by Mary Nichols
‘It’s not you and it’s not me,’ she retorted, gulping back her tears. ‘It’s just a picture, that’s all, a bloody stupid picture. I’ll go and get you something to eat.’ And she disappeared into the kitchen and fetched cold meat and salad out of the larder. She knew he didn’t consider salad a proper meal, but it was the middle of summer after all. And she didn’t feel like cooking.
When she returned to the sitting room with the tray, he was sitting in the armchair, jogging Alison up and down on his knee. ‘Who’s got a new tooth, then?’ he was asking her. ‘You’ll soon be eating proper dinners and then going to school and, before you know it, you’ll be all grown up and the image of your beautiful mother.’
Barbara stood and watched them and her heart contracted. He really was a doting father and she had wasted a whole day because the picture wasn’t all that good. And George was right: it was far too big. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, setting down the tray. ‘I got carried way. I’ll get rid of it. You’re right, it’s awful.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ He paused. ‘Look, I don’t want to stop you painting if you enjoy it. But not on walls. Do pictures, something small and delicate, flowers or animals. Submit something for the art competition at the summer fete. You never know, you might win.’
She hated his condescending attitude but it wasn’t worth another argument, so she smiled and took Alison from him. ‘I’ll think about it. Now, come and have your dinner.’
The next day she went out and bought several rolls of wallpaper, and by the time George came home in the evening, the mural was hidden beneath full-blown cabbage roses. She didn’t like them, but she knew George would.
The watercolour she submitted for the art competition at the summer fete was a picture of a field mouse, with bright eyes and long whiskers, sitting among barley stalks, surrounded by red poppy petals. She was genuinely surprised when it won first prize and went up to collect a postal order for two shillings and sixpence to enthusiastic applause. She didn’t feel she deserved it: the picture was competently painted but, in her opinion, it was twee and had nothing new to say about the countryside. She’d only done it to please George.
But there was someone who valued it. Seven-year-old Zita Younger stood in the marquee where the entries were exhibited and looked at it with her head on one side. Her dark hair fell across her face and she pushed it out of her eyes with a gesture which had become second nature. She was a serious-looking child, with stick-like arms and coltish legs. She wore a torn flower-printed frock and scuffed sandals without socks. She thought the watercolour was lovely and she envied the talent of someone who could bring the little animal to life on paper.
‘There you are, you little bugger! What are you doin’ hidin’ in ’ere?’
She turned to see her mother marching towards her, determination etched on a face whose freckles no amount of powder could disguise. ‘I wasn’t ’idin’. I was looking at the pictures. I like this one.’
‘Very nice,’ her mother said, without even glancing at it. ‘Now, come on or Gran will be home before we are.’ She grabbed Zita’s arm and marched her out of the tent, across the grass and through the park gates onto the market square. ‘I don’t know why we came, ’ti’n’t as if there’s anything new to see. It’s the same old thing year after year and all costing an arm and a leg.’
‘That’s silly,’ Zita said, running to keep up. ‘Nobody pays for things with arms and legs.’
‘And we’ll have less of your cheek.’ Rita was wearing dangerously high heels, but she could move when she wanted to. With Zita in tow, she skirted the market, dived down a side street and eventually came out onto a road of dilapidated houses, whose front doors opened straight on to the pavement. They were due to be pulled down under a slum clearance scheme, but until the houses on the new estate had been allocated, most were still occupied. The council had promised to house everyone who had been given notice to quit, but Rita didn’t think she’d get one of the new ones. For a start, they were being allocated to men who had served in the armed forces and Rita didn’t have a man, not now she didn’t. Her husband had disappeared seven years before, and besides, the rent was bound to be more than she could afford.
She opened the front door of a house in the middle of the terrace and pushed Zita into the front room. A man Zita had never seen before got up from the battered horsehair sofa. Another of Mum’s boyfriends, she thought, and then changed her mind when she heard her mother’s gasp of surprise. ‘Christ! What the hell are you doing here?’
