by Marie Joseph
‘Look, Dorothy,’ Margaret was saying, her interest in the missing Armstrong girl having evaporated, ‘I wish you’d just try and be nicer to Gerald. He’ll be Father’s partner in the mill one day; he’s taken the financial side over altogether now, and when we’re married he’ll be your brother-in-law, remember. We’ll be living not all that far away, and you’ll be coming to see us often I hope.’ She opened her blue eyes wide in accusation. ‘He knows you don’t like him, you know.’
‘He probably thinks it’s because I’ve fallen for him and am madly jealous that you’re the one he’s chosen, him being God’s gift to women,’ Dorothy said, biting her lip and turning away.
She knew she could never tell Margaret the main reason for her active dislike of the elegant young man from London. Just how, for heaven’s sake, did you tell someone with their wedding coming-up in June that you wouldn’t trust their precious fiancé any further than you could throw him?
Her real aversion to Gerald Tomlin had started the day she had seen him flirting with one of the mill girls as they streamed out of the yard on their way home late one afternoon. He was leaning against his red MG sports car, a fawn raincoat tightly belted round his waist, a cigarette held casually in his long fingers, and what he was saying was making the young girl giggle in a familiar way that would have made Phyllis’s blood run cold. She was a big girl, with the front piece of her hair peroxided to a white candy-floss, and as Dorothy watched unseen from the office window, Gerald had suddenly turned her round and fondled her plump behind before giving it a resounding slap.
She wasn’t a prude, heavens, not that, and she wasn’t a snob, heavens not that either, but it wasn’t quite in keeping with the gentlemanly behaviour he displayed when he came to Appleroyd. Perhaps there was more of her mother in her than she realized. . . .
No, she could never tell Margaret, nor could she tell her that the New Year’s kiss she had received from Gerald had disgusted her and almost made her feel sick.
It was what the girls at school would have described as a French kiss, with his slack mouth opening over her own, and his tongue probing wetly and rhythmically.
It had been almost a case of incest, she had told herself dramatically afterwards, and had wondered how Margaret, her fastidious, prim, and reserved sister could possibly put up with it? Compared with that nauseating kiss, Stanley’s kisses were hard and fierce. And very much to be preferred, she decided.
‘Are you very much in love with Gerald?’ she asked, trying to imagine Margaret responding to such a sickly embrace. And failing.
‘What a thing to ask!’
Margaret fiddled with the silver-backed brush on the dressing-table, the back of her neck going slightly pink. ‘You’ve been reading Mrs Wilkinson’s Woman Pictorials again, haven’t you?’ She gazed up at the ceiling as if searching for the right words. ‘Life isn’t a bit like it’s set up to be in those stories you know.’
‘No, you’re right. Life is like Gerald Tomlin,’ Dorothy said, not quite underneath her brèath. Then feeling ashamed of herself, left the room and went downstairs to set the seal on her nasty mood by lying to her mother about the mythical netball practice. Getting so carried away that she even described the way she had hurled the ball into the net from a distance of at least ten yards. . . .
She was back from the typing lesson just in time to sit down at the dinner table with the family. She had been driven back by Philips, and he’d told her there had been a police car in the mill yard all the afternoon.
‘Right excitement there were in the weaving sheds,’ he’d said with some satisfaction. ‘Tongues clacking almost as loud as the looms. They say they’re thinking of dragging the duck pond in the Corporation Park.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where all the courting couples go, isn’t it?’
She blushed and hoped Philips hadn’t noticed, but he had changed the subject, and anyway he wasn’t interested in what she did, only at the moment in telling her about his lady friend’s mother, who apparently was on her deathbed, which meant he could marry Vera at last.
He was a neat man, with tiny hands and a bald head which he concealed beneath his peaked cap. What bit of hair he had was plastered to his scalp with solidified brilliantine, and he had a habit of smacking his lips at the end of each sentence, which must, Dorothy had often thought, drive his fiancée mad.
