by Maureen Lee
‘Are you sure the aliens haven’t taken you over?’ Marcia quipped. ‘You’ve been quiet an awfully long time.’
‘I was just thinking.’
‘Could you stop thinking and take us back? I’m starving.’
Elaine gasped. ‘I’d like to apologise for my sister’s non-existent manners, Jeannie. It’d be nice to say she’s not always this rude, except she is. She badly needs her head examining.’ She glared at Marcia’s head. ‘I might do it once I’m a qualified psychiatrist.’
Marcia was unperturbed by this remark and Jeannie explained they were at the other end of Holly Lane and already going back.
As they approached Disraeli Terrace, two boys emerged from the first house; one tall and dark, the other small and fair.
‘I spy other human beings!’ Marcia remarked with pretend amazement.
‘Hello, Jeannie,’ the blond boy shouted as they passed. ‘What’s it like at your posh school?’
‘All right.’ Jeannie shrugged.
Marcia turned and looked at the boys with interest. ‘I quite fancy the tall one.’
‘Sean McDowd? He’s only thirteen, far too young for you.’
‘Only thirteen! He looks more like twenty. Did you notice the way he looked at me? He’s got dead sexy eyes.’
‘He was looking at Jeannie, not you,’ Elaine pointed out. ‘I think he quite fancies you, Jeannie.’
‘Well, he needn’t bother.’ She wouldn’t look twice at Sean McDowd.
Tea was cold chicken with tomatoes freshly picked from the garden, potato salad, and chunks of home-made bread, thickly spread with butter. For afters, they had damson pie and cream.
Marcia, as liberal with praise as she was with criticism, declared it quite the nicest meal she’d ever eaten.
‘It was delicious, Mrs Flowers,’ Lachlan said courteously. ‘I really enjoyed everything.’
‘Me too,’ concurred Elaine.
Rose glanced at the clock. ‘It’s almost six. Your father will be here at half past and I’m dying to hear Jeannie and Lachlan play.’
Everyone went into the parlour; even Gerald seemed interested.
‘Shall we start off with Minuet in G again,’ Jeannie whispered to Lachlan, who condescended to look at her properly for the first time.
‘Why not!’
‘And then what about a Strauss waltz and some Chopin? The music’s on the stand. We could finish with “Love Me Tender”. I’ve been practising all week.’
Lachlan grinned. ‘I couldn’t have chosen a better programme myself.’ He bowed at the small audience, tucked the violin under his chin, raised his eyebrows at his accompanist, and they began to play.
Dr Bailey arrived when they’d just started their final piece. Rose crept out to let him in, and the doctor enthusiastically joined in the applause at the end of the little concert.
‘Well done, son, and you too, Jeannie,’ he said. ‘That was most enjoyable.’
‘I won’t be playing this for much longer.’ Lachlan waved the violin. ‘I’m getting a guitar for Christmas. I want to play rock ’n’ roll, like Chuck Berry and Bill Haley and the Comets.’
‘That’s a shame!’ Rose cried. ‘You’re very good.’
‘Well, if it’s what the boy wants . . .’ Dr Bailey didn’t seem the tiniest bit bothered by his son’s intentions.
‘Dad,’ Lachlan said eagerly, ‘if Max comes with us to the Cavern tonight, would you mind driving him home? The Merseysippi Jazz Band and the Ron McKay Skiffle Group are playing.’
Max glanced warily at his own father. Tom was frowning, stuck for words, obviously wanting to protest, but unwilling to do so in front of the doctor. The boys had almost certainly set it up between them, knowing neither man was likely to refuse.
‘You can’t expect your father to go so much out of his way,’ Tom stuttered.
‘I don’t mind,’ the other man said easily.
Jeannie’s heart sank at the idea of being left behind, but help came from an unexpected quarter.
‘In that case, why doesn’t Jeannie come back too? Dad can bring her home with Max,’ Marcia suggested in her foghorn voice. ‘We can go to the pictures. They only show old films on Sundays. Frenchman’s Creek is on the Plaza with Joan Fontaine. I saw it ages ago, but I wouldn’t mind sitting through it again.’
‘Please come, Jeannie,’ Elaine implored, as if Jeannie was likely to have any say in the matter.
