by Marie Joseph
‘You do?’ Lottie looked doubtful.
‘I’ll have a word with him first.’ Dora got up and went to get the ironing board from the cupboard. ‘I must get on, or you won’t have a clean blouse to wear in the morning. Why they have to have a box-pleat down the back I don’t know. They’re a real sod to get right.’
‘I wish you’d been my mother,’ Lottie said, going pink in the face and rushing from the room.
Leaving Dora reaching in her apron pocket for the handkerchief again.
Amy told Dora that Charlie had once asked her to have a quiet word with his daughter.
‘A birds and bees word?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you?’
‘No. I never got the chance. I haven’t seen much of Charlie lately.’
‘I wonder why?’ Dora said dreamily, not caring one way or the other.
Charlie had started persuading her to stay on and have a meal with them instead of going home at six o’clock. ‘It’s only right when you’ve prepared such magnificent food. I bet the King wouldn’t turn his nose up at this hotpot,’ he’d said.
‘We’re having red pickled cabbage with it,’ Lottie had told him, and they’d sat there, the three of them, tucking in and laughing, like a proper family.
‘Wrap yourself round that, Charlie,’ Dora had said. ‘It’ll put hairs on your chest, that will.’
‘He’s only got one at the moment,’ Lottie confided, shaking the HP sauce over her plate.
‘An’ I knot that one so it can’t escape,’ said Charlie, setting them off laughing again.
Amy could hardly bear to see the shining happiness on Dora’s face. If Mrs Battersby was right, and Wesley was looking fed up, then he and Clara weren’t getting on with each other – so Clara would go back to Charlie, Dora would leave her job and would never ever again look as she was looking at this moment. As though all her ships were coming into harbour at once. She would be back to running from one job to another. She would shrivel up again, become exhausted and ill. She would probably die. It wasn’t fair! Amy felt like crying.
‘Life itself isn’t fair,’ her father had told her years ago. ‘Once you’ve learnt that lesson you’re halfway there.’
‘I’m making spotted dick pudding tomorrow,’ Dora was saying. ‘Charlie’s had to let his belt out two notches.’
The next day Wesley came without his key, which he could have sworn was in the glove compartment of his car. Where the hell was Amy? He stood fuming on the pavement for a good five minutes before going back to his car to sit drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
Obviously in a paddy, Mrs Rakestraw decided, watching him through her lace curtains.
‘Your husband was here, but I told him you always went round to your mother’s on a Friday.’ Mrs Rakestraw all but fell off her doorstep in her haste to pass on the news to Amy. ‘He was sat in his father’s car for ages before he drove off. How is your mother? She’s a bad colour lately, isn’t she? I haven’t seen her in Sunday school for a while. Has Mr Dale been on his holidays? I saw him coming past with a case not half an hour ago. He’s caught the sun on his face. It’s as brown as a pickled walnut.’
13
‘I KNEW YOU were back because Mrs Rakestraw told me,’ Amy said. ‘She saw you, and I bet she’ll be watching us now. I think she fears the worst.’
‘She has the picking eyes of an old woman who sleeps badly,’ Bernard said.
‘Or of one who strains them peering through her lace curtains.’
He looked so different with his brown face and his open-necked shirt with the collar laid neatly over his sports jacket that Amy couldn’t resist telling him.
‘Mile upon mile of open moorland. Wild flowers, running streams, the sound of birdsong, heather-clad hills . . .’ Bernard shook his head. ‘No one where I come from would believe it. To the majority of Londoners, Lancashire is all mills and muck and rows of terraced houses, flat caps and whippets, flat vowels, and men who would kill if you insulted their football club.’
‘That last part’s true,’ Amy said.
They were walking towards the centre of the town and, because it looked like rain, Bernard had brought an umbrella with him. Already Amy was calmed by his nearness, warmed by his solicitude, happy to be with him, and never mind who saw them together. Outside the Majestic Cinema they stopped to stare at a framed still of Greta Garbo, bare-shouldered and glamorous, and Bernard said how glad he was that Amy had left her eyebrows where they were.
‘Wesley came today.’ Amy dragged her feet a little. ‘But I wasn’t in.’
‘Mrs Rakestraw told you?’
