The Girl From Barefoot House

by Maureen Lee

  ‘I don’t care,’ Francie wailed. ‘That’s what’s so bloody tragic. I want to care, about something, someone. I’ve got a gene missing, Jose. The gene that makes a person fall in love.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Francie. You just haven’t met the right person yet, that’s all.’

  ‘What about the bed bit? I do care about that.’

  ‘The bed bit’s over and finished with. We’re not getting married, and I’m not the sort of woman who sleeps around.’

  ‘Oh, Jose! But we’ll still be friends, won’t we?’

  ‘The best of friends,’ Josie assured him.

  A distraught and tearful Neil Baxter left the house by Woolton Park and got a flat in Anfield as close as possible to Liverpool Football Club. Lily was a bit put out when, after an indecently short interval, he started going out with his landlady’s daughter, almost twenty years his junior. They got married two years later, as soon as the divorce came through.

  In the meantime, Lily ruthlessly set about wooing Francie O’Leary with all the wiles at her disposal. She and Josie developed a code. When Francie came to Baker’s Row, Josie would dial Lily’s number and let it ring three times. Shortly afterwards, Lily would arrive, as nice as pie, usually with the children who had been trained to call him ‘Uncle Francie’ and sit on his knee whenever possible. Invitations were printed for Samantha’s and Gillian’s parties, which required Lily calling on Francie at his place of work, and also for the headed notepaper she suddenly found essential. She threw grown-up parties, and played nothing but Louis Armstrong records, Jellyroll Morton, King Oliver – Francie’s all-time favourite music.

  One night, Francie arrived at Baker’s Row, and collapsed in a chair. ‘Lily’s proposed,’ he said in a strangled voice.

  ‘Are you going to accept?’ Josie held her breath. She’d known a proposal was on the cards.

  ‘It’s either that, or move to another country. Or another planet.’ He smiled slightly and stretched his legs. She thought he looked a bit smug. ‘Actually, Jose, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have someone like Lily Kavanagh on your side. She’s come up with all sorts of ideas for the business, quite good ones. But I won’t be nagged,’ he said warningly, as if Josie had the power to prevent it. ‘I will not be nagged or pissed around or told off in public – in private either, come to that. By the way, Jose, you’ve never told her about us, have you?’

  ‘Lord, no, Francie.’ Lily would have killed her.

  And so it came to pass that Lily became Mrs Francis O’Leary, twenty-two years, almost to the day, since she’d been so publicly jilted by him in a noisy pub in Smithdown Road.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Mum,’ Dinah said three days after the fateful dinner. ‘You could publish Louisa’s book yourself.’

  ‘Oh, yeah! On Terence Dunnet’s photocopying machine?’

  ‘No, get Francie to do it. He does books, at least he does booklets. Marilyn brought one to school one day. It was a history of Liverpool Docks.’

  ‘He won’t do it for free, luv.’

  ‘Get a loan from the bank,’ Dinah said promptly. ‘Francie got a loan when he expanded, I remember him saying once.’

  ‘I’ll talk it over with Terence.’

  ‘It’s not such a bad idea.’ Terence smiled. ‘Your daughter has a good business head on her shoulders. This is not a first novel by an unknown author, it’s a book that comes with its own advance publicity. It doesn’t need to be promoted. A circular sent to every bookshop in the land, a few advertisements in the press, should do it. It’s a venture I would very much like to invest in, Josie. Get a quotation from your friend, and I’ll draw up a business plan. We mustn’t forget postage and packing, and I’m sure there will be other things to take into account.’ He rubbed his dry hands together. ‘This is getting rather exciting. Wait till I tell Muriel!’

  ‘How many copies would you want, Jose?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, Francie. Thousands, I expect.’

  ‘That’s a great help. I’ll do two quotes – one for five thousand, another for ten. Once the machine’s set up, it’s a simple matter to run off more. Have you thought about the cover? The more colours you have, the more expensive it’ll be. And would you like it glossy?’ He punched the air. ‘Actually, Jose, I’ve never done such a big job before. It’s dead exciting.’

  Daisy said there was a directory in the reference section of the library listing bookshops in the British Isles. ‘It’s not supposed to be borrowed, but I’ll make an exception, seeing as it’s you. Let me have it back as soon as possible, though.’