‘That’s a good idea, isn’t it, Tom?’ Rose said before her husband could open his mouth. ‘We’ll have a quiet evening for a change. There’s a good play on the wireless. Gerald will be in bed by then.’
And so it was that fifteen minutes later, Jeannie found herself squashed beside Lachlan Bailey in his father’s car and being driven to Walton Vale.
Frenchman’s Creek was really exciting. Jeannie was on the edge of her seat the whole way through. When it was over, they went to the Baileys’ and Elaine made bacon sandwiches, which they ate in the kitchen. They were still there, talking, when Dr Bailey popped his head around the door to say he was off to collect Lachlan and Max, and would Jeannie like to keep him company?
She went like a shot. It was a new experience to see such brightly illuminated streets and the lights still on in shop windows at such a late hour. There were lots of people about for a Sunday night, but that was because the pubs were letting out, Dr Bailey explained.
As had been arranged, Lachlan was waiting in Whitechapel, outside the Post Office, when his father arrived. There was no sign of Max. He came a few minutes later, staggering slightly, causing the alarmed doctor to ask if he was drunk. ‘I thought they didn’t sell alcohol in the Cavern!’
Lachlan chuckled. ‘They don’t. He’s not drunk. It’s the music, it’s made him delirious.’
Max collapsed into the car. ‘That was magic,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it in my life before. I didn’t know music like that existed. All we hear at school is hymns and stupid folk songs and Mum only ever has classical stuff on the wireless. Skiffle’s okay, but jazz! Jazz is the best sound in the world! Oh, Jeannie! It made me go all funny inside.’
‘If jazz makes you go all funny, wait till you hear rock ’n’ roll,’ Lachlan advised him. ‘ “See You Later Alligator” will send you round the bend.’
‘It sends me round the bend,’ the doctor remarked mildly.
‘Max, why don’t you come with us to see Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender on Wednesday?’ Lachlan suggested. ‘Your Jeannie’s coming.’
‘My father hasn’t said yet if I can go,’ Jeannie reminded him.
Max banged the seat with his fist. ‘I’ll make him let us go. I’ll bloody strangle him if he won’t let us go. If he won’t, I’ll kill myself.’
Dr Bailey asked if that wasn’t putting it a bit strongly? ‘I can’t see any reason why he won’t allow you to visit the cinema. Tell him he’s lucky his children bother to ask. Mine do as they please and I have no say in the matter.’
Max snorted. ‘You don’t know our father. If me or Jeannie did as we pleased, he’d burst a blood vessel.’
‘Tell him I’ll bring you home, seeing as this Elvis Presley character is involved,’ the doctor said good-naturedly. ‘But don’t expect me to make a habit of it. I’m not prepared to go to and from Ailsham like a yo-yo.’
Outside the walls of number ten Disraeli Terrace, Tom Flowers was very much aware of his place in the world, which was pretty close to the bottom of the social scale. He was keenly respectful of members of the professional classes. Having met Dr Bailey, he considered it would reflect on him badly if he refused to let his children visit the cinema when they’d been offered a lift home.
‘But once and no more,’ he warned them. The idea of the good doctor providing a taxi service made him uncomfortable. After a furious argument, a wild-eyed Max was told he could attend lunchtime concerts at the Cavern and on Saturday and Sunday evenings, but that was all. Jeannie could go to tea with her friend but, now that the nights we
re drawing in, it had to be when Max was meeting one of his friends, and they could come home together. They must be back by half past seven, otherwise there’d be hell to pay, Tom said threateningly.
Benedicta Lucas was very tall and desperately thin; so thin that the bones in her wrists and elbows showed through her delicate white skin like ping-pong balls. Her face was long and narrow, her pale blue eyes perfectly round, the two contrasting shapes giving a bizarre impression. She had lank, creamy hair, and the quietest voice anyone had ever heard – or not heard, as it was very difficult to know what Benedicta was saying in her timid whisper. She had the unfortunate habit of turning bright crimson if attention was drawn to her, so just answering the register caused her some embarrassment – the mention of her unusual name was inclined to raise a few giggles – and poor Benedicta, with her weird appearance and equally weird name, had become a figure of fun.
