following weeks, Frankie improved Lydia’s lot in stages. He bought her toiletries and cosmetics, and Annie and Effie donated clothes to his cause. There was a pattern to their courtship that ran parallel with Lydia’s improving appearance. In the early days, when Lydia’s attire might have caused embarrassment, Frankie usually met her at dusk. He chose secluded places for their trysts: a woodland lane known as Rope Walk, a lonely stretch of river, and, on one occasion, they visited his father’s grave. Now that the butterfly had emerged from its chrysalis, Frankie was happy to be seen with Lydia. They took Sunday afternoon strolls in the local park and visited the cinema and theatre together. Wearing Effie’s black straw hat on her head, with Annie’s brown leather shoes on her feet, and a full complement of buttons on her jacket, Lydia was unrecognisable from the street urchin in the refreshments tent.

Inevitably, Lydia’s improved presentation attracted the attention of other men, and Frankie was quick to notice. She did rebuff their advances, but Frankie secretly wished she would do so more firmly.

Now that he was courting, Frankie’s thoughts turned again to marriage as a means of escape from his mother. Lydia’s sudden elevation from lowly ragamuffin to desirable young woman added impetus to the idea, as Frankie figured a wedding ring might deter men from approaching Lydia. It was time to act.

After his mother had retired one night, Frankie took a small chocolate box from a drawer in the kitchen. The box contained assorted items of jewellery that had belonged to his mother’s sister, Constance, now five years dead. He fished out his late aunt’s engagement ring and looked upward. “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind, Auntie,” he said, dropping the ring into his pocket.

The following Sunday, Frankie and Lydia walked through the park. They stopped and sat on a bench to listen to a brass band that played inside a white rotunda. Although he had rehearsed his lines many times, Frankie couldn’t muster the courage to propose to Lydia. He feared she might reject him in front of the crowd watching the band. After three tunes, he gave up and they moved on.

The sun shone brilliantly as the couple walked by the boating lake in the park. On Lydia’s insistence, Frankie hired a rowing boat. Two single adults stepped into the rocking vessel, and after thirty minutes on the water, one engaged couple disembarked. Three months after that event, Frankie slid Aunt Constance’s wedding ring onto Lydia’s finger to be reunited with the engagement ring.

Only weeks after the honeymoon, it became clear to Frankie that he’d merely exchanged one miserable existence for another. Lydia complained relentlessly, and everything she complained about was Frankie’s fault.

The stream of gifts she had become accustomed to receiving had dried up, as Frankie’s wages now went to pay rent on the small house where they lived. After he had paid bills and bought food, there was no money left to spend on those frivolous things Lydia had become accustomed to receiving. She was piqued that Frankie turned off the tap that had brought her gifts for months past, and her frustration led to heated rows, which became part of their everyday lives.

In Lydia’s eyes, they didn’t have the nice home she’d expected because he wasn’t earning enough money, and she said he lacked the initiative to better himself. She even blamed Frankie for her failure to conceive, although there was no evidence to support that claim.

Frankie retorted by reminding Lydia that when they first met, she had holes in the soles of her shoes and wire holding her jacket together.

Relations between the couple were strained, and, as Lydia saw Frankie as lacking in all departments, it was perhaps inevitable she’d take on a more proficient lover. One evening, as Frankie walked home from the office, Mrs Morley, a busybody who lived at the bottom end of the street, beckoned him to her front door. She said she felt duty-bound to tell him that for several weeks, she had observed an unemployed ship’s stoker named Archie Fredericks regularly sneaking through the back gate and into Frankie’s home while Lydia was alone. Frankie was shaken by the news, but he steeled himself, determined to act like he was unaware of his wife’s alleged infidelity when he got home.

Desperate to find out if his wife was cheating, Frankie hatched a scheme with his informant to be set in motion the following day, which might confirm the liaison.

When he got home, Frankie’s resolve was tested further by the sound of Lydia cheerfully singing as she fried fish. At the dinner table, she was even more critical than usual of her husband, who half-heartedly picked at his food, and whose demeanour was morose. She called him a right old miseryguts, unaware he knew her secret and was suffering the mental anguish that knowledge brought.

