by Dawson, Jill
Well, I’m Queenie Dove, and I like to do things my own way. Yes, those were the worst, darkest years, and I don’t want to dwell on them for longer than I have to here. But I didn’t deal with it by cutting off or shutting down, or fogging myself over with drugs. I cracked that horrible plastic ball I was running in right open, and I let memories, pictures, my story, my baby, flood in.
Sometimes when I woke to the sound of a baby crying, I’d lie still, telling myself, soothing myself with the knowledge that it would quieten down eventually. This time it’s Vera, I’d think. Remembering how we used to call her Baby Grumpy and how grizzled and old she seemed, compared to my light, vanilla-scented Maria. Remembering, too, that gin we used to put on our fingers, me and Bobby, to calm her and how heavy she was for a little girl of six to pick up, which was how old I was, I realized with a jolt. The struggle to walk with Vera; half-dead with sleepiness myself; the effort to quieten her cries; Vera’s head banging relentlessly against my shoulder. What a lot to ask of me.
I’ll be a better mother than you, Moll. I’ll get out of here in one piece, and I won’t give up, or forget my daughter, or turn to drink. I won’t go fucking doolally either.
Towards the end of my second year, Dad visits on his own. No Annie or Gracie. This is unusual, and puts me on edge at once. He’s forgotten to bring me anything, either: no smokes, nothing. It’s near Christmas and there’s pathetic decorations in the visitor’s room—you know, paper chains, that kind of thing, pinned to the windows with Sellotape, sagging over the chairs. Dad makes small talk about his flower stall, and talks about Bobby; have I noticed how much weirder he is these days, how he even counts the beans in his plate of baked beans? I ask about Maria. Yeah, Gloria brought her to visit last week and he took her to Santa’s grotto down the People’s Palace, in Mile End; she got a box of colored pencils. And other bits of chitchat, and then long silences. I find myself staring at the clock, trying to make out the hands behind a little loop of colored paper. What’s Dad doing here? He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, crosses his legs, picks a bit of fleck off his sock.
Then time’s up and he scrapes back his chair and coughs, and coughs again, and says he’s heard something. So that’s it. Something he wants to tell me, about Tony.
It can only be one thing. It can’t possibly be anything good. I stare across at the door, then down at my hands; I’m standing up now, gripping the back of my chair. Then down at my toes, in their prison issue flip-flops. I’m not listening. I want to put my fingers in my ears, and inside I’m silently humming, blocking Dad out. La, la, la . . .
“Yeah . . . this was before he met you, an old girlfriend of his, but just the same . . . this fella says he beat this bird black and blue, knocked two teeth out; she was hospitalized. The Royal London. Broken jaw, two broken ribs. It was after his dad got sent on that boat, that one what got hit on the way to Canada . . . you remember how all the I-ties was sent to Canada in the war? Either Canada or the Isle of Man? Anyhow, Tony beat this bird to a pulp, this fella says, not just, you know, a little slap . . . it weren’t a pretty sight at all, I’m telling you . . .”
Why? What on earth do you think I’m going to do with that piece of information?
I’m staring at him so hard that he starts to look nervous. He’s pulling on his jacket.
“Yeah, well, I just thought you should know. Tony’s bad news. Hospitalized her, he did, Queenie . . .”
And it’s that word, that word in the end, that unleashes me.
“You’re such a fucking hypocrite, you know that!” My voice stops others in their tracks. The place crackles: they love a fight.
“What—wha—”
“Hospitalize her, did he, like you did to Mum?”
“What—”
“Yeah, except not for the rest of her life, eh, just a bit of a bashing, rather than getting her hospitalized for the rest of her fucking life.”
“What? Your mum was sick, Queenie, she weren’t her ticket, nothing to do with me, I never . . . I don’t know what you’re on about . . .”
“No, but someone had to sign the papers, didn’t they? Someone had to commit her there and then leave her there.”
“No, you’re wrong, gel, it was the courts, the courts what decided . . .”
I’m on my feet suddenly and the room itself seems to be pounding, like a big drum.
