“Not now. Later, perhaps.”
Molly wanted desperately to console; but the girl who faced her exuded a chill self-containment that dismayed and discouraged her. “I’m sorry, Nancy,” was all she could manage. “Truly sorry. But it isn’t the end of the world. You mustn’t think so, however badly you feel. You will get over it You will. Nothing hurts for ever.” She moved awkwardly to the door. Nancy still said nothing, but at least nodded faintly when Molly urged, “Do try to come down later. You shouldn’t be up here on your own, it isn’t good for you. You know how we all love you. We’ll help if you let us—” the last words were very soft and the door closed quietly upon them.
Nancy looked across her shoulder at the shut door for a brief second before turning back to her dry-eyed, sightless gazing across the regular grey ranks of the rooftops.
Chapter Seventeen
“No more,” said Ellen with dismissive conviction, “than you would expect from dockers.” She invested the last word with such absolute contempt that Molly’s fork clattered to her plate and she opened her mouth to protest, the quick red banners of temper flying in her cheeks.
Sam forestalled her. “Not dockers, Mother. S-stevedores. Jack and Charley Benton are stevedores.”
Ellen sniffed. “Stevedores. Dockers. What’s the difference in a fancy name? Not a pin between them that I can see.”
“There’s all the difference in the world. S-stevedores work the ships, not the wharves. They’re skilled men. That’s the d-difference.”
Ellen ignored him. “Brutes, all of them. Drunken, idle good-for-nothings. The streets around the docks aren’t fit for decent people to walk in, and you know it. There’s no excuse for it.” Ellen’s mouth snapped shut, her last word uttered, and there an end.
“That isn’t f-fair, Mother. You don’t know anything about it.” Two pairs of eyes turned to him, Molly’s astonished, Ellen’s outraged. Sam’s own glance could not sustain his mother’s, but he would not be intimidated to silence. “All right, some of them are rough, yes; they have to be to survive. But idleness is forced upon them by the system.” He flushed at his mother’s disbelieving snort. “It’s true. M-men walk for miles to be told there’s no work for them; and when there’s no w-work, there’s no money. Jack says that’s treating m-men like animals. And if you do that you can’t blame them if they don’t always act like so-called d-decent men. And he’s right.”
“I see.” Ellen’s voice was acidly quiet. Molly glanced at her from beneath lowered lashes; two patches of colour burned in the older woman’s sallow cheeks. Ellen Alden did not take kindly to being contradicted at her own supper table.
Sam ploughed on with more stubborn persistence than tact, his head bent over his plate.
“If you put men in cages, force them almost literally to f-fight for a few hours’ work, make no provision for them or their families wh-when the work isn’t available, what can you expect from them? The calling-on system is corrupt; it gives too much power to too few, and they abuse it. A man’s livelihood, his right to work, is put into another man’s hands; it leads to preference, to b-bribery—”
“Cages?” Molly had only just managed to swallow a mouthful of hot pie. “What do you mean, cages? Jack and Charley don’t work in cages, do they?”
Sam almost laughed. “No, of c-course not. The cage is what they call the place where the casuals have to wait to be taken on. But I told you, the B-Bentons aren’t casuals. The stevedores are more or less permanently employed. Better paid too.”
“Then what business is it of theirs what happens to others?” asked Ellen brusquely. “Do they think they know better how to run the docks than men who have been doing it for generations? I daresay they’ve managed well enough till now without Jack Benton’s free advice. What would he have them do? Pay men to stand idle? What a very good idea—” her voice was heavily sardonic “—for the dockside publicans.”
“Oh, Mother—”
“Don’t ‘oh Mother’ me. What do you know about any of this, tell me that?”
“What J-Jack tells me.”
“Exactly. And he’s not about to say that his precious docker friends are a bunch of lazy, drunken bullies is he?” asked his mother with sour sarcasm.
“Jack doesn’t try to pretend they’re angels. He just says that the system is wrong. It’s t-too open to abuse, and it has to be changed. The dock authorities don’t care; why should they, as long as there’s labour there ready when they want it? No, reform has to come from the m-men. And that’s why Jack’s come round to the union side—” It had been mention of the Stevedores’ Union that had first provoked Ellen’s wrath.
