The Dressmaker's Daughter

by Nancy Carson

  Scullery tables, scrubbed extra clean for this special day, were put out and laid end to end, and covered with best tablecloths, for nobody wanted to be outdone by their neighbour. There were sandwiches, enough to feed an army, of hot pork and stuffing with the bread dipped in gravy. There was cold ham, beef, cheese, pork pies, salads and pickles. There were apple pies, custard, cream, bread pudding, jelly, and even ice-cream. Huge teapots and urns appeared as if by magic, to provide some liquid refreshment for the hard-working ladies.

  It went on into the night and Ben appeared to be drinking more than Lizzie had seen him drink before. But it only seemed to enhance his good humour. The landlords of The Dog and Partridge and The Sailor’s Return donated a barrel of beer between them, so it was no surprise to note that most of the men and, indeed, some of the women, were already heady from the effects of it. Lizzie realised, of course, that it would be ridiculous to try and keep up with Ben, drink for drink but, as she emptied her glass, so it was filled again when her back was turned. The cumulative effect of all her drinking was having a remarkably relaxing effect.

  Six strong men had carried Ezme Clancey’s prized pianola outside, and it stood on the footpath with a couple of broken slates under one corner to keep it level. She played some of her favourite tunes, while Jesse accompanied her on his mouth organ and others sang. Lizzie giggled when she saw that every time Jesse put the mouth organ to his lips and blew, the black and white mongrel, belonging to another neighbour, howled tunelessly along with the music.

  Children were everywhere, running riot up and down entries, under tables and chairs, exploiting the freedom they acquired while their parents and grandparents applied themselves single-mindedly to the serious business of drinking. Laughter rang through the street as one amusing comment was topped by another, and both Lizzie and Ben found the mirth infectious.

  At a quarter to ten it was not yet dark, but word reached them that a huge bonfire had been lit on the top of Cawney Hill, so they decided, along with Joe and May, to take a look. When they arrived, panting from the steep climb, they were plied with more drink by Neddie Growcott, Maggie Soap’s husband. They fell into conversation with him and Alf Collins, and a pretty young girl Alf was trying vainly to impress.

  But the conversation was going over Ben’s head. Lizzie was by his side and he kept glancing at her, mentally undressing her, thinking about her smooth, firm body, nubile, vibrant beneath her best clothes. He never grew tired of making love to her. While he was at work he would think about the way she held him, the way she kissed him, the way she responded with enthusiasm to his touch. He was entirely besotted. And the alcohol was rendering him lustier than ever.

  He drained his glass. ‘Come on, Lizzie,’ he said, ‘it’s time we went. It’s past our bedtime.’

  ‘Aha!’ Alf exclaimed. ‘It’s your lucky night by the sound of it, Lizzie.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll be his,’ Lizzie laughed. ‘With what he’s had to drink he’ll be falling asleep before his head touches the pillow.’

  ‘Just gi’ me a shout, then, eh?’ Alf suggested, all beer and bravado.

  Ben grinned and took Lizzie’s hand, leaving Joe and May to make their own way back in their own time. When they returned to Cromwell Street the party was still in full swing. They saw Eve chuckling at something Beccy Crump was telling her, and Albert looking on with a superior expression, a picture of upright sobriety compared with everyone else. Jesse Clancey saw them return and straight away handed them fresh glasses of beer.

  ‘Cheers, Jesse,’ Ben said, and raised his glass. ‘It’ll be a wonder if I don’t drown, the beer I’ve drunk today. This’ll see me off.’

  ‘Enjoy it, Ben. There’s ne’er a coronation every day. What d’you say, Lizzie?’

  ‘I say enjoy it, Jesse. But I’m tired now and Ben’s got to be up early for work. He’s on at six.’

  ‘Then let him go to bed. You stop here and have a good time with us.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d let me do that, would you, Ben?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not on your nellie. You’re coming to bed with me. Tell your mother we’re going up.’

  ‘See?’ she said, and shrugged as she waltzed over to her mother.

  Lizzie caught up with Ben half-way up the entry. As soon as they entered by the back door he stopped and pressed her against the wall. His mouth urgently sought hers. The feel of him, thrust hard against her, lit her up, and he recognised the signs.

