Coronation Wives

by Lizzie Lane

  Her father was giving her mother a bath when Edna got there. Her intention had been to ask him whether he’d come with her to the sanatorium to see Susan.

  The room was full of steam. His poor red face ran with sweat and his rolled-up shirtsleeves clung damply to his upper arms. He told her, ‘She’ll be all right. We’ve got everything ’ere we could ever want. Good job we got this bathroom put in, weren’t it?’

  Edna leaned against the bathroom door, which was propped open with the laundry bin. Her mother was in the bath, her shrivelled curls clamped wetly to her head by the steam. She frowned and looked around her as if trying to get her bearings.

  She doesn’t know where she is, thought Edna, and suddenly felt sorry for her. She was a pitiful sight, but not tragic enough for Edna to forget Susan and her reason for coming here.

  ‘Will you come to Saltmead with me?’ she asked her father.

  His mouth hung open while he thought about it. ‘Your mother will have to come with us.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ She couldn’t help snapping at him.

  He looked hurt. ‘But who else will take care of her while we’re out there?’ he asked.

  Edna did not have an answer. With mixed feelings, she watched her mother who, in turn, watched the water trickle through her raised hands.

  She suddenly had second thoughts. What was the point of telling her anything? Then a sense of duty overrode her sense of hopelessness. This is my mother, she reminded herself. Susan is her granddaughter. It’s only right that she knows what’s going on.

  Resting both hands on the side of the bath, she bent down, looked into her mother’s face and tried to explain. Ethel Burbage sat very still, her face placid and her eyes vacant, though fixed on her daughter’s face. Suddenly she said, ‘What are you doing out?’

  Edna explained about visiting the sanatorium.

  Her mother ignored the comment. ‘You should be locked in at home. That’s what they used to do in my day. The house was locked up with the family inside it and a notice was pasted on the door.’

  Anger replaced pity. Edna got to her feet. ‘If she’s going to start, I’m going.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said her father quietly. ‘That’s what they used to do just after the Great War when folks had polio, cholera or scarlet fever. Lock the house up and paste a poster outside. The doctor would call – if they could afford one. And food was delivered. But until it was all over, that’s what they did.’ Edna turned cold. Good God, this was the twentieth century. What her parents had just described was medieval.

  Her mother’s mood changed. ‘I want some … thing,’ said Ethel Burbage slowly holding her hands at shoulder level. One of them held a face flannel.

  Edna watched with mixed feelings as her father leaned towards the bath tidy that was only inches in front of her mother’s mean looking breasts.

  ‘You need this, love,’ he said gently and handed her the soap. ‘Do you want me to wash your back for you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t! What are you doing in here? Dirty old man! That’s what you are! Bluebeard! Bluebeard!’

  Edna backed out of the door and out of her father’s path. A missile, possibly a pumice stone, narrowly missed his ear. ‘And close the door!’

  They stood there on the landing, both breathless and leaning against the wall. Edna eyed her father sidelong, noticing the hole in his pullover, the hint of shadow over his chin. He looked faded and thin inside clothes that had once strained over his broad chest and bulging waistline. The pullover was dark green and the horizontal pattern at chest level was a muddled mix of Fair Isle diamonds and squares. She felt she should offer to do something for him, but the weight of her own problems was far too heavy. ‘Dad. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Wait for her to finish, then let the bath water out, and make sure she gets herself dressed properly.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  His look was fiercely protective. ‘Till death us do part. In sickness and in health. That’s what I promised and that’s what she’ll get. I could do with some help though.’

  ‘Well, don’t look at me, Dad. I’ve got Susan to consider, Colin too for that matter. And two other children.’

  Pamela chose that moment to start crying.

  A raucous, low-pitched shout came from the bathroom. ‘Get that brawling brat out of here!’

  Edna straightened and headed for the stairs, her mouth set in a grim line. Her father followed. His shirtsleeves had come loose and were flapping around his wrists.

  ‘I’m sorry, Edna love. This is all too much … too much.’

