Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  ‘Go on,’ I said sweetly, squatting down beside the cage. ‘You don’t have to stop because of me. Keep talking – I like to hear you.’ I pressed my nose against the bars. They fled to the opposite side of the cage and stood on the bottom, shifting nervously from one horrible naked pink foot to the other. I hated to see their scalded-looking skin and the way they were so scared and shifty.

  ‘All right,’ I wheedled. ‘If you’ve got nothing to say, I’ll talk to you. Daddy’s having one of his parties tonight and there’s a big tent on the lawn in case it rains, though it doesn’t look as if it will. And all the important people Daddy knows are coming. And he’s going to make me play the piano in front of them and I don’t want to! I HATE THEM ALL STARING AT ME!’

  My shouting made the birds panic. They crashed around the cage, nowhere to escape to, their wings clumsily hitting each other, beaks open and vicious. Sometimes I thought they might peck each other to death to escape me.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m sorry,’ I soothed them. ‘I’ll tell you something nice now. Something that makes it better. Katie’s coming. My best friend Katie. You like her, don’t you? She doesn’t scare you. She’s coming to keep me company and stop them all pressing in on me with their eyes. Katie doesn’t mind it. She doesn’t see it. She loves me.’

  And I loved her. How I loved her.

  ‘Much more than you ugly little pigs,’ I said to Lady and King. I stuck my tongue out at them.

  Dear Kate. She was so overwhelmed by it all. So impressed. Her family were restrained and colourless. She was always wide-eyed and in love with us, her round face pink at a word from Daddy. He charmed her as if with a magic pipe and she lay squirming at his feet. She was so sweet. Of course she was plump and she had to wear those dreadful glasses, but she was a darling behind all that gruff self-protectiveness. Win Munro never gave her an ounce of self-esteem. She had no idea how to say anything warm or caressing. It was my parents who did that for her. And Daddy was so fond of Kate back then, giving attention in a way that he never normally did to women who weren’t beautiful. But you couldn’t not like Kate. She was full of innocence and fortitude. She’d go to the ends of the earth for you in her tight cotton frocks and buckled sandals.

  ‘Gosh, Livy, it’s beautiful!’ she cried, looking round the garden with her mouth open. The wisteria was hanging in flower and there were garlands of lilies round the entrance to the marquee. The servants were on the run, Dawson and O’Callaghan heaving a huge side of cooked meat on a platter.

  ‘My feet are killing me already,’ O’Callaghan moaned. I hadn’t got the measure of O’Callaghan yet, she was a new one. The maids were always coming and going. Except Dawson. Dawson was a very sensible woman. She’d learned: she lived out and had a small child and no husband. She hung on to her job with us.

  It was already nearly dusk when the guests arrived. Lanterns glowed between the leaves in the garden. Mummy had dressed me in a white bridal frock like Betty McNamee wore for her First Communion. Kate’s dress was pale green and as frumpy as ever, poor thing, but I could never lend her one of mine because she couldn’t fit into them.

  ‘It’s gorgeous, Livy,’ she said wistfully to me. She wasn’t jealous. That wasn’t Kate. She just admired. Her heart was so whole. She didn’t see bad things and I didn’t want to make her. I needed her to believe in us, in our fairy tale, so we could have her wonder, her adoration.

  We stayed at the edge of the crowd, darting to the table to fill our plates. Kate ate, I picked at the food, the meats and sweet tomatoes and eggs and prawns trapped in aspic. I gave my most angelic smiles to those who stopped me and spoke.

  ‘You’re not eating much,’ Katie said, as we sat in our spot near the shrubbery and watched.

  I was sick with nerves. ‘Oh, I’ve seen the food going past under my nose all day,’ I said. ‘Dawson and O’Callaghan gave me some bits to eat. I’ve no space left.’

  We gazed up at the shadowy figures around us, the men in their dark suits and the shimmering, coloured silks of the ladies’ long dresses which swished across the grass as they walked. I pointed to a tall, lean man talking earnestly near us. ‘Neville Chamberlain,’ I told Kate. ‘Look, there’s his wife over there.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Kate breathed, peering over at Annie Chamberlain, swathed in pale violet silk. ‘Look at that dress.’

