Laceys Of Liverpool

by Maureen Lee

  ‘What’s a dish?’ enquired Fion, who wouldn’t have minded kissing Micky Lavin either.

  ‘Someone who’s dead gorgeous. Montgomery Clift’s dishy, and Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘Neil Greene’s dishier than both of them,’ Fion said. She fancied kissing Neil even more than she did Micky Lavin.

  In mid-afternoon Mr and Mrs Lavin arrived at the hospital, laden with fruit and flowers, and accompanied by four of the children. Visiting time was almost over. Before a nurse could complain there were too many visitors around the bed Alice left, promising to return that night.

  Outside, the morning’s drizzle had become a steady downpour and she wished she’d brought an umbrella. She stood in the rain and wondered whether to go home or to the salon. She didn’t feel like doing either. Her nerves were on edge after the conversation with Orla. It worried her that the girl would refuse to see sense and eventually Micky would snap. There was only so much a person could stand. So far, Micky had been dead patient. But he wasn’t a saint.

  If only she could talk to someone – her dad or Bernie, but they’d be at work for hours yet.

  She could talk to John. He might not agree, but it was every bit as much his problem as it was hers. Anyroad, despite the way he’d acted with Orla, he had a right to know he’d become a grandfather. And she wouldn’t wait till tonight. She’d do it now while she was in the mood, go round to the yard and see him. You never knew, his attitude might change if he could be persuaded to see Lulu, who was without doubt one of the loveliest babies ever born. It was a pity the poor child had been blessed with such a dead silly name.

  Alice had only a vague idea where the yard was situated: somewhere in Seaforth not far from the playing fields. Benton Street rang a bell. For some reason John had always discouraged them from going there. She caught the tram to the terminus in Rimrose Road, walked under the railway bridge and emerged in Seaforth.

  The first three people she asked had never heard of Benton Street, nor a firm called B.E.D.S. The fourth, a woman, had an idea the street was near the playing fields.

  ‘That’s right,’ Alice said eagerly.

  The directions were complicated. Turn right, then left, then right again at a big pub the woman couldn’t remember the name of. Go half a mile down Sandy Road, turn left at a greengrocer’s and Benton Street was the second turning on the right, or it might be the third.

  Alice got wetter and wetter as she negotiated the complicated maze of streets. She thought about giving up, but decided she couldn’t, not after having made it this far.

  She was soaked to the skin by the time she turned into Benton Street and hoped John had a towel so she could dry herself. A wooden sign with B.E.D.S. painted on it was attached to a pair of tall iron gates, just round the corner in a place called Crozier Terrace, a cul-de-sac with no more than ten tiny houses either side.

  Her heart sank when she tried the gates and found them locked. Surely John didn’t lock himself in! Behind the gates a two-storey building had a light on upstairs. It was probably the office. Alice rattled the gates in the hope of attracting her husband’s attention, but to no avail.

  Disappointed, she turned away. After coming so far! She wondered where he could be. Maybe he’d gone to the timber yard for wood. Alice frowned. If that was the case, what was that smart green van doing parked inside the gates? Did it belong to John? It looked new, but he’d never mentioned having a van. She noticed a wire strung across the street attached to the top half of the building, the office. He hadn’t mentioned having a telephone either.

  ‘You’ll find him at home, luv.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  A woman had emerged from one of the tiny houses in Crozier Terrace. She was sensibly shielded from the rain in a plastic mac and hood. ‘Mr Lacey, he’s gone home to see his missus. I saw him pass me winder less than ten minutes ago.’

  ‘You can’t possibly have!’ John had never been known to come home during the day. Anyroad, he’d have to go the other way, down Benton Street, not past this woman’s window. There was no way out of Crozier Terrace.

  ‘Please yourself, luv.’ The woman shrugged. ‘But I don’t doubt the evidence of me own eyes. You’ll find Mr Lacey in the end house, number twenty.’

