The Doorstep Child

by Annie Murray

  ‘Like me.’ Evie knew she would not tell Jack the real reason she had to leave home. She spoke shyly to him at first, but right from the beginning she knew she could be honest – except for that one thing. Not about Julie, who was locked tight in her heart.

  From the very start it felt as if the two of them, together, were a fortress against the world. She could face anything with Jack.

  And he raised her up, gave her new ideas and more ambition.

  ‘Why’re you working in that factory?’ he asked her. ‘You’re clever, you are. You could be doing something better than that. Work in an office, get some training. The more you know, the better you get paid – and you can go anywhere then. Get a job in Canada, not just stay stuck in this bloody place. Mr Richards, my gaffer, he says I could get a job over there no problem. I know all about the machines, see – pumps and that, for the oil. They’re sitting on a gold mine over there and there’s people going over in droves. I want to see the world, I do, not just stay stuck here.’

  ‘You really want me to come as well?’ She asked this when they had been together a few months. She was wondering if he meant to go off and leave her, like Ken had.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jack sat forward and gave her his intent look. Once again they were sitting in a coffee bar. ‘That’s if you’re up for it. In a year or two. Everything’s opened up. We could have a much better life over there.’

  With his encouragement, she went to work in an office. She had imagined herself as an office girl, learning to type, even doing shorthand, but she got herself taken on as a trainee comptometer operator with Midland Red buses in the Bullring. At first she was afraid she would not be able to keep up, but the work was all right, though punching numbers in made her fingers ache. But she soon got used to it and liked most of the other girls she was working with, rows of them in front of the big machines.

  She lived and breathed Jack. When they parted, she felt an actual physical ache of separation and counted down the hours until they were back together again. She loved his energy, the way he was full of schemes, full of enthusiasm for her. Whenever they were together they ended up in each other’s arms, wrapped close together, kissing and touching. She loved stroking the hair at the nape of his neck, because it felt soft, vulnerable, like a baby’s. But even though she so often felt weak-legged with longing for him, she was very strict.

  ‘I’m not going the whole way, not if we’re not married,’ she told him.

  They had been walking out for nearly three months when they had this conversation, on a warm May evening, in Cannon Hill Park. They were wrapped round each other as usual and Jack had whispered, ‘You’re driving me mad, I fancy you so much. I’m getting so I can’t think of anything else.’

  When she drew back and gave her answer, she saw Jack look startled. She realized he was used to girls falling into his arms, because Jack could charm anyone into doing anything he wanted. But this time, even though she was crazy about him, she wanted to be sure.

  ‘What if you got me in the family way? What then?’ An ache began in her throat. All the sadness of the memory, of loss. She wanted him to know, to understand how it felt, but she knew somehow that he never could.

  ‘Oh . . . yeah.’ He laughed. She did not like him laughing – not about this. He put his arm round her shoulder and they walked along, beside the water and the preening geese. He seemed to be thinking. After a while he said, quietly, ‘They should never’ve had kids.’

  ‘Who? Your mom and dad?’ She was glad he had spoken because she had wondered, with a rising panic, whether he was angry.

  ‘Yeah. Dad any road.’

  She wasn’t sure what he was trying to say and, in any case, Jack always got very moody when he mentioned his dad, so she brought the conversation back to what was really on her mind.

  ‘I love you, Jack.’ She looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘But I’m scared. I don’t want to be left with a baby. I’ve got no one else but you.’

  ‘Who said anything about leaving?’ Jack said. ‘I’m nothing without you, wench. Look . . . what if we was to get married?’

  ‘Married? Oh Jack! D’you mean it?’ She was so excited, so amazed, she was jigging up and down in his arms. Everything was perfect. This was everything she had ever wanted! ‘Oh, d’you mean it? It’s so soon!’

  ‘Yeah. I do.’ He ducked down suddenly and was perched on one knee. ‘Miss Evie Sutton, will you marry me?’

  ‘I will,’ she said solemnly, though her grin was already spreading wide, a huge excitement fizzing inside her. ‘Yes Jack. Course I will!’