It was therefore a little surprising when, one day just before Christmas, as 1-remove were in the middle of a history lesson, Benedicta raised her hand for the very first time and asked Miss Appleton in a whisper if she could please be excused.
Miss Appleton, who was describing the victories and exploits of her favourite historical character, the Black Prince, nodded irritably, and the ghostly figure of Benedicta got up and left the room.
A good fifteen minutes had passed before the form mistress realised the girl hadn’t come back. She scanned the rows of bored, interested, or uncomprehending faces in front of her for someone she could trust to send in search of her missing pupil. Her eyes lighted on Jeannie Flowers, the most sensible girl in the class, popular with everybody.
‘Jeannie, will you see what’s happened to Benedicta, please? She might be feeling sick or something. Let me know if anything’s wrong.’
‘Yes, Miss.’
Benedicta was found within minutes. Although the lavatories appeared empty, one door was closed. Jeannie bent down and saw a pair of feet underneath. She knocked. ‘Is that you, Benedicta?’
There was a muffled ‘Yes.’
‘Are you all right? Miss Appleton sent me to find you.’
‘I’m not all right. I want to die.’
Used as she was to dealing with Max’s histrionics, Jeannie wasn’t as thrown by this statement as some girls might have been.
‘Why?’ she enquired calmly.
‘No one likes me,’ Benedicta replied in a hoarse whisper that contained more than a touch of hysteria. ‘Everyone hates me. I can’t stand sitting next to Edna Fellows. All she does is ignore me. She wanted to sit by some other girl, who preferred to sit by some other girl, and she’s fed up being stuck with me. No one talks to me. If I speak to Edna, she just tells me to shut up. She told me again this morning and I decided I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d sooner die.’
‘Come out and I’ll talk to you.’
‘You’re only doing it because I’m crying.’
‘I didn’t know you were crying.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Jeannie Flowers.’
There was a long pause before the catch clicked on the door and a hunched, red-faced, red-eyed Benedicta shuffled out. ‘I suppose you’ll tell everyone what a show I’ve made of meself,’ she sniffed.
‘I won’t tell a soul, except Elaine Bailey, who’s my friend.’
‘I haven’t got a friend. And I’ve no brothers and sisters, or a dad. He died when I was two. If it wasn’t for me mam, I’d think I was invisible.’
‘You’re anything but invisible,’ Jeannie said generously. Benedicta Lucas was merely the sort of person you looked at once, but not twice. The only memorable thing about her was her awful name.
‘I’m not very clever either,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t always understand the lessons and I daren’t ask Edna to explain.’
‘You must be clever if you passed the eleven-plus.’
Benedicta sighed miserably. ‘I didn’t pass, I failed. Me mam pays, five guineas a term. She had to take on an extra cleaning job to pay the fees and buy the uniform, which cost a small fortune. She says I’m her “investment in the future”, though I’m not sure what that means.’
Jeannie wasn’t sure either. It was getting a bit too complicated for her. ‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘do you have school dinners or bring sandwiches?’
‘I bring sarnies. I’m eligible for free school dinners, but Mam doesn’t want anyone to know we’re that poor.’
‘Me and Elaine bring sandwiches, so why don’t you eat with us?’
The girl squirmed. ‘Elaine mightn’t want me.’
‘She’ll want you as much as I do.’ Jeannie hoped this was true. She and Elaine had reached the stage where they shared quite intimate secrets, which they couldn’t do with Benedicta present. But she felt the same obligation to take Benedicta under her wing as she’d done with Rita McDowd, despite her so often being a nuisance.
‘Will you do us a favour?’ Benedicta pleaded.
‘If I can.’
‘Don’t call me Benedicta. I hate it. It puts people off. They might like me if I was called Jeannie or Elaine.’
‘What shall I call you then?’
‘Benny. It’s a boy’s name, but I prefer it any day to Benedicta.’
‘It’s not really a boy’s name if it’s short for your own. There was a Charlotte at my old school, but everyone called her Charlie. Look, we’d better be getting back – Benny – else Miss Appleton’s likely to send someone in search of us both.’
Benny Lucas turned out to be a bigger nuisance than Rita McDowd. She stuck to the girls like a clam and became sulkily jealous if she discovered they’d been out together and she hadn’t been asked. She was invited to tea at both their houses. Marcia ignored her existence and Max considered her a pain.
