by Marie Joseph
And as he turned into Inkerman Street, they were there, the vultures, pretending to be stoning their window-bottoms, some of them mopping their front steps and the surrounding flags for the third time that day. Turning eager eyes towards him as he ran panting to number twenty-seven.
‘Is there any news, love?’
That was Mrs Crawley from across the street, a neighbour who spent all day wearing her husband’s flat cap and an apron made out of sacking, and went out each night wearing a tight black suit and a pillar-box hat with an eye veil. Rouged to kill and up to no good, as everyone said. She would be the only one with the nerve to ask outright, Stanley thought, and shook his head. Not because he wished to snub her, but because there wasn’t the breath left to speak.
And besides, Mrs Crawley had the right to ask if anyone had. The street’s official benefactor, she was the first one called on when a laying-out became necessary. Propped against her back-yard wall was a spare lavatory door, kept for such a purpose.
‘Keeps ’em nice and straight,’ she would say, laying the corpse out flat on its unyielding surface, closing the eyes for the last time with pennies weighting down the lids, arranging the lifeless hands in a neatly folded praying position over the newly washed chests. No point in paying the undertaker when Mrs Crawley would do it for no more than a cup of tea or a glass of throat-stinging ginger wine.
Mrs Crawley it was who had scrubbed the oilcloth in Ruby’s room till the pattern had almost vanished when Ruby had been taken off in the ambulance to the fever hospital burning with diphtheria two years before. Making the entire house reek to the rooftops of Jeyes Fluid for days to come.
Mrs Crawley who had sat up with the three-year-old Ruby when the pneumonia had almost finished her. Sitting up all night so that her mother could get some rest. Keeping the steam kettle going, changing the sheets from under her when the fever broke and she lay bathed in sweat. Searching the town on a Sunday afternoon when Ruby, over the crisis, fancied a bit of ice-cream.
Oh, yes. Mrs Crawley had the right to ask. . . .
‘Mum! I’m back!’ Stanley called out as he closed the front door behind him. ‘I wasn’t long, was I? I told you I wouldn’t be.’
But the woman who turned her face towards him as he walked down the passage, past the front parlour, and into the living-room, was a woman for whom time had lost all meaning. One hour, or two, or three, what did it matter? All she was waiting for was the knock on the door to say that Ruby had been found safe and well. The other supposition she would not countenance. So she did what she had to do, as if she’d been wound up inside, all her being concentrating on the shirt she was ironing on the table in front of her.
Otherwise she’d crack, and she knew it.
Double bits first. Cuffs, neck-band, button-trim, wrong side first. Spitting on the iron first to see if it was the right heat. She could tell that by the way the spit bounced off and slid along the gleaming slipper. Stiff collars, damp dry from the big basin of starch with a dab of dolly-blue in it. Collars ironed to a polished smoothness with the iron running over a piece of fent from the mill. The mill . . . Oh God, that’s where her Ruby should be at that moment, standing at her looms on the wet flagged floor with her flowered overall over her dress, and her dark curly hair wisping softly round her bonny face. Back to the collars. Curving them round her hand, then layering them one inside the other, making sure the fold was in the right place.
When she saw Stanley she straightened up for a moment and stared at him through dark eyes sunk deep into their sockets with worry and exhaustion. She laid the iron on its rest for a moment.
‘They came again while you were gone. He said they were going to drag the duck pond in the Corporation Park at first light tomorrow. Seems one of her work-mates was standing by the side gate in West Road last night about ten o’clock with a boy, and thought she saw Ruby go in with a boy. Or a man. She couldn’t see either of them; didn’t look really, but she thought it might have been our Ruby’s voice.’
‘Oh, Mum. . . .’
Stanley went to her and gently brushed the hair away from her hot forehead. It was unbelievable how in one short day his mother’s looks had changed to what he imagined they might be when she was an old, old woman. Surely flesh could not sag in the space of twenty-four hours? Less than that. Deep wrinkles appearing where wrinkles had never been before?