She nodded. ‘I gave his mother a piece of my mind while you were away. She doesn’t think that Wesley is at all happy at the moment.’
‘And that bothers you?’
They were on the Boulevard in front of the railway station. Behind them Queen Victoria stood on her plinth staring sternly at the soot-blackened buildings.
‘I can’t be glad he’s unhappy,’ Amy said at last. ‘I know I don’t want to see him or talk to him, but you can’t live with someone for all those years and then just cross them from your mind.’ She bit her lips. ‘I suppose it’s because he dominated me so much. I feel I’m just waiting for him to order my life again, even though I know I would never let him influence me again.’
Bernard was very pointedly ignoring her. ‘Look at the semicircular arches and triangles of that building across there.’ He pointed with the umbrella. ‘Some people find Victorian architecture pretentious and over fussy, but I don’t.’
‘I just wish I didn’t feel so married! I wish I was better at casting off inhibitions. I wish I didn’t always feel guilty – even when I’m as innocent as a flamin’ newborn lamb!’
‘All that detail in stone symbolizes an age to me when wealth and the flaunting of it wasn’t considered to be a sin. I would quite like to have been a mill owner going off to exploit my workers for all my worth.’ He grinned down into Amy’s serious face. ‘Wearing a red carnation in my buttonhole.’
They walked through the cathedral grounds, and because no one was about Amy took his arm, pressing it into her side.
‘The Inn of the Lord,’ she said softly. ‘That’s what this church was called hundreds and hundreds of years ago.’
‘The Inn of the Lord. I like that,’ said Bernard. Then he brought the conversation down to earth by saying that he hoped the war he could see coming wouldn’t put a stop to the huge building project planned for the cathedral.
‘I refuse to discuss the possibility of another war.’ Amy withdrew her arm and began to walk more quickly. ‘I won’t look back. Not at anything. From this moment I have no past, not even a single memory. I have decided that I only began from the time I’ve known you.’
Bernard took her hand. ‘But you are your past, lassie. Just as I am mine. What has happened to us has made us the persons we are. The sad things, the glad things – we measure what is to be by them. Can’t you see that?’
‘I’d like to tell you about my babies some day,’ Amy said suddenly. ‘Because they are part of me.’ She hesitated. ‘As Anna is part of you.’
As he left her at her door she told him, ‘I think I know what I’m going to do. I think that time is almost here.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said, walking away from her with the rolled umbrella looped over his arm. Like a city gent, Amy thought fondly.
Ethel would never have believed that Wesley could speak to his mother like that. Not after the way she’d always thought the sun shone out of him, not after the way they’d paid for him to go to the Grammar School. To give him a place in the sun, as Phyllis had been fond of saying.
‘All three shops will be yours eventually, dear,’ Phyllis told him. ‘But Mr Thomson thinks . . .’
‘Mr Thomson? Harold po-faced Thomson? I might have known. Father primed him well, didn’t he? Can’t you just see the old codger taking instructions from Father, giving advice to Father? He
never liked me.’
‘Their friendship would have nothing to do with anything legal. You know better than that, Wesley.’
‘Stop playing God! Try and see things my way for a change!’ His face twisted into a sneer, and when Ethel moved towards the door he called her back. ‘Listen well, Ethel! You may learn something about this family that will surprise you.’ He rubbed his finger and thumb together, in what Ethel thought of as a very vulgar motion. ‘It’s cash I need, Mother, not bloody promises.’
As he leaned over Phyllis’s chair she cowered back as if she was afraid he might be going to hit her, and for one heart-stopping moment Ethel had thought the same. She looked at his features contorted into ugliness with the force of his emotions and she shrank back herself from the popping hatred in his eyes. In that moment she decided that it was just possible, probably even more than possible that her cousin’s blue-eyed boy might not be quite right in the head.
‘Two hundred to the church extension fund!’ he shouted. ‘Two hundred to the Oddfellows and various other charities, and the same to my wife. Only she isn’t my wife now, is she? The only wife I have lives with me in two dreary rooms with packing cases instead of furniture, a spluttering gas fire and a camp bed that wasn’t even good enough for the Scouts’ last jumble sale. I was sure,’ he yelled, stabbing his finger at his mother, ‘that things would improve for me from now on. I promised Clara that we’d move. I promised and promised her that we’d move. Even before Father died I was sure he’d come up with a loan, but instead of that he hands over my house to Amy!’
