Charity

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘They did wrong,’ she went on, letting anger take her along with it. ‘But what you do to me is a real sin. It’s called incest.’

  The word she’d never dared say openly before floored him. She saw fear in his pale blue eyes and his tongue flickered across his lips like a big slug.

  ‘Get into bed!’ he roared out. ‘Tomorrow I’ll find a job for you, well away from this house so you cannot influence those innocent children further. Another word from you and I’ll strip the skin from your back. I have nursed a viper in the bosom of my family.’

  He turned and stamped down the stairs. The only satisfaction Charity had was hearing him pass the children’s room with an order for them to say prayers for God’s forgiveness.

  It was over an hour before she could even cry. She didn’t dare creep down to see Prudence and Tobias and reassure them they could sleep easily because Father wouldn’t punish them further. She had done all she set out to do; she had protected her brother and sister. But the triumph was hollow.

  Charity knew exactly what sort of job he would find for her. A skivvy for one of his parishioners. Not quality people who would treat her fairly, but cranks like himself who would show suspicion from the outset.

  Desolation engulfed her as she lay sobbing in her narrow bed. Her mother had abandoned her years before. Now she was to lose the children she loved.

  Prudence was so quick and clever, top of her class at school, but how long would it be before she was as dull as her older sister? What would happen to Tobias without someone to sympathise when he fought against his fetters? Would Father suck him into his church, or would he rebel against everything in defiance and end up in serious trouble?

  As for James, what would become of him? Kept in the house all day with a mother who barely looked at him. Slapped and scolded continually. Charity might be able to explain to Prudence and Tobias why she had to go. But how could anyone make a child of two understand why the only person who had shown him love was suddenly gone?

  A foghorn rasped out a warning to other boats down on the river, and it sounded to Charity like an omen of worse things yet to come.

  ‘Help me, God!’ she whispered in the darkness. ‘Do something to help all of us.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Get up!’

  The curt order woke Charity instantly.

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her mother stood over her wrapped in her camel wool dressing-gown, her hair loose on her shoulders. Under the dim overhead light her face was grey and haggard and her mouth twisted with spite.

  ‘Is it morning?’ she said sleepily, glancing towards the window. The curtains were open just enough to see that it was still dark and there was no sound of traffic.

  ‘Satan finds work for idle hands,’ her mother snapped viciously, pulling the bedclothes from her. ‘So you can clean the kitchen and the lavatory and prepare the vegetables for dinner now, before you get any breakfast.’

  She was gone before Charity could speak, clonking down the stairs on shoes with broken backs.

  Charity sighed wearily, got out of bed, hauled on her everyday dress and tied back her hair. Sundays were always interminable.

  It was freezing in the kitchen, with ice on the inside of the window. Her mother had gone back to bed and it was just six o’clock. Aside from two unwashed cocoa cups in the sink, there was nothing to warrant a demand for it to be cleaned.

  The wooden rail hoisted to the ceiling was clear of airing clothes, the plain wood table was scrubbed almost white; even the chairs were tucked under it. But she knew exactly what was expected of her. She must spring-clean it. Every pan must be scoured, every shelf washed and the contents replaced, the cooker stripped down and the floor washed.

  Two hours later Charity had finished. She took some pleasure in the fact that she’d discovered dirt her mother had missed and found mice droppings behind the stove. The room didn’t look much different, but her red hands and the clean smell of polish on the old dresser proved she’d completed her task.

  The potatoes were peeled and placed in a scoured saucepan, cabbage washed and cut up, carrots scrubbed and sliced and now she was laying the table for breakfast.

  ‘Haven’t you lit the stove?’ Her mother came in as Charity filled the kettle, intending to take her parents tea. ‘Get the others up,’ Mother snapped. ‘Then get yourself washed and changed for church.’

  It was clear there would be no respite today. Charity obeyed silently.

  James was soaked right through. It was only recently that he had stopped having a nappy on at night. Charity normally lifted him late at night to use the potty, and no one else had bothered. She stripped off his pyjamas and the sheets and made them into a bundle, then lifting him up into her arms she carried him downstairs to wash him.

