by Marie Joseph
‘That’s right! Blame me! Blame me because you can’t be a bloody Girl Guide! Let us go without everything that makes life worth living; let us live in a slum, begrudge me my cigarettes, but most of all make a terrible fuss about a Guide uniform.’ She hurled the china cup at the fireplace so that it fell broken into two pieces on the hearth.
Lisa closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the familiar prickle of fear run down her spine. It was all because her father was no longer here, she whispered to herself. Her mother was missing him to quarrel with, that was all. Nurtured on their shouting rows, scared witless at times, she had still known that once the storm was over the house would be full of laughter again. Delia would flutter around the room, flicking cigarette ash in the vague direction of the cut-glass ashtrays, her silken skirts billowing out as she twirled. And Angus would laugh, teasing, smiling to show all was forgotten.
Now it seemed that Lisa was to be the captive audience for her mother’s petulant rages. So she must just learn how to cope. Her father had managed and now so would she.
‘I’m going now.’ Getting up from her knees, Lisa dusted her hands together. ‘The fire will be OK if you put more coal on in about an hour.’
She left Delia cowering in her chair, whimpering about the unfairness of everything, weeping into a lace-edged handkerchief. The sound stayed with Lisa as she closed the front door and stepped out on to the pavement.
At the top of the street two small boys swung on a rope tied to a lamp post. In spite of the touch of frost in the air, they wore skimpy jerseys, and their faces were blue with cold. From both their noses ran green candles of slimy ropes. Lisa shuddered.
‘Sken, sken, you big fat hen! We don’t lay eggs for gentlemen. And if we do they’re not for you, so sken, sken, you big fat hen!’
They shouted the words in unison, small faces taunting and cheeky. Lisa hurried on, hating the embarrassment of it, despising herself for caring. On the way to the town centre she passed rows of shops, and winced away from a reflection of herself with hair sticking out like chewed rope.
A coal cart clattered along the street, its driver sitting hunched up at the front, coal sacks neatly folded after the first of his morning’s deliveries. Lisa walked on, past the town hall built in 1856 in the classic style, square and solid, then crossed the road before turning right down to the Labour Exchange.
She was almost past a draper’s shop, its large window stuffed with draped curtain nets flanking bolts of flowered cotton prints, when she saw a notice penned in large black capitals: YOUNG LADY ASSISTANT WANTED. APPLY WITHIN.
Without stopping to think twice, Lisa opened the door, hearing the bell ping behind her as she went in.
‘I’ve come about the vacancy,’ she told a man with fair straight hair brushed back from a high forehead. She smiled a bright, trying-to-please smile. ‘Are you the owner of this shop?’
Richard Carr blinked short-sighted blue eyes at the small girl across the counter smiling at him from beneath a yellow beret, with dark tufts of hair sticking out like Vikings’ horns at either side. He tucked a long green Venus pencil behind an ear and riffled the pages of an order book before answering.
‘I am indeed the owner, Miss.’ His tight smile held a touch of patronage. ‘But that notice has only just gone in the window.’ He glared at her accusingly. ‘You must have seen me put it in.’
Lisa’s answering smile was radiant. ‘There you are, then! It was meant to be. I’m a great believer in things being meant to be.’ She pushed the beret back with a finger. ‘Will you consider me for the position, Mr …?’
‘Carr. Richard Carr. But look here now… .’ To gain the time he felt he needed, Richard Carr took the pencil from behind his ear and wrote something down on a note-pad, underlining it firmly.
Setting a great store on the way a person spoke, he told himself that this strange little girl must have talked that way since birth. In spite of the atrocious hair and the navy-blue school raincoat, he guessed she came from a class more used to giving orders than receiving them. That, he decided, was why she was speaking to him now without a trace of servility in her manner.
His face gave nothing away. ‘How old are you, Miss …?’
‘Logan. Lisa Logan. I’m in my sixteenth year.’ She glanced round the large shop, taking in quickly the large bolts of material on the shelves, the wide counter with its brass ruler incorporated along its length, the dummy by the door, draped in flowered cotton in the tucked and gathered semblance of a dress. A woman of indeterminate age appeared from a room at the back, coming forward with an ingratiating smile to serve a customer at a smaller counter set at right angles to the one across which Richard Carr surveyed Lisa, his fair head on one side.