Frankie left the house at the usual time the following day but he didn’t go to work. Instead, he went to a cafe a few streets away, where his coffee went cold as he stared blankly at a painting that hung on a wall.

An hour passed, and Mrs Morley approached the cafe hurriedly. She halted, and her shawled head bobbed from side to side as she peered through the window. She made eye contact with Frankie, gave a single nod of the head, and then she hurried away. Frankie immediately rose, left the premises, and strode quickly toward his home.

He opened the front door and marched along the passage to the staircase on the left side. His anger was inflamed even more by the sound of Lydia giggling, but her laughter turned into cries of alarm at the sound of boots on the stairs.

When Frankie pushed the bedroom door open, Lydia hid her naked body beneath the bedclothes, and Archie, in a similar state of undress, picked up a pair of long johns from a chair. The raging cuckold — never a fighter — balked at the sight of Archie’s well-toned torso as the intruder stood by the bed. But high dudgeon is a great motivator, and a man is never more vulnerable than when naked, so Frankie swung a mighty right hook that caught Archie square on the nose and sent him reeling back over a dressing table, where he scraped his neck on one of the mirrors. Frankie grabbed one of Archie’s boots from the floor and threw it forcefully at the cowering figure.

All the while Lydia screamed hysterically, and Frankie turned his anger to his cheating spouse. “What are you covering up for?” he snarled, “we’ve both seen all you’ve got.”

Alarmed by the raised voices, a neighbour alerted a passing policeman, and the portly officer announced his arrival by beating on the bedroom door with the flat of his hand.

“Enough!” he barked, and the commotion ceased. The officer, breathing heavily after the exertion of the climb, studied each of the three occupants of the room. “Now, what’s gone on here?”

“That’s my wife,” Frankie said, taking a small suitcase from the top of a wardrobe.

“I see,” the officer said, looking at Archie, who sat on the edge of the bed holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose with one hand and pulling on his underwear with the other.

“He attacked me,” Archie said, “I’ll bring a charge of assault.”

“You could try, Sir, but I’m not sure it would be worthwhile,” the policeman said calmly, “If my reading of the situation is correct, I’d say this is a clear case of provocation beyond endurance. Any right-thinking magistrate would throw it out.” His gaze then turned to Lydia, who sat on the bed with a sheet around her. “I may be an officer of the law, but all men have their boundaries, so let me tell you this. If I caught my wife cavorting naked with another man, well, there’d be two bloody noses in the bedroom.”

Frankie packed some clothes into the case, which he carried from the room. His final act was to spit on Lydia as he passed.

“I’ll get you for this,” Archie growled, “just you see if I don’t.”

Frankie walked down the stairs to the accompaniment of the constable berating Archie for issuing threats. The departing husband opened the front door and left his home for the last time. He didn’t look back.

With rage still seething inside, Frankie took a tram into town. He withdrew some money from the bank and then walked to the railway station, his destination unknown.

It was early evening when Frankie stepped onto the platform at a station in a small coastal town some thirty miles from the home he had left. He had chosen that destination because Aunt Constance once lived there, and he knew the area. As children, Frankie and his sisters were dispatched every summer to spend a week at their aunt’s, so he felt a kind of affinity with the place. More importantly, it put enough distance between him and the conspirators to prevent a murder from taking place.

Mrs Haddaway’s boarding house was rather run-down, but the rates were reasonable. It was no worse than the home he’d just left, and the food was decidedly better. The landlady had eyed him suspiciously when he presented himself shivering on her doorstep that frosty evening. But when Frankie opened his wallet, and the hall light illuminated the banknotes inside, her suspicion vanished into the air like the sherry fumes she emitted when she spoke.

“Come in. Come in out of the cold,” she said, as though welcoming an old friend.

His first night in the strange new room was horrendous. The momentous events of earlier had put him into a melancholy frame of mind, and his misery was exacerbated by a fierce March gale blowing in from the sea and rattling a loose pane in the window. The sound of old Podmore coughing in the next room added to the grim chorus. In that miserable environment, and with unshakable thoughts of Lydia and Archie, Frankie lay awake, staring at a chink of dim light at the window caused by a flickering gas lamp outside. A triangle of pale light lengthened and diminished as the curtains moved in the draught. He sobbed momentarily as feelings of misery, loneliness, and self-pity fought for prominence in his consciousness. But Mrs Haddaway hadn’t skimped on the blankets, and warmth and comfort slowly overtook Frankie’s torment, and he drifted off to sleep.

