She sipped this one more slowly, savouring it as she found herself basking in the warmth of the fire, the attentiveness of her companion, the enjoyable strangeness of the place and situation. A slight recklessness seemed to have overtaken her. And why not, she reasoned silently. Was it such a crime that just for a few hours her life should not be bounded by the office and the kitchen, by Jack’s dirty shirts and the children’s sticky fingers? Where was the harm? She looked up. Paxton was at her shoulder.
“Lunch is served, Madam.”
“Thank you.” As if to the manner born she allowed the man to conduct her deferentially to the small room where their table was laid, firelight sparkling in tall wineglasses.
With the landlord gone from the room Adam lifted his glass in grave salute. “How is it,” he asked, “that all women are born actresses? It is the one overwhelming advantage that you have over poor, unimaginative men. I drink to you all.”
She had never enjoyed herself so much. He talked nonsense, he deferred, he flattered, he made her laugh. The minutes flew, became an hour, two. Paxton served port. Adam, still talking, played with the stem of his glass with long, strong fingers. She watched them in fascination. Then something that he had said jolted her to reality.
“America?” she repeated, aware of an unreasonable dismay. “You’re going to America?”
“That’s right. The United States. My favourite place. I’m off next week. Have you ever been there?” She shook her head. His face was lit with enthusiasm. “That’s where the real opportunities are, Molly. America’s the place for a man of ambition.”
“You mean you’re going for good?” she asked blankly.
He laughed. “Good Lord, no. Three or four months, that’s all. I’ve some people to see, a couple of deals to set up—”
“I see.”
There was the smallest spark of victorious amusement in his eyes. “Dare I suggest that you don’t seem too happy at the idea?”
In that moment it came to Molly that perhaps the introduction of the subject of the trip had not been quite as casual as it had appeared. “And you try to tell me that women are actresses?” she asked.
“That’s no answer. It’s very sharp, but it’s no answer.”
Her face was flushed with wine and the heat from the fire. She laid the back of her hands against her cheeks, not looking at him. “It would sound silly to say that I’ll miss you. We hardly know one another.”
“It doesn’t sound in the least silly.” He reached across the table and took her hand. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to do. “Some people you can know for years, yet they never touch you, never get close to it With others – very rarely, but it happens – an hour is enough. A minute. There’s a bond, you know each other. No matter how you might try to deny it. Such people make the best of friends, and occasionally the worst of enemies. Such people can love while others are still saying ‘How do you do’.”
“Not a conventional view,” she said as lightly as she could manage.
“To hell with convention.” He reached a hand, traced the line of her mouth with one finger. She shivered. “We’re doing no one any harm,” he added, her own thoughts of a short while before, the simplicity of the words infinitely seductive. “When I come back it will be summer. Summer…” He made the word an invocation of magic. “Then we’ll see.” As he bent towards her, without thought or volition she lifted her head. His mouth was just as she had known it would be; the pleasure it gave, greater. Much greater.
“Time to go,” he said softly. And she could not, for her life, say if she were relieved or disappointed.
* * *
She did not see him again before he left for America. He telephoned her once, to say goodbye, but it was an awkward and unsatisfactory conversation. Molly had still not quite mastered the telephone; she suffered from an urge to shout, to speak in words of one syllable, as if the instrument had reduced her own and her listener’s capacity for understanding. On the day of his sailing the thought of his going was in the back of her mind all day, a small misery, scarcely acknowledged. How could she miss someone she hardly ever saw, barely even knew? But she did. She missed the possibility of his coming, discovered that she had listened for his voice on the telephone, or in the outer office greeting Nancy. He had enlivened her life disproportionately, and now he was gone. Three months seemed like an eternity. Yet as the weeks flew by and he had been gone a fortnight, a month, six weeks, the memory of him faded, unable to compete with the realities of a busy life, and their relationship – such as it was – took on a slightly unreal atmosphere. And, too, there were doubts, and guilt. As one month turned into two and the sweet soft smells of May drifted in The Larches’ overgrown garden she listened to the voices of the children calling through the long, light evening and found, to her relief, that the distinctive tones of that other voice had almost slipped her memory. It was only a step from there to coming to believe that the whole thing was absurd, a moment’s aberration best forgotten, as Adam Jefferson had no doubt done by now. She had trouble enough, she reflected wryly, with one man, without getting needlessly entangled with another. Jack’s involvement with the troubled Dockers’ Union, his stubborn resistance to the growing power of the dedicated revolutionaries who lost no opportunity to ferment discontent and violence were making him harder to live with by the day. His temper was short, his absorption in his own hard, man’s world complete.
The matter came to an inevitable head one evening in June.
Three nights out of six Jack had come home late, tired, out of temper.
“I don’t know why you agreed to go on to the committee if it makes you so mad,” Molly said. Not best pleased herself Molly set before him yet one more ruined supper.
