She turned to Sooky and gave a sneering grimace, which, on her face, passed for an amused smile. Then she jerked her head towards the corner where Katie was standing chatting to Frank Barber, apparently ignoring her mum and her daughter who were on the other side of her. ‘More like he don’t fancy the idea of what he might see out here, if you ask me.’
‘Well no one is asking yer,’ snapped Stephen. ‘The only ones who don’t like what they see out here are you two, you vicious old bags. May God forgive the pair of yer.’
With that, Stephen straightened up and went back across the street to where Danny was waiting by his family’s shrine. ‘So what was all that about then, Farvee? You don’t usually have nothing to do with them.’
‘I dunno what yer talking about, Dan,’ said Stephen, still glaring across at the two sniggering women.
Danny laughed to himself. ‘I don’t think Nanna’ll accept that as much of an answer, Farvee. She was nearly breaking her neck trying to see what yer was up to.’
‘Aw bugger,’ cursed Stephen. ‘She saw me then?’
‘That’s right,’ grinned Danny, rocking back on his heels and giving a little wave to Liz, who was smiling at him from across the street where she was still posted by her own family shrine with her mum. ‘I reckon yer gonna be answering plenty o’ questions when they get back from church later on.’
‘No, boy,’ said Stephen, shaking his head. ‘Yer nanna won’t get nothing out of me.’
‘A tosheroon says she does.’
‘Yer on!’
Danny won his half-crown from Stephen with no trouble at all. As soon as Nora, Katie, Molly and the boys had made their way back to Plumley Street, after having gone to the church to receive the final Holy Blessing from Father Hopkins, Nora made sure that she got Stephen by himself at the first opportunity. And, despite his earlier resolution that he would tell her nothing, Stephen had soon told her not only practically word for word what Phoebe had said, but also what she had insinuated about Katie and Frank Barber.
‘Right,’ said Nora, pushing up her sleeves.
‘Sure, yer not going out to cause a scene now, are yer, Nora?’ Stephen knew only too well how the women in his family could let fly when they got into one of their moods and he hated to think he’d be the one responsible for a woman getting a bloody nose or losing what few teeth she had left, even if it was only Phoebe Tucker.
‘No, I ain’t going out to cause no scene,’ said Nora, striding out of her kitchen. ‘But,’ she called from the passage, ‘I’m going in next door to put that daughter o’ mine right about one or two things.’
Nora tapped on the frame of her daughter’s kitchen door.
From where they were sitting at the table, spreading marg on a pile of bread ready for the Sunday tea, Katie and Molly looked up in surprise.
‘So what’s all this knocking lark in aid of, Mum?’ Katie asked, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Is something up?’
‘I just wanted to be sure that I wasn’t disturbing Pat and his workmates.’
Katie’s expression stiffened. ‘Yer all right, they cleared out as soon as we got back. Went round one of the other blokes’ houses to drive his old woman mad instead.’
She started slicing angrily at the rest of the loaf, tossing each slice in Molly’s direction as she cut it. ‘Good job and all, if you ask me. He’s still got the right hump. The boys took one look at him and they was off over the back wall like sticks a’cracking.’
Nora took a butter knife from the dresser drawer, sat down opposite her daughter and began helping Molly with the spreading. ‘It’s Pat I wanna talk to yer about, Kate. I don’t wanna speak out of turn, but yer’ve gotta know.’
‘Shall I go in next door with Farvee?’ Molly asked warily.
Nora stared at Katie, leaving the decision up to her.
‘I ain’t got no secrets,’ Katie said primly.
Nora raised a doubting eyebrow and then looked over Katie’s shoulder, checking that the boys hadn’t reappeared in the back yard. Satisfied that no one except Katie and Molly could hear her, Nora continued, ‘There was talk about Pat not being there this afternoon.’
‘I should think there was,’ Katie sniped, slapping down another slice of bread on the kitchen table. ‘How d’yer expect people to act when he couldn’t even be bothered to step outside the street door to see his own children in the parade?’
