by Marie Joseph
12
IN 1905, WHEN Rose was a sullen and secretive child just starting school, Joe Barton came back to the town to see his sister Belle.
When she first opened the door to him, she wanted to cry. She was wearing the white cap and apron her mistress liked her to wear, even though the house was only a semi-detached villa at the end of a cul-de-sac. Joe thought she looked even more washed out and servile than she had as a child.
She fidgeted nervously with the corner of her apron as she stood aside to let him in.
‘Mrs Armitage has gone out for her tea, so she said we could sit in the parlour when I told her you was coming. Come in and see how nice everything is, but rub your feet on the mat first.’
She led the way down a narrow hall, made even smaller by a round table bearing an assortment of plants, into a room at the front of the house, a room with a bay window shrouded by net curtains.
If she had not said that about him wiping his feet on the mat, she would have broken down and flung her arms round him, but the only time she remembered having physical contact with her brother was when they had slept together. In houses where they had stayed only long enough to get into arrears with the rent before doing a moonlight flit.
‘Sit you down then.’ She pointed to a chair covered in plum plush velvet. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’
Obligingly Joe looked round the over-furnished room, at the oilcloth patterned with squares filled with baskets of flowers, and at the mantle-cover scalloped and bobbled.
‘Aye, it’s nice,’ he said, then he smiled directly at her, and it was still the same Joe, the same laughing teasing Joe, who had stolen the money just for her, then had to go away rather than face the consequences.
‘You got my letter?’ she asked, sitting down opposite to him with her hands folded in her lap. ‘The minister wrote it for me.’ She frowned. ‘Well, at least the minister’s wife wrote it for me.’
‘Aye, I got it.’
It was strange, Joe thought, how in spite of the fact that Belle had received practically the same intermittent schooling as himself, she had never managed to pick her letters up.
There was a sadness filling his heart that made him want to clench his fists and beat them on the arms of his plush chair. She was so old, this little sister of his. His half-sister from what his mother had once let slip. So prim and proper, with her small feet in their laced-up boots crossed at the ankles. So much a stranger. He smiled at her again.
‘Our mam went quick-like,’ she said. ‘It was the drink. She choked in her sleep.’
Joe stared at the brightly coloured flooring.
‘I never wanted to go away, Belle. You know that.’
She shook her head. ‘You had to go, Joe, and from how you look you’re doing all right. That suit didn’t come from no pawn shop.’
‘No, it didn’t, love.’ He smiled at her again, thinking that was all they seemed to be bloody doing, sitting smiling at each other and thinking of things to say.
‘I have me own room,’ she said, and he saw the pride shining in her pale eyes.
‘Want to take me up to see it, love?’ His eyes teased. ‘I am your brother, you know. It wouldn’t be rude.’
Belle stood up, the desire to show off the first room of her own she had ever had too much for her.
‘Carpet on the stairs,’ she pointed out, bending down to feel it as she went before up the narrow stairway. ‘There’s a WC downstairs, just through the scullery. You don’t have to go out to the back.’
She opened a door off the landing into a room sparsely furnished by a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a wash-hand stand with a towel on the rail and a jug and soap dish standing on top. On the wall was a framed text bearing the words: ‘Be sober and hope to the end. (Peter 1 Verse 13)’, and on the floor a rag rug, pegged by herself, she told him.
‘I come up here after I’ve cleared the tea-things away, then I am free until it’s time to go down and make Mr and Mrs Armitage their bedtime cups of Horlicks.’
‘And one for you?’ Joe asked.
Her eyes opened wide with surprise.
‘Of course not, our Joe. Do you know how much Horlicks costs?’
He shook his head at her. ‘What you want to do is make enough for two do for three. Mrs Armitage doesn’t mark the bloody jar, does she?’
Belle put her finger to her lips, staring at the open door, a door she had left open deliberately, for it would never have done to close it, not with a man in the room, even if he was her brother.
