The Flower Girl

by Maggie Ford

‘There were four …’

  ‘Four!’ Anger was in the voice, her hard work tossed in the gutter. ‘It takes me ages ter make just one bunch and you sling ’em …’

  ‘They was all wet and soggy. It’s pea soup out there. I was lucky to keep what I sold dry in this weather.’

  Even as she retaliated, she kept a fine distance between herself and Mum, whose hand could be hard on a girl only just out of her fifteenth year. ‘No use bringing ’em ’ome again with me. They weren’t no good any more. Yer couldn’t of done nothink with ’em.’

  The anger faded. She even shrugged. ‘Ah, well, don’t s’pose so. But it’s a waste. I got yer supper keepin’ warm on the trivet.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Emma, gazing towards the two plates balanced on a gently steaming, black saucepan of water standing on a small iron platform hooked on to the grate to the meagre fire.

  ‘Scrag-end. Got it yesterday from the butcher just before he closed, in time ter stop ’im throwin’ it out. Said I could ’ave it for tuppence because it was all dried up. But it soon plumped out with a drop of water. With a bit of onion and potato an’ a bit of salt, it’s made a nice meal, all in all.’

  Maud watched with satisfaction as her daughter ate with relish. She’d had hers around midday, just a little to keep her going. Money didn’t stretch all that far. Now she contented herself with bread and a scrape of plum jam.

  ‘I ’ad mine earlier,’ she said when Emma looked concerned. ‘After yer being out all day in this weather, yer need all the nourishment yer can get.’

  Ben, if he noticed at all, would think only of himself. After scrimping and scraping to give him a decent meal, he’d gaze at it as though she’d given him a plate of horse droppings. She knew just what he’d say. ‘What’s this muck?’ and if he saw her bread and jam, ‘Do yer ’ave ter eat that when I’m ’avin’ me tea? You tryin’ ter make me feel guilty or somethink?’

  Her explanation of having had hers earlier would earn a sneer.

  ‘Yeah, the one what cooks ends up with the biggest share – a little taste ’ere, a little taste there, and before yer know it, they’ve ’ad enough ter feed a regiment!’

  No point arguing. It would lead to a row and Ben going off half-cocked could be a bit too nippy with his hands. She might be his mother but there’d been times when he’d landed her one. Sorry after, but a bucketful of sorries didn’t get rid of a smarting cheek.

  Emma was so different, caring, hardworking. The money she was now handing over from selling would help pay next week’s rent. It was hard work keeping this roof over their heads, miserable as it was. What little was left would go on food, scrounged cheaply from market stalls.

  These past years she’d learned to become very alert to what could be got for next to nothing, she who’d once received Jack’s pay packet before ever he’d opened it. A good man he’d been, never off into the pub to drink it all away like some did. Heavy-handed, true. She’d dodged a few of his swings during the odd quarrel or two. Sad, thinking back, unable to remember any cause for quarrelling, just married life. But he’d always been fair. Wouldn’t stand no nonsense, but fair. They had lived moderately well until …

  Now she was reduced to scrounging and it went against the grain. She’d learned to swallow her pride as she ducked under market stalls when they were closed down for the night for a few cabbage leaves, a couple of potatoes, a manky onion or a carrot that had fallen underneath or been thrown down. A marrow bone from the butchers or, like today, a couple of bits of scrag-end of mutton the butcher might have thrown to his dog. Last night she’d hung about watching him clear his counter, dropping the unsaleable bits in a bucket before bringing down his shutters.

  ‘Do you want them?’ she’d asked as she always did, as did all the women in her straits. It was up to her to keep an eagle eye out and get in first. Sometimes it was a fight.

  He had grinned. He knew the rules, and sometimes even dropped a bit of good stuff in the bin. It was the same with the bakers, for a farthing or so, two or three-day-old bread was still eatable if not saleable to those well off enough to expect fresh bread each morning, or even others who would take yesterday’s loaf for a penny while the truly poor waited and watched like hungry rats in a cellar – hungrier, for that clever vermin got its food free, always. The scurry for bits and pieces as shops closed was degrading. But she was thin and agile and sharp-eyed and could by now swallow her pride.

