by Marie Joseph
Only natural, he supposed, that Seth Haydock’s daughter would go religious. Some of the Bible thumping was bound to have rubbed off on her. A loud burst of singing from a public house on the corner made him slow his steps, but he carried on. What a dump this town was. Half past six and hardly anybody about. Pubs and the odd theatre, that was all. A seat in the gods and a hot roasted spud from the cart on the Boulevard. Most folks would call that a good night out! It was like living in the Dark Ages up here.
There was no light streaming from the clogger’s shop. Joe frowned. That was unusual. Mr Haydock always worked late, mending clogs for mill workers needing them the next morning. Seth’s hunched figure, sitting on his stool, bathed in the dim light from the overhanging gas bracket, was part of the street.
Joe stopped, irresolute, shifting the weight of his case from one hand to the other. A peculiar sense of unease settled on him, as if someone had dropped a wet blanket over his shoulders. He was in no hurry to go home. After what Clara had told him he could anticipate the recriminations, the tearful emotional welcome. Besides, there’d been something strange about Clara, some terrible change in her, quite apart from the religious thing. And if he’d been three years away, another ten minutes or so wasn’t going to make no difference.
Opening the door of the shop, he stepped inside the darkened interior. From memory he skirted the long bench, moving sure-footed to the dividing door.
‘Mr Haydock?’ He was calling out as he entered the back room, and even before the words were out they died away in his throat.
The room was as bare as a prison cell. Gone were the rag rug and the red chenille cloth on the table. Joe had smelt poverty many times before, and it was there now, rancid and sickly sweet in his nostrils. The room was clean and tidy, but the black fireplace was dull, its grate empty, even though the man in the rocking chair crouched over it with hands extended as if warming them at a blaze.
‘Oh, my God!’
It was the sight of Seth’s right hand that brought the involuntary exclamation to Joe’s lips. Red and stunted, shaped like the claw of some great bird, the big hand was curled in on itself, the once nimble fingers tucked grotesquely out of sight. Joe knew in that heart-stopping moment that Mr Haydock would never again hold his cutting block with one hand, operating a sharp knife with the other, never cut leather laces with a steady hand.
‘It’s me, Joe West,’ he said, moving forward, candlelight catching the sheen of his black hair, showing up the healthy glow of his face, giving him in that street of white, pinched faces the appearance of a being from another planet.
Seth stared at him, the blood warming his thin cheeks. Three years of pain and frustration, when he’d been forced to realize the use of his right hand had gone and with it his living, had seared the sweetness from his soul. For a while, after he came home from the infirmary, he’d tried to work left-handed, holding his last between his knees. But even a child could have told him that clogging was a two-handed job. One day he’d thrown his hammer straight through the shop window, narrowly missing a small boy playing whip and top on the pavement.
‘You …’ he whispered, getting up from his chair to stand not a foot away from Joe. ‘How dare you come here!’ The words came from the clenched brown teeth, sharp as the crack of a whip. ‘Haven’t you done enough? What are you here for? To gloat on your handiwork?’
Joe stepped back as the ugly claw of a hand was thrust into his face. He moistened his lips. God knew he’d been blamed for more than a few things in his life, with good cause most of the time, but this?
‘I’m sorry, Mr Haydock, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He tried a smile, then knew at once it was a mistake.
There was a cold black fury in Seth now. As if it had happened only yesterday, he saw Clara being sick over by the slopstone from the drink this man had given her. He heard her babbling about wanting to go on the stage, and he saw himself agreeing to buy the piano so she could learn to play proper music and forget the fancy notions put in her head by this man grinning at him as if he found the whole thing a joke.
He saw again the piano toppling over, felt its crushing weight on him, trapping his hand, bursting it open like a tomato thrown against a wall. He saw his Clara growing thinner by the week as she tried to manage on what she earned. He saw their bits and pieces going to the salerooms and his precious tools being sold for a pittance.
All this time the anger had been held tight inside him, veiled by the prayers he still mouthed, cloaked in a false sense of acceptance that it was God’s will. Clara believed that. She was the one who had the faith now. Riddled with guilt, she blamed herself for the way he was. Because of the piano. The towering massive mahogany piano with its brass candlesticks and its jangling yellowed ivory keys.
