Chrissie's Children

by Irene Carr

  But Vesta Nightingale, the professional, said absently, ‘That’s nice.’ She glanced at a clock on the wall and stood up hurriedly. ‘It’s been lovely talking to you but I have to make a change now. Come and see me again, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I will. I’ll come every—’ Sophie was urged towards the door, Martha’s hand in her back.

  ‘Do that, darling. Here . . .’ Martha fumbled in the pocket of the robe, pulled something from it and shoved it into Sophie’s hand. ‘Couple of complimentary tickets for a midweek night. Enjoy the show. Goodnight.’ The door closed on her smile.

  As Sophie danced away, clutching the tickets, she passed a middle-aged man in an overcoat which hung open over his paunch. A cigar stuck out of his fat, red, round face. His shoulder caught Sophie, sending her staggering, but he waddled on without a word of apology and instead gave her a glare. Nothing could upset Sophie now, however. She had talked with her grandmother, Vesta Nightingale, and was invited to meet her again. As she passed the man guarding the stage door she waved the tickets at him and called, ‘I’ll be back!’

  Meanwhile the fat man had tramped into Vesta Nightingale’s dressing-room without knocking and demanded, ‘What the ‘ell’s going on ‘ere? That stage door keeper just told me your friend had already come in. Who is he? Where is he?’ He glared around the room that was little bigger than a cupboard.

  Martha patted his cheek and let her robe fall open, saw his eyes hungry on her and soothed him, ‘It was the lass you must ha’ passed on your way in. She turned up out of the blue to see me and he thought she was the guest I told him I expected. That’s all I told him: “I’ve got a friend coming to see me, George.” See?’

  He wiped a fat hand over his red face and mumbled, ‘Ah! Well, that’s different.’

  She kissed him and pushed his bulk down into the chair. ‘You sit there, Wilf. I’ve got to make a change and if you’re a good boy you can watch. Then later on, when I’ve finished here, we can have a drink and a bite to eat – and so on.’

  He smirked at her. ‘Aye. And so on.’

  Then they both laughed.

  The tickets were for the night Sophie was due to meet Peter Robinson, so instead of walking with him along the sea front in the rain she took him to the Empire. The seats were in the circle and Peter gazed wide eyed at opulence such as he had never seen. The soft carpets underfoot, the luxuriously padded seats, the orchestra and the lights – the whole show was a world removed from the sixpenny seat in a small local cinema.

  When he had asked how she came by the tickets, Sophie told him, ‘One of the chaps in the show is staying at the hotel. He left a few tickets for the staff.’ That was true – but those tickets had gone to the staff and were for another night. Sarah Tennant was given one of them and had sat enthralled through the performance.

  After Vesta Nightingale took her bow and left the stage, Sophie asked, ‘Wasn’t she good?’

  Peter answered cautiously in face of her enthusiasm, ‘All right. A bit brassy, though.’

  She did not say much to him for the rest of the show and left him at the hotel with a curt ‘Goodnight.’ She would not tell him of her relationship with Vesta Nightingale, nor take him to the dressing-room to meet her. Vesta was Sophie’s secret.

  She went to the Empire every night for the rest of the week, wheedling the money out of her father. She watched, rapt and dreaming dreams. After the last performance on Saturday night Sophie asked Martha, ‘Can I write to you?’

  Martha patted her cheek with a beringed hand. ‘Course you can, pet. And let me know how you get on with your singing. It would be nice to have another artiste in the family.’ She glanced at the clock and hedged, ‘I haven’t got digs yet but you can drop me a line at the Empire in Newcastle. My agent has got me a month or more in panto: Aladdin. Now I have to pack because we’ll be travelling tomorrow.’ She eased Sophie through the door and sent her on her way with a pat on the back that was half a shove: ‘’Bye, ’bye, love.’

  On her way out Sophie passed a fat, red-faced man in an overcoat. She thought vaguely that his face was familiar but did not recognise the man she had seen earlier in the week. She was too excited by the encouragement she had received from Martha: ‘It would be nice to have another artiste in the family.’