  Terence Dunnet’s clients were neglected as Josie spent several days typing the envelopes for the circulars announcing the publication of My Carnal Life in November. There was a cut-off section at the bottom for orders.

  ‘Don’t forget to send advance copies to the critics,’ Mr Kavanagh advised from his sickbed.

  ‘Can I have ten copies for Christmas presents?’ enquired Muriel Dunnet.

  Lily, heavily pregnant with what she prayed was a son, borrowed a typewriter from Francie’s works and typed the manuscript out. She kept ringing Josie every time she reached a particularly juicy bit. ‘Louisa went on a cruise once, and she slept with three stewards and the purser.’

  ‘I remember her telling me that.’

  ‘Will you dedicate the book to me after all my hard work?’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing. It’s already dedicated to me.’

  ‘It’s a miserable cover, Mum,’ Dinah remarked.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s dead tasteful.’ The cover was plain grey, with Louisa’s name in black and My Carnal Life embossed in gold. ‘That gold cost an arm and a leg.’

  ‘Another thousand!’ Francie gasped. ‘That’ll be twenty altogether. You’re going to have a bestseller on your hands. By the way, Jose, your company needs a name.’

  ‘What company?’

  ‘Your publishing company. Even if it’s only a one-off, it needs a name. Coltrane Press would do.’

  Josie cogitated overnight. ‘Make it Barefoot House Press,’ she told Francie next day.

  ‘That’s a bit of a mouthful. What’s wrong with just Barefoot House?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’ll sue,’ Leonard McGill threatened when news of the imminent publication reached him.

  ‘So sue. I’ll tell everybody how you tried to rook me.’

  ‘I am Louisa’s agent.’

  ‘You were Louisa’s agent. You’re not now.’ Josie slammed down the phone.

  This is better than sex, she thought one morning, feeling a surge of pleasure when even more envelopes than usual were pushed through the letter box. Well, no, not better. Not even as good. But close. One of the orders was from a shop in Knightsbridge where Laura had ordered books when she’d stayed in London before the war. There was a letter enclosed. ‘One of our assistants, Miss Whalley, can actually remember Miss Chalcott coming in. All our staff wish you well with your venture, and look forward to having the book on our shelves.’

  Oh, Lord! There was an order from W.H. Smith for 6000 copies. Josie whooped. She quickly got ready for work and rushed to tell Terence.

  It was a dreary November morning. The air was wet with drizzle, and banks of ominous black clouds slowly rolled across an already grey sky. But the six people gathered in the glass-partitioned office in the corner of a print works in Speke were oblivious to the weather. Lily and Francie O’Leary, Muriel and Terence Dunnet, and Josie and Dinah Coltrane had something to celebrate. The first pages of My Carnal Life had just begun to roll off the press. Francie produced a bottle of champagne. Lily had brought glasses.

  ‘To Louisa.’ Francie raised his glass.

  ‘To Louisa.’

  That night Lily gave birth to a boy weighing eight pounds six ounces. Francie called Josie from the hospital. ‘She wanted to call him Louis, in memory of Louisa, like, but I talked her out of it. I mean, Louis O’Leary is a helluva moniker to wish on a kid. We’re call
ing him Simon instead.’

  Some critics thought My Carnal Life disgusting, but confessed they couldn’t stop turning to the next page. Others said Louisa’s life was reflected in her dark, passionate poetry. Or that she had been a feminist before the word had been invented. That she had been a greedy, arrogant, over-sexed woman, who’d known what she’d wanted and hadn’t cared who she’d hurt in the process of getting it. But they all agreed she wrote like a dream.

  By Christmas, Louisa’s book had already been reissued three times. Josie had given several interviews to the press about her part in Louisa’s life and the publication of the book. She’d gone all the way to Broadcasting House in London to be interviewed on the wireless.

  ‘Radio, Mum,’ corrected Dinah. ‘Don’t say “wireless”, they’ll think you’ve come out of the ark.’