“Jack’s joined the union?” The exclamation came from Molly – Ellen for the moment apparently being struck dumb by the unique experience of having her son actually stick to his guns in an argument. “But it’s Charley who’s the union man, not Jack. He had no time for them at all.”
“He’s changed his mind—”
Sam got no further before his mother recovered her tongue as she further lost her temper. “And yours with it, apparently. Well, that will be quite enough, thank you. This is my house, Sam Alden, and my table, and you’ll please remember that I’ll have no union talk here. Not from anyone, leave alone my own son! The very idea! Unions!” She spat the word out like a pip. “They make contented people miserable; they stir up trouble where there was none; they dangle ridiculous hopes and expectations before those who did very well without them; they cost people – the very people they say they care so much about – their jobs and their homes. They cause nothing but discontent and disruption.” She stabbed a bony finger into Sam’s helpless face, and went on, “The men who run our industries are the men who made this country great, make no mistake about that. The mines, the railways, the mills – yes, and the docks. They know what they’re doing. Your Jack Benton’s precious unions would be better employed in helping them rather than hindering. But no, they say, every man is entitled to the same as his master. What rubbish. There are those who’ll work and those who won’t. Those who’ll save and those who’ll squander. You can’t change human nature. Pity the poor miners, they say. Well, I say this: if a man doesn’t like his work in the mines, let him leave and look elsewhere for a livelihood. No one forces him to be a miner. And as for the unions inciting trouble, encouraging people to gang together against those who pay their wages – well, it’s always been my feeling that if a man—” the faintest scorn accentuated the noun as she looked at her son square in the face “—wants something, then let him fight for it himself and not rely on others to do it for him. It’s easy enough to be part of a crowd; it takes neither strength nor courage. The weak and the idle may be thankful for charity; they should not expect anything else by right.”
Sam’s shoulders drooped. He looked down at his plate and played with his food. “You’re very hard, Mother. You m-make the world sound like a jungle.”
“It is only thanks to me, Sam,” his mother said with cutting clarity, “that you haven’t discovered that for yourself. I forbid, absolutely, any further discussion on this subject at my table.”
“Pretending they don’t exist won’t make it so,” pointed out Molly, rejoicing for once in the advocacy of sweet reason. “The unions are not going to go away just because you won’t talk about them.”
Ellen turned withering black eyes upon her more usual adversary. “And discussing them gives them more dignity than is their due. The world would be turned upside down by these people: socialists, anarchists, these mad suffragists who try to pretend that women are interested in politics. I’ve no time for any of them. And I’ll thank you, Molly, to remember upon whose charity you and your child live and obey me in this.”
Molly smiled, a derisive downward turn of her soft mouth; a knife may strike stone so often that it is blunted, and charity was a word cast at her so often by her mother-in-law that the insult did little beyond adding slightly to the grudge that each bore the other. Sam was rather thinner ski
nned. With the blood rising again in his pallid face he began to rise clumsily to his feet. Molly put out a gently restraining hand and shook her head. “Leave it, Sam. It really doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, and was amply rewarded by the flash of fury that she saw in Ellen s eyes before she applied herself quietly to what was left of her pie.
Later that night, lying beside Sam and with little Danny snuffling in the crib on the other side of the room, she asked thoughtfully, “Did Jack really say all that? About the docks and the casuals and the unions and all?”
Sam moved beside her. “Yes.”
“I’m surprised. A year ago he gave the impression that he was positively opposed to them. Charley was the union man—”
“Charley’s an Annie man now,” Sam said, smiling into the darkness at his own small joke, “and no one else is allowed even the smallest slice, so f-far as I can tell.”
“But Jack of all people! I wonder what changed him?”
“Oh, no, Moll, you’ve got it wrong. J-Jack was never anti-union. It’s the extremists he’s against. He’s made friends with th-the man – Ben Tillet’s his name I think – that led the strike a few months back.”