‘But, Mum, yer know his meeting was important.’ Straight away, Molly knew she should have kept her mouth shut.
‘So, yer on his side, are yer? Typical. I’m always the one at fault in this house. I thought I could at least count on me own daughter to support me, but obviously I can’t.’
‘I ain’t on no one’s side, Mum. Yer know I ain’t.’ Molly dropped her chin to hide the tears gathering in her eyes, tears that were as much for the confusion and fears she felt about her own life as for what her mother had just said to her. ‘I never thought I had to be. I thought we was all on the same side in this family.’ She shoved her chair back, lifted her chin and looked at Katie, the tears now running down her cheeks. ‘I’m going out later on,’ she sniffled. ‘So I’ll go up to me room and start getting ready, if yer don’t mind.’ With that, she ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom.
‘I think yer’ll find yer arguing with the wrong ones, Katie,’ Nora said flatly.
‘I’ve gotta be grateful when they cheek me, have I?’ Katie asked illogically.
‘Don’t be deliberately stupid, girl. If yer stopped fighting with everyone and just listened for once . . .’ Nora sighed despondently. ‘It’s like the way yer treat yer father. Do you know that that man stood up for you out there when those two sharp-tongued old biddies from across the street were running you down?’
‘So I’ve gotta be grateful to him and all now, have I?’
‘Don’t yer even want to know what they was saying about yer?’
‘No. But I can guess.’ She looked defiantly at Nora. ‘Something to do with me standing within ten yards of Frank Barber, was it?’
‘I’ve not lost my temper with you since you was a little girl sticking yer fingers in the jam pot, Katie, but I mean it: yer pushing me that far; yer pushing all of us too far—’
‘Why don’t you just leave me alone? I’m fed up with the lot of yers. I’m fed up with trying to make ends meet. I’m fed up with worrying about what the kids are up to. And I’m fed up with being told who I can and can’t talk to. I’m fed up with all of it. Every rotten stinking bit of it.’
‘Well then,’ Nora replied, as she strode over to the kitchen door, ‘I suppose yer’d better do something about it then, hadn’t yer?’
The next day, Pat and Katie barely said two words to one another during breakfast. Pat didn’t even ask why, on a Monday morning, his wife was all done up in her decent dress, the one she kept for church and other important occasions, the one, in fact, that she had worn yesterday for the Procession. And, when he arrived home from work much later that day, tense and weary as he usually was of late, Katie never bothered to ask him how he had got on with the meeting with the guv’nor as she always would have done in the past. But she did explain why she had been wearing her good frock.
She poured Pat his cup of tea, but instead of putting it down on the kitchen table, she said, ‘Let’s go in the front room, Pat, there’s something I wanna say to yer without the kids hearing if they come in.’
Pat took the tea and went through to the parlour without saying anything.
She followed him in, shut the door behind them and sat down on the arm of one of the easy chairs that stood either side of the hearth. ‘I’ve been out today.’
Pat didn’t answer. He just sat down on the armchair opposite her and sipped at his tea.
‘Look, Pat, I said things to yer yesterday morning that I had no right to. I know yer bringing home all the money yer can, but we need more just to make ends meet. And what with the boys growing like Gawd knows what, and food definitely ain�
��t getting no cheaper—’
‘You think yer telling me something I don’t know?’
Katie put her teacup down on the hearth and bent forward, her red hair falling over her face. She rested her wrists on her knees, letting her hands dangle. ‘Please, Pat, I don’t wanna row. I’ve been feeling that rough.’
‘Ain’t we all? You should try doing what I have to do every day. I’m down that dock every hour God sends, waiting for them bastards to do me a favour and give me and the blokes a bit o’ work just to have it thrown in me face that I’m not needed, not wanted.’
She lifted her face and looked directly at him. ‘That’s why I went and got meself a job,’ she blurted out. ‘In a laundry in the Commercial Road.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s only mornings.’
‘If you think I’m gonna let a wife of mine go out to work—’
Katie was on her feet. ‘That’s typical of you, ain’t it? Yer don’t care about me and my worries, all yer care about is what other people’ll think of you, always you.’