  By March, the orders had virtually dried up, the foreign rights had been sold, the interviews were over, the excitement had died down. Terence Dunnet’s loan had been repaid with interest and all the bills had been settled, leaving Josie with a reasonable sum in the bank, more than enough to have her house modernised and extended or buy somewhere else, as well as get a car. It was nice to be well off, but life seemed emptier than ever after the last tumultuous months. She still worked for Terence, and the job was much more pleasant since they’d become friends, but it wasn’t enough to occupy her mind. She badly missed finding heaps of post on her doormat, the endless phone calls, typing letters late into the night on her own behalf. The portable typewriter she’d bought hadn’t been used in weeks.

  She badly wanted back the turbulence, the excitement. But how?

  The manuscripts had started to arrive when Louisa’s book had hardly been out a week, poetry mainly. Sometimes only a single poem was sent, or two or three. ‘In case you should ever decide to publish an anthology,’ the authors wrote. They were addressed to ‘The Editor’, as if Barefoot House were a huge company with loads of staff.

  Josie always sent them back with a polite letter, explaining that Louisa’s book had been a one-off and there would be no more. A few novels came which, out of interest, she began to read, but gave up when she realised they were awful. There was a murder mystery from a man in Somerset that was so good she read it right through to the end, returning the manuscript with a flattering letter saying she was sure he would find another publisher for his excellent book.

  She came home from work one day and found a large, fat envelope on the mat, obviously delivered by hand. It was from a William Friars of Bootle, she discovered when she read the badly typed covering letter. The more than three hundred pages, entitled The Blackout Murders, were just as poorly typed. She made a cup of tea and began to read. She was still reading when Dinah came home from school to find there was no meal made, and she was despatched for fish and chips. Josie read while she ate, and was still reading at midnight. She took the book to bed and read there.

  ‘Phew!’ she gasped when she had finished. Her eyes were hurting, her head was aching, but she had never read anything so gripping before. It was a thriller, set during the last war, in which a killer stalks the blacked-out streets and back alleys of Bootle, secreting his hapless victims in the rubble left by the blitz. The hero, Edgar Hood, a sensitive, disturbed young man with a club foot, rejected by the Army and longing to do his bit, has set up his own private detective agency by the time the novel ends.

  Josie visualised more books involving the same character – Edgar Hood could be another Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey. She went downstairs and made tea, too excited to notice it was almost two o’clock, then found the carbon copy of the letter she’d sent to the man in Somerset who’d written the thriller, not quite as good as The Blackout Murders, but still highly readable. She wrote there and then and suggested he kindly send his novel back.

  Tomorrow she would hand in her notice, and ask Terence to draw up another business plan. It would be harder this time as the authors would be unknown, but Barefoot House was about to become a proper publishing company of crime fiction. She knew nothing about poetry, and only liked it if it rhymed, but she’d been reading thrillers all her adult life.

  Huskisson Street

  1974–1984

  1

  ‘That was dreadful.’ Dinah yawned and threw the manuscript to the floor.

  ‘Be careful, luv. I can see it’s beautifully typed.’

  ‘That’s the only thing good about it. I could tell who “dun” it by page five. I’ll get Bobby to send it back tomorrow.’ Dinah read through every piece of work received by Barefoot House, the small but highly respected publishing company located in Liverpool. Sometimes a few pages were enough to judge if it wasn’t suitable. The more promising ones she passed over to her mother.

  ‘I’d better get ready. Me and Jeff are going to the Playhouse.’ She got to her feet. Dinah hadn’t stopped growing until two years ago when she was seventeen, and she was now three inches taller than Josie, slender and graceful in her jeans and T-shirt. ‘Actually, Mum …’ She sat down again. ‘There was something I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘I’m all ears, luv.’ Josie felt sleepy, curled up in a chair in front of the realistic flames of an electric fire.

  ‘I’m thinking of moving to London.’

  She was suddenly wide awake. ‘London! But why, Dinah? I thought you and Jeff were serious?’ She found it difficult to keep track of Dinah’s young men, but Jeff had lasted longer than most. He was twenty-four, a quantity surveyor, almost handsome. She quite fancied him for a son-in-law.

  Dinah wrinkled her nose. ‘Jeff’s serious. I don’t want to settle down, Mum, not like Samantha, with a husband and baby at nineteen. There’s a whole world out there I’ve yet to see.’