“Oh, what the fuck! What do I care! Get the fuck out of here! Don’t come here telling me about Tony, I don’t want your advice! I don’t want nothing from you!”
And I’m screaming by now, and the room is erupting, the screws moving towards me, one of them no doubt feeling for the panic button, as I’m picking up a chair, and with the most blissful sense of achievement I see the look in Dad’s cocky blue eyes—a look so ashamed, it’s gratifying, as if he always knew it would come to this one day—and watch him duck.
Look, I wasn’t stupid. In fact, after I’d calmed down, and thought it over, in a tiny part of me, I even felt touched by Dad’s efforts, touched by the one and only attempt he’d ever made to be, well, fatherly towards me. To try and protect me. I knew that I’d forgive him by the next visit, make it up with him. It’s just that it was too late. And easier said than done. I’ve learned that people are surprisingly judgmental and angry at women who get hit by a man. Everyone’s advice is the same: leave. It used to make me feel like saying yeah, OK, why don’t you leave your relationship, the man you love, the father of your children, why don’t you leave tomorrow if you think it’s so blinkin’ easy? But my fella’s not beating me up, they say; he doesn’t have a temper. Those people are absolutely sure that if they accidentally did fall in love with a person with an unpleasant personality trait, they’d leave at once. Well, I’m no angel myself. Tony puts up with my temper, doesn’t he? I can handle him. That’s always my reply, to myself, to Dad, to Stella, to anyone else who tries it. I’m the strongest person I know—I don’t need your advice. I can handle anything.
We drive to pick up Maria from Gloria’s on a spring day in 1960. Tony is outside in a car I don’t recognize, waiting. I come blinking into the light, like a newly shorn lamb. Everything is bright, and loud, and bigger; I can hardly believe it. Tony leaps up and throws his arms around me with such force I think he’s going to topple me. We survey one another. I can’t stop rubbing my eyes. He looks different, older, of course, despite me seeing him on visits. His eyes are as striking as ever, but he has these deep grooves alongside his mouth even when he’s not smiling, and he’s bulkier; when he hugs me he doesn’t feel familiar: there’s a thickness to him that wasn’t there before. He hasn’t shaved and the stubble coming through is grey, giving his face a fuzzy, less sharp, less defined outline. Or is that just me? Does everything look fuzzy because I’m blinking so much?
I’m carrying my little bundle of belongings, which Tony throws in the boot. And I feel ashamed, because I know what I’m wearing—slacks and blouse—are all wrong, out of date. In fact my body is out of date, too much of an hourglass for the new shapes—A-line and straight-up-and-down dresses—but new clothes and whatever underwear it takes to create that shape will have to wait. First, we’re driving to Gloria’s to get Maria.
Tony grins and grins, telling me about all the things that are new, all the things he says I’ll be surprised by. But I’ve been reading the papers. We get News of the World and The People in prison. Tracey was always going on and on about the riots in Notting Hill and that colored fellow who got killed last year. I know about Coronation Street, and that short dresses mean you don’t need girdles and corsets and long-line bras; you wear tights. Tony talks about what he calls “technological changes”—I’m stunned to be outside, I can’t really concentrate—and how he and a mate, Jimmy, tried to get hold of these new argon guns, high-powered electric torches that can blast through metal so that they can break into safes. Tony did a little bird of his own for nicking six argon guns: eight mont
hs in Durham. And it’s absolutely clear that any money he made has gone.
The main difference, according to Tony, is the club scene. Was that new café opened when I went in? Next to the delicatessen on Old Compton Street? Yes, I say, it was—it had just opened.
“Fucking hell, that all went mad,” Tony says. He tells me about kids coming from far away, the suburbs, just for one night. Pavement’s always full of them. He does this funny little hand jive movement with his hands on the wheel, to show me.
“I hate that Lonnie Donegan record though, don’t you?” I say. Tracey had a radio and for a half ounce of tobacco she’d let me listen to it for an hour.
Tony starts singing it, in old-fashioned music-hall style—“Oh . . . my old man’s a dustman, he wears a dustman’s hat . . .”—until I laugh and whack him and tell him to shut up. He has a good voice, though: a rich, lilting voice. I’d forgotten that.