  She must be mad. Alice watched the woman walk away, then gave the gates another shake. Still no one came. She was about to walk away herself but, feeling curious, went down Crozier Terrace to number twenty. She took a step back and looked it up and down. It was a perfectly ordinary house, identical to the others, with pretty, flowered cretonne curtains. There was a vase of dried leaves in the window. The front door and the sills were painted maroon.

  The woman had been talking nonsense. She couldn’t possibly be right. On the other hand, how could she possibly be wrong? She’d referred to ‘Mr Lacey’. She lived within spitting distance of the yard, so she must know John well. And another thing, Alice’s heart began to pound painfully in her chest, it was John who insisted on maroon every time he painted the outside of their house in Amber Street. She would have preferred bottle green herself.

  ‘His missus,’ the woman had said. ‘He’s gone to see his missus.’

  ‘But that’s me,’ Alice said aloud. She wondered if she should go home, run home, forget the house, what the woman had said, just wait for John tonight and tell him about Orla. She would never mention having been to the yard. Perhaps it would be best not to know whatever secrets might lie behind this door.

  But she had to know. She would never rest until she did. There was still a chance that the woman had got things wrong, that it was another man who looked like John who’d passed her house. Except she’d called him Mr Lacey.

  Maybe there were two Mr Laceys and they were similar!

  Alice took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  After a few seconds it was opened by a young woman, heavily pregnant, with lovely soft fair hair. Through the door Alice glimpsed a simply but comfortably furnished parlour with a plain brown fitted carpet – she’d always fancied fitted carpets in her own house. There was something wrong with the young woman’s face – she had a hare lip. Without it, she would have been extraordinarily pretty. A tiny girl, little more than a baby, clung to her leg and Alice felt herself go cold. The little girl could have been Orla at the same age. The young woman smiled, but didn’t speak.

  ‘John Lacey,’ Alice said in a cracked voice. ‘I’ve come to see John Lacey.’

  ‘He’s upstairs.’ A little boy appeared. He had his mother’s fair hair.

  ‘Would you mind giving him a call, luv.’ Alice still retained a shred of hope it was another man entirely upstairs.

  ‘Dad!’ the boy obediently yelled.

  ‘Who is it, son?’ John’s voice called.

  ‘A lady.’

  There were footsteps and John came to the door. Alice, sick to her soul, was presented with the perfect picture of domesticity: the little girl, so like Orla, the boy with the fair hair, her husband, John, his arm laid casually round the shoulders of the pregnant woman.

  When he saw Alice his face hardened and she glimpsed hostility in the brown eyes. He bundled his family out of sight, came outside, closed the door.

  But by this time, Alice had already reached the end of Crozier Terrace and was running, racing, flying home. She didn’t stop until she reached Amber Street.

  Alice lay curled up in the armchair, knees pressed against her chest. There was something terrifying about her blank, staring eyes in a face that had lost all trace of colour. She looked like a ghost. Every now and then her body convulsed, as if she was about to have a fit, and the sobs that emerged fom her pale lips were strangely subdued.

  A frightened Cormac had begun to cry, something he had hardly ever done when he was little. Maeve was visibly shaking.

  Only Fionnuala, who could always be relied on to act sensibly in a crisis, managed to remain calm. ‘What’s wrong, Mam?’ She shook her mother again and again. ‘Mam, what’s wrong?’ But Alice seeme
d incapable of understanding, let alone providing answers.

  ‘Perhaps our Orla’s baby has died?’ Maeve suggested.

  ‘Or Orla herself?’ Cormac’s lip trembled.

  ‘No,’ Fion said. ‘She would have told us. No, it’s something different from that. She’s had a terrible shock.’

  Cormac managed to crawl on to his mam’s knee, which he still did occasionally, despite the fact he was eleven and at grammar school. ‘Mam!’ He tenderly stroked her face. ‘Oh, Mam!’

  ‘Maeve,’ Fion commanded, ‘make a pot of tea. That might bring her round.’

  Maeve hurried into the kitchen to put on the kettle. ‘Should we fetch someone?’ she asked when she came back.