“It isn’t the committee that’s the problem,” Jack said, eyeing the plate with no great enthusiasm, “it’s the bloody Shipping Federation. It’s the Cement Combine downriver that’s refusing to use union labour, or to abide by union terms. It’s the paper people with their own wharves downstream who’re doing the same. They’ve undercut wages till it’s got to the point where organized firms are having to ask us to lower our rates so that they can compete for contracts. It’s no bloody wonder that membership’s falling. I’d think twice about joining myself at the moment. What the hell good are we to anyone? It’s opportunity on a golden platter for the agitators, the syndicalists who’d rather smash things than alter them.”
“What about the Dockers’ Union? Are they in as bad a state?”
“Worse, if anything.” Gloomily Jack picked at his dried-up meal. “Ben Tillett’s got the right of it. He wants an amalgamation of waterside unions.”
“Will he get it?”
He shook his head. “Shouldn’t think so. Memories are too long. There’s still bad blood between the dockers and the stevedores from way back. There’s many on our executive wouldn’t give Ben Tillett the time of day. And the lightermen, too – independent buggers, they are, they’ll have nothing to do with the idea of amalgamation with anyone. Christ, no wonder we’re in such a state. The Federation must be laughing their damned socks off.”
Molly seated herself opposite him, weighing the moment against the seething anger in his eyes. “Jack?”
“Hmm?” He did not look up.
“Had you considered – would you consider leaving the docks? It’s hard and thankless work. Dangerous too. And we could—” He lifted his head and she knew with sinking heart that the moment was wrong.
There was a long moment’s quiet. Jack stopped pretending to eat, pushed his plate away.
“What do you suggest? Jobs are growing on trees nowadays are they? P’raps I should run errand boy for Charley and Annie?”
“There’s no need to talk like that. It was a suggestion, that’s all.”
“A bloody silly one.”
“Keep your voice down. You’ll wake the children.”
“Keep your own down, you’ll wake the street.”
Molly,
in stony silence, began to clear the table.
Jack rubbed a harassed hand over his stubble-grown chin. “I’m a skilled man. The docks are all I know. It’s where I earn my living. Our living.”
Molly opened her mouth, had enough sense, on the edge of temper, to shut it again without saying anything.
“And it isn’t just that, either.”
Molly clattered the plate she was holding into the sink, rolled up her sleeves. “And don’t I know it,” she muttered.
His head turned sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She turned on him, her sudden rage impossible to contain. “It means that three times this week I’ve wasted time, effort and money in cooking a meal that I don’t want and it’s spoiled in the oven – not because you’re working late, but because you’re chasing round on business for a union you just yourself admitted is doing no more good than none. You march in here like a bear with a sore head and expect me to put up with your bad temper. And if I do show some concern, if I try to make a constructive suggestion, you bite me head off. I’ve had a bad day meself, Jack Benton.” She was aware of her carefully educated vowels slipping into pure Irish.
“Well, that’s easy fixed.” He was glaring at her, his strong face mottled with anger, the scar standing white and welted, a raised gash on his cheek.
“What do you mean?”
“If you find it so bloody hard to cope with the business and your husband and children then there’s just one way out, isn’t there? You give up the business.”
“No!”
“—And you concentrate on doing what every other self-respecting woman I know does – with no great effort.”
“Jack, no.”
“You cook and you clean and you talk over the back fence to your next-door neighbour—” He ran out of steam. His voice echoed in the deathly quiet kitchen.
She looked into his baffled, angry eyes and divined at last the real reason behind the outburst. “And have babies, Jack? Is that it?”
He turned from her, smashed his fist down onto the table hard enough to make the cups rattle in their saucers. “Is it so much to ask? Is it?”
“You know it is.”
Visibly his shoulders slumped. He took a slow, deep breath. When he spoke his voice was almost pleading. “I’d look after you. I’d help you, I swear it. You wouldn’t have to give up the business, of course you wouldn’t. I didn’t mean that. I know how much it means to you. But our Nancy could manage for a few months, couldn’t she? It was bad last time, I know. But that was twins, Molly, twins. It wouldn’t happen again.”
“But why risk it, Jack? Why?”
“You know why.” His temper was rising again, and with it his voice. “Is it some kind of crime for a man to want a son?”
“You have a son.”
“No! No, Molly, I don’t! You have a son.”
The silence that fell was awful. Molly turned from him, stared blankly at the wall above the sink. She heard him fling violently from the table, grab the coat that he had thrown across the back of a chair, heard the front door slam hard enough to shake the house.
In the small bedroom above the kitchen, Danny, through half-closed, blurred eyes, made inconsequential pictures of the light and shadow that dappled his ceiling from the lamp that illuminated the lane outside.
When Jack came home, much later and staggering a little, Molly was already in bed, albeit far from sleeping, in a makeshift bed in the twins’ room.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The atmosphere at The Larches remained strained. For days Jack and Molly barely exchanged a word, except when necessitated by the everyday business of the household. And although Molly, realizing the stupidity of sleeping uncomfortably in a makeshift bed, moved back into their shared bedroom, they slept like strangers, and the few cold inches that separated their backs might have been a mile. The evenings that Jack spent on union business, or with Charley and Annie, or visiting Sarah grew even more frequent; Molly neither commented nor complained.