‘The problem is that Vera wants us to live in her house in Charlotte Street, but I don’t want to give my little place up,’ he said, with a loud expressive smack of the lips. ‘I’ve just got it to my liking with a back-boiler in the living-room that heats the water a treat. But Vera’s adamant.’
He pronounced it as ‘adayment’, and Dorothy, over the blush now, thought of Vera, who could have been any age between forty and sixty, and who wore her black hair in pin-wheel plaits over each ear, and sported white ankle socks over her stockings. Vera ran the Church Guide Troop at St. Hilda’s as if the patrols were training for military manoeuvres, and the very idea of her lying by Philip’s side in a double bed filled Dorothy with a kind of hysterical horror. Gerald Tomlin had said that Philips was a pansy and would never marry, and that Vera was a natural spinster, clinging to her invalid mother and making her an excuse not to marry.
‘They’re born virgins, the two of them,’ he had said, making sure that Mrs Bolton was well out of earshot before using a word that she would have considered indelicate. ‘Any couple who court for over twenty years have no intention of marrying. I’ve seen the inside of Philips’s house, and no woman could keep it as clean and tidy as that.’
Dorothy had felt bound to agree, having seen with her own eyes a potted plant on a doyley on the draining board in the kitchen, and covers covering the covers on the three-piece suite in the front parlour.
‘I bet he goes to bed with his vest on underneath his pyjama jacket,’ Gerald went on, and Dorothy’s father, who did exactly that, had merely grunted as he’d come into the room and caught the tail-end of the conversation.
Matthew Bolton’s big face settled into lines of contentment as his younger daughter took her place at the dinner table.
‘Hallo, chuck,’ he said, winking at her, and thinking what a corker she looked in that blue spotted dress. By the heck but she were a bonny lass, even though from the expression on her face she looked as if she might be spoiling for a fight as usual. Always asking questions there weren’t no answers to, and not knowing what it was she wanted to do when she left school. Wondering what life was all about, and worriting about things far beyond her control, things she could do nowt about. Not like Margaret there, who took it all for granted. He beamed again at Dorothy who wrinkled her nose at him affectionately.
He’d been doing a bit of wondering about life himself lately, come to that. What with the worry of them bloody Japs modernizing more and more of their cotton mills, and supplying the British markets at a price he couldn’t hope to compete with. Not with the overheads he’d got. Already he’d scrapped a third of his looms, and a good job it was he’d stuck to his father’s maxim of not spending a penny unless he could put his hand in his back pocket and cover it with another. And still seeing his family went short of nowt into the bargain.
At the other end of the long mahogany table, his wife was presiding over the brown dish of hot-pot, as regally as if it were a gold-plated dish, her hands daintily occupied as she passed the plates round.
‘Typed any good letters, Dorothy?’
Gerald Tomlin was smiling at her with his freckled pouchy face, his wet eyes glistening with anticipation as he took a plate of food from his prospective mother-in-law.
Everything about him is wet, Dorothy thought, with the familiar feeling of distaste. His hair shines too much, and his lips look as if he’d just licked them ready to give one of his awful sloppy kisses.
‘I’ll never be as good a secretary as Margaret,’ she told him, being polite and rather humble for her sister’s sake. ‘This evening we had to type in t
ime to a military two-step on the gramophone, and the keys on my typewriter kept on coming up all jammed together. I think I’d have been better off with a funeral dirge.’
Gerald threw back his sandy head and laughed as if she’d said something unbearably witty. He laughed so much that there was almost a touch of hysteria in it, and he really was pathetic, Dorothy thought with distaste. Then saw the expression on her sister’s face, and seeing, got the answer to the question she had asked earlier.
Margaret was in love. Really in love. The head-over-heels kind so strongly advocated in Mrs Wilkinson’s magazines. She must have been at her hair with the sugar and water, Dorothy decided, for now it curved softly on to her flushed cheeks; her eyes shone blue, and when she smiled her mouth was a soft and dreamy curve of contentment. She studied her sister’s face with a morbid fascination. Margaret seemed to be smiling affectionately at the hot-pot on her plate, pushing it gently from side to side, almost as if she found its beauty too much to bear.