  ‘Who?’ Fion asked simply. ‘Anyroad, there’s no need to fetch someone, she’s got us. You know what I think we should do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Throw cold water on her. She’s having a fit of some sort. I saw it once in the pictures. It’s either water, or slapping her face and I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t bring meself to slap our mam. I prefer the water idea. She’s already soaking from the rain, so it won’t exactly hurt her.’

  ‘Shall I fetch a bucketful?’

  ‘A cup will do. You’re the one who wants to be a nurse, Maeve Lacey. You should know about these things. Cormac, mind out the road, there’s a good lad, we’re going to throw a cup of water on our mam.’ Fion dragged her brother off Alice’s knee when he appeared not to hear.

  ‘You do it.’ Maeve handed Fion the water.

  ‘You’re going to make a hopeless nurse.’ Fion took a deep breath and threw the water in her mother’s face.

  Alice screamed and violently shook her head for several seconds. ‘Oh, my God!’ she screamed again when she saw three of her children standing anxiously over her. ‘What have I been saying?’

  ‘Nothing, Mam. All you did was sort of cry.’ Although relieved to see her mother all right again, Fion felt suspicious that things were being kept from her. Why should Mam be worried about what she might have said? ‘Has Aunt Cora been at you over something?’ she asked.

  ‘No, luv.’ Alice held out her arms and the children fell upon her. They might find out one day what their father had been up to, but they’d never hear it from her. She hugged them fiercely. ‘I love you. I love you so much it hurts. Now, if someone doesn’t make me a cup of tea soon, I think I’ll bust.’

  ‘The kettle’s already on, Mam,’ Fion and Maeve said together and disappeared into the kitchen. Cormac, with his mother all to himself, snuggled his face in her shoulder.

  Alice felt dead ashamed. She had only a vague memory of being in the chair, having lost all grip on reality. There’d just been that awful feeling you had when you woke up from a horrific dream, unsure whether it was true or false. For the first time in her life the dream had turned out to be true. Perhaps her brain and her body had been fighting against the truth, praying for the dream to turn out to be just that, a dream.

  John! Till the end of her days she would never forget the look on his face, as if she were a trespasser on his happiness. It would have been far preferable if he’d just walked out of Amber Street, left them. But to set up another home, with another woman, other children!

  Fion and Maeve came in with tea on a tray and a plate of digestive biscuits. ‘Is Orla all right?’ Fion demanded.

  ‘She’s fine and the baby’s lovely.’ Alice realised she’d have to explain the hysteria. Now seemed the time to tell them their dad wouldn’t be coming home. ‘I went round the yard to tell your father about Orla and we had a big bust-up. He’s not coming back.’

  ‘But what about us?’ Cormac wailed. Fion and Maeve didn’t appear particularly upset.

  ‘We never got round to discussing you, luv. I know’ – she had an idea – ‘you can telephone him from the salon, arrange to meet somewhere.’ She hoped John would be nice to the son he’d once loved so much, that he wouldn’t regard him as a trespasser as he had done his wife. She remembered the other little boy and wondered what his name was. ‘Son,’ John had called him. ‘Who is it, son?’

  ‘A lady,’ the child had replied.

  It would be easy to cry again, but not now, not with the children there. She’d already frightened them enough. Cormac was still on her knee. She hugged him hard. He adored his dad and would miss him more than any other member of the family. Well, this family, she thought drily. From now on, John’s other family would have him all to themselves.

  ‘She looked so pretty, so nice,’ Clare wrote quickly in her neat, precise hand. She started to weep again. ‘I feel terrible. So should you,’ she added, underlining the ‘you’.

  ‘I do,’ John said in a heartfelt voice. He did indeed feel terrible, but he also felt very hard. He couldn’t get Alice’s shocked white face out of his mind, but there was no way he would let her spoil things between him and Clare.

  Clare was writing again. ‘We should have lived further away. It was always dangerous here.’

  ‘We’ll move as soon as possible.’ He didn’t want Danny Mitchell or one of the girls coming round to make a scene. They could yell at him all they liked, but he wasn’t prepared to let Clare or his children be subjected to abuse, though he had a feeling Alice would keep things to herself. She’d be too ashamed and embarrassed to tell anyone, not even her dad or Bernadette.

