Gemini Girls

by Marie Joseph

  ‘Father . . .’ she began. ‘There are four more weeks left before I go back to school. I’m good at figures, you know that. Isn’t there something I could do to help? I’m bored at home, I need to do something. I know I’m not a man, but I’m quick and practical. I could hold the fort on the days you go to the Cotton Exchange at Manchester. I learn fast and maybe even after I’m married I could come in in the mornings. Answering the telephone for Harry won’t be enough for me. Already I dread being alone in that big house with nothing to do but arrange the flowers and entertain Harry’s friends. I’m wasted, Father! I want to help!’

  For a moment she thought he was actually going to explode. His deep-set dark eyes narrowed into slits in the puffiness of his face, and when he reached for a paperweight she thought for one wild moment that he was going to hurl it through the window.

  ‘What bloody nonsense!’ What typical rubbish!’ He sat down heavily. ‘Oh, yes. I can just see me having a woman working alongside of me, ferreting about, getting in my way. And I can see Harry letting you.’ He jerked his head towards the door. ‘You’ve wasted enough time for me already this morning, and now you try to tell me it’s time I packed it in. You think that because I’m reaching retirement age, I’m finished. You’re like your mother, always telling me it’s time I sold out and went to live with her in a bungalow at Southport.’ He snorted. ‘I know better than most that this industry is in a steady decline, and it will get worse before it gets better. But let me tell you something, madam. Cotton is in the blood, it’s in my blood like it was in my father’s, and his father before him, and like it would have been in Willie’s. If he had lived.’ He seemed to slump deep into his leather desk chair. ‘But with my son gone I have to carry on, and I will carry on. I’ll keep that chimney smoking and that machinery going if I have to die in the doing of it, and without any help from anybody, least of all from you.’ He jerked his thumb towards the door. ‘And you can take yourself off, and get back to the house where you belong, and heaven help this man of yours when he finds he’s married to an interfering woman who thinks she has the mind of a man.’

  With tears stinging behind her eyelids Libby groped her way blindly towards the door. She had known and accepted for as long as she could remember that her father had a cruel streak in him, but his cruelty was – or had been – not so much in what he said but in the way he said it. He could wither her mother with a glance from beneath his bushy eyebrows, and he could reduce Carrie to tears with his sarcasm. But now, since the strike of three months ago, he had taken what he termed his weavers’ ‘disloyalty’ personally, blaming the slow trickle of orders directly on them, incurring their hatred to the point where it threatened to explode into violence.

  As she stumbled through the outer office not a head was raised from the fat ledgers. The three clerks, legs wound round the spindles of their high stools, carried on writing, struggling to see in the far from adequate light, even their backs showing fear and apprehension as to what might be coming next. Not one of them turned as Libby opened the door and stepped outside into the deluge, remembering too late that she had left her umbrella in Oliver’s inner sanctum.

  ‘And I’m not going back for it,’ she muttered aloud. ‘He’s my father, and he’s sent me out in this rain wearing a summer dress and a short jacket, and he doesn’t care. He cares for nothing but his profits and his blasted mill.’

  The gutters in Meadow Street overflowed as the drains failed to take the onslaught of water. The sky hung low and grey over the chimney tops of the terraced houses. The curtain of rain hit the flagstones and bounced back again as she hurried along, unaware of the spectacle she presented of a girl obviously out of her environment, with muddied knees from where she had knelt on cobbles, her ruined upturned straw hat tipped crazily to one side.

  ‘Well, well!’ She stopped suddenly, whipping round as the voice called from an open doorway. ‘Miss Peel!’ What on earth . . .?’

  Tom Silver stepped from the doorway and planted himself in front of her. ‘You’d better come in.’ He took her elbow and guided her towards the door of number 14. ‘You’re soaked to the skin, lass. Come on, come on. I don’t know where you think you’re going, but you can’t go anywhere like this.’

  At the kindness in his voice Libby felt the tears, held in check, brim over and run down her face to mingle with the rain. She shrugged away from his solicitous grasp even as she allowed herself to be led over the doorstep into the dingy lobby, and up the stairs to the room at the top of the house.