  We took in fragments of conversation. There was much talk of the election and the downfall of Socialism, and of riots breaking up meetings of the New Party. Labour’s darling MP for Smethwick, carried on shoulders through the street after the 1929 election, dark and dashing with a red rosette, had soon fallen foul of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Oswald Mosley’s meetings in the Bull Ring were now broken up by hecklers, bottles and chairs flung into the crowd by irate members of the Labour Party.

  ‘Quite extraordinary, Mosley’s lot seem to be,’ a voice said. ‘Bunch of thugs. Fearful tribe.’

  Oswald Mosley had become the bête noire, but of course the Tories weren’t complaining. I was fascinated by Mosley. He was so attractive. There was something diamond hard about him, and everything dark: his hair, clothes, heart, black and dangerous as a cobra.

  ‘Olivia?’ Daddy’s voice cut across the chatter of the guests. ‘Have you seen my girl? Where are you, Livy?’

  I loved him so much I wanted to run into his arms, do anything I could to please him. My daddy, my handsome, adoring father. I was all to him, his kitten, his princess. He wanted to show me off in front of his friends. The piano. I felt my stomach lunge and buckle.

  ‘Olivia?’ Kate cried in alarm. I stood retching in the darkness behind the blossoms of buddleia, its drugging scent all around me. The guests couldn’t have noticed.

  Wiping a spot of my mess from my shiny black shoe on to the grass, I walked from behind the leaves, standing up very straight.

  Kate was big-eyed. ‘Here, drink this.’ She handed me her glass of ginger beer.

  ‘Been over-eating, Olivia?’ Daddy teased softly. He loomed over us both, immaculate in his evening dress. Kate beamed up at him. ‘Come on now, they want to hear you play.’

  The piano was my passion. I knew I was good, brilliant perhaps. It was something I was sure of, deep in me. But my music was precious, intimate. I liked playing for myself, and for Kate, not for strangers. But I had to do it to make him happy.

  A semi-circle of them were sitting, polite and expectant, in the drawing room, skirts carefully arranged, on chairs and on the sofa, some of the men standing and smoking, wafting the smell of it round the room. As I walked in and the talk lowered I could hear the ladies exclaiming to each other how pretty I looked, what a darling child.

  I tried to pretend they weren’t there. I walked to the piano and sat down, closing my eyes for a second. But when I opened them I saw Kate had slipped into the room and was standing blushing by the door. I remember feeling aggravated by that. They weren’t looking at her, so why was she all tomato red?

  ‘Tell us what you’re going to play, Olivia,’ Daddy prompted me.

  I looked up. They were all smiling. Lipstick lips, moustaches, rows of teeth. I knew I looked sweet and pretty and small. I was too short to reach the pedals.

  ‘M-Mozart,’ I said. The stammer was deliberate of course.

  I chose something easy and rattled it off, badly. Three sonatas played perfunctorily. I kept my face down, my heart pounding. The music did nothing for me. I wasn’t lost in it. I was outside it and hating those people. Hating them all.

  Of course they all clapped. They had to. I boiled inside. Clapping something bad. Hypocrites.

  ‘Bravo!’ a voice boomed.

  ‘What a lovely child.’

  ‘Credit to you, Alec!’

  My feet took me across the cream Persian rug and out of there, running up the stairs to my room and my sleeping birds. Kate followed me. Moments later I was sobbing, held in her round, comforting arms.

  Chapter 3

  Devon, July 1935

 
; ‘Livy? I love you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say that.’ Olivia sat up abruptly in her bed across the room. ‘Girls aren’t supposed to love girls. Not like that.’

  ‘Not like anything,’ I protested. ‘Why d’you have to twist things? I just love you. You’re my best friend.’

  Olivia relented and rolled sleepily across the bed again, grinning through strands of hair. ‘Funny old thing. I love you too.’

  I lay back on the firm pillow. I was so happy. On holiday with the Kemps – in a hotel! I stretched and wiggled my toes, the dry grains of sand scratchy between them. The cotton sheet felt delicious against my bare legs. I couldn’t see anything clearly because my specs lay on the chair next to the bed. The light in the room was a blurry green, filtered through curtains which wafted by the open window, through which we could hear the waves.