  Sophie wrote to Martha several times a week in the month that followed, without getting a reply. She read the reviews of Aladdin in the Sunderland Echo and in the Newcastle Journal. She was surprised and disappointed when Vesta Nightingale was not mentioned but told herself that critics were notoriously biased.

  She stopped seeing Peter, another biased critic. Sophie had kept on meeting him at the Wheatsheaf corner though he now believed she lived in the Ballantyne Hotel, but there came a night when she told him, ‘I can’t meet you next week. I’m busy.’

  Peter answered glumly, ‘Working overtime?’ He could understand that because you worked whenever you got the chance.

  Sophie let him believe it and nodded, but then he asked, ‘When will I see you again?’

  Sophie searched for an answer but only found, ‘I’ll send you a postcard.’

  Peter reluctantly accepted that.

  Sophie still met Helen for visits to the cinema. Then one night Helen asked, ‘Have you seen that Peter Robinson lately?’ When Sophie shook her head, Helen went on, ‘I thought you hadn’t.’

  Helen had seen Peter hanging around the Ballantyne Hotel, had guessed why and avoided him. One wet night, when she had been hurrying, head bent against the rain, he had stepped out of the station forecourt, across the road from the hotel. He caught at her arm and Helen yelped, startled. He released her quickly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind.’ Helen forced a laugh, guessing what was coming. ‘You didn’t hurt me, just scared me the way you jumped out.’

  He muttered again, ‘Sorry. Look, have you seen Sophie lately?’

  ‘Not much. I think she’s been busy. Work, you know.’ Helen looked round at the hotel as if searching for Sophie, but in fact avoiding his eyes because she was a reluctant and poor liar.

  ‘Aye, well, if you see her, tell her I was asking after her.’ The rain ran down Peter’s face, plastering his hair to his skull. Helen had promised to tell her.

  Now she said to Sophie, ‘He’s been standing outside the hotel, watching for you.’

  Sophie sighed. ‘I know. I’ve seen him.’ She pulled a face, ‘I’ve been ducking out of the back door to avoid him.’

  Helen, remembering and resenting how Sophie had lied to Peter, snapped, ‘You’re not being fair to that chap.’

  Sophie shrugged, uninterested. ‘All right, I’ll chuck him.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘I told you it wasn’t a big love affair. Remember?’

  ‘I remember that, and telling you he might feel differently.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help that now.’

  Helen shook her head despairingly. ‘Sometimes you can be a right little bitch.’

  Sophie reacted angrily. ‘And sometimes you can poke your nose in where it’s not wanted.’

  So they went their separate ways. Sophie avoided Helen, not wanting to face that accusing stare and having to make excuses. Helen was just too busy looking after her home to seek out Sophie.

  When the letter came at last it was little more than a note. Sophie found it beside her plate at breakfast, saw the Newcastle postmark and exclaimed, ‘It’s from Gran!’

  Her mother had seen the postmark and sat tight lipped, but did not condemn or forbid, guessing that Sophie would only construe that as trying to turn her away from Martha. Chrissie reasoned that Martha Tate out of sight would soon be out of mind. She cold-bloodedly calculated that her mother would not waste time, paper and stamps on her grandchild and that this letter was just an attempt to annoy Chrissie.

  She was right about the motive, and the letter, a single, pink, scented sheet, did little more than give the address of rooms in Newcastle where Martha would be staying for a while. She sai
d, in an erratic scrawl, ‘I have got some work lined up locally for when this panto finishes. Love . . .’

  However, the letters, albeit only a single sheet each time, continued. One arrived every week and Sophie took them upstairs to read. Often there was a brief enquiry, like: ‘I hope you are getting along all right with your singing. I wasn’t much older than you when I went on the stage.’

  It was in March that Sophie stopped avoiding Peter. She needed his help no longer – and she had to play fair with him. She walked up to him where he wandered along the pavement opposite the Ballantyne Hotel but then lost her nerve and only asked, ‘Will you come to a dance with me on Saturday? I’ll pay for my own ticket.’ She insisted on that and he gave in, just glad to see her again. At the dance he found her silent. She seemed intent on watching and listening to the band and the one singer, a young man with a nasal tenor voice. Peter put up with that, too. The hall was not a big one, nor was the band. There were just seven instrumentalists, the tenor and the leader at the front, conducting. Their dinner jackets were shiny with wear and their hands, except those of the leader, were rough and broken nailed, showing the signs of manual work. Peter thought they looked to be only part-time musicians.