‘It’s all your doing!’ The shiny red claw was thrust into Joe’s face again. ‘You began it! Putting ideas into my child’s head …’
The nearness of the hand was making Joe feel sick. The clogger had gone off his chump. Must have. In another minute he’d be starting a fight, and if he thought Joe West was going to spar with someone more than twice his age and half wick into the bargain, then he’d another think coming. Grasping Seth’s arm, carefully avoiding the dreadful hand, Joe held him off easily.
‘Now come on, Mr Haydock. Why don’t you sit down and tell me what all this is about?’
As though the puny little man were a puppet on a string, Joe dangled him at arm’s length. Seth’s face was purple with fury; the veins in his neck bulged and his pale eyes protruded from their sockets. Once he had believed that the meek inherited the earth, but it wasn’t true. It was folk like Joe West, who lied and schemed to get what he wanted, who did the inheriting.
‘Go away!’ he shouted, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. ‘Go back to where you came from. To doing God knows what. Break your mother’s heart, but keep away from me and mine!’
Joe’s lightly tanned face was a study in open-mouthed disbelief. With his total lack of understanding came the touch of fear, and when Joe was afraid his reaction was to grin.
‘Steady on, Mr Haydock. There’s no call for you to upset yourself. Just calm down and tell me what I’m supposed to have done. Man to man.’
The grin was the last straw. Seth heard the words spluttering from his own mouth, but the power to control them had gone. He knew that he was being held lightly and the knowledge drove him to even greater fury. At one time he would have been more than a match for this young man. Not all that long ago his arm muscles had bulged with animal strength. With a twist of his wrist he could have thrown Joe West away from him like so much driftwood. But the arm Joe was holding couldn’t have knocked a fly off a rice pudding. Seth heard his heart pounding and blinked to clear the mist forming in front of his eyes. All his pent-up anger, the frustration of three long years, surfaced. At last he’d found someone to blame. Murder was in his heart, filling his soul with blood.
‘You … ! You … !’
To Joe’s astonished gaze it seemed as if the little man swelled like a toad, until his eyes rolled back and his mouth grew slack. When Joe let go of the wrist, Seth’s body slumped, sliding down in slow motion to lie in a heap on the floor.
Before Joe knelt down to feel for a pulse he knew that the clogger was dead.
His first instinct was to run. As a boy he’d always run from trouble, and for most of the time without being caught. Putting his brown trilby on his head and picking up his case, he backed away from the inert figure sprawled with wide staring eyes on the floor.
He had done nothing. He’d never even considered striking a blow. But who would believe him? Certainly not a policeman, who would find out that Joe West had done time more than once. That would be the first thing they would turn up. Trust them. An inborn loathing of anything to do with the law surfaced, lending wings to his heels as he stumbled through the shop, jarring his knee against the counter, sending the clogger’s stool clattering, with its three legs pointi
ng ceilingwards. Pausing only to upend it, he opened the door and stepped out into the street, where the drifting rain was a blessing on his face. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and he’d be in the clear.
The cobbles were greasy to the soles of his polished shoes. The doors of the little houses closed against the weather, the front parlours darkened, families crouched over fires in back living rooms. Nothing would happen. Not till Clara came home. With his hand to the iron knocker set high in the front door of his mother’s house, Joe paused.
In his mind’s eye he saw Clara groping her way through the clogger’s shop, through to the bare candlelit room at the back, calling out to her father, maybe falling over the thing lying with its legs bent up and that terrible hand clenched in a last gesture of defiance.
Slowly Joe lowered his hand from the door knocker. Slowly he retraced his steps across the street, his agile mind working fast. There was a shop doorway just round the corner and he’d wait in there, then when Clara came along the street he would step out and pretend he’d called in the pub. She’d be ready to believe that of him. Shivering, Joe turned up his collar. That way he could see her home, crack on he’d like a word with her father; go inside with her and be there when …
Desperately he craved for a cigarette but controlled the longing. Suppose the match illuminated his face and somebody passing by recognized him? Suppose they checked and found he hadn’t been in the pub after all? Suppose, suppose and bloody suppose! What a mess it all was. And what a homecoming! Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Joe stared out from his shelter at the rain bouncing up from the cobbles, at the lamps shedding pools of light at regular intervals down the long street.