  Our first full day there and everything about it felt right. The sun was shining and only tiny puffs of cloud shifted slowly across the sky. We had swum and climbed on the rocks all morning while Elizabeth Kemp lay back in a chair on the sand and Alec had taken a boat out. We were now resting to let our lunch go down before swimming again. And the best thing of all was that we’d talked and laughed together all the morning, just her and me as close as close.

  Before lunch we walked up the steep path from the beach to the cliff top, our legs scratched by gorse as we climbed the path of compacted mud, small stones rattling away from our pumps. We found a place to sit on the wiry grass which topped the headland, and looked out over the hazy blue of the estuary, tiny white sails in the distance.

  Olivia sat leaning back on her hands, her legs stretched out in front, the warm wind blowing her hair back from her face.

  ‘I found a piano in that back sitting room in the hotel,’ she said. ‘So we shan’t have to do without playing after all.’

  ‘No music.’

  ‘But we’ll remember it, won’t we?’

  When she said we I knew she really just meant herself. She sat for hours at a time in front of the piano at home, whereas I was forever looking for excuses to get out of practising, and Mummy didn’t pay too much attention to whether I did or not.

  ‘It’ll be something to do after dinner,’ Olivia said. ‘If we’re not already done in from all this fresh air.’

  She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. I could see the shape of her eyes moving restlessly under the lids. I sat watching her. Both of us had changed in appearance since we first became friends, but we had spent so much of our time together that I barely noticed Olivia’s looks alter any more than I did my own. Since she had been away at school in Staffordshire and I didn’t see her for weeks on end, though, I’d begun to notice things. Livy’s voice, which was deep and strong, had become even more forthright with a confidence that the school had given her, its Birmingham intonation fading. Her hair was thicker and glossier. She was thinner, had a waist suddenly, and breasts. Curiously I looked down at my own body. I’d certainly not been short-changed on that front. Just like my Granny Munro. My legs looked much pinker and rounder than Olivia’s slim ones.

  ‘I wish they hadn’t sent you away to that school.’ It was far from the first time I’d made this complaint. ‘It’s not the same without you around.’

  I was waiting for Olivia to agree and say how much she missed me during the term time and how there was no one else at school who was half such a good friend. This familiar conversation was like a ritual seal on our friendship.

  But this time Olivia said, without even opening her eyes, ‘Well, it could be worse. Gets me away from them at least.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy, of course.’

  ‘But they’re marvellous, your parents!’

  Olivia started laughing, sitting up hugging her knees, her body shaking.

  ‘What? What did I say?’

  ‘Oh, Katie. You’re so innocent, aren’t you?’

  I felt cross suddenly. Olivia was putting on that superior tone she sometimes used, as if the fact that she was a mere six months older let her into all sorts of adult secrets.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said sulkily. ‘Granny Munro tells me all sorts of things.’

  Olivia laughed again. ‘How is your mad granny?’

  ‘She’s not mad,’ I protested, with a reluctant grin. ‘She does it all on purpose.’

  Granny Munro, Daddy’s mother, had come from Scotland to live with us only three months ago, after my grandfather died. She had made up a little bit for Livy not being around. Already she had appeared at the breakfast table with no clothes on, told the local grocer’s that she needed biscuits and cheese on tick because we wouldn’t give her any money and set up a trestle table at the front of the house in Chantry Road in order to hold her own jumble sale because she had brought too many possessions to Birmingham with her. She was driving Mummy nearly demented.

  ‘It’s been really fun having her living with us,’ I said. ‘She tells me all sorts of things Mummy would never dream of saying.’

  Olivia had lain back suddenly, head among the blades of grass, her eyes closed. ‘Lucky old you,’ she said in a bored voice. I felt rather hurt and didn’t bother telling her any more.

  She’d never explained what she meant about her parents, I thought, lying on the warm bed. Perhaps it wasn’t anything. Maybe it was just one of those Olivia things to say, making a drama out of nothing much.

  ‘Livy?’ I lifted my head, resting it sideways on my tanned arm.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Let’s take the boat out later?’

  Olivia nodded, eyes closed.