‘The time I start smiling at hot-pot I’ll know I’m really sunk,’ Dorothy told herself, and made up her mind to go on trying to be nice to Gerald.
‘I like your tie,’ she told him, knowing this remark was sure to please as Gerald was a snazzy dresser. And at once he beamed round the table and told them all that it was hand-made silk from Harrods in London, and that with the matching crêpe silk handkerchief peeping from his top pocket, it had set him back all of twelve and sixpence.
‘But worth every penny, Gerald,’ Phyllis said, and Dorothy tried not to raise her eyebrows as she remembered the times her mother had reminded her that to mention the cost of anything was extremely common.
‘I even put Mrs Wilkinson’s wages in an envelope so that I don’t have the embarrassment of handing her the actual money,’ she’d once said.
It was no good, Dorothy told herself, she couldn’t bring herself to like the bland young man sitting by her sister’s side. She would try, just as she was trying now not to mention the intruding worry in her mind of Ruby Armstrong’s disappearance. She knew how much her mother hated controversial and serious subjects being aired at the table. And Phyllis had gone to a lot of trouble, ladling the hot-pot into her best Wedgwood dinner plates, and using the silver knives and forks from the polished mahogany case on the sideboard.
‘Unpleasant subjects should always be kept from the table,’ was another of her sayings, and Dorothy knew she wouldn’t be able to bear it if the missing girl was mentioned and her mother said, as she was bound to say, that she had got what she was probably asking for.
‘If she said that I would just walk out,’ Dorothy told herself silently, and watched Gerald being pressed, obviously against his will, to accept a second helping.
‘My compliments to the chef,’ he said, just as she had known he would say.
It was no good. She couldn’t keep silent after all. She had to ask. She could still see Stanley’s thin face, noble with suffering, and the police might have told her father something? Perhaps even now Ruby was weeping on her mother’s shoulder, saying that she didn’t know what had made her do such a dreadful thing; swearing that she didn’t mind working at the mill, that she fully understood that anyone as brilliant as her brother had to have his chance.
‘I heard today . . .’ she began.
‘Margaret and I . . .’ Gerald said at the same time.
‘Sorry,’ Dorothy said. And the moment was gone.
Gerald smiled, showing white teeth as small as a child’s first milk teeth. ‘I’m taking Margaret to the Rialto, to the Second House. Would you like to come with us, Dorothy? I could sit between you; a thorn between two roses, what?’
Dorothy thanked him, and explained quite truthfully that she had piles of homework to do. Then, as Gerald started talking about the film, she decided that being nice wasn’t a virtue at all. It was merely the way one wanted to be at a given time. A form of self indulgence, in fact.
What hypocrites we are, she thought, every one of us.
‘I saw the film in London at the beginning of the year,’ Gerald was saying. ‘Charles Laughton makes a topping Henry the Eighth, and Merle Oberon as Anne Boleyn is simply superb.’ He waved his fork about to add emphasis to his words. ‘She is that marvellous and rare thing, a stunning woman with intelligence as well as beauty.’ He patted Margaret’s face to show he meant no offence. ‘And Robert Donat . . . well . . .’ Words seemed to fail him. ‘He takes the part of Catherine Howard’s lover, and his voice is superb, sort of hoarse with a marvellous sense of feeling in it, if you know what I mean. Superb,’ he said again.
Dorothy leaned forward, forgetting it was Gerald she was talking to, and not Stanley.
‘I read that they show the jovial side of the King’s nature, not his selfish cruelty. Surely that’s all wrong?’
Gerald smiled his shiny smile. ‘People go to the cinema to be entertained, not to witness the unsavoury details of history, my dear.’
Dorothy gave up trying to be agreeable. ‘That’s just silly. If the film people want to show actual characters who lived and breathed, then they should show them as they were, warts and all. So why can’t we be shown Henry as he was, with all his unsavoury habits, and his . . .’
Gerald’s smile dimmed a little. ‘Perhaps until you see the film for yourself . . .?’