  ‘I can make you a pot of hot tea, and the first thing we must do is get those shoes and stockings off and get them dry. Come on. Off with that jacket, then give me your hat.’ He produced a towel and handed it over. ‘Look, you stop where you are an I’ll go down and cadge a bucket of coal from Mrs Barton.’ He nodded towards the tiny empty grate wearing its summer embellishment of a pleated paper fan. ‘I stopped my coal recently, but she’s a good sort. I won’t be more than a minute.’

  Libby heard him clattering his way down uncarpeted stairs, and for the first time felt the cold seep through her. The little room was as damp and cheerless as the grave, with the rain slanting down against the window and the faded oilcloth slippery to her feet.

  When he came back he knelt down, screwed up a newspaper, placed a firelighter on top, arranged a heap of coal and applied a match, then covered the front of the grate with another paper spread wide. He nodded as the flames roared up the chimney, and from a coal scuttle by the side of the fireplace he took a bundle of wood and added it to the already leaping flames. Then he placed a small tin kettle on the gas ring and applied a match, nodding again and stepping back as it spluttered into life.

  ‘And now those stockings.’

  Embarrassed and confused, Libby lifted her head and shook it from side to side. ‘I can’t take my stockings off. Not here!’

  ‘Then I’ll have to take them off for you.’ He grinned. ‘Come on, lass. I’ll hang them over this tidy here and they’ll be dry in a minute.’ He draped her jacket over the back of a chair and set it to one side of the blaze. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf. Don’t look so worried, there’s nothing going to happen. I’m not going to go mad at the sight of a bare leg. See, I’ll turn my back and promise not to turn round till you give the word. Right?’

  ‘They’ll dry on my legs.’ Libby tried to stop her teeth chattering. ‘And I’m not shivering because I’m cold. I’ve just come from my father and I’m upset. He’s upset me, that’s all.’

  She put a hand to her mouth. Now why had she said that? She hardly knew this man watching her so gravely, and yet at that moment she wanted nothing more than to put her head down and wail, and feel his hand on her hair and hear the soothing tone of his voice.

  ‘Get those stockings off!’

  Tom turned away to reach two mugs down from a shelf, then from a cupboard beneath he took out a small brown teapot and a packet of tea. ‘And if you want to cry, then get on with it. Tears held in do nobody any good, and you’ve got a towel there to wipe them away.’

  There was no mockery in the words, just a gentle understated consideration for her feelings. So, sniffing audibly, Libby unfastened her suspenders through the folds of her wet skirt, and peeled off the dirty, wet stockings.

  ‘And your frock,’ Tom said firmly. Still with his back to her he reached out and took a dressing gown from the rail at the foot of his single bed. ‘There’s not many folks round here sport dressing gowns, but this one was bought special a few years back when I went to a conference in Cambridge.’ He threw it over. ‘There were a few women delegates there, and I didn’t want to shock them going along the landing in the nude. I don’t wear pyjamas,’ he added, and she suspected there was a hint of teasing laughter in his voice now. ‘And there’s something not quite right about a man going to the bathroom in his raincoat with a towel over his arm, wouldn’t you say? Now give me the word to turn round when you’re ready. I never have liked this view of Mrs Barton’s back yar
d, with your father’s mill shutting out what light there is. On a day like this it’s enough to make even an optimist like me feel he’s reached the very depths of his existence.’

  Stepping out of her dress and pulling the rough blanket wool of the dressing gown round her, Libby told herself dramatically that the depths of her own existence had been reached the moment her father had let her walk out into the torrential rain. Oliver Peel had no love for her – the hatred and contempt he felt for her had shown in his narrowed eyes – and he had no love for Carrie either, mentally regarding them as one since the day they were born. Her mother he tolerated, that was all, his servants and workforce he treated with contempt, and some day he would get his just deserts. She was sure of it.

  ‘Do you believe the devil can get into people, Mr Silver?’ She held out her hand for the proffered pot of tea. ‘I mean, so that they’re angry all the time and you can hardly ever remember them speaking normally?’