He smiled. He had very white teeth, Zita noticed, and clear blue eyes. ‘Is that the way to greet your loving husband after such a long absence?’
‘Seven years!’ she said. ‘Seven bloody years. What makes you think you can just walk back into my life and turn everything upside down again?’
Zita stood looking from one to the other in puzzlement. He smiled at her. ‘You must be Zita.’
‘Yes, and a lot you care,’ her mother said.
‘Now don’t be like that,’ he wheedled. ‘I’ve had a long journey and I’m tired. Make us some tea, there’s a good girl, and I’ll tell you all about it.’ He turned to Zita. ‘You’d like your old dad to stay, wouldn’t you? We can get to know each other…’
Zita remained dumb. She supposed she must have known that some time, somewhere, she had had a father, but she had never thought of him as being alive, nor as handsome as this man was. He had dark crinkly hair, brown eyes and a military-style moustache. He smiled at her while he dug in his pocket and extracted a half-crown and held it out to her. Her eyes lit up at the sight of it, but before she could take the money her mother had snatched it.
‘Bribery won’t work, so you can forget it. If you’ve got money to spare, I’ll have it. This’ll pay for your tea if nothing else.’ And with that, she flounced into the kitchen, leaving man and child staring at each other, the one in friendliness, the other in bewilderment.
‘You’ll give me a welcome, won’t you?’ he said, subsiding back onto the sofa and pulling her down onto his knee. ‘Your dad’s been having a bad time and he needs somewhere to lay his head.’
‘You could go to bed,’ she said, seriously considering his problem. ‘Though I don’t know where. There’s only two bedrooms, one for me and one for Mum.’
He leant back and laughed. ‘There’s a good girl to be so concerned for her dad. But never mind, before the day is done, your ma and I will come to an understanding.’
‘Not bloody likely!’ This from her mother who stood in the doorway, hands on hips. ‘You’re not treating this place like a doss house, ’ere today and gone tomorrer. What do you think I am, a ruddy doormat?’
‘No, never that,’ he said with a smile which made his eyes twinkle and revealed his white teeth. ‘You’re too good at getting up and hitting where it hurts.’
She laughed, remembering the last of the many rows they had had, just before he left home seven years before. She had kicked him where it hurt; she doubted if he had been able to use that particular bit of his equipment for several days, which must have been a great disappointment to the tart he had been exercising it on. ‘And I’ll do it again, if I have to.’
‘You’d be the loser,’ he said, grinning. ‘No one else.’
‘Is that so? And what makes you think you’re God’s gift to women, Colin Younger?’.
‘There was a time,’ he began and then turned to Zita, who was looking from one to the other. ‘Clear out, little’n. Go and have your tea. Your mum and I want to have a little talk.’
Reluctantly Zita went into the adjoining kitchen and spread a slice of bread with margarine and plum jam and sat down to eat it, pondering on this new development. She remembered once telling one of the boys in her class at school that she didn’t have a dad, only to be told everyone had to have a dad, it couldn’t be done otherwise.
‘What can’t be done?’ she had asked.
‘Havin’ kids. Don’t you know nothin’?’
‘An�
� you do, I suppose?’
‘Yeah.’ He had told her in great detail, disgusting her to the point of disbelief.
‘You’re a liar, Bobbie Smith, that’s what you are.’ But there was a seed of doubt in her mind. Other titbits she had overheard in the school playground seemed to confirm what he said.
‘Cross my heart,’ he’d said, doing just that. ‘Tha’s how you were con…con…’ The word escaped him. ‘Tha’s how you got inside your mum’s belly and grew into a baby. You knew that much, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sylvie’s mum told her just afore her little sister were born. She didn’t say how she got there, though.’
‘Well, now you know.’
But where had that man been all her life? She wondered if he had come to stay and what her Gran would have to say about it when she arrived.