  I took a deep, contented breath, enjoying the smells of the little hotel: floor polish and cabbage and Rinso on the sheets. I’d have liked Angus to see the place. In fact I was feeling so well disposed towards everyone that I’d almost have liked William to be there.

  I knew Olivia’s parents were having a rest in the next room. They had the very end room along the corridor facing the sea, and ours was next to it. A touch ashamed of myself I tried to imagine Alec and Elizabeth Kemp lying together on the bed which I’d glimpsed that morning through their door. Elizabeth would have unpinned her soft, fair hair. Perhaps she would have changed into a loose gown for taking a rest. My imagination skated quickly over Elizabeth’s slight body. Beside her I pictured Alec’s darker, more robust one. His handsome face with those brown dancing eyes would be close to Elizabeth’s. Was he leaning over her? I wondered. I thought I could hear their voices through the wall. Was he about to kiss her? Would he then do that to her? What Granny Munro had told me about that I knew my parents could not bring themselves to mention?

  For a moment I allowed myself to imagine Alec Kemp leaning over me, his lips moving closer to mine . . . Of course Alec was my best friend’s father and I was a rather lumpish fourteen-year-old with thick spectacles. But he was also the prince in every story. Kiss any frog, I thought, and it would transform instantly into Alec Kemp.

  I heard a door open, close again. Growing sleepy I followed the faded pattern of dog roses and convolvulus on the wallpaper, hearing the rustle of the sea. As my eyes closed and I began to drift into sleep I heard noises from next door and was suddenly awake again. The sounds were soon unmistakable. I held my body absolutely still, listening, me heart starting to beat very fast. The sound of weeping was so desolate, so intense, and it could only be coming from Elizabeth Kemp. At first her crying was quiet and muffled. I waited, expecting to hear Alec’s voice comforting her, but there was nothing except these terrible broken cries. For a few moments Elizabeth sobbed loudly and uncontrollably before the sounds died down. Then there was silence.

  When I woke, Olivia had already gone.

  I stood by the window, enjoying the salty air and looking for her. From below came the sounds of children shouting, a dog barking, a boat’s engine in the distance somewhere. The hotel was sited in the angle of a narrow bay with only a few cottages for company and a narrow road passing through. Round the headland was a small
holiday town, which could be reached by the road or a short ferry ride.

  The tide was out and shadows from the cliffs were already beginning to edge across the sand. Everything had turned the richer colours of late afternoon and children were busy digging on the wide shiny platter which was now the lower half of the beach.

  The memory of Elizabeth Kemp’s crying shifted uneasily round my mind. I had always liked Elizabeth. She was very gentle, a timid person who I had scarcely heard utter an angry word since I’d known her. She wasn’t a vibrant woman. She was unsure of herself and she provided a counterbalance to Alec, his restlessness and drive. But there was a sweetness about her and she always gave me a warm welcome. Above all she obviously loved and admired her successful husband with wholehearted devotion. So what could have brought on such broken-sounding grief? I tried to persuade myself that I’d been mistaken and the noise had been coming from somewhere else.

  The boat was drawing closer. It was the ferry. The red paint on the hull became visible, the engine droned louder as it advanced on the low stone jetty, pulling in with a churn of reversing engines.

  As the passengers climbed out, a movement caught my eye, something known, familiar. Alec Kemp walking the tapering jetty among them, jumping down athletically. He was dressed in navy trousers and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and already his arms and face had lost their city pallor. He looked tanned and healthy. He held a cigarette in one hand; on his face was a look of satisfaction, amusement even. When he reached the hotel he stood, facing the beach, to finish smoking. I knew instinctively that there was something wrong in his being there. I drew my head in quickly, closed the window and waited a few more minutes before going down to find Olivia. By then he’d gone.

  Olivia was down near the sea, scraping wet sand out of the blue rowing boat, Serenade, which Alec had hired for the week. The breeze puffed out the yellow blouse she was wearing over her swimming costume. She was not alone. Three boys were standing round her, and as I drew closer I saw that they were much our age, perhaps older, locals by the look of them, who were watching Olivia, giving unwanted advice, bantering with her. Olivia had let her hair loose in a wavy curtain down her back. Uncertain, I went and stood by them, wishing they’d go away.