“Is it all kids then. Teenagers?” I ask, trying to keep the anxious note out of my voice. The sense of being old now, having missed something, being locked away while it was all going on.
Tony glances at me and his look is reassuring. Like he just flicked a hot brush over me.
He assures me it’s not just teenagers. And we both agree we like Adam Faith, and he sings that one, too, for a while: “What do you want if you don’t want money?” There are swanky places, too, Tony says. Churchill’s and The Beehive and Winston’s—the new club we were heading for on New Year’s Eve that’s become the top spot; yeah, that’s the number-one venue in the West End. Also this place called Murray’s, posh place, do I remember it—Stella works there now as a dancer. She has to get all these fellas to buy her drinks and then they charge them the earth, and Stella gets paid in what she calls scalps. How many losers buy her a drink. He’ll take me. But Hackney, though. Back home. I won’t recognize it. So many blacks . . . they’re everywhere. There’s cafés in Clapton where you don’t see a white face; just all these pork-pie hats and a Blue Spot radiogram and pinball machines . . .
“Where we going to be living, then?”
“I’m renting a place. Not far from where you and Stella was—Frampton Park Road.”
He’d told me once when visiting inside that he’d left the Soho Don. I knew from before I went in that the control of London was changing and what Stella said was true: it would always be best to be working for the right firm. The impression I got, and I didn’t like to delve, was that now Tony was working for himself—only doing piecemeal, casual things as they came up, if they were tempting—but generally, since Durham, trying to stay out of trouble. Mostly he was back working in his uncle’s café. I’m relieved, because this means the likelihood of Tony being banged up for something is smaller; but it also means we won’t exactly be rolling in money.
“Back there? Near Dad and Annie . . .”
I try not to sound disappointed. My mood is crackly, brittle. I can’t quite believe that I’m actually on the outside. That someone won’t come along and click handcuffs on me, haul me back there. Also, Tony keeps mentioning that we can get spliced now, we can get our little baby girl back and have a big do at St. James Church in Bethnal Green, or the Italian church in Clerkenwell, wouldn’t that be fine, doll? I say nothing in reply to this. An elastic band tightens round my lungs; I feel like I can’t breathe. “Can we open a window in here?”
It doesn’t take long for Tony to get fresh. This is what he’s convinced I’ve been missing most in my three years’ bird. That I’m about to explode, right? I’m smoking one cigarette after the other, dragging deeply, blowing smoke towards the open window, as we leave London for Kent, where Gloria’s house is, and he’s leaning over, squeezing my knee, smoothing his hand over the cotton of my slacks and up to my crotch, smiling at me, trying to unbutton my blouse with one hand. “Leg-over and chips is what you need, doll,” Tony says.
We decide to pull over in a lay-by and push back the seats; Tony takes off his jacket and shoes and produces a bottle of Jack Daniels. We’re on a country road. I look up from my position pinned under him—legs painfully braced, feet on the dash, seat-buckle sticking into my back—and see it all over his shoulder: birds, sky, a tree covered in pale pink blossoms, like a giant lollipop. The world again. Rumble of the odd lorry passing us, and mad twittering sounds from the birds. The tang of diesel and orange peel and plastic and whiskey and Tony’s skin: a riot of scents. It’s too much; it’s nearly choking me.
Tony is hot, frantic, scuffling—like we’re having a pub fight. He gets my knickers off and quickly unbuttons himself and gets inside me—he hasn’t lost any of his urgency or abandon, but he hasn’t learned to pace himself, either. Just as I start to get interested, it’s over for him, and he’s sighing and kissing my neck with an unmistakably satisfied air. I almost push him off me, but I stop myself, count to ten, ask for a tissue, and hold him for a while. I try to disguise the drumming of my fingers, pretending I’m just stroking his back.
It’s fine, I’m in a hurry, too: I want to get to Maria. I wriggle about awkwardly to pull my knickers and slacks back on; Tony combs his hair in the rearview mirror, whistling and grinning at me. We open both windows and hit the road again. I’m drinking it all in: deer, fields, signs, petrol stations. As long as I live, a petrol station will never look as good to me as it does right now.