‘Clara …’ he muttered to himself. ‘Oh, little Clara. What’ll happen to you now?’
From now on she’d be alone. Joe straightened his shoulders, a glow of something resembling righteousness flooding his heart. Not as long as he, Joe West, was around would she be alone. The resolution, coming unbidden, drove out the fear.
When Clara came at last, hurrying, head bent, on the other side of the street, Joe was his own man again.
‘I’ll see you home, love,’ he told her. ‘On this nasty neet.’
‘I thought you’d’ve forgotten how to talk like that,’ she giggled, making no protest when he took her by the arm, ‘you living down south where they speak posh.’
‘I’ll just come inside with you and say hello to your dad,’ Joe told her as they got to the little shop.
And his voice was as steady as a rock.
Seven
‘HE WASN’T YOUR real father, Clara. You knew that, didn’t you?’
Joe was sitting on the edge of the table swinging his legs and smoking a cigarette. In the six months since Seth Haydock had died – of a pulmonary embolism, according to the death certificate – Joe had stayed in the north. He had offered Clara money which she’d refused, and food which she’d accepted, and now that the first terrible weeks of grief were over the colour had come back to her cheeks.
‘I know he wasn’t my real father.’ She was down on her knees by the blazing fire, blackleading the grate, and the sight of her small bottom moving from side to side as she polished was giving Joe wrong ideas. ‘He told me a long time ago that he’d adopted me, but it made no difference.’ Clara sat back on her heels and pushed the hair back from her flushed face. ‘I couldn’t have loved him more.’
Joe lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. ‘But don’t you ever wonder who your real mam and dad are? You don’t look like nobody round here, not with your skin that peachy shade.’ He grinned. ‘You look as if you’ve just come back from your holidays.’
‘Holidays?’
‘Yes, you know. The sea.’ Joe made an undulating movement with his hand. ‘You’ve never seen the sea, have you, our kid?’
‘Have you?’
‘Saw it a while ago, as a matter of fact, when I was working in Blackpool at the Queen’s Theatre. The sea’s big and wet. Nothing to it, really.’
‘Then I’ve not missed owt, have I?’
It was a Saturday afternoon, Clara’s cleaning-up day, and she wanted to get on. Methodically, just as Seth had showed her, she stowed away the two brushes, one for the blacklead and the other for polishing, in an old biscuit tin. ‘Now, if you’ll shift yourself I’ll give that table a bit of a scrub. The water in the kettle should be hot enough now.’
Amused at her industry, Joe moved to the rocking chair. ‘Want to earn a tidy bit of money tonight, love?’
Clara looked round from pouring hot water into the enamel bowl in the slopstone. ‘Doing what?’
‘Singing.’ Joe leaned forward, bringing the chair with him. ‘Seven shillings for two songs, and an extra one and sixpence if you get an encore.’
‘You’re ’aving me on.’
‘God’s truth, sweetheart.’
‘On the stage?’ Clara’s green eyes were troubled. ‘Me dad would never have let me go on the stage.’ She took up a scrubbing brush and rubbed a bar of yellow soap along its length. ‘He was set against that.’
‘But he’s dead, love!’ At the expression on her face Joe waved his hand in a gesture of apology. ‘Listen to me, Clara Haydock; you know what I do for a living?’
‘You mean as well as playing cards for money?’
Again the wide grin. ‘OK, OK. So I do make a bob or two on the side. No, I mean what I do as an entertainment secretary.’ He raised his voice over the sound of heavy scrubbing. ‘A sort of agent, that’s what I am. Going round the clubs on the lookout for new acts. On commission, of course. The customers want more than to sit and drink these days, though they can knock back plenty of that. No, what they like is a bit of a laugh, and a bit of a singsong.’ He set the chair rocking with his foot. ‘You’d go down a treat.’
‘Never!’