  He sounded as if he was about to cry and Edna almost felt like joining him.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said after handing Pamela her teddy bear. She turned and kissed him on the cheek. ‘We’ll have to get someone in to help with the cleaning, the laundry and some light nursing duties. Not a nurse as such – just someone to help.’

  He shook his head. ‘My pension don’t run to paying any help.’

  Edna fastened the top button on Pamela’s bright red coat, which had a corduroy collar with matching trim on the pockets. Her mittens were beige with Fair Isle bands of red and orange running through them. ‘Don’t worry about that. Colin will deal with it.’

  She was telling the truth. The toy factory was doing well. They’d never had so much money in their lives. Colin was already talking about moving to a detached house with a bigger garden. Edna had argued that children should feel settled in their younger years and that they should wait until later on.

  Her father rubbed at his bristled chin and eyed her nervously. ‘It won’t be easy to find someone strong enough to cope with yer mother. You know what she’s like. She’ll play up something rotten.’

  Never in her life could she remember him looking so dishevelled. Her mother had always been difficult to live with. She’d now become a nightmare.

  Edna sighed. ‘I wish there was more I could do.’

  Her father shook his tired head. His eyes were red-rimmed. His skin had a greyish, greasy look, as if he hadn’t washed, let alone shaved. ‘Now, now. Don’t you go feeling guilty about it. You’ve got enough on yer plate.’

  Edna looped her arm through his, tugged it close and said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t come to see young Susan with you,’ her father said as they stood at the front door. ‘Won’t Colin?’

  ‘No!’ she snapped. Colin’s attitude had surprised her. She could not accept that her child was best left in the hands of the medical profession. Colin could.

  ‘You have to trust them,’ he’d said to her. ‘I had to.’

  She’d seen regret flash momentarily in his eyes. ‘You were grown up. She’s just a child.’

  The remark was almost cruel and she regretted it, her mood swinging back again later when she reasoned it wasn’t really her fault. Polio had touched all their lives.

  Her father shook his head sorrowfully as he said, ‘Them nurses and doctors … if they’re that determined …’

  ‘So am I.’

  He patted her shoulder, then squeezed it in an effort to reassure her. ‘I hate the thought of you going alone …’

  ‘I won’t be alone.’

  A cold wind plucked leaves from the gutter and sent them scurrying down over Nutgrove Avenue. Edna pulled on her gloves. Determination, she decided, would not be enough. Someone with courage, nerve and vitality was needed who would stand up to stiff upper lips and starched uniforms. One name above all others sprang to mind.

  Polly’s job at the Broadway was over. Griffiths kept to his office when she called in to collect wages owing and her cards. Muriel, the peroxide blonde with big earrings and bright pink lipstick, did the honours. Polly could tell from her attitude that she was glad to see her go. Muriel would supplement her wage by earning a few bob extra with Griffiths down in the grim cellar where colonies of spiders spun webs in dark corners and a chaise longue with worn springs served
as a love nest.

  ‘Got a job yet?’ Muriel asked, a sneer painted more heavily on her mouth than her lipstick.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Oow. Sorry I spoke! Not going to be easy though, is it, what with your ol’ man in clink. You’ll miss the money. Have to make do and mend and buy all the scrag ends of mutton to make a pie fer Sunday.’

  Polly reared up, her finger stabbing close to Muriel’s nose. ‘Cheap meat I’ll buy at the butcher’s, but I don’t want to stay ’ere and end up as “cheap meat” for ’im in there! But then, you always was more scrag end than prime steak, wasn’t you, Muriel?’

  ‘Well!’ Muriel looked fit to burst. Her plastic earrings rattled, reminding Polly of milk bottle tops strung on string and laid out over seedbeds to keep the birds away.

  Polly snatched her money and her cards and walked out, her head high, glad that she’d put on her best black and white checked suit for the occasion.

  Billy had been sentenced at the magistrates’ court and transferred to Horfield Prison. Although it wasn’t that great a distance, Polly had to fit visiting in with making a living and the dictates of the prison authorities. She’d made up her mind to go there straight after collecting her cards.