Over the following days, he adjusted to his new surroundings, partly due to the mother-like pampering of Mrs Haddaway, although the pain of his break-up was still raw. Five other lodgers were staying at the house; Podmore and four young men who worked at a local gasworks. Although he was of a similar age to that quartet, Frankie was excluded from their clique because he was a new addition to the group: an outsider.

Despite all his cheating wife had done, Frankie missed Lydia terribly, and he wished they were together. While suffering a bout of desperate loneliness, Frankie wrote to Lydia, suggesting she come to him and they start anew. His pain was such that Frankie remembered only Lydia’s better qualities, and he shut out her infidelity and constant complaining. After he’d posted the letter, misgivings crept into his mind, and he uttered, “Damn the potency of loneliness.”

As the days passed, Frankie was torn. Some days, he longed for Lydia to be there with him. On other days, he called himself a bloody fool for contemplating a reunion. That Saturday morning, a desire to see his wife was the overriding emotion.

On hearing the letterbox clatter, Frankie rose and hurried to see if there was any post for him. He purposefully dampened his enthusiasm, not wishing to give anything away to Mrs Haddaway.

It was the landlady’s custom to make soup for her lodgers every Saturday, and the pungent smell of the latest batch hung in the air on the narrow staircase as Frankie descended.

Mrs Haddaway stooped to gather the five envelopes scattered on the lino behind the front door. She gasped as she picked them up, then straightened up with a groan, which she cut off abruptly on seeing Frankie on the stairs. As Mrs Haddaway scanned the addressees, she side-eyed the postmark of each letter. She was terribly nosy.

“There’s one here for you,” she said, “oh, and would you be a saint and take this one up to Mister Podmore?”

“Of course,” Frankie said, taking two envelopes from Mrs Haddaway.

He knocked on Podmore’s door, which opened a few inches, and a grey, gaunt face peered out. The mouth was hidden beneath a thick grey moustache with a deep brown nicotine stain below the nose. Pale blue eyes were shining wet with tears, which Frankie guessed were caused by the exertion of coughing.

“Letter for you, old man,” Frankie said. Podmore took the letter and nodded a grunt. As soon as the door closed, the coughing resumed.

Back in his room, Frankie studied the envelope. A glance at the postmark told him the letter hadn’t come from Lydia. Instead, it was the welcome news that his application for a clerical post at a local brewery had been successful, and he was to start on Monday morning.

As Frankie folded the letter, the dinner gong went an hour before lunch was due to be served. Mrs Haddaway heaped bones from the soup onto a large platter and then invited her guests to pick them clean.

“Come on, boys,” she yelled up the staircase, “get these bones.”

On hearing the invitation, several guests stampeded down the stairs, yelping and laughing as they ran to fight over the slim pickings in the kitchen. Frankie and Podmore stayed in their rooms.

“Seventeen days,” Frankie said, looking at a small cane table in the corner of the room, on which reposed a pen, an inkwell, and a blotter. “Why doesn’t she write?”

He turned and stared trance-like from the window onto the bleak, deserted street, which looked like the wind and rain had scoured it clean of all life. A milk cart appeared, the horse maintaining a steady canter as it hauled its load back to the depot around the corner. The milkman was huddled in a heavy overcoat and cap. A woolen scarf wrapped tightly around his face protected his nose from the biting wind.

Frankie was stricken by an almost overwhelming feeling of loneliness as he thought of Lydia and what antics she might be getting up to with Archie. He assumed that their sexual adventures — new and exciting — were the reason she hadn’t answered his letter, and the assumption stoked up a feeling of inferiority to add to his misery. He sat on the bed and picked up a book, but he merely stared at the pages.

The tortured soul was jolted from his trance by the dinner gong sounding again, this time in earnest. At the kitchen table, Frankie listened but made no contribution to the conversation as he made short work of a bowl of soup with dumplings.