On one icily cold day in February they went to tea in Benny’s house in Grenville Street, Bootle, on the clear understanding they didn’t mention they knew her mother was a cleaner.
‘She tells people she works for the council, which she does, except she says she’s in the office, though I bet no one believes her. Saturday afternoons, she cleans some bank.’
Mrs Lucas was as small as her daughter was tall, just as thin, and even more knobbly. She wore a neatly darned jumper and a skirt beginning to fray at the hem. Her hands were unnaturally large, the knuckles swollen and red from years of hard work. The house was a tiny terrace, poorly furnished, though the old furniture sparkled and there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen. A small fire burnt in the grate and the room was cold. Jeannie had to stop herself from shivering, which would have looked rude. Mrs Lucas kept glancing at the grate, as if weighing up whether or not to throw on a few lumps of coal.
Great pains had been taken with the food; lamb chops, roast potatoes, and peas, followed by a massive trifle decorated with cherries and hundreds and thousands. The dishes were mostly chipped, but the tablecloth looked new, as if it had been bought especially for the occasion.
Benny was clearly the apple of her mother’s eye, her ‘investment in the future’, and the sole topic of conversation throughout the meal. Apparently, there wasn’t a single talent that Benedicta didn’t possess. Her mother’s small, tired face became alive and her eyes glowed when she described how well she could dance, sing, write poetry, sew, knit, embroider, draw the prettiest pictures. She could walk at eleven months.
Elaine raised her eyebrows at her friend, and she and Jeannie shared a smile. They hadn’t noticed Benny being capable of any of these things, apart from walking.
By the time they reached the trifle stage, Benny was cringing with embarrassment. ‘Oh, Mam, you’re not half laying it on thick. Jeannie and Elaine can do things too, you know. Jeannie’s dead good at playing the piano – she sometimes plays at assembly – and Elaine’s going to be a doctor when she grows up.’
Mrs Lucas went on to remark that her Benedicta was going to join the Civil Service when she left school. What’s more, she didn’t doubt she would have learned to play the piano
brilliantly if only they’d had one.
‘She wasn’t the least bit interested in us,’ Elaine remarked later when she and Jeannie walked through the chilling wind to the bus stop. ‘She didn’t ask us a single question about ourselves. Her own life is so dead miserable that she’s living through her daughter, like a leech. Stage mothers are like that, pushing their children to do things they weren’t able to do themselves. I read about it in a book on psychiatry.’
‘Gosh! The things you read!’ As ever, Jeannie was awed by her friend’s knowledge. ‘I thought my dad watched over us too much, but he’s not nearly so bad as Mrs Lucas.’ She sighed. ‘Poor Benny.’
‘My dad doesn’t watch over us at all. He just trusts us not to do anything stupid.’
‘Does that mean my dad doesn’t trust me and Max?’
‘I’m not sure,’ the budding psychiatrist said thoughtfully. ‘It could be that, or he’s got a power complex. I’d need to know him better before making a prognosis.’
‘I wonder if Mrs Lucas knows Benny came next to bottom of the class? I bet she hasn’t seen her end of term report.’
‘Benny probably didn’t show it her.’ Elaine linked her friend’s arm and squeezed it. ‘Oh, Jeannie! I’m so glad we’re us.’
‘So’m I,’ Jeannie replied with a sober nod. ‘I’ll never complain about my dad again.’
‘You will.’
‘I suppose. I’m still trying to talk him into letting me go to the ice rink on Saturday.’
‘If Benny comes, Mrs Lucas will expect her to be another Sonja Henie.’
‘Who’s Sonja Henie?’
‘A Norwegian ice skater. She won the Olympics and became a Hollywood film star.’
A cheerful fire, much bigger than the Lucases’, blazed in the grate of the waiting room on Orrell Park station when Jeannie arrived to find Max staring gloomily into the flames. He’d been to see Lachlan. They no longer talked about football; it had been replaced by a feverish interest in rock ’n’ roll. The Baileys had a gramophone and Lachlan earned enough from a paper round to buy records; Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and the one and only Elvis Presley.