  ‘Dirty boy!’ Mother slapped him on the leg as Charity carried him in.

  James howled indignantly, wrapping his arms round Charity’s neck and burying his small face in her shoulder. She took James and the sheets into the scullery, filled the sink with warm water and plonked him into it.

  Although the temperature was well below freezing, he reached out for a cup and spoon on the draining board, the smack forgotten.

  ‘No time for playing today,’ Charity said gently, standing him up so she could wash him. ‘Smelly boy!’

  ‘Not smelly.’ He sat down, making the water splash over the sink.

  She lifted him out and wrapped him in a towel, then took him back into the kitchen to dry and dress him. Mother handed her his clothes without a word.

  ‘Smart boy,’ Charity said as she pulled on his navy blue knitted trousers and matching jumper with a sailor collar. ‘Now mind you don’t get in a mess before church!’

  Mother was cutting the bread, banging the knife down on the breadboard hard to show her displeasure. Charity reached out for a bib and put it round James’s neck, then sat him on a chair.

  ‘Now behave,’ she warned him, filling his bottle with weak tea. ‘I’ve got to get washed too.’

  She hated taking all her clothes off when someone, particularly her father, might walk in at any minute, but this was the routine every morning and had been since she was thirteen when he had accused her of smelling like a polecat.

  She shivered, goosepimples all over her thin body as she soaped herself from head to foot. Standing on a cork board, she wondered if there was anything she could do today that would be right.

  The children sat at the table, subdued and white-faced as they heard Father coming downstairs. Mother had ignored them so far, turning her back on them while she boiled eggs. She banged a fresh pot of tea down on the table just as he came through the door, looking up at him enquiringly.

  ‘Stand for grace,’ he said.

  His voice was calm and measured. He was always more amenable on Sundays, perhaps because he knew it was the one day of the week when he could preach to people who actually wanted to hear him.

  He smiled benignly round at his children, all in their Sunday clothes and with well-scrubbed faces and brushed hair.

  ‘Today in church you must pray for God’s forgiveness. Yesterday you broke one of his Commandments. After dinner today I want all three of you to write all ten of them out, a hundred times. Now Tobias, what is the first one?’

  It struck Charity that her parents’ attitudes were opposing. Why, if Father had decided to forgive them all, was Mother still smarting with anger? But then Mother was always a mystery. She wouldn’t speak of the past, even though she sometimes hinted she’d been used to better; neither did she ever speak of the future. Was it Father who made her so unhappy? Or her children?

  By half-past nine Father was washed and shaved, dressed in his Sunday suit with a clean white collar. Charity stood awkwardly as Mother put the mutton with the potatoes round it into the oven. She spooned some rice into an earthenware dish, added sugar and milk and grated a nutmeg over the surface.

  ‘Don’t stand there staring at me,’ she snapped at Charity as she pu
t the dish on the bottom shelf of the oven. ‘Go upstairs and make the beds, or we’ll all be late for church!’

  Charity stood for a moment in her parents’ room, just looking. Like all the rooms it was devoid of colour or real comfort. A plain wooden bed, a dressing-table holding nothing but a hairbrush, comb and glass receptacle for hairpins, and a battered wardrobe with a full-length mirror. But it was the bed which held her attention, and the clear indentations made by her parents’ bodies.

  All of them had been born in that bed and there was a time when she had considered it a magical place. But now as she bent over to pull the bottom sheet tight and smelt that smell of her father, it was just another shameful reminder of what men, marriage and having babies entailed.

  Once the bed was made and the quilt smoothed over, Charity paused in front of the mirror to look at herself. Her grey Sunday dress was identical to every other dress her mother had made her since she was a small child: a loose smock gathered on to a wide yoke, only this one had a white lace collar and pearl buttons on the cuffs.