To Ethel’s horror he threw himself down on his knees by his mother’s chair and laid his head in her lap. Ethel stood transfixed with disgust.
‘Mother, darling Mother . . . I have to get my hands on some money now. She’ll leave me if I don’t get her out of that terrible room.’ His voice was a drawn-out wail. ‘It’s diabolical what my father’s done to me. He’s deliberately left me out – left me skint, penniless, humiliated me.’
‘The Preston shop could be a little gold mine.’ Phyllis’s hand was on her son’s dark head in a gesture of motherly concern. Ethel held her breath. Couldn’t she see that Wesley was play-acting? Just as he’d play-acted all his life. If she fell soft and gave him money or made promises, Ethel would walk out. Or say something she might regret.
‘How do you know the Preston shop could be a little gold mine?’ Slowly Wesley raised his head.
Like a snake preparing to strike, Ethel thought.
‘I thought you never discussed business with my father?’ Wesley stood up. ‘He told you I wasn’t running the shop properly, didn’t he? He suspected me of filching part of the takings. Didn’t he?’
Ethel thought that Phyllis looked just like Queen Mary sitting there, upright in her chair with her waved hair as perfectly ridged as corrugated cardboard. Only a slight twitch beneath her left eye betrayed her agitation.
‘I’m beginning to think that a lot of what your father kept from me was for what he imagined to be my own good.’ Phyllis met Wesley’s angry gaze unflinchingly. ‘Because he knew I would be more than likely to take your side against his. That’s something I’m beginning to realize day by day.’
‘But my father is dead! He’s influencing you from the grave!’ Wesley snatched up his trilby from the chair by the door. ‘I’ll come back when you’re feeling better, when you’re seeing things the way they are.’ He glared at Ethel, standing harmlessly by the door. ‘I don’t suppose you could . . .?’ He brushed past her, almost knocking her over. ‘Oh, God, forget it. You’re two stupid women who can’t see further than the ends of their noses!’
‘I think we’ll have a little drinkie, dear.’
Ethel thought that Phyllis needed something to pull her together. She seemed to have shrunk, to have shrivelled to half her size, to have aged twenty years, but already she was enjoying the sherry, even though she was drinking it far too quickly. It was the first time Ethel had seen her cousin looking vulnerable and the sight choked her up.
Plunging in where angels should have been terrified to tread, she said: ‘Wesley had no right to speak to you like that. He’s not brought you a lot of joy, has he? No, you’ve not exactly had an easy life, Phyllis. I mean to say, I know Edgar was a good husband, but he was wrapped up in his shops, either working on his papers when he was at home or asleep in his chair.’
‘He and Wesley never saw eye to eye, Ethel. I thought Edgar was too strict with him, and he thought I was too soft.’ Phyllis held up her empty glass, narrowed her eyes as if examining it for flaws. ‘You don’t understand, dear. How could you be expected to when you’ve never had a child? Never even had a man.’
Battle lines were drawn. Ethel wasn’t going to stand for a nasty remark like that. ‘Everybody knows you spoiled him rotten. The whole family knew.’
‘One of us had to! What chance did the boy have being forced to marry when he was only just twenty?’
‘How old was Amy?’
‘Still at school. Seventeen.’
‘She had two stillbirths, didn’t she?’
‘And more than one miscarriage. Her mother revelled in the details, but her sort would.’
‘Her sort?’
‘Her class, Ethel. You know full well what I mean.’
‘I like Amy’s mother.’ When Ethel raised her voice it came out as a squeak. ‘From the first time I saw her it was like calling to like. The one in the pinny, always in the kitchen – let’s send for Ethel – just as I suppose it was always Amy’s mother with her hands in hot soapy water when a dirty job needed doing.’
Second sherries had been poured and were being knocked back.
‘I wish I hadn’t been so sharp with Wesley.’ Phyllis was feeling awful about it, wishing Ethel hadn’t been there as a witness. And why was she imbibing when it was common family knowledge that Ethel could get tipsy on a spoonful of cod-liver oil?