  ‘Come on to bed afore your mother comes up.’

  She assented wordlessly, following him upstairs in darkness. In their bedroom Ben lit a candle and placed it on top of the tallboy, then began to undress.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘I’d best go up the yard afore I get into bed. I should’ve gone before we came up.’ He disappeared down the stairs again.

  When he returned, three minutes later, Lizzie was as naked as the day she was born, her hair let down. She was erotically performing a belly dance by the light of the candle, in time to the sounds of a march being played mechanically through the pianola outside. She wafted a square of satin, sensually passing it over her breasts and stomach.

  ‘You brazen trollop,’ Ben breathed, incredulous. He watched her for a few minutes, mesmerised. Her lithe movements tantalised him, stoking his already rampant desire. He pulled her to him and, as she fell onto the bed, laughing, wriggling, enjoying her wantonness, he at last felt her firm, satin flesh yielding to him once again. She helped him off with his clothes, making a game of it, and they lay naked, quiet for a few moments, laughing, panting, savouring each other’s damp, perspiring skin, which was causing their bodies to cleave.

  ‘Have I got to dance to get you going again?’

  She went to get off the bed, but he pulled her back. ‘Stay here. Kiss me, Lizzie. For Christ’s sake come here.’

  She kissed him, hungrily, her head swimming with alcohol. But it was with a little gasp of pleasure that she felt him slide into her. Her tongue probed his mouth and she kissed him with passion. She raised her hips and sighed as he probed her even more deeply. Their bodies quickly found their natural rhythm and they were caught irrevocably in the intense, seductive power of the moment.

  Next morning, Lizzie sat up in bed watching Ben at the wash stand getting ready for work. He was naked from the waist up.

  ‘You were randy last night,’ she remarked. ‘I’ve never known you so randy. It was the drink, I suppose.’

  ‘Drink be buggered,’ he replied with a grin from behind his towel. ‘It was you who made me randy. You and your bellydancing.’

  ‘Hmm … I’ll have to try that again then.’

  Chapter 10

  The beginning of October in 1911 brought two significant events to Cromwell Street. First, gas was laid to the remainder of the houses that didn’t already have it, which included number 48. Workmen dug up the pavements and ran pipes to the houses, while others installed piping runs in the downstairs rooms. Unfortunately, the landlord made no provision for extending the luxury to the upstairs rooms, but for the first time, the family could enjoy brightly lit evenings in the scullery and in the front room. Eve was able to read and sew easily, without her usual squinting.

  The second event directly involved Lizzie. Ben was working shifts, which this particular week meant starting at two o’clock in the afternoon. She’d said nothing to him yet, but she was certain she was pregnant, having missed three months. So after a hurried meal at teatime on the Thursday she got ready to visit Dr. Donald Clark. As she emerged from the bottom of the entry, Joe was just about to enter it.

  ‘What-ho, our Lizzie. Where’m you off all decked up in your hat and coat?’

  ‘I, er … I was just on my way to the doctor’s, Joe.’

  At once he looked concerned. ‘Why, what’s up? Is Mother bad again?’

  ‘Mother’s all right. It’s me this time.’

  ‘Am you bad, then?’

  ‘No, not bad exactly.’ She looked at him, half smilin
g, half serious; a knowing look, which he picked up at once.

  ‘You mean you’m pregnant?’

  ‘Shh! Keep your voice down. I’m not certain yet, that’s why I’m on my way to see Donald. Ben doesn’t even know yet. Now I suppose you’ll go and blab it all round the parish before I have a chance to tell him myself.’

  ‘Hey, I can keep a secret, Lizzie. But congratulations.’

  ‘Congratulate me when I know for sure … I’d better go.’

  ‘It’ll be dark soon. Look at the sky. I’d feel easier if you let me walk you there and back. I know you – you’m ever likely to walk down Pitfield Street by yourself, when two bobbies together would think twice about it.’

  ‘Come with me then, if you want.’

  ‘I think I’d better. I’ll just tell May, and get me jacket.’