Gran had quite a lot to say. Rheumatism prevented Dora Symonds getting about as agilely as she would have liked but it had done nothing to still her tongue. She took one look at the prodigal, mopping up the last of a plate of bacon and eggs with a piece of bread, and let rip. ‘What the ’ell are you doin’ ’ere? You idle good-for-nothin’ scumbag.’
He looked up and grinned. ‘Why, Ma, it’s nice to be so ’ighly thought of. I’m eatin’ me dinner.’
‘Well you can clear off. If you think you can come back ’ere and upset everyone, you got another think comin’. We don’t want you ’ere, livin’ off the backs of other people, mostly poor Rita. Useless you are, always were, always will be. God knows what she ever saw in you.’
He did not seem in the least put out. ‘I reckon it was my manly body, Ma.’
‘Oh, we know all about that. It’s all you’re good for.’
‘At least I married her,’ he retorted.
‘And a fat lot of good that did her.’
‘Listen who’s talkin’. What did you ever do for ’er, except teach her how to be a tart? Now clear out, you’re giving me a pain in the belly.’
For once in her life Dora was silenced. She stared at him with her mouth open. He had penetrated the layers of brashness and carelessness with which she cloaked herself and made her squirm inside. It was a cloak she had worn so long, it had become real; so real and so thick that the old Dora had all but shrivelled and died. No one of their acquaintance would ever have said Dora Symonds was anything but a cantankerous old bat with a tongue like a razor. She didn’t love anyone, didn’t know the meaning of the word, and if Rita had grown up to be like her, it was hardly surprising.
She looked away from him to Rita who stood with a plate of bread and margarine in her hand, looking from one to the other. The exchange between mother and husband was nothing new: she had heard it many times before, but not for the last seven years, and in that time memory had dulled the rancour. She had come to rely on her mother to look after Zita while she worked and, whatever she was or had been, she was far more reliable than an absent husband. She put the plate on the table. ‘I’ll not have you talking like that to Ma,’ she told him. ‘If you can’t be civil, then clear out.’
‘Oh, so it’s a choice you’re making, is it? I’m your husband, or had you forgot that?’
‘Yes, I had,’ she said. ‘Leastways, I did my best to. Ma was here, which was more than you were. How d’you think I managed? D’you think money grows on trees? You must do, for you never provided me with any.’
He fumbled in his pocket, withdrew a handful of crumpled five-pound notes and threw them on the table. Then he picked up another piece of bread and continued to mop up the ketchup on his plate. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’
Rita picked up the notes and began smoothing them out, counting them as she did so. ‘Seven,’ she said, laughing. ‘Five pounds a year. When do I get the next instalment, in another seven years?’
‘I’ll get work.’
‘Work!’ shrieked Dora. ‘Work, he says! My God, do you mean to say you’re expectin’ to settle down ’ere as if nothin’ ’ad ’appened? Rita, for Chris’ sake, send him packin’.’
‘It i’n’t nothin’ to do with you,’ he told her. ‘It’s for Rita to say.’
Dora looked at Rita and knew she had lost. Rita had always been as soft as butter where Colin Younger was concerned. God knows what she saw in him, apart from a handsome face, and even that had deteriorated over the years. There was grey in his hair and he had a pot belly that strained over the belt of his trousers.
Rita shrugged. ‘Ma, I gotta give it a try. For the sake of the kid.’ Which was a statement so palpably dishonest that it reduced Dora to helpless laughter and puzzled Zita who had been listening to the exchange with a great deal of curiosity and no understanding.
Dora shrugged. ‘OK. Have it your own way. I’ll be off home, then…’ Dora lived in a tiny hovel in Farrier’s Court, a cobbled yard just off the market, squashed between the blacksmith and a cobbler. It had no running water and no main drains. It was where Rita had been born and brought up in direst poverty and from which she had escaped to marry Colin.