It was nearly two weeks after the row that Charley came, accompanied by Edward, on a warm June evening that was overcast and had a hint of thunder in the air. Molly kissed him with real pleasure. “Charley, how nice to see you. Come in. Jack isn’t home yet.”
“I didn’t think he would be. There’s a meeting tonight, he told Mam. It’s you I came to see.” He used the word easily, as if completely unaware of painful irony. “What’s the point of having a gradely lass like you for a sister-in-law if I never get a kiss from her?”
Molly laughed, pecked another kiss on his cheek. “You should have been born an Irishman for your blarney. There. But don’t tell your Annie or she’ll have my scalp. Sit yourself down, I’ll put the kettle on. Tea, Edward?”
Edward glanced at Charley. “No, thanks. Danny about?”
“In the garden with the girls. They’ve a house in the branches of the apple trees.”
“I’ve made him this.” Edward held up a little model motor car, carved in wood, beautifully detailed and with spoked metal wheels that turned.
“Why, Edward, it’s lovely! Run and give it to him now, he’ll love it.”
Edward tried not to look too pleased. “Aw, it’s nothing really. But I know how much Danny likes cars.”
“Almost as much as you do.” Molly watched the boy down the long garden path. “Hasn’t he grown? He’s a proper young man.”
“That he is.”
“It doesn’t seem possible does it?” The kettle sang and Molly made the tea, waiting. Whatever Charley had come to say he would say it in his own good time. “Is he still as happy at the garage?”
“As a sandboy. I’ve never known a lad so well suited.”
Silence fell, broken by the tinkle of their spoons as they stirred their tea, the sound of the children from the garden.
“Molly?”
She sat a little straighter. Here it came. “Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m grand, thanks. Yourself?”
The corners of his mouth turned down in clear exasperation. “Don’t be daft, woman, I’m not making polite conversation.”
“I know it.”
“There’s something wrong between you and our Jack.”
The silence was longer this time.
“It’s none of my business,” he said.
She relented. “It isn’t that, it’s just oh, we have our ups and downs, like anyone else. This is a down, that’s all.”
He felt for the table with a careful hand, placed his empty cup precisely upon it. From experience Molly did not offer to help him.
“Annie’s worried about the pair of you.”
“Annie worries about everyone, doesn’t she? Has Jack said anything?”
“No, of course not. Though we do seem to be seeing rather a lot of him lately.”
“It’s up to him what he does with his time.” She had not intended to sound quite so sharp. “I’m sorry, Charley, I know you want to help, but you can’t, believe me. It’ll blow over, I daresay. We’ve just hit a rough patch, that’s all.”
Charley turned his head, his sightless eyes directed towards the open door through which faintly floated the sound of the children’s voices.
“How’s Danny?” he asked, a little surprisingly.
“He’s fine.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Well of course.”
“Does what’s come between you and Jack have anything to do with Danny?”
“No.” It was too quick, too sharp. “Whatever makes you think that?”
“He hasn’t been – misbehaving?”
Molly placed her cup tidily on the table. “Don’t you think that you’d better just tell me whatever it is you came to tell me?”
He sighed. “There’s no easy way, Molly. I have to say it straight. Danny’s been stealing.”
Molly’s breath seemed to have stopped. “From you?”
Charley nodded. “A couple of times. At
first it was just stuff from the shelves. When Annie caught him at it she read the Riot Act good and proper. Annie was upset – you know the kids can have anything they want from the shop if they only ask—”
“Did he take much?”
“Quite a bit, yes. Anyway, the lad cried, swore he’d never do it again, begged us not to tell you, and we agreed. But it’s money this time, Moll. From the till.”
“What!”
“Yesterday afternoon. Young Danny forgets that though I can’t see I can hear things a dog wouldn’t.”
“Oh my God.”
He leaned forward, reached blindly for her hand. “Now listen, it’s a childish mischief, that’s all. But he’s got to be told, for his own sake. He doesn’t know that we know. Annie thought you’d rather speak to him yourself?”
“You are absolutely certain?”
“Would I be here else?”
“No, no of course not. But I don’t understand. Why would he do such a thing?”
“You’ll have to ask him that. I’m sorry, I really am. But you had to know.”
“Yes, I’ll speak to him. But Charley—?”
He waited.
“Don’t tell Jack? Please don’t. I’ll sort it out, I promise.”
He smiled gently. “Why do you think I came when I knew our Jack would be away? Now, is there another cup of tea in that pot?”
* * *
It did not take much to get the truth from Danny, the boy was no practised liar.
“But why, Danny, why? And from Aunt Annie and Uncle Charley, of all people! Aren’t you ashamed?”
He hung his head determinedly, would not look at her.
She gazed at the bent red head. “Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? If you don’t, who does? You must know—”
He shook his head.
“Look at me. Will you look at me!”
Obdurately he kept his eyes on his dusty boots.
“Do you know what they do to little boys who steal?”
Silence.
“They take them away and put them in prison. Is that what you want?”
Molly Page 34