‘Experience?’ He lowered his voice.
‘None at all.’ Lisa went on smiling through an increasing sense of desperation. ‘But I pick things up quickly.’
‘References?’
‘Miss Adams, the headmistress of the High School. The Mayor,’ Lisa said quickly. ‘He’s a personal friend of my father.’ Her chin lifted. ‘Was,’ she amended. ‘My father died quite recently.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Richard Carr wasn’t a man to be rushed into a snap decision. A businessman with a ruthless eye for a worthwhile proposition, he saw in the small girl standing there with a naked pleading in her eyes a distinct and viable asset to his business. With that voice and that accent it was just possible that young Lisa Logan could turn out to be exactly the kind of girl he’d had in mind but never hoped to find. Miss Howarth, ringing up the till for a twopenny paper of pins, knew the working of the shop like the back of her hand. She had worked for his father and could gauge the exact yardage of material by the simple expedient of holding one corner underneath her chin and extending one of her arms. But her flattened vowels betrayed her lack of education. She made no attempt, as Richard himself had done, to refine her speech. ‘I think you’d best take an extra quarter of a yard,’ she would say. Or, ‘That’s nobbut enough for a long-sleeved blouse.’ And on occasions, unforgivably, ‘The only way to keep your nets nice is to starch and dolly-blue ’em regular-like before they get too mucky.’
Yes, there was no doubt that what Miss Howarth lacked was finesse, whereas this peculiar small girl would add tone to the establishment. And if she was on social terms with the Mayor, it could be that his good lady the Mayoress might one-step over the threshold and lend her valuable patronage to the shop.
‘You’d have to wear a black frock,’ he said, his mind made up. He coughed discreetly. ‘And perhaps smooth your hair down a little. We set great store on personal appearance. It’s only an hour’s train ride to Manchester and the big stores. The girls who work in Manchester in shops like Kendal Milne’s are very ladylike. From good homes, well connected.’
‘My mother’s father was a Colonel in the Indian Army, and my own father was a Captain in the Scottish Highlanders. Three times mentioned in dispatches,’ Lisa said quickly, adding an extra mention for effect. ‘I need to go out to business only on account of him dying and leaving my mother and I temporarily short of ready money.’
In her eagerness to impress, Lisa’s accent became even more swanky. Richard Carr hesitated, then, uncharacteristically for him, made an impulsive decision.
‘Very well, then. I’ll take you on a month’s trial, starting tomorrow. Seven shillings and sixpence a week. Half day Thursday, working from eight forty-five in the morning to eight o’clock at night. Late closing at nine on Saturdays.’
Shrugging off the notion that he himself had been interviewed and not his prospective employee, Richard nodded a dismissal. His eyebrows ascended almost to his hair-line as, after thanking him breathlessly, Lisa took off like a whirlwind, out of the shop, past the window, her yellow beret bobbing furiously.
Her face shone bright pink. She was filled to bursting point with sheer joy. Nothing in her life up to now had prepared her for this soaring, blazing sense of triumph. It was as though all her fu
ture had been mapped out by a few strokes of Mr Carr’s dark green Venus pencil as he’d taken down the addresses of the two people he was going to ask for references.
All her mood of previous despair was gone. She had got a job, her first, and at the very first try. She had out-smarted Mr Carr good and proper. Adrenalin pulsed through her veins as she went over the interview, word by word. She had made him like her; she had willed him to take her on.
It was of course a pity she wasn’t beautiful, but personality counted for far more. Hadn’t she just proved that? In spite of her awful hair, her freckles, and her shameful over-large bust, he had accepted her. So it followed she must have something. It did, didn’t it?
What she had was charm, her father’s natural ability to make people like him. And although Lisa was too young to realize this fact, she accepted the attribute with gratitude.
It was a gift much tested during the long, cold winter to follow… .
It wasn’t easy being charming to women who made her unroll bolt after bolt of heavy velvets and velours for their inspection before deciding there was nothing they fancied after all.