  He was back with her almost at once, and she heard May call ‘ta-ra’ to him. On the way they talked exclusively about the new gas lighting and agreed that it was a boon. Joe said that May was already planning to have one of those new gas ovens in the scullery, and he agreed it made sense, since they needn’t light a fire every day in the summer for cooking and boiling kettles. They would save a fortune on coal – and the supply of coal was unreliable anyway.

  Donald Clark held his evening surgery in a front room of his elegant house on Dixons Green Road, while patients waited in another room on the opposite side of the hall. When they arrived only one other person was waiting, a familiar old lady dressed entirely in black. She had a whiskery chin and kept chewing her gums and humming. Lizzie and Joe both nodded to her and sat down. Within a few minutes, a bell rang, and the old lady rose to her feet painfully and shuffled across the hall into the room opposite.

  ‘Why haven’t you told Ben you think you’m pregnant, our Lizzie? Don’t he want kids?’

  ‘’Course he wants kids, Joe. It was just something May said a long time ago … That she’d never tell anybody she was pregnant till she was sure. Tempting Providence, she reckoned.’

  ‘By Christ, we’ve been close though. A couple or three times we’ve known she’s been pregnant … but she’s lost ’em at three or four months. She’s pining for a child now. It’s pitiful to see. I dread it every month when she’s due.’

  ‘What’s Donald say?’

  ‘Donald reckons there’s nothing amiss necessarily. Just keep trying, he says. I’ll be honest, our Lizzie, I used to enjoy sex when we did it for pleasure but, nowadays, doing it as if it’s a perishing duty – like a job of work – I ain’t so bloody keen. I’d just as soon have a piece of bread and dripping … It ain’t funny, you know.’

  ‘You are hard done by,’ she chuckled.

  They heard the elderly woman go out, and Donald rang the bell, calling his next patient.

  ‘Wish me luck, then,’ Lizzie said and got up to go in.

  Joe winked. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world, our Lizzie.’

  Lizzie reappeared about ten minutes later with a smile on her face, her cheeks glowing. Donald was behind her and he greeted Joe affably. No other patients had followed them into the waiting room.

  ‘If you were Ben, Joe, I’d be congratulating you now,’ he said. ‘But your time’ll come.’

  ‘Is it right, then? Is our Lizzie pregnant?’

  There was contentment in Lizzie’s eyes. ‘Donald says there’s no doubt. He’s even given me a date.’

  ‘Go on, then. When’s it due?’

  ‘Twenty-eighth of March. And he’ll attend me when I’m confined. I don’t want Annie Soap.’

  ‘Oh, Annie’s all right if there are no complications. If you can stand the smell of her pipe,’ Donald said. ‘But I’ll be happy to oblige, seeing as it’s you, Lizzie.’

  ‘Well if Ben’s on shifts and I have to come and fetch you, you’d best be ready, Donald. And you’d best be sober.’

  Donald’s eyes creased, showing his amusement. ‘Are you trying to insinuate I’m liable to be sozzled, Joe?’

  ‘Well, if you ain’t, it’s only ’cause you spill most of it.’

  ‘Well, at least I shan’t faint when presented with childbirth, Joe. Sozzled, or sober.’

  *

  Lizzie stood on tiptoe, stretching up as high as she could, yet the broken gas mantle remained obstinately out of reach. Warily, because of her condition, she took a chair from the table and dragged it over the rag rug, struggling to position it beneath the gaslight. She expected another torturous pain at any moment.

  By the scant illumination from the coal fire Eve looked on, lips tightened with apprehension. ‘Be careful, our Lizzie. You’ll start yourself lifting that heavy chair. Why didn’t you get Ben to mend it afore he went on his night turn?’

  ‘’Cause he’d gone before I could ask him,’ Lizzie murmured to herself.

  She lifted her skirt, revealing her neat ankles, but it was with little elegance and a womanly grunt that she heaved herself up onto the chair. Any graceful motion was clearly impeded by her nine month belly. Once on the chair, however, she reached up comfortably, detached the flimsy broken mantle and carefully fitted the new one. Eve folded a strip of newspaper into a spill, kindled it in the fire, and handed it to Lizzie. She lit the gaslight and gently pulled the chain on the tap to increase the brightness. The moment it glowed she felt another agonising pain deep inside her. There could be no doubt that her child was on its way.