  Smokes were on ration in prison and weren’t too easy to get hold of outside given the price they were now — one shilling and sixpence for ten Woodbines. But Betty Knight, a neighbour, worked in W.D. & H.O. Wills where they made the things so she got free issue. It was just a question of passing them to Billy.

  On the last occasion she’d visited there’d been a grille between her and him. He’d looked down in the mouth since he’d just gone down for nine months. Strange how little things become important, she thought, as she got the bus that would take her up Gloucester Road to the prison. A guard named Jock McGregor had told her that the visiting facilities were being altered, ‘To make more room for the amount of crooks we’ve got in this city. Must be an army of lonely women out there without their men.’ He’d looked at her suggestively. ‘I don’t mind keeping a lady company if she’s got a need for a man in her life.’

  For a moment Polly had had half a mind to blow a bubble with the pink gum she had been chewing right into his stupid face. But what he’d said next had changed her mind.

  ‘You’ll be just across a table from him next time. It’s a temporary measure. And I’ll be watching you,’ he added. ‘Never fear! I’ll be watching you.’

  She remembered that fact now. ‘I need the lav first,’ she said and grinned up at him. ‘Must be all the excitement.’

  ‘Don’t think you can get too friendly across them tables,’ repeated Jock. ‘Remember I’ll be watching you.’

  ‘With a bit of luck you won’t be watching close enough,’ Polly murmured to herself once she was behind the thickly varnished wood of a lavatory door. Taking care not to squash it flat she slid the packet of cigarettes beneath her stocking suspender.

  She’d told Meg what she intended doing before she’d left that morning.

  ‘What if you get caught?’ said Meg.

  ‘I’ll get a telling off and be banned for a while.’ She smirked at Meg’s worried face and added, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t end up in there with ’im sharing ’is bunk.’ She paused once she realized what she’d said and smiled cheekily. ‘Though I could definitely do with it.’

  Meg tutted, but not very seriously.

  Polly was glad she took the cigarettes. Billy’s appearance was not good. He looked thinner, there were dark hollows beneath his eyes and his skin was almost as grey as the prison issue clothes he was wearing. He coughed as he sat down opposite her. A guard reminded them that they were not allowed to touch. They didn’t – not above the table. Beneath it Polly passed the packet of cigarettes to Billy.

  ‘It’s still warm,’ he whispered.

  ‘Came from a warm place.’ She winked, then frowned as a series of coughs caused him to bend over the table. ‘Billy! Are you OK?’

  He nodded, but still coughed, his face as red as a turkey cock’s gizzard.

  Without her asking, a prison guard brought over a glass of water. ‘Wanna stop that smoking,’ the guard said. ‘It ain’t no good for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Billy croaked as he took the glass.

  Polly put both hands on the table and leaned forward. A frown crumpled the bright expression she’d adopted especially for the visit. What with Susan and David, there was enough illness about without him getting sick too.

  ‘Billy?’

  His shoulders shuddered with each cough. He’d never had good lungs, but had continued to smoke, continued to rush around chasing the next easy fiver. None of it could be doing him any good.

  Once the coughing subsided he managed to smile. ‘That guard’s probably right. I should give up the fags, not these though, not now I know where they come from.’

  He brightened and lit up a cigarette and Polly brightened too.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Just you wait till we get you out of here. Soon feed you up and get you fit again. And then, once yer on yer feet again we can be off to Australia. That sunshine over there’ll do you the world of good.’

  Billy looked at her pensively from behind a plume of swirling smoke. ‘We can’t go there. Not now.’ He looked away, seemingly preferring to look at the dull walls, the hatchet-faced warders or the smoke curling up from a dozen other lit fags – anywhere rather than at her.

  Polly’s smile froze, but didn’t disappear entirely. Her expression and her voice were resolute. ‘We made the decision, Billy, and we’re sticking to it. There’s no going back.’