  They made preparations. Since Evie was living in Balsall Heath they decided to marry there, where they could most easily have the banns read. Neither of them went to church but Jack told her that if he was anything he was Church of England and Evie thought she must be the same.

  The question of her family haunted Evie at this time – both Jack’s and her own. When she told Mrs Hardy she was getting married and would soon be moving on, her landlady smiled in a pained way, trying to be nice while obviously worried that this was all being done in such haste.

  ‘Have your family given their consent?’ she asked. ‘You are underage, aren’t you, dear?’

  Until this moment, this had not crossed Evie’s mind. Panic filled her. Did this mean she could not marry Jack without going home and asking Mom and Dad? She and Jack were hoping to marry in October, by which time she would only be nineteen. She could not bear the thought of having to wait another two years until she was twenty-one. The thought of going home gave her a twinge of regret now and then. If only she had a nice family. If only things were different . . . But she knew straight away that she was not going back.

  As if blown there on her thoughts, while she was in town, dreaming of clothes for her wedding, she saw a familiar figure appear before her one day in Grey’s department store. Evie was mooching about in the women’s clothing department, immersed in the fantasy of a new dress and soft underwear and new stockings for her wedding day. She planned to spend the rest of Ken’s money – her pay-off. That was still how she thought of it, with a bitter, enraged feeling which almost made her want to throw it away. She didn’t need their hush money! But she knew that was stupid. Ken’s life had presumably gone on as it would have done if none of it had happened, unperturbed except perhaps for a few guilty pangs. And Ken would have felt guilt, she knew. He was a nice, dutiful boy. There would be these few painful shadows of guilt in a blameless life. She, on the other hand, had been cleaved apart, mind and body and spirit, moulded into someone else, who knew the grief that only the loss of a child could bring. She had earned that money. After all she had lost, she was damn well going to have something nice.

  She was looking through a rack of pretty dresses when someone caught her eye across the racks of clothing. The store was crowded but the person leapt into her attention, even though she was turned to face the other way. All Evie saw was thick, shoulder-length hair, sage green wool across the shoulders, a flick of the head, but she knew almost by a second sense that it was Shirley.

  Her heart began to pound. Her first instinct was to run across. Shirl! It’s me! Of anyone in her family, Shirley was the person she would have been gladdest to see. Shirley, the one who had been all right to her – sometimes. She was suddenly swelling inside with curiosity. How was everyone? Rita and Conn and the babby? Mom and Dad? And the neighbours – Gary and Carl, Mr and Mrs Waring. All that had been familiar, had been her home.

  Tugged by a longing for something she belonged to, however much it caused her pain, she hurried after Shirley, who was moving away towards the main doors. In those moments she wanted her mother, her sisters, her old childhood life; wanted everything to be new and fresh, for them to come to her wedding, to wish her well and forgive her, to love her, love her . . .

  Shirley disappeared. It broke the dream. Other thoughts rushed in. The day Mom threw her out, Shirley had not intervened to help. Never said a word. And Rita would certainly not have done. T
hey did not care for her, did not love her and never had. Mom was mean and nasty and had tutored her sisters into being the same. She stopped abruptly, full of the grief of reality.

  ‘Oi, watch it,’ a voice said behind her.

  ‘Sorry.’ Evie stepped aside, taking refuge in a rack of winter coats. She wanted to break down and howl, right there in Grey’s, to weep from the depths for all she had never had. Could it never be better? Could she never have that love, not ever in her life?

  ‘Tell ’im your parents are dead,’ Jack said. ‘That’s what I’d do.’ Jack’s age was not a problem, only hers.

  After deciding to get married, they spent the early autumn making hurried plans. They met almost every evening, walking out or in pubs, depending on the weather. Tonight was a wet September evening and they were back in the Old Mo again in Balsall Heath.

  ‘Would you?’ Evie said doubtfully. They were on a bench, backs to the wall, and she pressed her shoulder against his, wanting to be close to him, to be with him at all times. He was all she had, but she didn’t mind that, so long as she had him. ‘It’s such a big fib, though. S’pose he finds out?’

