‘No, it’s a lovely day.’ The midnight sky had turned to eggshell blue.
‘It’ll be a scorcher,’ Walter confirmed. ‘It was on the weather forecast.’
‘They could be wrong, couldn’t they?’ Sadie argued for the sake of it. Headstrong Meggie would go her own way.
‘Where are you meeting him?’ The sight of his stepdaughter so excited made Walter smile.
‘Up at the bridge.’
He offered her a lift. ‘Hop in, I’ve got the cab outside. I’ll take you there.’ He also wanted to tour round the neighbourhood to look at recent bomb damage.
Meggie scrambled to find her shoes and handbag while Sadie, her face still closed off, cleared the table. ‘I won’t be back till late, Ma. No need to wait up.’
‘What’s there to do till late on a Sunday?’
Meggie was bubbling, doing everything at high speed. ‘ “That’s fine, Meggie. Have a lovely time!” ’ She rebuked her mother for being a killjoy. ‘It’s his only full day. He goes back tomorrow dinnertime.’
And Sadie had to relent. She kissed Meggie’s cheek and saw her off from the front doorstep. Meggie stepped into Walter’s cab, eager to be gone. Sadie, watching them go up the court onto Duke Street, stood in the long morning shadows cast by the old houses, and came to a decision of her own.
An East Ender by birth, Sadie rarely visited the broad squares and terraces of central London, where the building lacked a human dimension. It was as if they were designed expressly to impress and intimidate and keep at bay the humble visitor who might stray across the river from the courts and alleyways of Southwark. But she made her way undeterred, a slight figure in a grey tailored two-piece, wearing a black hat with a curled brim, rehearsing the speech she would make when she arrived on Gertie Elliot’s doorstep.
Approaching Shaftesbury Avenue via Piccadilly Circus, Sadie left behind the capital’s monumental arches, its imperial statues, splendid galleries and museums, and entered the, to her, equally foreign world of theatreland. Sunday mornings meant empty streets, and space to notice the drabness behind the billboards and hoardings. These buildings wept soot down their carved and convoluted frontages, the pigeons showed them no respect from the crowded ledges, and the clear, bright air painted them in an unflattering light. Shattered windows had been boarded up, roadblocks erected across badly-bombed streets, dust left to lie in doorways, silting up pavements, drifting across wide streets in a flurry of summer breezes. Pages from an old newspaper lifted and blew around Sadie’s ankles. Still, The Lyric, The Apollo, Queen’s soldiered on.
If Sadie had been in two minds when she decided to pay a visit to the Bell earlier that morning, she had been through dozens of twists and turns since then. For one thing, how would she feel if the shoe was on the other foot and Gertie turned up unannounced in Paradise Court? For another, ought she not to have consulted Walter first? Then again, she risked denting Meggie’s sinning happiness by interfering. Gertie Elliot was bound to put her foot down over the harum-scarum plan to get married, and Sadie wouldn’t blame her. Between them, the two mothers should form a counter-movement to steady things down and make the young people behave more sensibly. It was crucial that they didn’t rush into something they might later regret.
Sadie wove in and out of side streets, a frown of concentration on her face. She’d come partly because she wanted to understand what Gertie held against Meggie; was it only that she was too young for Ronnie, or that she knew something about him that set her against the whole romance? Perhaps he had another girl to whom he was promised; something in his past that Meggie knew nothing about. She must go very carefully, Sadie decided. She would introduce herself and open up the general topic of Ronnie and Meggie; see how the land lay before she mentioned the bombshell news.
Bernhardt Court, squeezed between the high, blank wall of the theatre and a row of small shops and eating places, had the same ghost town feel as the rest of the West End on a summer Sunday morning. Blinds were down, windows shuttered. A disconsolate lad shouldering a ladder and wearing faded blue overalls ambled ahead of her, a woman stood in a doorway smoking a cigarette.
It was an easy matter to find the Bell by the sign over the door. The publican’s daughter in Sadie approved of the newly washed leaded windows, the scrubbed doorstep, the polished brass door handles. It was a small but well-kept place, barred and bolted to the world at this time of day, but inviting looking all the same. She peered above street level at the living quarters, where the windows were open and the net curtains shifting in the breeze.