  ‘I know, luv.’ She sighed. She’d felt the same when she was young. ‘But what about a job? Unemployment’s soaring.’

  ‘I can type, Mum, and I have experience in publishing. In fact …’ She looked ever so slightly uncomfortable. ‘You know that agent, the new one – Evelyn King? Well, she’s offered me a job, doing more or less what I do now – reading manuscripts, corresponding with authors, that sort of thing. She even said I can stay in her flat till I find somewhere of me own.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few months ago.’

  Josie smiled. ‘So you’ve been plotting and planning behind me back, have you?’ Despite the smile, she was hurt.

  ‘Not exactly, Mum. I didn’t take much notice till Jeff asked me to marry him, and I realised it was the last thing I wanted.’ Dinah leaned forward in the chair, her blue eyes bright with hope and excitement. ‘I haven’t lived, Mum. At least London’s a start. I thought I might go after Christmas. One day I’d like to go to New York, like you.’

  ‘Well, I’ll not stand in your way, Dinah.’ Josie smiled again. ‘Not that you’d let me if I tried. It’s your life, and you must do with it exactly as you please.’

  ‘I knew you’d understand.’

  Dinah went upstairs, and returned fifteen minutes later in different jeans and T-shirt. She was also wearing a short, fake-fur coat, which seemed a dead funny outfit to wear for the theatre but, then, Josie had worn a few dead funny outfits in her day.

  ‘Tara, Mum.’

  ‘Tara, luv. Have a nice time.’

  Josie listened to the footsteps racing swiftly down the stairs. The front door opened, and again Dinah yelled, ‘Tara.’ The door slammed.

  ‘Tara, luv,’ Josie whispered. A lump came to her throat. She felt incredibly sad, as if Dinah had gone for good.

  She didn’t want her daughter to go to London. Over the last few years, with Lily preoccupied with Francie, Dinah had become her best and closest friend. It was selfish, but Josie wanted her to get married, live in Liverpool and have children so she could visit her, the way Lily visited Samantha and her grandson.

  Tea! She urgently needed a cup of tea. The new fitted kitchen was in Maude’s room. Ever since she’d bought the house in Huskisson Street, four doo
rs away from where she’d lived with Mam, with exactly the same layout, she couldn’t help but think of the girls. Irish Rose’s room was Reception where Esther, her secretary, worked, as did the office junior, Bobby, who staggered to the post office twice a day with returned manuscripts.

  Fat Liz’s room had been split into two – one half Josie’s office, the other Dinah’s and Richard White’s, who was in charge of publicity and circulation. What had been a very large cupboard now housed Eric, who’d been made redundant by the English Electric Company and worked part time, organising the wages, paying the bills and keeping the books in tiptop condition for Terence Dunnet, who did the firm’s accounts and read through contracts to make sure they were correct. The more complicated legal work Josie passed on to a solicitor. Lynne and Sophie, the proofreaders, both graduates and married with small children, worked from home.

  The kettle boiled. How many times in her life had she stood and watched a kettle boil? Millions. She made tea, furiously stirring the pot, but instead of taking the mug back to the lounge she went up two flights of stairs to the attic, to Mabel’s and Josie’s room! The house had been renovated throughout before she’d moved in, but there seemed little point having the little black grate and the corner sink removed.

  This was where the rubbish was kept – the odds and ends of furniture she didn’t want to throw away, the books she’d read but might read again, Dinah’s school books which she preferred to keep, despite the fact she hadn’t exactly been a star pupil. With her record, she’d been dead lucky to have a job waiting for her in Barefoot House when she left. There was a box of Dinah’s toys, the trumpet Aunt Ivy had given her on her fifth birthday on top, its shine long gone.

  It had been a shock, Aunt Ivy dying so suddenly without any apparent reason. It turned out her heart had just decided to stop beating one night as she lay beside Alf who, with his children, had stripped the house in Machin Street of everything nice. Josie had been surprised to find herself in tears at the funeral. Perhaps it was because she was gradually losing all links with the past – Mr Kavanagh had died not long before, and Sid and Chrissie Spencer had retired to Morecambe. According to Daisy, who still lived in Machin Street with Manos, Aunt Ivy’s house had been sold to pay Alf’s debts with the bookies. No one knew where the family had gone.