  The leader was a man of forty with a thin moustache and a ‘fiddler’s haircut’, long and combed back from a central parting. When he announced a short interval, Sophie emerged from her apparent abstraction, took a breath and spoke the piece she had prepared and rehearsed – and postponed as long as she could. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Peter, but I think you want to be too serious. I think we’d better stop seeing each other.’

  He stared at her, bewildered, and asked, ‘What?’ Sophie repeated her little speech as the floor cleared around them. Now he recalled how he had not seen her for some weeks, her silence. He said, ‘You’ve got somebody else.’

  Sophie had not expected that, and was dumb for a second, then she shook her head. ‘No! Nobody else. I just don’t want anybody – yet.’

  He didn’t believe her, couldn’t believe that she would do this to him, but then faced the fact that she had, and that she meant what she said. His hurt came out in anger then and he told her, ‘That’s all right wi’ me, lass. There’s plenty o’ fish in the sea.’ He turned and walked away, leaving her alone.

  Sophie watched him go, hurt that she had hurt him. Then she turned and walked across the wide, empty floor to the stage and the band who were climbing down for their break. She pulled at the leader’s sleeve. ‘Excuse me.’

  14

  April 1937

  ‘You are a woman now. You must look to yourself.’ Helen could almost hear the words of Paco Diaz as she watched the train pull out of Monkwearmouth station. Her father and brother were aboard it, bound for Newcastle to catch the night train to London and then a ship to Spain. They were going to join the Republican Army and the fight against Franco. She was left on the echoing platform with its cones of yellow light and the smell of smoke, soot, steam and hot metal.

  Helen walked home in the quiet of the evening, the silent shipyards shut for the night. She would be walking everywhere now because every penny was precious: ‘You must look to yourself.’ And was she a woman? At sixteen? And home? There would be no home. Paco had left her no money, saying, ‘Close down the house and keep what you get for the furniture. Find some work and lodgings.’ Helen knew the furniture would fetch little, and to get a job and find lodgings would not be easy, but she thought she knew a way . . .

  She was into Monkwearmouth and walking up Church Street when she glimpsed a couple sauntering down the hill towards her. She recognised Matt Ballantyne as they passed under a streetlamp, and saw that the girl clinging to his arm was the blonde Pamela Ogilvy. They turned into the Frigate, the public house on the corner. Matt had not seen Helen, but then she told herself that he never had done.

  Back at the house, spread out on the kitchen table were the newspapers with the reports that had finally broken up Helen’s world. She glanced at them now, the big headlines shouting that the German Condor Legion had bombed the little Spanish town of Guernica. Paco and his son, Juan, had devoured all the earlier news of the fighting in the Civil War in Spain since its outbreak in the previous July. Paco had muttered vaguely about going to fight against Franco and Juan had more noisily agreed. But Helen had taken that to be just talk. She and Juan had been born here. She had never been to Spain in her life. Why should she or her family be involved in this war?

  The bombing of Guernica changed that. Her father and brother had gone and now she was alone. ‘You must look to yourself.’ A small fire burned in the grate, just enough to take the chill off the house and boil a kettle. Helen swept up the newspapers from the table and fed them into the fire. She watched the flames roar up the chimney and wiped at the tears that would not stop.

  The sitting-room of the Frigate was lined with leather-covered benches. The round-topped wooden tables gleamed with polish and a spittoon filled with sawdust sat under each table. Pamela whispered, ‘Here.’ She pushed the half-crown into Matt’s hand. ‘Buy some more.’

  Matt said, ‘Well . . .’ He looked up at the clock above the door to the bar, doubtful.