  ‘Did Ben get work today?’ Emma asked as she ate.

  Emma had gone out this morning on two slices of bread and dripping. She had become used to only two meals a day, maybe a penny cup of dark brown tea in a workmen’s café around midday.

  ‘Ben? Work?’ queried Maud. ‘Came back around nine this morning. Said there weren’t nothing to be ’ad at West India Docks, then slouched off ter meet some of them bone-idle mates he loafs around with.’

  Her reference to Ben’s mates was scathing, deeming every one of them as bone-idle as him. All right, so dock work had always been irregular, but Ben gave up too easily, lazy more like it, preferred hanging around the boxing booths, betting on the winner, or even going up against some prize-fighter himself. If he won, he’d treat everyone in sight; if he lost, he’d borrow off a chum.

  He was big and well muscled like his dad, but there the resemblance ended. Jack, never a betting man, would lay his pay packet in her lap. But not Ben; yet with his father gone, he now saw himself as the man of the house. It was a pity he didn’t think to take on the responsibilites that should go with the title. Nineteen, he was, soon to be twenty, a man in years, yet not a drop of responsibility in his veins.

  Emma pushed away her empty plate. Mum could make a banquet out of virtually nothing. Ben hadn’t yet come home, and she was thankful. There had never been much love lost between them as far as she was concerned. He was all bluster and there’d been many a row. But it upset their mother.

  He still wasn’t home by the time she and Mum went to bed. ‘I’ll keep his supper hot for him,’ Maud said, putting what was left in the stewpot on the trivet over the fire, refraining from raking the few coals with a little water on them to stop them burning through so that tomorrow they’d only need a bit of paper and splintered wood to light them again. ‘Miserable night like this, he’ll need something warm inside him,’ she said. ‘We can spare a few coals for once.’

  Emma felt rancour stir. Why did Mum indulge him? He wasn’t worth it. Unkindly, she felt it was him Mum favoured, allowing him to lounge about while she went selling Mum’s flowers for her in all weathers. Tonight Mum was ready to keep the fire in and his supper hot, yet all day on her own she’d freeze rather than light it for her own benefit, to save fuel.

  In bed beside her, Emma listened to Mum’s soft, regular breathing and thought of her day, the man she had encountered on her way home. What if he’d become suddenly violent? He had been strange. Whether he’d hurt himself falling or not, she should have hurried away. But she hadn’t exactly been scared then, only later. She wasn’t usually jittery, she who stood up to the local louts, giving as good as she got, even Ben, big bully though he was. Like the other day when he had caught her a backhander during some row they’d had, sending her flying, she had refused to be cowed, spitting at him and calling him all the names under the sun before she fled. There were times when she had defended Mum against him too.

  No, she wasn’t scared of anyone. But someone blundering into you in the fog could be startling and that livid scar had been a bit alarming.

  Thinking back on it now, but for that scar he’d seemed a passable-looking man. In his early forties maybe, maybe less. What she’d seen of his eyes, even in the fog, she’d had the impression of them being a clear, sharp blue. She kept seeing those eyes and that straight nose.

  While Mum began snoring gently beside her, she fell to wondering where he lived, what sort of conditions he lived in. Finally she gave up. She probably would never see him again, anyway.

  Chapter Two

  Sti
ll thinking of the girl who had blundered into him, Theodore Barrington collected himself with a tot of brandy in a pub called The Flying Swan, glad to rest his painful ankle before going on to where he lived nearby.

  It wasn’t much of a place, set in an alley which was as squalid as his room, each side lined by smoke-blackened walls, with doors that hadn’t seen a lick of paint in years, and bare, dusty windows, many with cracked and broken panes. This is what he’d come down to. He wondered how much longer he could keep this up. Twelve months ago he had been living in luxury. Yet he’d deliberately chosen this life. No one else had made him do it. Now it was too late to go back.

  Closing the door on the stink of poverty outside, he set the hurdy-gurdy down on a small table in the far corner, laying his bowler hat down beside it. His overcoat, once expensive, he hung on a peg along with the muffler, and limped the five steps to the empty fire grate, lit the single candle on the bare mantelshelf above it and picked up a battered, blackened kettle.