‘Ee, I couldn’t do a thing like that, Joe. It would be like stealing.’
Joe scratched his head. ‘Belle Barton! What about all those times we pinched things off the stalls down the market? You could shove an apple under your shawl quicker than anyone I know. And what about that time when some of the neighbours hived off a sheep from the flock passing the end of our street? Who was it held our back door open? And who was it went round selling cut pieces of lamb till all the street reeked of the smell of roasting meat? You gone holy or something?’
‘The Lord Jesus has saved me,’ Belle said, folding her top lip tightly over the lower. ‘Mr and Mrs Armitage would never have taken me on if I hadn’t come from a good Christian family.’
At that Joe threw back his head and laughed out loud.
‘A good Christian family? Well, bugger me. That takes the bloody cake that does!’
‘You still swear too much, our Joe,’ Belle said, more in sorrow than anger.
Just for a minute Joe thought she was having him on, until he remembered that this slight serious little sister of his never had anyone on. He stared round the tiny room, at its stark respectability, at the framed text on the wall, at Belle’s house slippers sitting neatly by the side of the bed, and at the Bible he knew she could not read, placed dead centre of the bedside table, its marker spilling out on to the lace-edged cover.
His sister’s blue eyes were searching his face, pleading with him not to spoil all this splendour for her, beseeching him not to make fun of her. Willing him, he had to accept, to go away before her precious Mrs Armitage came back.
‘You haven’t even asked me where I’m stopping,’ he asked with mock reproach. ‘Or even how long holiday I’ve got.’
‘Where are you stopping, Joe?’
She was leading the way downstairs, running her hand lovingly over the highly polished wood of the banister rail. Showing by that give-away gesture that this little house with its modest furnishings had filled a void in her heart that nothing in the whole of her life had managed to fill before.
Suddenly he was reminded of how one afternoon, when she was about eight years old, Belle had helped him to build a puny little fire in a tip used for storing bricks. The fire had been built with sticks, odd bits of wood, old papers, anything that would burn, and Belle had crouched over it pretending to be stirring broth in a pan.
‘Your dinner’s ready, husband,’ she had said, and to humour her he had cracked on to be rolling up his sleeves before washing himself at the slopstone, before sitting down at an imaginary table.
‘By the gum, but this tastes good, wife,’ he’d said, and her face had gone pink with pleasure.
‘It was a nice piece of beef I got cheap from the butcher. Don’t forget to mop up the gravy with your bread, there’s a good husband.’
Poor little Belle, wearing an old tattered coat, seamed up the front to make a dress, with bare legs permanently navy-blue with chilblain scars. With a nose that always ran a candle, even in summer. No wonder this place was like heaven to her. An’ he wasn’t going to put no spoke in it for her, not in any way he wasn’t.
‘I’ve got to get back, love. Tonight,’ he lied. ‘Being a business man means you have to be on the spot. I’ve got four men working for me now. What d’you think about that? This carpet cleaning lark is a cinch, a bloody cinch.’
He glanced down at the hall carpet, and grinned. ‘This ’ere carpet of yours could do with a bit of a clean, madam, a
nd no need for it to be taken up and beaten in the garden, madam. Just give me a date and I’ll send round one of my men with one of my vacuum cleaners, and we’ll have the dirt sucked up and carried away without you even having to get your maid to dust the skirting board. Shall we say next Tuesday, madam?’
Belle’s eyes grew round. ‘You mean no dust brushed up nor nothing?’
Joe described a shape with his hands. ‘About that big and worked with bellows, so all the muck goes into a bag. Into the bag, out to the bin, a pound in Joe Blob’s pocket, and there we are!’
‘A pound? For cleaning carpets?’
‘Five shillings to the operator of course,’ Joe said grandly, ‘but when you reckon I’ve got four of them on the go, it adds up . . . aye it adds up.’ He tickled Belle underneath her chin. ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass, love, you know that, and some of them ladies down in London like to boast to their friends that they’ve had their carpets professionally cleaned. I’m in the middle of negotiating a contract for a row of offices in the West End, one of them posh places where they have carpets in the boss’s rooms just to show how flourishing their businesses are.’ Suddenly serious he jerked his head towards the stairs.