  She was probably the only girl at Maze Hill Secondary Modern who preferred wearing her uniform. At least in a navy gym-slip and blazer she looked like everyone else. There was no point in fantasising about buying a full skirt with a can-can petticoat beneath it, pretty pointed shoes, and having her hair permed in a bubble cut when she started work. By Easter she would be in an overall, cleaning up after people she’d like even less than her parents and still with no money.

  In church Charity held James still with one hand and her prayer book with the other, but her mind wasn’t on the prayers.

  Babylon Hall was a grubby little place with a corrugated iron roof and many of the windows boarded up. Father’s religious convictions didn’t allow adornments or comfort, so the chairs were rickety and the hassocks threadbare. Even the altar was covered in a simple white cloth with a plain brass cross.

  Prudence, on the other side of James, was dressed just like Charity, except that her coat, dress and hat with an upturned brim were brown instead of grey. The colour gave a peachy glow to her cheeks and she was putting on that goody-goody face that fooled everyone. Prudence had never had it as hard as Charity. Because she was clever and five years younger, she managed to get out of chores. Sometimes she treated her older sister like a maid and she had precious little loyalty to anyone.

  Toby was fidgeting, his mouth set in a surly expression of boredom. His hands were in his blazer pockets and his long grey socks had fallen down round his ankles. If Father was to notice he would get more punishment than writing out the Ten Commandments. Charity worried a great deal about Tobias. He was cunning, greedy and untruthful. Although some of this was only because he was kept on such a close rein at home, sometimes she saw a ruthless streak in him that she couldn’t find an excuse for.

  There were a great many new faces in church today, but all of them looked remarkably like the regulars: poor, feeble-minded and lost.

  Tobias called the lady in the red hat in the front row ‘Mrs Amen’ because every time Father paused for breath she would shout out ‘Amen’ and wave her arms. There was Mr Beavis who belched continually and went straight from church into the Stag’s Head on the corner, and frail little Miss Wilkes who had paper flowers tucked into her hat-band, along with a dozen more equally sad people.

  Why was it that her father’s rousing sermons only moved people like this? There was not one rich or beautiful person in his entire congregation. Was it just that people further up the social scale didn’t need the support of religion in their lives?

  Father was positively bouncing with good humour at dinner. Not only had the collection brought in nine pounds, twelve shillings and tuppence, but three new followers had all spoken up about their changed lives since they found Christ and Preacher Stratton.

  ‘It’s never too late to turn from wickedness.’ His voice filled the kitchen as he carved the mutton. ‘A man can be in the gutter, even in a prison cell awaiting hanging, but if he offers his heart and life to the Lord, even at that late hour, he will be saved.’

  Charity kept her eyes on her dinner plate. She knew he would move on to the bit about how not a sparrow falling from his nest was missed by the Lord, and she wondered if God had been looking the other way when Father came to her room at night.

  ‘I spoke well today, didn’t I, Mother? Some days my words fall on stony ground, but not today I think.’

  ‘You were very eloquent and rousing,’ Mother replied. ‘Let’s hope the new followers manage to keep your light inside them and resist temptation.’

  Charity found the interchanges between her parents interesting. Their conversations were always so stilted, like two strangers on a bus speaking out of politeness, rather than interest. Charity looked from one to the other, through her lashes.

  Mother wore her Sunday brown wool dress with a cream lace collar. The drab colour made her skin even duller; the shapeless style would have been more suitable to an older fatter woman. Charity had vague recollections that she hadn’t always looked like this. Was this something that happened to most women as they grew older? Or was it a manifestation of her inner unhappiness, just like her imagined illnesses?

  The clock in the parlour struck eight and Charity sighed with relief. It had been an endless day. Sundays always were.

  The wind grew stronger and stronger as Charity lay in bed. It was coming straight from the river with fierce gusts that made Mrs Rumbelow’s washing line next door slap against their yard wall like a whip. Someone further down the street had a tin bath hanging on a nail and it banged like a bass drum.