‘Does Amy know that Wesley was expelled from school?’ she was saying now. ‘From nursery school? He had a vicious streak in him right from the beginning.’ Another sip, and worse was to come. ‘Does Amy know he was sacked from his job on the railway for being caught with his fingers in the till?’
Phyllis’s thin mouth was slack with shock, but Ethel hadn’t finished yet. Draining her glass, her head thrown back like a Russian general at his regiment’s annual dinner, she hurled it into the fireplace.
‘You may have slept with a man, Phyllis Battersby, but, by God, I bet you’ve never let rip enough to do that!’
Clara was upstairs in the room that had once been her bedroom before she left Charlie. She was waiting for Wesley to pick her up and in the meantime she was packing a few things into the small case she’d brought with her.
She had no fancy to go downstairs to where Dora Ellis was queening it in the kitchen. The spare little woman, seen close to, was better looking than Clara remembered. No oil painting, but fuller in the face, rosier, younger somehow. Perhaps she’d had a perm? Clara leaned towards the triple mirrors on the dressing table to pout her lips and fluff out her hair.
‘Dora told me you were here.’ Lottie drooped against the wall, lank-haired, ink-stained, school tie askew. ‘Don’t you get tired of looking at yourself in the mirror? Nothing’s changed as far as I can see.’
‘Oh, Lottie . . . Lottie . . .’ Clara picked up her case. ‘I’m going in a few minutes and goodness knows when I’ll see you again. Must you hate me as much as all that?’
Lottie closed the door and slitted her eyes in a way that made Clara wince. ‘Why do you keep coming back? There’s no room for you here. You’re not wanted.’
To Clara’s amazement the remark was like a stab through her heart, hurting for a second then flaring into instant anger.
‘You don’t need to worry, Lottie. I won’t be coming back. This is the last time, I promise.’ She snatched up a black velvet theatre coat from the bed and looped it over her arm. She motioned to Lottie to let her pass, then something in the girl
’s expression held her still. ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself say, ‘I’m sorry – sorry – sorry.’ Then she was running down the stairs, calling out to Dora that she was going, taking a letter from her pocket and putting it on the hall table, crashing the heavy front door behind her.
As soon as she got into the car she could see that Wesley’s anger matched her own. He drove badly, wrestling with the gears, crouching over the steering wheel. Already he was regretting speaking to his mother the way he had. He would ring her up after they’d eaten, sounding so apologetic, so contrite she’d be forced to laugh. Tomorrow he’d send flowers, masses of them. Clara needn’t know. She wouldn’t understand.
Feeling more relaxed, he reached for her knee and squeezed it. ‘We’ll be out of the flat very soon now, darling. Things are moving slowly, too slowly I admit, but you know how long these things take.’
A glance at Clara’s set expression told him that she didn’t know and wasn’t prepared to understand. He frowned, the fear creeping towards him again. She seemed to have distanced herself from him lately, to have moved a pace or two away, to have stopped listening properly to what he was saying. Almost as though she wasn’t interested.
‘I’m not going back there again,’ she said at last, breaking the silence growing and lengthening between them. ‘Charlie’s got quite a cosy set-up going for him, with Amy’s friend in his kitchen, and like as not in his bed.’
‘No chance of that.’ Wesley laughed and swerved right, frightening the life out of a woman driving a little Austin Seven. ‘Dora Ellis has been past it for years. She’d run a mile if a man snapped his braces at her.’
‘Is that meant to be funny?’ Clara was wetting a piece of hair and bringing it forward on to her cheek. ‘You’re grinning like a butcher’s dog.’
She was gone from him again, into some far-off place where he couldn’t reach her. Feeling murderous again, Wesley pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator.
A temper like Wesley’s needed watching, Ethel told herself as she got her things together in Phyllis’s guest room. But she ought not to have said the things she had, unforgivable things that Phyllis would never forget. Folding a lock-knit nightdress, she laid it in the bottom of her case. The drink had done its worst, leaving a lump where her stomach used to be, so she sat down on the bed for a while, holding her manicure set in one hand and her furry slippers in the other. Her hair was slipping down at the back, but what did it matter?