‘Ma, you know I need you.’
‘No, you don’t. Let that ’usband of yourn look after his daughter.’
‘What does she mean by that?’ Colin queried, looking up at Rita, still standing by his chair, but doing nothing but gaze at her mother in helplessness.
‘Ma looks after Zita while I work evenings,’ she said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Barmaid at The Crown.’
He smiled. ‘No need to change your arrangements. I’ll come with you. See if the old place has changed.’ He got up and reached for his jacket which he had draped over the back of his chair.
Rita picked up her handbag and followed him. She didn’t know why she did. Her ma was right: he had brought her nothing but grief and yet there was something about him that could still tug at her insides. It was all very well to say she was better off without him, that she never wanted to set eyes on him again when he wasn’t around, but when he was in the same room, grinning at her, she seemed to lose her ability to say no. And there was the added incentive that they might get one of the new houses if Colin could say he was an ex-serviceman. Was he?
He turned to look at her as they strolled towards the marketplace where The Crown had stood since the days when it was a coaching inn. She was wearing a tight black skirt which was short enough to show her calves and a bright red blouse which clashed with her ginger hair. And she was fatter than he remembered, but he didn’t mind that. It was good to be home. It was the only home he could remember.
He had been brought up in an orphanage. He could vaguely remember his mother taking him there and handing him over to the matron, telling him to be a good boy and one day she would come back for him. It hadn’t occurred to him he would never see her again. It had taken him a few weeks to realise that grown-ups didn’t always keep promises, even important ones.
Only several years later was he told that she had died, and by then he had been fostered by a woman called Edna Day. Mr Day was in the merchant navy and Colin had only seen him when he was on shore leave. He hadn’t liked Keith Day because he monopolised Mrs Day on these occasions and he hadn’t had a look in, which had been, he decided afterwards, better than the abuse he subsequently received when that gentleman returned home for good. When Mrs Day had given birth to a son of her own, Colin had become surplus to requirements. He hated the new arrival and his behaviour became naughtier and naughtier until one day he had tipped the baby out of his pram. No harm was done but it was the last straw as far as the Days were concerned. He was labelled ‘out of control’ and put in a children’s home for wayward children.
Five years later, at thirteen, considered by then old enough to fend for himself, he had been found lodgings and a job in a grocer’s shop and left to get on with his life. The shop had proved too much of a temptation, and before long he was in court for taking cigarettes and booze, both of which he needed to give to his mates. You couldn’t expect people to be friends with you if you didn’t giv
e them things, but they had proved as fickle as everyone else. They turned their backs on him at the first sniff of the law. He took the rap alone. It became the pattern of his life until he met Rita.
Always afraid of close relationships, he had never taken any girl seriously, never opened his heart, never shown the tiniest amount of sentiment. Girls had to take him as they found him, brash, boastful, cruel, or they didn’t take him at all. Why Rita should affect him differently he did not know. Maybe it was because she didn’t ask him to give her things, maybe because her own background had been equally deprived. Dora Symonds was a tart, everyone knew it, and many’s the time Rita was left to fend for herself as a child while Dora went to the pub. But she had spirit and a zest for life he found appealing. She laughed a lot and she could give as good as she got in a slanging match, which she seemed to enjoy as much as he did. He had married her in 1912 when she told him she was pregnant. God knows why he had done that: he couldn’t cope with marriage and he especially couldn’t cope with fatherhood, but the child had been stillborn and, unable to understand Rita’s misery over it, he had left. A year later he had drifted back, simply because he had nowhere else to go. The arrival of Zita in the spring of 1914 had sent him off again. ‘Footloose and fancy-free,’ he was fond of saying, except that most of the time he wasn’t free but serving time for one thing or another.
‘Where’ve you bin all this time?’ she asked him.
‘Here and there.’
‘Not in the war, I’ll wager, cos I’d have had an allowance, wouldn’t I?’