  Tom pulled up the little hard chair from the table by the window, turned it with its back to the fire and arranged her dress over it. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you called me Tom, and let me call you Libby? You can’t come out with a question like that to a stranger.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed, holding his own mug of tea with both hands curled round it. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you think your father is going mental? Because if you are, it’s that doctor fella of yours you should be discussing it with, not me.’

  Libby gave a visible start, then glanced down at the ring on her finger. She had forgotten all about Harry. In the whirl of her disordered thinking he had never come into the picture.

  ‘When Harry’s there my father seems almost normal,’ she said slowly. ‘He doesn’t talk much to Harry, but on the other hand he doesn’t ignore him altogether. Once when I told Harry my father had hit me, he seemed to think I had asked for it.’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘No! All I want is to be treated as if I had a mind, a will of my own. I want to be treated as if I’m capable of being more than just a silly girl with nothing else to think about but getting married and setting up home. I care about people, Tom.’ She said his name quite naturally. ‘I sometimes feel that when I marry in December, I’ll just be moving from one safe cocoon to another, and it stifles me. I should be happy, and I’m not.’ She raised her head and stared into the fire. ‘What’s wrong with me? I mean to say, what am I doing here, sitting on this chair in your dressing gown, talking to you as if we had been friends all our lives?’ She blinked back the threat of tears. ‘And I’m selfish, too. My life is mapped out for me, safe and predictable, but what about yours? I haven’t even asked you if you’ve had any luck in finding another job yet.’

  Tom grinned, the couldn’t-care-less grin that had infuriated her the last time they met. But now she realized it was merely a ploy to cover his despair. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘When you go to see the clerk at the labour exchange you tell him you haven’t been able to find work, and after a while you have to give three places each day where you’ve looked and failed, or they knock you off the list. Otherwise you are classed as not being genuine in search of work.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, there is always Poor Law Relief, and if they send the relieving officer round and he finds you have any coal, or furniture that will sell, or too much food on the shelves, then you have to sell it all before you can get relief.’ He shook his head. ‘But I’m not making out a case for myself. No, it’s the married men with families who have to feed their kids on bread and jam if they’re lucky and they’ve managed to pay the rent.’ His face set hard. ‘Talk about a land fit for heroes! I’ve seen men standing in line down at the labour exchange, men who were in the thick of it in France, and they have to listen to some clerk who sat out the war on his bottom laying the law down to them. It makes me despair . . .’

  Libby watched him, her cheeks glowing with a colour that owed nothing to the fire now leaping in the tiny grate. When he went out of the room later while she pulled on her dry stockings and the creased dress, she prayed that he would hint that he wanted to see her again. But when she thanked him for his kindness he merely bowed his head and stood aside to let her pass.

  When she stepped out into the street the wetness on her cheeks could not have been mistaken for the rain, for by now the storm had rolled away in a tumble of grey clouds over the chimney tops.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CARRIE SUSPECTED THAT Libby wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying, but then Carrie was used to talking to blank faces and glazed eyes at school. She had accepted a long time ago that whilst she was an adequate teacher she had none of her sister’s flair for making a lesson come alive. Still, she had to talk to her and at the moment, as they sat at the table in the window of the first floor café overlooking the town’s main shopping street, Libby was a captive audience.

  ‘Mungo just won’t take no for an answer,’ she said splitting a scone and spreading it with butter. ‘He keeps trying to get me alone and he stares at me, even when there are other teachers in the staff room. Great smouldering stares they are, and now, instead of making me feel sorry for him, they just make me feel sick. It’s as though I can see him now for what he is, whereas before . . . I must have been out of my mind.’

  Libby had insisted on waiting until the window table was vacant and now she leaned over to peer down into the busy Saturday afternoon street thronged with shoppers.

  ‘Looks can’t kill,’ she said, proving to a suspicious Carrie that she had been listening after all.