‘I’ve left a bit of something under the cover on your bedside table, love. And you’re sure you are proper settled? Certain sure? Because if not you can go up and pack your bag this minute and I’ll take you back with me.’
‘To London?’
Joe nodded. ‘Where the King rides by wearing a top-hat and smoking a dirty great cigar.’
‘You’ve seen him, our Joe?’
‘Many times,’ Joe lied. ‘Once he raised his hat to me.’
Belle wrinkled her small nose. ‘Oh, our Joe, you haven’t changed. But I wouldn’t leave this place, not my room. Not the Chapel and everyone what’s so kind to me.’ She was opening the door on to the quiet cul-de-sac. ‘You’ll keep on writing to me?’
He nodded, wanting to bend his head and kiss the soft pale cheek, but knowing there were net curtains twitching behind the windows of the neat little houses. It would never do for the Armitage’s maid to be seen being kissed by a man. So he raised his hand, then walked away with his jaunty tread down the short path.
It was raining now, the mucky clinging rain sifting its way through smoke-filled air as he walked away from the newly built box-like houses into the streets he knew. Rows of houses, and still more, down to the railway arches, past the canal, down on to its banks where the oily water lapped.
Joe walked on the balls of his feet, walked like a cat. Up and back on to the road again, past the gasworks, into the labyrinth of streets, alleys, the murky courts he had been reared into.
Leaning against a wall, he felt in his pocket and took out a crumpled packet of cigarettes, flicked one out and felt for a match.
‘Blast!’ The word came out as a groan. That was all it bloody needed. A fag and nowt to light it with.
Walking on he saw Kit’s shop on a corner, with its cardboard cut-out window display of curly-headed girls in red-riding hoods and its little boys in velvet suits blowing bubbles. He went inside.
There were three women in the shop, all with shawls over their heads, and one of them was feeding a baby underneath its concealing folds. They turned around and stared at him, decided they did not know him, and continued talking to each other in loud strident tones.
Just for the hell of it, Joe winked at the youngest of the women, the one suckling the baby, and smiled to himself as she twitched the shawl over the baby’s face.
‘What can I get for you?’
The man behind the counter was smiling at him, a big fat man with short-cropped curly hair, and an indefinite chin. The front of his hair was combed up into a sort of quiff, and his voice was pitched as high as a woman’s.
‘These ladies here are not in any hurry,’ he went on, still smiling, a tiny hammer in his hand held poised over a tray of glistening brown toffee, patterned with nuts. ‘A quarter, did you say, Mrs Parkinson?’
‘Tha knows I said two ounces, Mr Carmichael. I’m not made of brass,’ the smallest of the three women said. ‘By the gum, but tha’d sell a quarter’n of potted meat to one of them vegetarians, tha would.’
‘That’s a long word for a Thursday morning,’ one of her companions said, and Joe smiled to himself.
He was back home all right, even if it was for less than a day. He’d always known that for quick-fire give-as-good-as-you-get, you’d go a long way before you could beat a Lancashire working class woman.
‘A box of matches, please,’ he said, ‘and I’d better light my fag in here, it’s coming down like stair-rods.’
‘I’ve seen him afore,’ the oldest woman said, when the shop door had closed behind Joe.
‘Looks a cheeky type to me,’ the girl with the baby said, letting the shawl drop down again because it didn’t seem to matter in front of Mr Carmichael.
‘Now then, Mrs Parkinson,’ Kit said, tapping with the little hammer, then twisting a piece of white paper into a perfectly formed poke as he dropped the pieces of toffee in one by one.
‘A nut in every piece, love,’ he said. ‘And you can fetch it back if there’s not.’
Joe walked down the hill, past the house where Kit had lived with his mother, along the main street of shops to the top of Foundry Street.