Miss Howarth knew most of the difficult customers by sight, and would leave them for Lisa to deal with.
‘Tell ’em to measure t’windows, then multiply by three,’ she told Lisa. ‘An’ if they’re too skinny to buy enough stuff, then let ’em find out for themselves how skimped the curtains will look when they’re hung. It’s their funeral, not ours.’
Lisa’s feet and ankles froze into aching chilblained agony as she stood for hours in the draught from the constantly opening door. She had dyed her speech-night white frock a patchy black, and with an old black jacket of Delia’s worn over the top was reasonably satisfied that she looked the part of a sales assistant.
Too depressed to argue, Delia had trimmed Lisa’s hair to a club-cut neatness, and given her a stub of Tangee lipstick.
‘There!’ Lisa had presented herself to her mother for inspection that first day. ‘Three yards of the dotted Swiss muslin? Certainly, moddom!’
But Delia had turned away, refusing to smile, pursing her lips and saying nothing.
Before Christmas The Laurels had been sold, and the asking price distributed among the growing band of creditors. When the solicitor sent his own bill, Delia had sold her engagement ring and a pair of diamond ear-rings, giving them to Lisa to take to a tiny shop where the jeweller had tut-tutted into a magnifying glass before handing over the money.
‘There’s still my brooches and your gold locket and chain.’ Delia sat in the chair by the fire as if she was growing from it now, shrunken, defeated, deep in a lethargy that carried her, strangely uncaring, through the long winter days when Lisa was out at the shop.
‘And what then?’ Lisa served their evening meal, two bowls of Force followed by the inevitable bread and jam. The months of deprivation had honed her small frame down so that the flesh stretched tightly over her cheekbones, throwing her huge grey-blue eyes into startling beauty. ‘What then, when we’ve sold all the jewellery? Mr Carr is going to put my wages up to ten shillings after Christmas, but we can’t live on that.’ She turned to face her mother, her small face pinched with worry beneath the straight fall of dark hair. ‘We haven’t paid a penny in rent yet, and we wouldn’t even be able to have a fire but for the coal delivered free every month. It’s from Uncle Patrick. You know that, don’t you? And it costs two shillings a hundredweight. Did you know that?’
‘He’ll be paid back.’ Delia reached for a cigarette. ‘Every penny. With interest. You always look on the black side of things, Lisa.’
The injustice of the remark made tears sting behind Lisa’s eyes, but she knew better than to defend herself. Even the mildest remark was enough to send Delia into one of her tearing tempers, when a torrent of abuse poured from her thin mouth; when she would shake all over, throw whatever happened to be handy, and then collapse sobbing into her chair.
‘There must be …’ Lisa said carefully, ‘… some way we can claim even a small allowance. Nobody is allowed to starve in this country. Are they?’ She sat down at the table and picked up her spoon. ‘Isn’t there something called the Means Test or Parish Relief? Miss Howarth was talking about it yesterday. She says half the population of the town are on it.’ She sprinkled a teaspoonful of sugar over the Force. ‘It might be worth trying.’
Delia threw back her head and laughed, looking for a moment as she had looked less than a year ago when she had been full of life and vivacity. ‘Oh, God, you really are naïve!’ She looked down at the solid-silver spoon in her hand and pointed it at the dresser. ‘Before they would give us a bean we’d have to be eating off newspapers with Wool-worth’s knives and forks. Before they gave us a penny piece all our last pieces of good furniture would have to go.’ Her face darkened. ‘Haven’t I suffered enough? Is that what you want me to be subjected to now? A pack of bullying officials coming in here and telling me what to flog before they hand out a pennyworth of charity? Is that what my parents endured years of filth and heat in India for? Is that what your father fought for in France, sleeping in trenches running with mud and rats?’
Pushing the bowl aside, she grabbed for a cigarette, lighting it with hands that shook. ‘Haven’t I been humiliated enough? How low do you want me to sink? Do you want me to end up like that dreadful woman next door?’ Delia dragged smoke deep into her lungs. ‘Do you know what she’s taken to doing?’