  ‘He’s so obviously unhappy.’ Carrie, feeling better now she had her twin’s attention, spread red plum jam over the butter on her scone. ‘And I really am sorry for him, but what can I do?’ She removed a crumb from the corner of her mouth. ‘When I look back to the summer, I can’t believe it was me behaving like that. All that rushing about, terrified in case anyone saw us together, and do you know, you won’t believe this, but I had an awful pain low down in my stomach most of the time.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s true, Libby. It was just like colic. I used to lie in bed thinking about him, then when I woke up in the morning he was there immediately in the front of my mind. And you know, I never once allowed myself to realize just how . . . how weak he was. He looks weak, all pathetic and cow-eyed. And I thought I loved him! Oh, I must have been obsessed! I can’t believe it was me behaving like that.’ She giggled. ‘You know those pointed shoes we bought and regretted? Well, on the days I was seeing Mungo I sometimes wore them, and they were as comfortable as bedroom slippers, yet now I can’t bear them on my feet. And when I think . . .’ she shuddered, ‘when I think how nearly I gave in to him . . .’ She poured milk into the two cups by her side before lifting the heavy silver-plated teapot. ‘I could have ruined my whole life, and he would never have married me, never left Beatrice.’

  ‘Beatrice?’ Libby swivelled her glance away from the window for long enough to accept the cup and saucer from her sister’s outstretched hand.

  ‘His wife.’ Carrie took another scone from the plate lined with a fluted paper doily. ‘They still fight. He came to school yesterday with a bruise the size of a half-crown underneath his eye, and he was all white and shaky. He looked dreadful.’

  ‘I never liked the name Beatrice,’ Libby said, moving the curtain with one hand to see better.

  Carrie, exasperated now to the point of uncharacteristic irritation, put out a foot underneath the table and stepped none too gently on her sister’s shoe. ‘Libby Peel! You’re miles away! Listen! I am asking your advice. Mungo managed to get me alone for a minute yesterday, and he said if I don’t see him just once more to talk things over, he’ll do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Kill himself. Commit Suicide.’ Carrie looked round the crowded café and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘He’s desperate, Libby. He’s rung me up twice at home, and if Father ever answers the telephone he’ll demand to know who it is, and if it comes out, well, anything co
uld happen.’ She bit her lip. ‘And I know this sound selfish and dreadful, but supposing Mungo does, well, you know, and leaves a note saying he’s done it on my account, and then it gets into the paper? He’s capable of it. He told me I would regret it if I didn’t meet him.’

  She stared open-mouthed as her sister suddenly pushed back her chair, grabbed her handbag and rushed towards the wide staircase leading down out of the café and into the street.

  ‘Libby! Where are you going? What on earth . . .?’

  Conscious of the inquisitive stares from the other tables and the sudden lull in the teacup chatter, Carrie gathered up her own bag. Covered with embarrassment, she walked as casually as she could to the check out till at the far end of the mahogany counter, where she handed over the bill and a ten shilling note to the middle-aged woman in a pink overall.

  For weeks, Libby had seen Tom Silver’s dark head everywhere – in the tram, walking down the street. Now he was really there – across the road by the bank, standing on the wide corner pavement talking to someone. He was hatless, his long black hair flopping over his high forehead, probably the only man she knew who went everywhere without a hat. Coatless too, in spite of the cold wind that had apparently blown the September Indian summer straight into winter.

  Dodging the traffic, her own coat flying open, dropping a kid glove as she went, Libby ran straight up to him, her legs as wobbly as if she was just getting over the flu. Her feelings were in such a turmoil that she was incapable of caring about anything but the fact that he was there. After the weeks of longing he had finally materialized, just when she had thought she would never see him again.

  ‘Tom!’ Ignoring the man in a trilby hat talking earnestly to him, she actually clutched at Tom Silver’s arm, feeling the bone hard through the thin serge of his shabby navy blue suit. ‘How are you? I was over there . . .’ she pointed back at the café, ‘and I saw you. How are you? Have you found a job yet? You’ve been ill, haven’t you? Oh, I can tell you’ve been ill . . .’