All right, so he was being a bloody fool. Maggie had not answered his letters, and the last one had been returned with the message that she had gone away.
But whoever lived there might know where she was. They might tell him and he would go and find her. He would demand to know why she hadn’t written, because surely, even if she had never wanted to see him again after that last night, she owed him some explanation?
All right, so he had taken his time about writing to her, but he had said he was going to get a job first, and that was what he’d done.
At the bottom house he lifted his hand and rapped smartly with the knocker. He felt the palms of his hands break out into dampness, and his heart was beating with staccato jerks beneath the narrow stripes of his dark grey suit. Waiting only a few seconds, he knocked again, then looked up at the windows. Aye, it looked just the same, but then all these bloody houses looked just the same. Disappointed he turned away.
There was a full hour to go before the hooters went, and apart from a cat slinking across the street, everywhere was deserted. He was standing there, just standing, wondering what to do next when a door across opened, and a youngish woman came out carrying a bucket and a mop.
‘Better late than never!’ she called out cheerily before getting down on a strip of matting to mop the step. Joe crossed the street.
‘Number two, missus? A Miss Craig. I know she doesn’t live there any more, but perhaps you . . . do you know where she might be?’ He coughed to hide the sudden tremor in his voice.
The woman sat back on her heels and stared up at him. She had lived down Foundry Street for twelve months only, but she knew who he was talking about, and a glimmer of excited suspicion narrowed her eyes.
‘Maggie? You’re talking about Maggie? Father did away with himself a while back?’
He swallowed hard, feeling the blood rush to his face. He nodded.
The kneeling woman dipped a piece of grey cloth into the bucket, then started to wring it out with hands as red as a lobster’s claws. Her mind working overtime, she was trying to remember what she had been told . . . something about a scandal . . . something about Maggie Carmichael having got herself into trouble and not with the man she had married.
‘Maggie’s still there,’ she said at last. ‘But she’s Mrs Carmichael now.’ She let the cloth drop back into the bucket with a resounding plop. ‘She’s up at the shops as like as not.’
Thanking her with a downward jerk of his dark head, Joe turned on his heel and walked quickly away.
He knew he had been ungracious, even rude, but how was she to know, that sloppy young-old woman mopping her step, that what she had ju
st revealed had been like the shaft of a dagger slicing into his guts? His Maggie married?
He was going to be sick. He could have been sick right there, and it was all his fault, wanting to be somebody, wanting to have something to offer before he came back for her. But she might have answered his letters. She might have told him herself that she had met someone else. She had forgotten him and who could blame her? Who could bloody blame her?
Joe walked with head bent, striding out, past the draper’s shop where Maggie was choosing a supply of bobbins of cotton, whilst Rose, unseen by her mother, was emptying a box of pins on to the floor.
So engrossed in his thoughts that he reached the boulevard leading to the station without knowing how he had got there.
‘I thought as how Mrs Carmichael was going to faint,’ the woman across the street told her husband that evening as he was sitting down to his tea of tripe and onions. ‘I told her there had been a fella asking for her, and she went as white as a sheet when I described him. I always said she was a dark horse in spite of her toffee-nosed ways. I wonder if it was him what got her into trouble afore she got married to that nice Mr Carmichael?’
‘This is a bit of all right,’ her husband said, mopping up the thick grey gravy with a slice of bread. ‘Goes right to the spot this does.’
13
JOE BARTON PAID no more visits to his home town after that rainy afternoon. For a while he left his digs and lived with a widow in Acton, making it quite clear from the start that marriage was not on the cards.
His business flourished, and now he stopped doing any of the cleaning himself, merely visiting housewives in their homes and charming them into agreeing to having the work done by his increasing number of employees.
He wrote fairly regularly to his sister. She was, after all, his only relative, his next of kin, the only link he had with his home town. And when he received a letter one day, written in careful script by the minister’s wife, informing him that Belle had married, he was glad for her sake.