Joe nodded to himself. She was interested all right. He’d sensed that by the way she’d stopped that infernal scrubbing for a second. Now if she didn’t go and bring God into it, he was halfway there.
‘Wicked men go to those clubs, Joe. Me dad used to tell me about them. He wouldn’t have set foot in one, not for the town hall clock.’
‘Wicked men!’ Joe’s tone expressed righteous indignation. ‘Men who’ve done a hard week’s grind in the mill or down the mine? Sitting there in their pit clothes, them that haven’t had time to go home after their weekend shift to change?’ He took a deep breath, weighing his words carefully. ‘Your dad was a good man, love, and I liked him a lot, but he did put some damn fool ideas in your nut. There’s more ways of praising God than getting down on your knees in chapel. I bet God likes a bit of a laugh on the quiet.’
‘Oh, Joe …’
‘Oh, Joe …’ he mimicked. ‘D’you reckon Jesus is behind that door, listening to what we’re saying?’
‘Stop it!’ Clara felt her mouth twitch. Joe really was terrible, but you couldn’t help laughing at him. And he’d been so good to her, right from that night when he’d come in with her and they’d found … Her knuckles tightened on the wide scrubbing brush.
She was not quite seventeen. She tried so hard to be good. There were times when she hurt with the effort of thinking kind things about people all the time. She was young and lovely, and it was almost impossible to close her mind to all the things, the exciting things that must be going on outside the confines of the narrow street, the chapel at the top end, and the dark basement room where she counted, collated and stapled sheets of paper all day.
She had bad dreams too, and always about Joe. He was holding her like they did in pictures, with her hair all hanging loose over his arm, and he was kissing her, with his curly mouth moving over her lips.
She turned round, unaware that he could read every single expression on her face. Funny, she’d never thought of it before, but he did have a curly mouth. It never ever seemed to be set in a straight line. When he grinned there were two tiny dimples coming and going at the corners. She’d been so un
happy for a long time and yet now, with Joe teasing her, she could almost admit to being on the verge of happiness. Oh, yes, Joe West was a beautiful man!
‘I couldn’t go in one of them clubs,’ she said slowly, never taking her eyes from his face.
Joe had always known when to play his trump card and he played it now. ‘Who said owt about you singing in a club? No, love, it’s a posh job I’ve got lined up for you tonight. It’s a Masonic do in the Assembly Rooms, with men in bow ties and their wives in fancy frocks. They’ll have paid two guineas for a slap-up meal and a dekko at a cabaret.’
Clara’s eyes grew round. ‘A cabaret? Like they have down in London?’
‘Better’n London.’
‘I’d have to wear me black.’
‘You can wear your nightie for all I care.’
‘Oh, Joe …’
It had been easy, but now the time had come Joe wasn’t too sure. He’d promised the gaffer in charge that he’d find a fill-in for the baritone who would surely have sung ‘The Road to Mandalay’. But when she was ready Clara didn’t look much different than she’d done in her cleaning-up clothes.
The black dress she had on had come, he guessed correctly, from a chapel jumble sale. Made for a much older and stouter woman, it hung like a sack, doing less than nothing for her rounded curves. She was pale with nerves, and her hands looked red and sore from the caustic soda she’d used that afternoon.
‘Seen the chap about your music?’ he asked her, and she nodded, her eyes wide in the pallor of her face.
‘You’re on next,’ he whispered. ‘After the comic, and before the dancers.’
She nodded again, averting her eyes from the trio of girls dressed as scarlet soldiers. ‘Showing too much leg,’ he read into her shocked expression.
‘Right!’ he said. ‘Knock ’em for six, love. OK?’
The audience sat at little round tables, replete and relaxed after a five-course meal and dancing to a four-piece band. They were businessmen in the main, mill and pit owners, doctors, solicitors, men from the Manchester Stock Exchange, and master builders of the new semidetached houses springing up round the outskirts of the town. Large cigars stuck in their flushed faces, glasses of brandy to hand, they felt a pleasing sense of indulgence at having brought the missus out for a good time. They were proud of the way she looked in her new frock after an afternoon spent at the hairdresser’s having her newly cropped hair marcel-waved.