Usually, Frankie retired to his room immediately after lunch. Today he stayed with the others to have a cup of tea and a slice of Mrs Haddaway’s home-baked sly cake, which the chaps called fly cake when she was out of earshot.

One of those present, a young man called Barnes, offered everyone a cigarette. When Frankie took one, the barriers that kept him outside the clique were lifted. He joined in a game of dominoes and contributed to the conversation when the group discussed football, horse racing, and girls. Frankie also answered their questions about his home-town. When asked if he was married or had a sweetheart, he replied firmly: no.

As Frankie rose to leave the table, Barnes asked if he’d like to join him and some of the boys for drinks at the Trafalgar that evening. Frankie smiled as he accepted the invitation. It had been almost a month since he’d tasted beer, and news of his successful job application was cause for celebration. That night, a clean-shaven, well-dressed Frankie entered the bar of the Trafalgar with his new friends.

A week later, the letter came. Mrs Haddaway handed it to him, and he hurried upstairs to the bedroom. Oblivious to the cold, he sat on the bed, and his heart pounded as he tore the envelope open. The letter was long and full of apologies. Lydia said the delay in replying to his letter was because Archie had all but moved into the house, and, as he was unemployed, he was often there, loafing about. He was also very suspicious and watchful, so she had to wait for an opportunity to write without him knowing. She told him she was pregnant, and the calendar showed Archie as the father. She added that many people in the town had shunned her because of what she did and that life there was pretty miserable as they struggled to get by. Things were just as bad as they had been at her father’s, and paying the rent was a weekly challenge. She expected that news of her slide back into poverty would cheer him up.

His suggestion that she move away to be with him again was kind, but she thought that in her current condition, it was best to stay put and see things through. The letter closed with her best wishes and a final apology.

Frankie crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it into the waste basket. He went to take his coat from a hook on the door, but, remembering Mrs Haddaway’s nosiness, he retrieved the letter from the bin and burned it. As he wafted the smoke away with his hand, there was a knock at the door.

“Are you ready?” Barnes said, “We’re meeting the girls at one o’clock.”

“Just coming,” Frankie said, grabbing his coat.

Frankie spent thirteen happy weeks at Mrs Haddaways, and he forged a close friendship with Barnes. On Saturdays, if the local football team had a home fixture, they went along to support them. When the football season ended, they started fishing off the nearby pier. Frankie had never seen Mrs Haddaway so happy as the evening he and Barnes brought home eleven mackerel. They joined a cycling club, and on Sundays, hired bicycles and rode inland to the countryside. During those rides, Frankie enjoyed the society of several young women, one of who paid him particular attention.

Lydia was becoming a distant memory, although he could never escape the uncomfortable fact that they were still husband and wife in the eyes of the law. It had been a painful journey, but Frankie finally knew contentment.

Then, on a fresh but sunny Thursday morning, Frankie left Mrs Haddaways for the last time. Wearing his coat and a cloth cap, Frankie presented himself to say goodbye in the hall, alongside Barnes, who was similarly dressed.

After embracing the tearful landlady, and taking in a final whiff of sherry fumes, Frankie picked up his suitcase and went to the front door just as the day’s mail fell onto the lino. He picked up three envelopes and was surprised to see that one was addressed to him. He put the letter into his pocket, not wanting to open it in the presence of, to use the chaps’ term, Her Royal Nosiness.

The two men left the house and walked in bright sunshine to a tram stop outside the Trafalgar. Once there, Frankie opened the envelope and studied the short note inside. It was from Lydia, and it read:

Dear Frank

I hope this reaches you in time. You must beware because Archie found the letter with your address written on it and he’s furious. He’s coming by train on Saturday with his brother to get you back for breaking his nose, and he intends to do you over good.

Be careful

Lydia

Frankie chuckled when he read the letter, and Barnes asked what was funny.

“He’s missed the boat,” Frankie said, handing the letter to his friend. Barnes read it and smiled.

“It looks like you got out at just the right time,” Barnes said as a tram approached.

“Indeed. And now we’ll see what this new adventure brings.”

Frankie and Barnes picked up their suitcases and walked to the tram, which slowed to a halt to take on passengers. Behind them, a giant image of the face of Lord Kitchener looked out from a poster on the wall of the Trafalgar.