‘Who do you want?’ The boy in overalls had propped his ladder against a neighbouring wall. He asked out of idle curiosity, as a way of putting off whatever he had to do.
‘Gertie Elliot,’ she said quietly. There didn’t seem to be an entrance round the side, or any way round the back. She saw that brewery deliveries were made down a shute to one side of the main door.
The boy swung the peak of his cap back from his forehead and yelled up at one of the open windows. ‘Gert, you’re wanted!’
Sadie took a step back from the raucous cry. It had practically split her eardrums and spoiled her carefully prepared entrance.
‘She’s in,’ the boy assured her. ‘I seen her doing the steps.’
Soon there were footsteps in the tiled hall, the sound of bolts being drawn back. Then the shiny black door opened and a grey head, a lined face with long moustaches peered out.
‘Shankley, tell Gertie she’s wanted, will you.’ The lad spoke with the volume permanently turned up.
Reddening under the old man’s scrutiny, Sadie gave the boy a few coppers to get rid of him. Meanwhile, Shankley opened the door wide, and Sadie could see beyond the man’s small frame into an inner porch and a bar room lined with photographs.
‘Wanted, who by?’ Shankley took his time while Gertie did her face and hair. He knew she wasn’t keen on letting strangers in out of hours. As it happened, he’d called in early to lend a hand, as he sometimes did these days. According to Gertie, Ronnie was worse than useless when he came home, spending all his time with the little girl from Southwark.
‘I’d like to see Mrs Elliot.’ Sadie spoke firmly. She hadn’t come all this way to be turned away by a go-between.
‘You don’t say.’
‘Could you tell her, please?’
‘I could if you give your name.’
‘Sadie Davidson.’
Shankley chewed this over. The name meant nothing, but he was beginning to see something familiar under the smart black hat, behind the formal approach. Take them away, subtract twenty years from the age, and you had a young Meggie.
‘It’s all right, Shanks, ask her in.’ Gertie had been eavesdropping. She came slowly downstairs and stood staring at Sadie. ‘Lock the door, will you. We’ll be in the bar.’ Leading the way, she gestured Sadie to follow.
Though Meggie had set up an image of Gertie in her mother’s mind of a woman young for her age, popular with her customers and game for a laugh, Sadie found she was still startled by coming face-to-face. It was true, her looks placed her well below what must be her real age of forty-something, but she was-not so much young as ageless. To appear young she would have needed an air of vulnerability, an artlessness, which Gertie lacked. In fact, she was all art, from her rich chestnut hair piled high on her head, to her painted lips and nails, her nipped-in waist and high heels. And she was in charge. She showed no surprise, little curiosity, except to appraise Sadie’s own appearance and to decide, no doubt, that she, Gertie, was wearing the better of the two.
‘What will you have? Sherry?’ The landlady offered Sadie a chair at a table by the window.
‘Nothing, thanks. I wanted to have a talk about Meggie and Ronnie, and since they haven’t seen fit to introduce us, I took things into my own hands.’
‘Well, you’re only young once.’ Gertie took an unopened packet of cigarettes from the bar and offered one to Sadie. When she refused this too, she lit up for herself and s
at cross-legged on a high stool, some distance away. ‘You know what they’re like.’
‘I know what I was like at their age.’
‘Exactly. No one has ever been in love before, tra-la!’ Gertie’s wide lips spread into a smile. ‘Tell them it was the end of the world and they wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice.’
‘I don’t know if you know it, but Ronnie is Meggie’s first boyfriend.’ Sadie led things forward. Gertie seemed noncommittal, waiting for her to make the moves. ‘She’s fallen for him in a pretty big way.’
The eyebrows flicked up. ‘It’ll pass, don’t you worry.’
Sadie allowed herself a smile. ‘Try telling Meggie that.’
‘It will, though.’ She’d seen it all before, she gave Sadie to understand. ‘Does Meggie know you’re here?’
Quickly Sadie shook her head. ‘She’d wring my neck.’
‘So, what do you want to know? Ronnie’s taken up with your daughter. There ain’t much I can do about that, is there?’ Gertie held her cigarette at an elegant angle, clicking her long thumbnail against the nail of her third finger.
‘And how serious is he?’
‘Blimey!’
‘No, I need to know.’ She wouldn’t be thrown off course by Gertie’s scorn.