  ‘He won’t,’ Jack said confidently. ‘Why would he bother? Any road, you could tell him you’re in the family way – he’ll marry you like a shot then.’

  ‘Jack! That’s another lie!’ she laughed, though with a tremor of excitement at hearing him talk like that about the thing she most wanted, as though it was what he wanted as well. She linked her arm through his. ‘It seems bad, all these fibs, and to a vicar as well.’ She looked into his face. ‘Are you going to ask your mom and dad? To the wedding, I mean?’ She wanted, really, a proper wedding, not this hole in the corner thing of theirs. She wanted someone to be glad for them.

  Jack almost choked on his beer. ‘Mine? Not on your life! All I want is to get far enough away from them, and this flaming place, that I never have to see any of them again. I wanna start again, have a house, a new life, not this miserable bloody tat over here. It’s different there. You can be someone else.’

  Be someone else. More than ever before, Evie felt herself leap and catch at the string of this idea. Start again. A new person, a new life, married to Jack. Seeing Shirley had left her raw, aware suddenly how close she was to her old home, terribly close, yet with an agonizing distance gaping between her and them. She wanted as much distance as possible – from the risk of running into them, from the feelings it gave her.

  ‘Oh, let’s, Jack! Let’s go. You’re so clever, you could do anything. We can start all over again – just us, away from everyone.’

  Thirty-Two

  ‘Oh my God!’ Evie gripped Jack’s hand, terrified but excited as the plane launched itself from the runway and her stomach turned in a queasy somersault. ‘How on earth is it going to stay up in the air?’

  ‘Aerodynamics,’ he whispered enigmatically, tearing his fascinated eyes away from the window to look at her for a second. She wondered if he knew, really. Maybe he did. Jack knew a lot of things. She didn’t really care, so long as it was going to be all right, leaving the ground, leaving everything.

  She swallowed hard, trying to fight off the nausea rising in her, and leaned round to look with him, both watching as they climbed through a swirling mist, up into sunlight, the clouds spread below like a frozen, woolly sea. And after a time, once the Boeing had lifted higher and there was nothing much to see, Evie sat back to admire the air hostesses in their blue uniforms. They’re so glamorous, she thought wistfully. I wish I’d done something like that. But she knew she couldn’t have. She certainly didn’t know anyone from Ladywood who had ever done anything like that.

  Evie had imagined at first that they would cross the Atlantic by ship. That was what you always heard about when people went over there, a sea journey taking days and days, like a voyage in a storybook.

  ‘Oh no, we don’t need to do that,’ Jack told her, with the usual confidence he displayed in his knowledge of everything, especially everything new and fast. ‘We can fly now. Just think of that, wench. You and me, flying!’

  And now the day had arrived, so strange and dreamlike still, and here they were, soaring above the ground, leaving everything they had known all their lives, except each other. And except . . . She laid a hand on her stomach for a moment and gave a secret smile.

  Sitting back, she closed her eyes, drained of energy. After the weeks of preparation, the scrimping and saving, the planning and dreaming and excitement of heading into the unknown; after the journey to London to queue at Canada House; after the job applications and Jack being offered work, and all of it seeming like a dream from which they would one day wake – now it had begun at last. They were moving to this new country, this new life, in Rosette, Alberta, Canada.

  Already things felt new. She was wearing the outfit she had bought to travel in – a pink skirt, in crimplene because it didn’t crease, a white short-sleeved blouse in broderie anglaise, a pale blue cardi and white shoes. She lifted her right shoulder and rubbed her cheek against the cardigan’s softness for reassurance. She had had her hair cut, styled with a deep parting at one side, brushed across her forehead. The finishing touch was a pink lipstick to match the skirt. She wanted to look her best to arrive in a new place.

  Unfortunately, she was not feeling her best. Pray God her acid stomach would settle down later in the day.

  She kept hold of Jack’s hand because she needed to; his strong fingers were linked loosely with hers, as if he did not. Between us, she thought, we’ve hardly a soul to say goodbye to. Carol had promised to write and she knew she would miss her and her family. But apart from her . . .