The long driveway from the road to Gloria’s house is intimidating; we both fall silent. There’s a little cottage to our right that I think at first is the house, but Tony—who’s been before, to visit Maria—tells me it’s the gardener’s cottage, one of several dotted on the property. Perhaps because it’s in Kent, I keep being reminded of the Approved School. I almost expect Sister Grey to come running out and sweep me inside. Ronald is away, Gloria has told me that. She’s indicated that Ronald is often away, and she’s glad of it. He’s quite a drinker, and mean, as it turns out, and “daft old Gloria” has “been and gone and fell for him, after all,” she says.
It rears up at last, this grand house: grey stone, closed-looking, flanked by trees, an enormous lawn, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. A scale I hadn’t imagined. I mean, I’d seen Gloria, the Rolls, the furs, the pearls. But those things seem like small-fry now, next to this. A house is something else. I’m surprised to find that I’m not just overawed, I actually feel afraid, and I can’t understand why. I wasn’t ready; I hadn’t yet imagined this is the strange thought that pops into my head. No sign of Ronald’s silver Rolls. There’s a white Jag though; Tony parks up next to it and leaps out to admire it.
To my surprise it’s Gloria herself, not a maid or butler, who answers the door. And she’s reassuringly Gloria—glass of champagne in one hand, cigarette elegantly poised in the other, yellow silky dress stretched across her vast bust so that she looks like a ripe canary, all warmth and delight at seeing me spilling over as she ushers us into the kitchen and plonks glasses of bubbly in our hands.
Maria is out towards the back of the property with Betty and the nanny, she says. The nanny? Gloria had assured me she’d been raising both girls herself, with no help at all. I don’t ask her about this, just note it, silently. I suddenly need to go to the lavatory; I think I’m going to be sick. Gloria shows me where it is, and I am sick, just a little—the champagne, no doubt, or the Jack Daniels, or just the shock of it all, after three years of sweet tea and stewed greens—and I sit for a second or two in front of the pristine white toilet bowl, closing my eyes, and trying to draw the strength to get up, and go back.
Then we’re standing in the kitchen, gazing out to the garden, which backs onto fields—part of the property, apparently—and where I can see a young girl in a navy uniform, and two little girls. I mean to run outside, but find I can’t move. Gloria prods me gently, and I step closer to the window. One of the girls is very small, barely more than a toddler. Black-haired, a scrap of a girl, in a white cotton dress, being lifted in the arms of the nanny. I can’t see her face. I sho
uld know her face, every nuance, every eyelash, but a picture of her always eludes me, much as I stared hungrily at her on visits. She kept changing week by week, growing and altering, her eyebrows lifting and darkening, her chin firming up, her eyes widening and sprouting longer lashes, silky-black like Tony’s. This is just what children’s faces do, of course. Generally you see them every day and you don’t notice. The gaps between visits made it impossible not to. As if I was seeing, in front of me, time passing. All the moments of my daughter’s life I was missing.
So, for longer than I mean to, I just stand and stare at the window, savoring or putting off the moment, I’m not sure which. After a second or two, tears spill down my cheeks. I can see clearly what the three figures towards the field are looking at. A white pony. Gloria has bought Maria a pony, all of her own.
It’s dark by the time we’re ready to leave: Maria sleeping on the backseat of the car, the trunk packed with her things. We’ve had tea cakes and hot chocolate, and I’ve prattled away to Maria while she has given me her usual hard stare, only occasionally replying with one-word answers that seem to come from nowhere.
I try to suppress the gnawing anxiety that I’ll never be able to give Maria the things that Gloria did; how will Maria accept life with Tony and me in the Frampton Park Road after this? Maria eats daintily, and looks to the nanny for prompting: is she allowed another piece of tea cake, should she now put the napkin on her lap? I note with a flicker of sadness that the person she’s most relaxed with is Tony, who tickles her and suddenly scoops her up in rough kisses, calling her his “hunny bunny” and making her squeal. Surprise assaults of affection—I remember them well. Dad used to do that.