  She’d known, almost from the morning after the coronation that she was pregnant. Not because she felt ill; she just felt different. It might have been her imagination, but somehow her belly felt more sensitive, more aware of something new and important going on within. Maybe she simply fancied she was carrying a child in those early days, but those fancies turned out to be fact. All the way through she’d kept well. Morning sickness was minimal and lasted but a week or two, and she’d put on little extra weight, though she’d eaten well. Indeed, Ben urged her to eat more, but she ate only what she felt she needed and was content. Her only craving was for pilchards.

  Ben was delighted when she first told him he was to become a father. No man could have been more pleased. Whilst they were courting he’d often wondered, since he was obviously aware that they were at risk, what a child of theirs might look like. So the idea of being a father at last, at the advanced age of twenty-four, appealed, and he was as anxious as Lizzie to meet his child. He had no preference for a boy or a girl – either would be loved – just so long as the child was normal and healthy, and so long as Lizzie came through it all well; for he worried about her.

  Later that night Lizzie sat at the hearth deep in thought, her hazel eyes fixed by images of bizarre faces in the fire’s glimmering flames. As the contractions came and went, doubling her up with agony for long, hard seconds, she pondered the events that had brought this all about nine months earlier: that night of the coronation; shamelessly dancing before Ben by the light of the candle, naked, tantalising him. God alone knew where she’d picked up the idea. Perhaps she’d read about those mysterious belly dancers somewhere; perhaps it was from some of those saucy old photographs of semi-clad girls – from that era twenty-odd years ago flippantly referred to now as the ‘naughty nineties’. She and her mother had found such photographs among her father’s things after his death. Or was it because she was just naturally, sexually creative? If ever her mother knew what she was really like she would have been thoroughly ashamed of her, but, on that memorable night, Lizzie saw with excitement the effect she was having on Ben and remorselessly teased him the more, no less driven by lust than he. Any thoughts of being careful were far distant from Ben’s mind. And Lizzie recognised then that she wasn’t just heady with the effects of her wantonness; she was also too tipsy to care.

  Now she was about to have his child. But, at least, she was married. At least she and her baby would have a home. At least the child would have a father. When she looked back at the days when she and Ben were courting she realised how much at risk she was. It was a wonder she never became pregnant then.
What if she’d found herself carrying a child and Ben had scarpered, never to be seen again, disclaiming all responsibility? She and her mother could never have afforded to keep themselves, let alone a child as well. It would have meant the workhouse. She would have been branded as feeble-minded, shut away for her own good never to emerge again. She knew well enough though, even then, that Ben was an honourable man; that she was safe from that.

  She’d mentioned nothing yet to her mother about the recurring pains, but now they were coming more frequently. A new one gripped her and she winced. She looked up at the black, marble clock squatting in the middle of the crowded mantelpiece, its peaceful tick as gentle and as regular as the heartbeat of her unborn child. It had stood there all her life, announcing the hours and the half-hours for many more years than she had known. They’d lived together, Lizzie and the clock, through her childhood, through illness, through grief, through unbounded joy, sharing both the monotony and the gaiety of life. Through her nightmares and through her daydreams the clock had remained indifferent, constant, reliable, unaffected by the emotions that affected her.

  It chimed half past ten.

  As the pains temporarily receded, Lizzie’s eyes scanned the room. Everything in it was as familiar to her as her own body; every run of brown paint on the doors, every knot and dent in the woodwork, every mark cast into the shining black Coalbrookdale fire grate, every tuft of material in the worn rag rug at her feet, every bubble in each imperfect window pane. And through that window she’d looked out onto the unchanging backyard with the changing eyes of childhood, of youth and of womanhood. She’d seen frost etch its intricate, grey patterns on the panes, raindrops roll down them like tears, the southern sun radiate its summer warmth onto the scrubbed, white table and the cracked linoleum of the floor.

  At the other side of the hearth Eve sat reading a newspaper in her high backed chair, tonelessly whispering every word slowly to herself, as she always did. Lizzie glanced at her, then took the poker to prod the coals into life. A flurry of gold sparks flitted up the chimney in a lick of smoke, then settled back into a hypnotic flickering. Eve peered over her spectacles and their eyes met.