  Billy looked down at the smouldering cigarette that he held between his yellow-stained fingers. She could see his mouth twitching as he sought to get the words out. From experience she knew he was about to say something she didn’t want to hear.

  ‘We can’t go, Polly, or at least I can’t. I was talking about it to some bloke in ’ere. If you’ve got a prison record they don’t let you in.’

  Polly’s mouth dropped like a slate from the roof. This couldn’t be true – could it? Suddenly she felt like a stupid brainless hen she’d read about in one of her daughter’s storybooks. Only in her case it was for real. The world had fallen on her head.

  She was still numb on the bus going home and stared out of the rain-spattered windows, hardly registering the Victorian villas, the shops lining each side of Gloucester Road. Even when the bus got to the Horsefair, so named because of a fair held in medieval times, she did not really see the white concrete facades of Jones’s and Lewis’s, two huge department stores that had risen on the ashes of the Blitz. She did recall tales of bodies being found there when they were building; plague victims, they said, from hundreds of years ago.

  Thoughts of past deaths and her prison visit combined to make her feel bad. Billy didn’t look well. Prison was not good for him, but she couldn’t help feeling resentful. If he hadn’t got into trouble with the law they’d be off to Australia now for the princely sum of ten pounds each. By breaking the law he had sentenced them to a life in this country and this one alone.

  With hindsight she wished she had given in to Griffiths, not because she wanted to, but purely out of revenge on Billy. He wouldn’t know. But I would, she thought, with a bitter sense of satisfaction. I would.

  She got off the bus at the Centre and went to the bus stop that would take her back up to Camborne Crescent. Waiting gave her plenty of time to think about things, mostly about getting another job. It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, she thought to herself, having a husband in prison would make it bloody damn difficult!

  Lazily, she eyed the traffic going by, uncaring of the spray thrown up by their wheels. What a variety! Buses, bikes, even the odd horse-drawn dray, just like the ones that used to pull up over the Batch from the brewery when they’d lived in York Street down in the Dings.

  ‘Happy days,’ she muttered darkly and scowled.

  If only she had married a bloke like one of the
se driving these cars. She eyed the driver of each vehicle as it went by, smiling at some, winking at others.

  ‘Toffee-nosed git,’ she muttered at those that looked away. She was alone on the bus stop. Couldn’t one of them stop and give her a lift?

  Just as the thought finished crossing her mind, a car pulled into the kerb. She stooped down in order to see the driver better and judge whether to be cheeky or charming as the case might be. Instead she came face to face with Edna, who offered to give her a lift home.

  ‘Bit out of your way, innit?’

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  Polly settled herself on the navy blue leather upholstery. ‘Been somewhere nice?’

  Edna shook her head and kept her eyes fixed on the road. ‘I’ve been to my mother’s. I was on my way home, then I saw you.’

  Polly frowned. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said apprehensively, and prayed that Edna wasn’t going to prattle on about Susan. In fact, she’d prefer it if she didn’t mention it at all. Sickness frightened her, though she didn’t dare admit it. And was it catching? Could Edna have caught it from Susan, and could she get it from Edna and then, heaven forbid, pass it on to Carol? The permutations were terrifying, but Polly composed herself and asked how things were.

  ‘I hear you’re out of work,’ stated Edna.

  Straight to the point, thought Polly. Well, that’s refreshing I must say.

  ‘Yep! Out on the streets – or I will be if I don’t get a job pretty sharpish.’

  ‘My father needs some help with my mother – a bit of general care rather than nursing. Would you be interested?’

  Polly hesitated. Looking after Edna’s mother? Could she do that?

  ‘I ain’t got no medical training at all, though I did work for David of course, but not kind of …’ She swallowed hard. Edna had seen her with David once. It had almost been the death of her – or at least the death of her friendship with Charlotte. ‘Why not!’ she said suddenly. ‘I could do with the money.’

  They had passed through Queens Square and were pulling up over Redcliffe Hill when Edna said, ‘That wasn’t all I wanted to ask you. I’m going to demand to see Susan. But I don’t want to go alone. Will you come with me?’