  He wondered aloud why she’d come to the yard in the first place and Clare wrote, ‘Perhaps your daughter has had her baby?’

  John smiled and stroked her swollen belly. If that was the case, it was possible he would become a grandfather and a father again within a single week.

  ‘You should go to see the baby.’ Clare supported the stumbling words with a movement of her hands, as if shooing him out of the house.

  ‘I can’t, not now.’ He shook his head. ‘Alice might be there. Anyroad, I’m not particularly interested.’

  ‘Should be.’ She nodded fiercely. ‘Should be. Not right.’

  ‘I’m the person to judge what’s right or not.’

  ‘I think we should wait a few days before we tell Orla about your dad,’ Alice said when the children were ready to visit their sister. ‘It’s said every cloud has a silver lining, and your dad going means Orla and Micky can move into the parlour. That’ll be nice, won’t it, eh?’

  Maeve and Cormac thought it a great idea, but Fionnuala wasn’t so sure. ‘Will the baby cry much?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘We’ll just have to see, luv. Now, are you sure you don’t mind me not coming with you? I don’t feel as if me legs will carry me far tonight. Just tell Orla I’m a bit off colour, but I’ll be at the front of the queue of visitors in the morning.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?’ Fion asked.

  Alice couldn’t wait for them to go, to be on her own, to think. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said heartily. ‘I’ll be even better after a rest. Now, are you sure you’ve got your tram fare? Maeve, be careful how you hold them flowers, else you’ll have the heads off. Cormac, put some stouter shoes on. It’s still raining outside.’

  She ushered them into the hall – her legs felt as heavy as lead – waved to them from the step, returned to the house, slammed the door, then let go.

  ‘You bloody hypocrite, John Lacey!’ she screamed. ‘You made me life a misery, accusing me of having affairs, when all the time . . .’ She aimed a kick at the skirting board and hurt her foot. ‘You even called our Orla names.’ What was it? A little whore. In that case, what was the women he lived with?

  Unless she didn’t know he was married! Perhaps he was a bigamist. If he was and if it hadn’t meant she’d never be able to hold up her head in Bootle again she would have reported him to the police.

  No wonder he handed over such a pitiful amount of housekeeping every week – he was buying fitted carpets for his other house, buying vans, having a telephone installed in the office. She would have loved a fitted carpet in the parlour. And it would have been nice for the whole f
amily to have gone places at weekends in the van. When Cormac passed the scholarship, she could have rung him from the salon, not stayed up till midnight to let him know. In fact, if she’d known about the telephone she would never have discovered his double life – she would have merely rung to tell him about Orla.

  Alice went into the parlour and kicked the bed that he’d slept on, then collapsed upon it, sobbing. Oh, God! It smelt of him. The whole house smelt of him: not just the bed, but the chairs, the very air. She had to get out of here and there was only one place she could go and think in peace, a place where there was nothing to remind her of John.

  She sat in her favourite place under the middle dryer. The nights were fast drawing in, it was almost dark. But it had been dull and miserable all day.

  ‘It’s been the worst day of me life,’ Alice whispered.

  Her anger had been replaced by, of all things, guilt. Guilt that he’d felt the need for another woman because his own wife hadn’t been sufficiently understanding. She’d tried but, somehow, in some way, she’d let him down. Perhaps she’d been selfish, taking over the hairdresser’s when he would have preferred her at home. Mind you, it had seemed dead unreasonable at the time and still felt unreasonable when she thought about it now.

  The young woman at the door had had something wrong with her face, a hare lip. Perhaps he felt more comfortable with someone imperfect, like himself. But it was still no excuse for having betrayed his wife and children, for taking the coward’s way out.

  Alice jumped when there was the sound of a key being turned in the salon door. It turned several times before it was opened and Neil Greene said, ‘It wasn’t locked. Alice must have forgotten.’

  He had someone with him, a woman, who was laughing helplessly. Alice wondered bleakly if she herself would ever laugh again. She prayed the light wouldn’t be turned on – she’d look an idiot, sitting in the dark on her own.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ the woman giggled.