“Wasn’t that broken by blacklegs?”
“Y-yes, it was.”
“Well, now,” said the practical Molly, “that sounds more like an argument against the union than for it?”
Sam subsided. After a while he said, almost to himself, “J-Jack’s a very clever chap, you know. I like him.” He stopped as he caught his breath and coughed painfully.
Molly winced. “Do you need your medicine?”
Sam was gasping for breath. “N-no. Thanks. I-I’ll be all right.”
But long after Molly slept peacefully beside him he lay staring into blind and silent darkness, listening to the rattle of his own breathing. And fighting desperately that gnawing fear that never, lately, seemed far from the surface of his mind.
* * *
“Mam?”
Sarah lifted her head, her fingers still busy with the needle, and looked at Edward, who was with great relish wiping out the last of a cup of last night’s gravy with a hunk of bread. “Hmm?”
“Does the Queen eat bread and dripping?”
Molly, sitting quietly in the corner with Danny asleep on her lap, smiled. Sarah considered. Nancy, opposite Molly across the hearth, continued to fiddle absently with the long fringe of her shawl, her blank eyes fixed unblinking on her own restless fingers.
“Well,” Sarah rested her work for a moment on her lap; she was embroidering a blouse, a lovely thing of cream and russet and deep red-gold, for Nancy to wear at Charley’s coming wedding. Nancy had hardly looked at it. “—I don’t expect she does, no.”
“Not even for tea?”
Sarah shook her head. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“That’s silly. If I was Queen I’d eat bread and dripping all the time. For breakfast too. Will we be having bread and dripping at the wedding?”
Molly laughed aloud this time and the baby stirred. Nancy did not look up. Since the break with Joe a couple of weeks before she had swung confusingly from introverted quiet to a kind of frenetic gaiety that, alien as it seemed to her nature, was more disturbing than the unhappy silences. Her family, nonplussed, watched helplessly and waited patiently for her to heal. Molly sometimes wondered, looking into those damaged eyes, if she ever would.
Sarah picked up the blouse again. “No, lad, I doubt that we’ll be eating bread and dripping at the wedding.” Her voice held the faint exasperation of a mother who isn’t certain whether or not she is being teased.
Edward, noisily, finished his bread and licked around the edge of the cup, then slipped from his chair and came to stand at Sarah’s knee, wiping his greasy fingers on his trousers and watching, fascinated, the glittering, jewel-coloured thread and the flashing needle. “What do they do with it then?” His bright head was on one side, the small angel-face was solemn.
“What?”
“The dripping,” supplied Molly, laughing from her corner, quicker on the uptake than Sarah. “He wants to know what the Queen does with her dripping if she doesn’t eat it. Right?” she enquired of Edward, who nodded.
“Well I don’t know—” Sarah stopped, seeing from the too-familiar set of the small pink mouth that that would not do at all; if some satisfactory answer were not forthcoming then Edward would pursue the question all afternoon. “I suppose they use it. To cook with. Or perhaps they give it to the servants. Cook’s perks.”
“What’s perks?”
“Perks is treats,” said Molly in dreadful imitation of a cockney accent, “somethin’ ter make yer eyes sparkle.”
Edward chuckled and sidled over to her. His early antipathy to Danny had declined now that the baby had become less of a novelty in the house and was consequently slightly less fussed over. And Molly’s special, friendly twinkle was still for him, even with the little intruder asleep on her lap.
He leaned heavily on her knee, to see if she would push him away. She didn’t, and he smiled up into her face. “What’s your favourite treat?”
Sarah watched the little group as Molly pretended to consider the question, her wide, white brow furrowed ferociously. Here was a different girl from the one who had stood, pale and half-defiant, in the kitchen doorway a few weeks before. She had lost that fraught and high-strung look she had possessed then; she had put on a little weight, and laughed almost as easily as she used to.
“Humbugs,” she said. “Those great big minty ones. And wallies out of Mr Simpson’s stone jar.”
Edward shrieked with laughter. “What, together?”