‘It ain’t that.’ Now Pat was standing too.
Katie shoved her fists into her waist and stared up at him, challenging him. ‘What, frightened there might be some blokes working in the laundry, are yer?’
She turned away from him, bent down and picked up her teacup, not caring that she was slopping it in the saucer, and marched over to the door. Wrenching it back on its hinges, she looked over her shoulder and said slowly and clearly, ‘All women ain’t like your mum, yer know. Just ’cos she was an old—’
She didn’t see Pat raise his hand, she just felt the sting as it slashed across her face.
Pat sprang back from her as though he had touched a burning ember. ‘Kate, I didn’t . . . I always swore I’d never . . .’ He could find nothing more to say. He pushed past her, spilling the remains of her tea all over the worn runner that covered the passage floor, and slammed out of the street door, leaving Katie to clear up the mess.
It was late on a hot and dusty Friday afternoon in August. Katie was sitting with Nora on the street doorstep of number ten, staring down at the potatoes she was peeling into the bowl she had balanced on her lap.
‘Look,’ said Nora, waving her knife at Katie, ‘he’s sending yer money round regular, so it’s not as though he’s just disappeared, now is it?’
Katie said nothing. It was difficult enough sitting there, knowing she was the object of so many people’s pity – ‘Poor Katie Mehan, did yer hear? Her old man’s left her. A right shiner she had. He must have really clocked her one’ – but she couldn’t let herself be kept indoors; she had to face people and carry on.
‘And he’s used to a clean home,’ Nora went on. ‘He won’t be able to stand them lodgings down by the docks much longer. He’ll be back.’ Nora laughed unconvincingly. ‘His old mum always came back. Like a regular little homing pigeon, that woman was. And he’ll be just the same. You see.’
Katie was hardly listening as her mother carried on talking, doing her best to jolly her daughter along; Katie felt too exhausted to listen. She had been at the laundry for nearly four weeks now – the same length of time that Pat had been away – but it wasn’t just doing the work and still having to see to the house that was draining her, it was the emotional fatigue, the agony of not knowing what would happen with her and Pat, not knowing what she even wanted to happen, and her almost complete lack of sleep since he’d been gone.
‘Will yer look at them?’ Nora shouted to her daughter, to make herself heard over the unintelligible calls and loudly jangling handbell of the rag-and-bone man who was pushing his handcart past the top of the turning. She waved her potato knife towards Michael and Timmy, who were racing up and down the street with a crowd of other kids from the neighbourhood. This week they were all playing at being contenders in the British Empire Games at the White City, the craze that had taken over from the last fad of playing tennis with bits of wood and an old deflated football after Fred Perry had won at Wimbledon. ‘The little loves. Sure, won’t they look just like little angels in their pageboy outfits?’
Stephen emerged from the passage where he had been standing behind his wife. He edged between her and his daughter, who remained sitting on the street doorstep, and leant on the wall, savouring the heat of the sun-warmed bricks. He fiddled around with his pipe for a few moments, getting it lit just the way he liked it.
‘The rate that Michael’s growing,’ Stephen said, his pipe bobbing up and down as he spoke, ‘he’ll be too big to be a pageboy by the time that pair finally decide they’ve saved enough to get married. And young Timmy’s not far behind.’ He puffed thoughtfully, sending up a cloud of blue, pungent smoke. We never bothered ourselves with that sort of thing, did we, darling?’
Nora chuckled. ‘No we did not. We got married with the clothes we stood up in. The lace tablecloth left to me by my old aunt, God bless her, was me only possession. Did we ever tell yer about that, Katie?’
When Katie didn’t reply, Stephen looked at Nora and shrugged helplessly. Nora shrugged back at him.
Stephen tried again. ‘Look,’ he said enthusiastically, ‘here’s our Molly home from work.’
Katie raised her eyes and saw Molly and Liz just coming around the corner.
‘Molly!’ Nora called. ‘Hello, me darling.’
Molly waved back to her nanna, but instead of smiling and crossing the street to see her, she paused outside number nine, listening solemnly while Liz Watts finished saying something to her.