  Father came home soon after Charity had gone to bed and he seemed in high spirits about something. His greeting to his wife was jovial and he laughed loudly. Perhaps he’d called into the Nelson or the Clipper on his way back from church; maybe tonight they’d put money in his collection box, instead of heckling him. The rumble of his voice lulled her into a comfortable dreamlike state, not sleep exactly as she could still hear the wind, but for once her mind was free of anxiety. When he intended to visit her he always slipped upstairs for a drink first. Maybe the scene last night had frightened him off for good?

  The wind woke her later. Something fell down into the yard at the back with a sharp crack. Charity knelt up on her bed and peered out, but it was too dark to see anything but the big poplar tree at the end of the terrace.

  It was being thrown from side to side, so violently it would surely come crashing down soon. In the house across the backyard there was a light in an upstairs room. Were they listening to the wind too and feeling frightened?

  Then she smelt it. Something acrid and smoky. She pressed her face up against the glass trying to see if it was a chimneypot on fire, but could make out nothing other than the dark outline of roofs against the sky.

  She sniffed again.

  It seemed to be coming from downstairs. Could Mother have forgotten to turn out the paraffin stove in the kitchen and now it was burning the wick?

  Pulling her cardigan on over her nightdress she made her way down to the next landing by the children’s room. The smell was far stronger here and to her horror she saw smoke wafting up the stairs.

  It was pure instinct to run into their room first. The kitchen was underneath it and just those seconds on the landing were making her choke.

  ‘Quick, get up!’ she screamed. ‘There’s a fire!’

  Tobias was out of bed in a trice. Prudence sat up sleepily.

  ‘Come on,’ Charity called again, shaking her sister’s shoulder. ‘Just slip your feet in your shoes and put your cardigan on.’

  She reached into the cot and lifted the still sleeping baby out, wrapped a blanket round him, then looked again at the other two.

  Tobias had a pullover on and was fumbling under his bed for shoes, but still Prudence was sitting in a trance.

  ‘Prudence! Hurry,’ Charity screamed at her. ‘We’ve got to get out!’

  Only then did the girl move, hastily stuffing
her arms into her cardigan, blue eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Come on.’ Charity opened the door, clutching James to her shoulder, but as she turned to go down the few steps to where their parents slept she could see flames licking round the corner of the hall below.

  ‘Mother, Father!’ she yelled. ‘Fire!’

  For a split second she was uncertain what to do. Reason said she must rouse her parents now, but another voice was urging her to concentrate on getting the children out.

  ‘Cor! A real fire!’ Tobias said almost gleefully, pushing round to look closer. Prudence’s wail of fear made her reach out to cuff Tobias’s ear.

  ‘Back to the bedroom,’ she ordered them. ‘We’ll have to get out the window.’

  Nails had been hammered in so the sash would only open a few inches, a precaution against the children falling out. Tobias struggled with it, Prudence began to cry and James was now coughing hard with the smoke coming in.

  ‘Hold James.’ Charity shoved the baby into Prudence’s arms, picked up a cricket bat of Tobias’s, and whacked the glass.

  ‘Let me do it.’ Tobias stepped forward when Charity failed to break it. He took a few steps back, ran at the window and crashed the bat hard into the middle. The glass was shattered, but still holding together. Using the bat like a battering ram, Tobias thumped again until there was a hole big enough to climb through.

  Charity could hear the fire now, even over the wind and the tinkling, falling glass. It was a roaring, whooshing sound that seemed to be coming closer with every second.

  ‘You first, Tobias.’ Charity quickly scooped up an eiderdown and draped it over the spiky shards left in the window frame. ‘On to the kitchen roof and I’ll pass James down to you. Once you’re down shout to Mrs and Mrs Rumbelow for help.’

  He wriggled through the hole and jumped the eight feet to the roof below effortlessly, as Prudence let out a howl of terror.

  ‘Is the fire in the kitchen?’ Charity shouted down, ignoring her sister for a moment. Tobias showed up clearly in the darkness in his striped pyjamas, his blond hair ruffled by the wind.