  He had to feel his way down the pitch-dark passage leading to a scullery and a tap in the yard beyond. The one in the scullery had long ago been cut off, but there was a gas ring, covered in the greasy fluff of ages. The scullery was littered with the rubbish of a dozen or more tenants crammed in the other four rooms – screwed-up newspaper, mouldering paper bags, tins with their residue clinging to the sides and stinking to high heaven.

  The tap in the yard dripped continuously, forming a permanent pond of stagnant water over which he cautiously stepped. Dripping was all it was capable of; turn it though he might, the kettle filled at a snail’s pace. The gas ring was every bit as bad, a tiny flame that took ages to heat a drop of water.

  Eventually the mug of tea was warming his hands. The room was stone-cold, the fog seeping in under the ill-fitting door. It was too late to light a fire from the small pile of splintered wood sitting beside it. He’d have tea, sweetened with a drop of condensed milk, and go to bed. The only way to keep warm.

  He sat on its edge and gazed around the seven-foot-square room by the light of the single candle. One peeling wall was completely obscured by cardboard boxes full of magician’s paraphernalia. He’d not looked in any of them these twelve months. Nor were they anyone’s business but his own.

  That girl had been far too curious. Precocious. How old was she? Sixteen? Seventeen? Around here, people aged quickly. Maybe she was only fifteen, who could tell? Yet she’d been quite beautiful. Confident too.

  Putting down the empty mug, Barrington sighed and eased out of his shoes, shabby enough to make him cringe: they too had been expensive. He reached forward, pinched out the candle and sank back down on to his bed.

  In the dark, visions began moving through his mind. Bright lights, applauding audiences, performances before the mighty and privileged, on one occasion royalty when their new King Edward had been Prince of Wales. All gone, gone from the moment when he’d regained consciousness in a hospital bed, his face bandaged, his eyes and nose swollen. His assailant hadn’t broken his nose but the scar across his face would remain as a reminder of a fine career ended so abruptly.

  That girl he’d cannoned into had been so apologetic. She hadn’t deserved the rough edge of his tongue – he’d been quite rude to her, but she hadn’t turned a hair. Time was when people fled from his roaring temper if a thing didn’t please. He’d been someone to reckon with then, commanding respect from the lowliest stagehand to the stage manager himself.

  Shattered by the loss of his wife, her death entirely his fault, this need to do penance for what had happened had reduced him to this. Now even that had been shattered by a slip of a girl he couldn’t get out of his mind.

  He was angered yet intrigued by her fearlessness. Eleanor had been fearless, standing up to that unnerving anger of his that would floor others. In the dark, the girl reminded him so much of Eleanor.

  Saturday had been another good day. Christmas near and the fog gone, she’d successfully plied the theatre queues outside the Hippodrome just off Leicester Square. Opened two years ago in 1900 its circus acts and aquatic dramas pulled in rich and poor alike. She now had a pocket full of money.

  ‘Yer do better than I ever could,’ Mum said, the smoothing iron she was using poised above one of Ben’s shirts as Emma spread the money out on the cloth.

  ‘It’s a pretty face what does it. So long as yer don’t look miserable. No one looks at a pitiful face. Pinch yer cheeks ’ard now and again ter bring up the colour. That’s what people want. They like ter buy from rosy cheeks.’

  ‘Rosy bloody cheeks be buggered!’ came a growl from the ancient sofa Ben slept on at night.

  There was nowhere else for him to sleep, but it suited him, coming home well after the others had gone to bed. He made full use of it during the day as well, as he had been today while she and Mum had been working.

  He rolled over to glare at the money Emma had brought in. ‘That ain’t gonna last us. A few bloody pennies!’

  Emma was at him immediately. ‘So what d’you bring in? I don’t see no money of yours on the table.’

  Ben came upright. ‘You shut yer mouth!’

  ‘And you shut yours!’

  She caught Mum’s look for her to hold her peace, but she was sick of Ben and his bullying ways. ‘Yer can bellow as much as yer like when yer start bringing a proper wage into the ’ouse. Until then …’

  Ben up on his feet, his roar cut short her words. ‘Who d’yer think yer talkin’ to, you bloody cheeky little cow?’