  Julie . . . I’m leaving her behind. It was a second of sheer grief, that she could not be near wherever her little girl was, as if in moving away she was betraying her. But that’s stupid, she told herself. Julie doesn’t even know who I am – and I don’t know where she is. Evie could not watch over her, even if she did think of her always, several times a day, every day . . . And knew that she always would.

  She had to stop thinking like that. Her new life was beginning – with Jack. She thought about how her life would have been if she had not met him. Would she still be living with Mrs Hardy? It felt too miserable to dwell on. And now, though she had not said anything to Jack yet, she knew that there was this other reason for her feeling so exhausted, aside from all their preparations for the journey. She knew the signs – the queasiness, the way things smelt and tasted stronger than usual . . . Every time she thought of the new life inside her – and she was almost certain of it now – a thrill of excitement went through her.

  They had married in a church in Smethwick. The vicar, an old man with a grey bush of hair and an air of having seen it all before, showed no interest in her age and married them with no objection when they said they lived within the parish boundary.

  ‘I reckon he thought you was over twenty-one already,’ Jack said as they emerged from the vicarage, hand in hand and giggling.

  Evie asked Carol Rough to be her bridesmaid. Her brother Tony was Jack’s best man and apart from them and a handful of work friends, there wasn’t anyone else to come to the wedding. The Roughs invited Evie to stay the night before the wedding. She took her leave of Mrs Hardy that day, as she and Jack were to move into their rooms in Smethwick.

  ‘Well, dear,’ Mrs Hardy said, stiff with disapproval. ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

  ‘Thanks for everything, Mrs Hardy,’ Evie said. ‘I’m sorry to leave.’ This was not true at all. Mrs Hardy seemed very disapproving of her getting married. And it’s none of her business, Evie thought.

  So Evie bunked up with Carol on her last night as a single woman in the Roughs’ little terrace, grateful to Mrs Rough for mothering her and to all the family for their kindness.

  ‘Dad’s mate Ron’s going to run us all over to Smethwick,’ Carol said. ‘And I can do your hair for you, help you get ready, like.’

  Carol was a homely soul but she was very good
with hair and her own mousey waves always looked nice. At first light she sat Evie on a wobbly wooden chair in front of her mirror in the tiny bedroom with its big dark cupboard and chest of drawers. Skilfully she arranged Evie’s hair into a stylish pleat. Evie tried not to wince as she felt the scrape of Carol’s comb against her scalp and her locks were pulled this way and that. Mrs Rough popped her head round the door every so often, still with her curlers in, and said, ‘Oh yes, that’s nice, Carol,’ and other encouraging remarks. Each time, she brought in a gust of cigarette smoke and frying bacon and music from the telly.

  ‘There you go,’ Carol said once she was satisfied, administering hairspray all over it so that they both coughed. ‘You look a treat.’

  ‘Oh,’ Evie said, turning her coiffured head this way and that, gazing in wonder. ‘I’ve never had it like this before. It looks . . .’

  ‘It looks bostin!’ Carol said. ‘Though I says it myself. You look really glamorous, Eves, like a film star.’

  It was true. Evie had already done her make-up. Her strong cheekbones were emphasized with a touch of rouge, her lashes drawn up with mascara. The stylish hairdo flattered the shape of her face. With a pang she saw how much she looked like her mother, only younger, softer, prettier. Her big blue eyes were alight with excitement. She had never felt like this before – new and grown-up, desirable and in charge of her life.

  ‘Thanks, Carol.’ She beamed at her friend in the mirror. ‘I’d never’ve managed anything half as nice by myself.’

  ‘Well, it’s your wedding day – you’re not supposed to be by yourself.’

  ‘No.’ Evie looked up at her. She felt as if she had always done everything by herself. She smiled. ‘I s’pose not.’

  Carol tutted. ‘You’re a daft one, you are. Come on. Get yourself dressed.’

  As Evie laid out her clothes, Carol gasped.

  ‘Oh, haven’t you got some lovely things!’ Carol had her best dress ready to put on, in cornflower blue wool, and it looked sweet on her but Evie’s dress was in a different league. She picked up one of Evie’s stockings. ‘God, Evie! You must have been saving forever for those!’