‘He writes her letters, don’t he? How should I know, for God’s sake?’ Sadie’s earnestness irritated her. She reached for a drink of the sherry that she’d offered her visitor. ‘Listen, I take it you’re worried about your girl getting in too deep? But if you take my advice, you’ll let things ride, see if they cool down.’ She wished she’d followed this line herself with Ronnie. Instead, she’d forced his attention onto Meggie all the more by moaning and wailing on.
‘I already tried that,’ Sadie let on. ‘I took a back seat, thinking the usual things; it’s her first time, she’s bound to fall hard, then she’ll pull herself together and take a good look at what she wants out of life.’
‘She will. Give her a chance.’ Meggie hadn’t been the first girl to fall head over heels for Ronnie.
‘The trouble is, it’s the war. It flings them together and pulls them apart. It ain’t natural.’
Gertie’s determination to underplay the strength of feeling between the young couple began to falter. ‘What are you trying to say, that you think this is the real thing?’
Sadie shook her head. ‘It don’t matter what I think. It’s what they think that counts.’
‘Listen.’ Gertie came down from her stool. ‘Have you tried talking some sense into her?’
Sadie sighed. ‘Talking to Meggie ain’t easy. She’s a good girl, but she’s got a mind of her own. What am I supposed to say? Ronnie Elliot ain’t the one for you. I don’t know that, do I? That’s why we needed to have a talk.’
Gertie came and sat at the table, silent and troubled.
‘Well, is he?’
Gertie stared hard. ‘Is that it? You came to check up on Ronnie through me?’
‘For a start.’ By now Sadie wanted everything out in the open. If there were real problems to sort out, she must give Gertie the full picture.
‘And then what?’
‘Meggie let something slip last night, poor girl. She came home in a state, sobbing and hugging me, saying your Ronnie’s asked her to marry him.’
Gertie stubbed out her cigarette with a violent twist. ‘Come again?’
‘He never told you, did he? I didn’t think he had.’ Sadie studied her. ‘It was last night. She was beside herself, otherwise I’d never have got to hear. Ronnie’s talking about the two of them eloping together.’
‘Over my dead body.’ Gertie stood up and paced the floor. ‘Has he gone out of his mind, for God’s sake?’ She noticed Shankley appear at the door in response to her raised voice, and went and closed it in his face. ‘You’re sure about this? She ain’t making it up?’
‘I’m cast-iron certain.’ Once again Sadie was thrown. Gone was Gertie’s hard shell, her tough air of knowing the ways of the world. There was panic in her eyes.
‘You ain’t gonna let her?’ She came and leaned over the table, arms braced, eyes staring. ‘She’s too young, ain’t she? Sixteen—’
‘Seventeen, going on eighteen.’
‘Seventeen. She’s throwing her life away. What about her job?’
‘I don’t know. They haven’t thought it through. All I know is what I’m telling you, they plan to get married.’
Gertie shook her head. ‘Well, you’d better stop her.’
‘What about you?’ A new idea dawned on Sadie. She too stood up. ‘Look, he ain’t got a wife already, has he? It ain’t nothing like that?’ Something, she didn’t know what, had appalled Ronnie’s mother. ‘What’s so bad about Meggie marrying him?’
‘I can’t say. It ain’t right, that’s all. I feel it in my bones.’ She pulled away as Sadie tried to take her by the arm. ‘Tell her Ronnie don’t mean it. His mouth ran away with him, you know how it is.’
‘You mean, he only wants her to think . . .?’ It was Sadie’s turn to be shocked.
‘That’s what men do. They make promises.’
‘And don’t keep them?’ Sadie wanted to fly out of the door to rescue her daughter. ‘Are you saying he’s that sort?’
‘Maybe, maybe . . . he could get himself into that sort of fix. Anyone could.’ Gertie held onto this idea. It put him in a bad light, it was true, but it was possible that Ronnie was playing this game, keeping Meggie dangling on a string.
‘If he’s done that, I’ll . . .’ Sadie was speechless.
‘Yes, and if your girl’s been fool enough to fall for it!’ Gertie’s hardbitten defences were back up. She crossed the room to the door. ‘Let’s keep a cool head. You go home and give her a talking to when she gets back. I’ll try and find out what Ronnie’s up to.’