  Pamela urged, ‘Go on! There’s plenty of time. It’s only eight o’clock.’ This had been her idea. She had asked Matt, ‘Can’t we go to a pub, somewhere we’re not known?’ They were both underage, though Matt at nearly eighteen could pass for a year or two older with his height and breadth of shoulder.

  Matt asked, ‘Are you all right?’ because Pamela had downed two gins and orange.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She smiled at him, rubbing his hand. ‘Go on, big boy.’

  Matt swallowed his doubts and gave in. It was easy. Pamela was an attractive girl and he liked the envious glances he got from some other males. He lifted a hand and the woman waiting on in the sitting-room came with her tray and took his order. ‘Gill o’ beer and a gin and orange, please.’ They had another round later and left just after nine because Pamela said, ‘Mam says I have to be in by ten.’

  Once outside Pamela clung to Matt and giggled. He found he had to hold her steady or she would waver from side to side of the pavement. He worried that she might fall asleep in the tram but instead she became more alive. Normally talkative, now she was silent as she held his hand. She clung to him as they walked the last quarter-mile to her home in the warmth of a spring night.

  As they walked up the drive they could see chinks of light at the sides of the curtained windows. Matt said, ‘I’ll see you later, then.’ He did not want to leave Pamela but neither did he want to meet her father. From what Matt had heard, Pamela’s father was a pompous bore.

  But Pamela still held his hand, and pulled him on. ‘Round here.’ She led him down the side of the house to the garden at the rear and a summer house that stood there. She shoved the door open, and the moonlight filtering through the windows showed that it held a lawnmower and some other tools used by the Ogilvys’ gardener. There were also a stack of basket chairs and a pile of cushions that chanced to form a couch.

  Pamela closed the door, sank down on to the cushions and drew Matt down with her.

  Helen Diaz sold off the furniture and shut up the house as she had been told. All she took with her were her own clothes in one cheap suitcase and her few mementoes of her mother. Among these was her birth certificate, and that of the sister who had died before she was born and been given the same name of Helen.

  It was this one she produced when applying for a post as a student nurse because it showed her as being over eighteen. That and her record with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade saw her installed in the nurses’ home.

  On her first night there she went to her bed happier than she had been for a long time. Her heart still ached for the father and brother who had left her, but she would settle for being a nurse and she knew her mother would be content.

  Her only regret was that she no longer had a friend to share her happiness. She had not seen Sophie Ballantyne since t
heir quarrel over Peter Robinson.

  Some three months later, in June, the afternoon sunshine beamed like a spotlight through the window of Chrissie’s office in the Ballantyne Hotel. It reflected from the dark, polished surface of her desk and lit up the notes laid out neatly across it. She looked them over again, partly to confirm the extent of Sophie’s sinning, partly to control her temper. All the notes were written on plain stationery, her home address at the head, and all in a passable imitation of Chrissie’s own writing. The excuses were varied: a cold, a visit to the dentist, a sprained ankle, etc. . . . All appeared to have been signed by Chrissie.

  She pushed them away, sat back in her chair and looked across her desk at Ursula Whittle. Ursula had knocked at the door a few minutes ago and asked nervously, ‘Can I talk to you about Sophie, Mrs Ballantyne?’ And then, ‘Did you write these letters?’

  Now Chrissie said crisply, ‘I did not. They are forgeries.’

  Ursula sighed. ‘Oh, dear. I was afraid you would say that.’

  Chrissie poked at the note on the top with one slim finger, ‘This is dated the end of March. I take it that’s when this business started?’

  Ursula nodded. ‘Her attendance record was good until then.’

  ‘And the increase in absences made you suspicious.’

  Ursula blinked unhappily. ‘Well, no. To tell the truth I never doubted they were true until I had to go into town one afternoon and I saw Sophie going into a dance hall. The next day she brought a note saying you had kept her at home with a stomach upset.’

  Chrissie said grimly, ‘I see. Well, I would be grateful if you would leave me to deal with this. Is Sophie at school today?’

  ‘No,’ Ursula admitted, ‘and I’d be glad to leave this to you. I haven’t told the headmistress yet. I know I should, but something like this is an expulsion offence and I can’t think Sophie deserves that. She must have had a good reason for acting as she has.’