Nora shook her head, her smiles replaced by a look of concern. ‘For goodness’ sake, will yer look at that girl? She looks that miserable lately. And restless! I just wish she’d settle herself. She’s worrying me that much. I’ve never seen such fidgeting and fussing, even in a girl of her age.’
‘Yer not wrong there, Nora,’ said Stephen, jabbing the stem of his pipe at her. ‘I was watching her yesterday.’ He nodded meditatively. ‘She was up and down from that table like a whore’s drawers on Boat Race night, so she was.’
Nora tried tutting disapprovingly at such coarseness, but it was no good, she couldn’t help laughing, Stephen had that effect on her.
‘It’s good to hear yer happy, Nora,’ Stephen said, looking pointedly at Katie. ‘It’s attractive in a woman, a sense of fun. I just wish that you and that granddaughter o’ mine would laugh a bit more, Kate. Just look at the pair of yers. Faces like a wet weekend, so yer have.’ He suddenly flapped his hand in Katie’s direction. ‘Sssh, don’t say nothing, here she comes.’
Katie gasped in disbelief at her father. ‘For Gawd’s sake, I didn’t even open me mouth. It was you. And how d’yer expect us to feel?’
Nora frowned at her daughter. ‘All right, Katie, I know yer’ve not been feeling yerself lately, but there’s no need to be rude to yer dad. And anyway, perhaps yer should be saying something to Molly, instead of just feeling sorry for yerself all the time.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ she snapped. ‘What d’yer mean, “not feeling meself”? Me husband’s left me.’
Nora shook her head, signalling that this wasn’t the time to talk about such things, as her granddaughter had crossed the street and was now standing in front of them. ‘Hello, Molly, love,’ Nora said, smiling up at her. ‘How are yer?’
‘All right, Nanna,’ she answered, without any enthusiasm. She bent forward to kiss first Nora, then her mum on the cheek. Then she straightened up and kissed her granddad. ‘I’m going in to have a wash. I feel like I’m lousy. It was that flaming muggy in the factory this afternoon.’
‘I’ll help yer fill the bath up if yer like,’ Nora offered. ‘How’d that be?’
‘No, yer all right, Nanna. I can’t be bothered with all that. I’ll wait till tomorrow night and have me bath like everyone else.’
Molly gave the three of them a strained smile and went in next door. But, as she stepped inside the passage of number twelve, the thought of dragging herself out to the back kitchen just to have a wa
sh, even though she was hot, sticky and uncomfortable, was too much for her. So, instead she hauled herself up the stairs to her bedroom, grasping the banister as though it were a lifeline. She closed the door behind her, dropped her handbag on the floor and flopped down on to the soft eiderdown. That was all she was fit for: lying on the bed and closing her eyes.
Thank goodness everyone else was outside, she thought to herself as she listened to the muffled sounds from the street below; even the idea of her mum and nanna coming indoors and talking downstairs in the kitchen was too much for her to contemplate, never mind what the boys crashing about would have done to her already jangling nerves. She had had enough noise and chattering for one day.
She sighed wearily; she knew that her friend was only trying to take her mind off things, but she was fed up to the back teeth with Liz’s non-stop prattling on about wedding preparations.
Even her beloved dad staying in that horrible lodging house in Limehouse wasn’t what was really upsetting her.
Molly knew she was being selfish when her mum was so distressed, but she couldn’t help it. She had been over and over it all in her mind so many times that it had become almost an obsession. And still she didn’t know what to do about Simon.
She loved him, she was sure of that, but she was also sure that if her mum found out about him, that would be the end of it. Catholic girls did not have Jewish boyfriends. She would never be able to be with him again, not in the way she wanted. She now realised what she had felt for Bob was a stupid, childish infatuation compared to the way she felt about Simon . . .
The trouble was, what with both Lizzie and her nanna knowing, her mum could so easily find out about him. Not that either of them would hurt her deliberately, but it was only too easy for her to imagine how they might let her secret slip.
Just Around the Corner Page 30