Lisa shook her head, holding her breath, praying that if she merely nodded and agreed her mother might calm down.
‘She peers in at me through the window!’ Delia stabbed her glowing cigarette in the direction of the slopstone. ‘I’m sitting in my chair when I hear a tapping, and when I turn round there she is, with her big fat face leering at me.’
Lisa forgot to be careful. ‘Mrs Ellis? But how does she get into our yard? The outside door is always bolted. She isn’t tall enough to lean over and pull it back like you say the coalman does. And anyway, if she came she would come to the front door, like she did that other time. She doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who would creep about staring into other people’s windows.’
Delia gave a hoarse shout of triumph. ‘Well, I tell you she does! And she bangs on the wall, over and over. Some days I have to bang back just to show her.’ The vixen-like face became sharp with cunning. ‘I kneel on that stand-chair there and I bang like mad. With a hammer,’ she added.
That night when Delia sat dozing by the fire, Lisa tiptoed through the front parlour, past the odd pieces of furniture, chairs badly arranged for the simple reason that no one ever sat in them, and the single wardrobe used for the outdoor clothes her mother never wore.
With her heart pounding against her ribs she lifted the iron knocker and let it bang against the door of Mrs Ellis’s house.
It was opened almost immediately by a girl of about Lisa’s own age, a brassy girl with bold eyes, and hair dried and frizzed into a curly perm. She wore a round-necked blouse of black cotton beneath a pinafore dress of green material blooming with yellow flowers. In the curly hair cotton fluff was dotted, as if someone had blown a dandelion clock over her head.
‘Mam?’ she called, before Lisa had uttered a word. ‘It’s her from next door.’ She stood back, sharp eyes gleaming with curiosity. ‘You’d best come in. She’s through there.’
Florence Ellis was ironing at a square table set in the middle of the back room, using two irons, one heating at the fire and the other clipped into a shining slipper which glided over the starched cottons at a touch.
‘You’d best sit down, luv,’ she said kindly. ‘You look fair beat.’
The room was so hot that Lisa closed her eyes for a moment in ecstasy. She couldn’t remember being so blissfully warm. The heat came at her from the high-banked fire, and orange flames set the brasses on the stone hearth twinkling like little stars.
‘I’ve come about my mother,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Oh, aye?’ Mrs Ellis
’s broad back was noncommittal.
‘I’m worried about her.’ Lisa watched, sitting quietly in her chair, as the stout little woman dipped the collars and cuffs of a blouse into a basin of blued starch before pressing them through a piece of white linen. ‘Do you see much of her during the day when I’m out at work?’
Mrs Ellis wiped a perspiring forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Nay, luv. I never as much as set eyes on her. How can I when I’m out meself, scrubbing? I leave earlier than what you do, then when I get back at teatime it’s dark. Besides, she keeps herself to herself, does your mother, as you rightly know. I’m not one for pushing me nose in where I’m not wanted. And from what I hear tell nobody else round hereabouts ever sees her neither.’
Lisa sighed. ‘Then you never go into our back yard and knock on the window?’
‘You what?’ Mrs Ellis banged the iron down on its asbestos stand. A flush of indignation reddened the round cushions of her cheeks. Turning round, she saw the look of white despair on Lisa’s face.
‘It’s her what does the knocking.’
The girl who had let Lisa in spoke from the doorway. ‘I’ve been on short time at the mill for the past month, and the first time it happened I thought as how somebody was hanging pictures up or something, then she began the shouting.’ The tightly-curled head nodded towards the dividing wall. ‘It’s only fair to say, Mam. It frightened the life out of me the first time I heard it, especially when I realized she’s in there on her own.’
‘Shouting?’ Lisa tightened her hands on the wooden arms of the rocking chair. ‘What kind of shouting?’
‘Swear words. Filthy screaming swear words.’ The bold eyes narrowed. ‘I know you said not to tell, Mam, but it’s terrible. An’ it’s not what we’re used to, not down our street.’
‘Joan!’ Mrs Ellis sat down opposite Lisa. ‘If you’re going up to the top house to see Jack, then go. But mind you’re back before ten.’