Ignoring the warning glances her mother was sending her from across the table, Dorothy said that she was in all probability going to see it with a friend on Saturday.
‘Which friend?’ her mother asked, forcing her to lie, and realizing from the knowing look on Gerald’s face that he knew that she was lying.
Oh God, she thought miserably, why did her family hang on to his every word as if he were Moses? Couldn’t they see that he would break Margaret’s heart? Why, oh why, couldn’t her sweet and kind sister have fallen in love with Edwin Birtwistle, the captain of the tennis club for three consecutive seasons, a director in his father’s firm at twenty-five? Edwin Birtwistle would have loved Margaret for ever more, and never ever kissed her sister with his mouth wide open, or fondled another girl’s bottom in broad daylight.
‘I had been thinking that perhaps you and I could go to the First House tomorrow night, dear,’ her mother was saying, her beads making little clattering noises on the edge of the table as she stacked the plates together. ‘Your father has a Rotary meeting, and we could have high tea in the Emporium Café first.’
‘I am going with a friend on Saturday,’ Dorothy said in some despair, wishing she could say the friend was Stanley. Wishing he could come to the house like Gerald Tomlin, and be accepted and listened to. Wishing they could hear the marvellous way he talked, his dark eyes eager, his voice going gruffwhen he talked about a subject dear to his heart.
Wishing he wasn’t going away. . . .
Three
AFTER STANLEY HAD left Dorothy in the park, he ran all the way down West Road with a long loping stride, his elbows tucked into his sides and his grasshopper legs covering the ground at an incredible rate, like a long-distance runner.
The houses, set well back from the road, were ivy-covered, solid and secluded in their respectability, a different world away from the mean street in which he lived. A group of girls in scarlet blazers and peaked caps were coming out of the private school on the corner, and a girl with a bold face called something out to him, but hearing nothing, he ran on.
At the bottom of the road, on the main trunk thoroughfare were the tram-lines, running parallel all the way into the town. For a moment he hesitated as he heard the rattle and whine of an approaching tram, calculating whether it would be quicker to catch it or take a short cut back to the house.
Already his breath was catching in his throat, and there was a stabbing, pricking pain in his left side, but he didn’t slacken his pace, running along for a while at the side of the tram, then turning into a street of Victorian houses which had been turned into solicitors’ offices.
He’d had no right to leave his mother alone, he
knew that now, but it had seemed important that Dorothy shouldn’t be kept waiting; that he told her what had happened before she heard it from her father. And his mother had understood. Or at least she had seemed to understand.
‘It’s the waiting,’ she’d kept saying all the long day, ‘The waiting, and feeling so helpless like.’
He had left her ironing a pile of shirts heaped high in her ironing basket. Standing at the living-room table with the familiar folded blanket in place. Slipping the heated flat-iron into its polished slipper while the second iron hotted up at the blazing coal fire.
‘How can you work at a time like this?’ he’d asked her, and she’d gone on working without looking up.
‘If I stopped doing something I’d go out of my mind. It’s the waiting, you see,’ she’d said again.
On he ran, along a wide street lined with shops, a third of them closed and shuttered, with slogans written on their empty windows. UP THE BOLSHIES. DOWN WITH THE MEANS TEST. Past a massive poster proclaiming that EVERYWHERE YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL. Past a tripe shop with the white honeycombed offal laid out in the window on a marble slab, flanked by pigs’ trotters, and a pig’s head with an orange in its mouth.
Past a chip shop, almost knocking over a woman coming out with a basin of fish and chips covered with a white cloth . . . reminding him that he was hungry.
Into the labyrinth now of steep streets with terraced houses opening straight on to the pavements, with housewives standing on their doorsteps, gossiping, arms folded over the flowered cross-over pinafores they wore like a uniform, keeping watchful eyes on their children as they played hopscotch, using the flagged pavements as their marking grounds.
On through a back passage, slipping on the greasy cobblestones, ducking under lines of washing, past a small boy walking with legs wide apart, sobbing loudly because he’d wet himself. Seeing it all. And seeing nothing.