“Of course not, tinker.” She tweaked his nose with her free hand. “The humbugs for dinner, with roast potatoes, and the wallies with winkles for tea.” She laughed aloud at the child’s disbelieving face, then said, “What about you, Nancy?”
Nancy jumped. “Pardon?”
“Treats. What’s your favourite?”
“Oh—” she shrugged “—I don’t know. Nothing really.”
Edward, overconfident of his elders’ indulgence, pulled a face, and used a phrase he’d heard more than once at school and had been dying to try out. “That’s a bit of a bloody silly thing to say, isn’t it?” he asked with simple clarity.
There was a moment’s slightly stunned silence during which all eyes turned to Sarah who, after regaining her breath, put a rapid end to the proceedings with a sharp slap and even sharper words. As the resultant furore died away up the stairs, where the miscreant was marched to the punishing seclusion of the bedroom he shared with Sarah, Molly looked at Nancy.
“The choice of words might have been a bit unfortunate,” she said quietly, “but he wasn’t far from right, was he?”
Nancy averted her eyes and did not answer. She knew that it was more than an answer to a child’s silly question that Molly was referring to.
Molly leaned forward. “Nancy, you must stop this. You must. You mope around the house, won’t go anywhere, won’t do anything. You’ll make yourself ill. You’d feel so much better if you’d try. So you lost Joey Taylor; good riddance I say. He wasn’t good enough for you; wasn’t worth the breath to tell him so—”
“It isn’t that.” Nancy’s voice was small, seemed to come from some distance. “Not just that.”
“What then?”
Nancy brought her eyes to Molly’s face. “The things he said. The words he used. I hear them, in my head. Almost all the time.”
“Oh, Nancy—”
“I can’t help it. I try, but I can’t. Sometimes I try to shut them out with noise, but they don’t go away, no matter how much I talk or laugh, they’re always there. So then I sit and listen. Because they’re true, those things he said. All true.”
“What!”
“They’re true,” she repeated.
Molly was staring at her in dawning, horrified understanding. “What did he say?”
Nancy did not answer.
Molly carefully la
id her sleeping son in the deep armchair and knelt before the other girl, taking her hands.
“Nancy, what did he say?”
Nancy battled with herself for a moment before saying in a voice completely devoid of emotion, “He told me that I was a whore. He said I had no business associating with a decent man, tempting him to sin. He said that my body had been defiled, degraded, that what should have been pure was—” she swallowed, “—dirty. Disgusting to him. And through my own fault.”
A bright mist rose somewhere behind Molly’s eyes and she shivered. Seldom did this kind of blinding fury possess her; never before had she felt it on behalf of someone else. Had Joey Taylor been in the room she felt she would have torn him apart with her bare hands. So great was her rage that she could not for the moment speak.
Nancy continued in the same, strained voice, “Harlot he said. Deceitful, shameless Jezebel. Am I?” For the first time she looked directly into Molly’s face. “Am I?”
Molly came up onto her knees in one movement as she flung her arms about the girl. “Oh, Nancy, Nancy, how dare he say such things? Wickedness to say them, wickedness to believe them. He’s the one, not you. You hear me? Devil take him, he’s no more love or life in him than a stone. Less. I pity him, that I do. He deserves nothing, and he’ll get nothing. I hope his cold-hearted God keeps him warm in his old age. ’Tis certain no one else will. Sanctimonious, narrow-minded—” Her invective ran out with her breath; she took another, added more calmly, “Don’t think of it, darlin’, don’t think of the things he said. You’re worth a thousand Joe Taylors. You’re good, and you’re kind. And listen to me—” she pulled fiercely away, held the bigger girl’s shoulders with hands made painfully strong by emotion, “—you just look at your Edward—” Nancy flinched from the pronoun, but Molly repeated firmly, “your Edward. He’s beautiful. You can be nothing but proud of him. You can’t regret a lovely lad like that, Nancy. You can’t.”
Nancy wrenched herself free and buried her face in her hands; the sobs shook her beyond any consolation.
Molly Page 20