Sadie collected her hat and bag with trembling hands. She felt sick, she felt a fool. Like Meggie, she’d taken Ronnie’s proposal at face value. Now his mother was exposing it as an age-old trick. Before she left, she gathered her dignity.
‘It’s true Meggie’s only young,’ she told Gertie on the doorstep. ‘But she ain’t a fool. If Ronnie’s stringing her along, she’ll see it in time, believe me. She knows lies when she hears them, and she’s been brought up proper.’ She fixed her hat on angrily. It was more than could be said for some, she implied.
‘Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?’ Gertie closed the door on Sadie. She leaned back against it, felt the blood drain from her face. She’d tried with all her might to keep Ronnie and Meggie apart, but in vain. It was time to think again, before it was too late.
Tommy waited all night in Edie’s empty flat for Morell to show his face, but he was meant to stew in his own juice, it seemed. The hours crawled by. Tommy went from room to room, waiting, listening, until it grew too much to bear. He went outside into a grey dawn light and hunted for him in the streets, with the idea that Morell might have drunk himself into a stupor and was lying senseless in a doorway, or slumped at a table in an all-night speakeasy. For an hour or so he turned up no clues; Morell hadn’t been seen since Walter and George had thrown him out of the Duke. Tommy knew every corner, every back alley of Southwark. They were the haunts of his childhood; the railway embankments, the arches, the cathedral close.
‘Take it easy, Tommy,’ Walter Davidson advised, off-duty but cruising round in his cab. He pulled in at the kerbside and called him over.
‘How’s Edie?’
‘Sleeping, finally. I just called in. Hettie says she had a bad night.’
‘Have you seen Morell?’
‘No, and if I had I wouldn’t tell you.’ Walter recognized Tommy’s shortening fuse. ‘You’ll get yourself killed if you’re not careful.’
‘Bleeding coward.’ Tommy walked on. Walter’s taxi crawled alongside. ‘He batters a woman, but when it comes to a fair fight, where is he?’
‘Winding you up, Tommy. Biding his time.’
‘If you see the swine
, tell him I’m ready and waiting. And I’ll track him down like a dog if he doesn’t come to me.’ Already he planned to get up to Paddington in time for the departure of the Glasgow train. Morell had to be on that, come what may.
‘And help you put your head in the noose?’ Walter gave up trying to talk reasonably. He drove off, shaking his head, while Tommy went on scouring the streets.
By midday, his mood had set into a bitter, reckless determination. The anger died down only after Tommy had managed to eliminate from his mind the picture of Edie lying injured on the bed. He wouldn’t call in to see her until all this was over. What he felt now was a cold desire to get even by using Morell’s own methods. He imagined his fists thudding into that thick jaw, his feet kicking his ribs once he’d got him down.
Coming into Meredith Court at the bottom end by the factory, Tommy decided to scale the embankment for a good vantage point over the rows of terraces below. The railway line ran at roof level; once he’d scrambled up, he would be able to see much of what was going on to either side.
Come on, Morell! He lit up a cigarette and studied the streets. A couple of kids played a skipping game on one corner, a salvage man drove his horse and cart past piles of rubble. Catching sight of a dark figure nip into one of the railway arches over Duke Street, Tommy’s skin crawled with the sensation of cat-and-mouse. Instinct told him the figure was Morell. Without stopping to think, he threw away the fag and raced down the bank, slipping, sliding, once losing his footing as he ran. But when he reached the spot, the arch was empty. It ran back for twenty yards, stacked with old oil drums and petrol cans, ending in a derelict workshop; perhaps a small iron works or blacksmiths. Tommy walked cautiously into the dead end, kicking aside loose bricks, rusting bits of iron and nails. The place smelt damp and disgusting, water dripped from the high arch, one of the workshop double doors hung half open.
‘Morell!’ Tommy’s voice echoed. He’d yelled the name so often he didn’t expect a response.
The door swung wide open, inviting him to enter.
‘Swine!’
He picked up an iron bar from the floor of the yard and ran forward. Morell must be hiding behind the door. Tommy went for the window to one side, smashed it and leapt through. The smell hit him again, a filthy, dark smell of drains and mould. The roof of the workshop ran with dirty water which landed in a swamp of rotting wood and sludge. Tommy whirled round, looking for Morell.
All Fall Down Page 26