  ‘You, that’s who!’ she shot back at him.

  Mum, still holding on to the fire-heated flat-iron, was between them, parrying the blow with her arm. ‘Get in the bedroom, Em.’

  There came a shriek of pain from Ben. ‘Christ! Yer silly cow, yer burned me arm!’

  Mum stepped back from the offended arm, now raised in anger at her, but Emma, stepping in, pushed him away.

  ‘Fer Lord’s sake, Ben! You ain’t ’ardly touched.’

  But he was already cowed, his mother still holding the iron aloft as if in defence. If he went for her now, the still hot iron would get the better of him. Instead, he pushed past the pair of them.

  ‘I’m bloody off out,’ he announced, grabbing his jacket and flat cap from the hook on the door. Yanking the door open with a force that threatened to have it off its hinges, he left it open as he made off down the stairs to the street. Emma looked at her mother. The woman looked suddenly exhausted.

  ‘You sit down. I’ll do the ironing.’ As if with no will of her own, her mother sank down on one of two wooden chairs they possessed. Taking the iron from her, Emma replaced it on the trivet. ‘You need a pick-me-up. I’ll pop down to the pub first and get you a drop of stout. You like stout.’

  Without waiting for a reply, she grabbed the one jug they possessed from the shelf by the fireplace. The white glaze was cracked, the handle stained, the lip chipped, but it held a comfortable pint. Many a household had such a jug, and many a relief it brought back from a pub for twopence. Making off in the wake of Ben, she closed the door behind her, quietly.

  Saturday night, The Flying Swan on the corner of Mitre Street and Three Colt Street was crowded and thick with tobacco smoke, beer fumes and sweat. Elbowing her way to the counter, she put tuppence down for her jug to be filled before fighting her way out again.

  Once outside she took great gulps of fresh air. It was then she heard the music, but such strange music, the tune only just discernible over a continuous, monotonous drone. Glancing towards it, she became aware of a sense of recognition. Wasn’t the man playing that odd-looking instrument the same who had cannoned into her last night?

  Emma realised with a tiny shock that he had seen her too. He stopped turning the small handle on the instrument. The little girls who had been dancing to his music paused while onlookers shot him a glance of irritation. Seconds later he’d resumed playing and the children their dancing.

  Emma hesitated. She could hardly walk on by. There had to be some acknowledgm
ent of him, if only out of politeness. She moved towards him through the few people watching the children. In the glow from the pub’s swing doors and window he didn’t seem so large or scary as last night.

  She put on a smile as she approached. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The smile was not being returned, making it look as though she had sought him out on purpose.

  Emma kept a tight grip on her sunny mien. ‘I didn’t expect ter see you. The Swan’s our local. I’ve been getting me mum a jug of beer.’

  He still hadn’t smiled. Not that she’d have seen it for the muffler over the lower part of his face, but his eyes would have crinkled a little if he had. In the pub’s glow the rest of the face was handsome, in a stern, commanding way.

  A voice rasped from close by. ‘Come on, mate, give us some more toons. We was enjoyin’ that.’

  Again he had stopped playing, and seeing she was spoiling his chance of making money, Emma said, ‘I’d better be off. Glad I saw you again. How’s the ankle?’

  ‘Recovered,’ he said curtly, resuming playing, almost like a hint for her to leave. Emma nodded.

  ‘Hope to see you again then,’ she said, retreating.

  He did not reply.

  While his nimble fingers sped over the keys controlling one of the strings to produce a merry tune at the demand of his audience, Theodore Barrington followed her with his eyes. He watched until the figure became swallowed up in the darkness, reappearing briefly under the light of a gas lamp. She had a graceful walk, and the sort of carriage that proclaimed her as being quite able to take care of herself in any circumstances.

  For a moment his heart raced. He didn’t know her name or where she lived, and there came an odd sadness that he’d probably not see her again. The onlookers were clapping in time to the prancing children, one or two of the adults joining in, trousered legs going, heavy boots stomping, a middle-aged woman waving her skirts, hat bobbing. This could bring in a few more coppers. On a Saturday night, beer brought careless generosity. It should have been gratifying, but all he could think of was the girl.