In spite of her long hours at the dolly-tub, fishing clothes out of the boiler with the rounded stick, and her backbreaking stretches at the mangle with its wide wooden rollers, Ada Armstrong was a handsome woman. The country freshness of her Cumberland upbringing had never quite left her cheeks, and her hair, black and coarse as wire, without a single strand of silver in it, sprang away from her forehead, refusing to lie smooth.
Stanley gave her a push towards the rocking chair set by the fire. ‘Sit down, Mum. Just for a few minutes. I’ll get you a cup of tea.’ His mind shied away from what she had just told him. They couldn’t think . . . not the duck pond in the park? Not the very place he’d just left with the wind rippling its dark green surface? Ruby with her hair, her pretty hair caught up in the long grasses, her body bloated and swollen . . . ‘They don’t know anything; it’s only that they have to follow up any kind of lead they get. Please sit down, Mum. To please me. You’ll be ill.’
So to please him Ada sat down for a second on the very edge of the chair, then got up and followed him through into the scullery.
‘She wouldn’t be going in the park with a boy at that time, not our Ruby. She was always in by ten. Besides she always told me where she was going, and last night she was going with a mate from work to the Bulb Show in town then back to this girl’s house.’
‘Which girl, Mum?’ Stanley filled the kettle and found a match for the gas. ‘They haven’t found her yet, have they?’ He had to make her think however cruel it might seem to be. His logical mind couldn’t accept that there was nothing, not a single clue. In spite of her recent secretiveness, Ruby was an honest girl, with every expression on her face there for all to read. He had to try again.
‘Did she ever even hint to you that she had found herself another boy? Even give you the slightest suspicion that she was doing something she had no right to be doing?’
Ada followed him to the cupboard as he reached for two cups and put them side by side on the draining board. Her usually clear voice was low. ‘What I’ve been thinking I don’t rightly like to say.’
Stanley went back to the kettle and she followed him there. ‘You must say it, Mum. Even if it doesn’t seem important. You must say it.’
Ada sighed a deep sigh. ‘Ever since she packed it in with Eddie Marsden next door, she’s been different. Keeping herself to herself, and snapping at me when I’ve tried to talk to her.’
The kettle came to the boil and Stanley carried it over to the teapot, his mother no more than a step behind him.
‘I think she’s been going out with a married man. Oh yes, I do, and you don’t need to look like that, son, because them what’s never come up against temptation don’t know what they’re saying.’
Carefully Stanley poured the hot water out in a steady stream. ‘There’s a Spanish proverb that says “He who avoids the temptation avoids the sin.” I wasn’t shocked, Mum.’
‘It all fits in somehow. She’s been telling me lies, that’s obvious. The sergeant told me she hasn’t been seeing the girls at the mill, not if they were telling the truth, that is. But they couldn’t tell him anything. Not a word, so she’s been just as secretive with them as she has with me. I know my girl and she was probably too ashamed to tell anyone what was going on, don’t you see?’
Without waiting for the tea to brew Stanley poured it into the cups, laced them both liberally with sugar, and went out to the small meat safe in the yard where they kept the milk.
‘You mean you think she’s gone off with this . . . this married chap?’
‘Aye, I do.’
‘Without taking her warm coat, or her
nightdress, or anything?’
He carried the cups into the living-room and set them down on the table next to the pile of ironing. Then, although the room was hot to the point of suffocation, he lifted a square slab of coal from the scuttle and put it on the fire. At that moment warmth spelt comfort somehow . . . Guiding his mother to the rocking chair he put the cup of tea in her hands.
‘Look, Mum, you could be right. I hope you are right, but I can’t think, I can’t believe . . .’ He sat down opposite to her in the big armchair that had been his father’s. ‘Anyway if you are right, all the police have to do is to check on some poor woman whose husband didn’t come home last night. She’d be bound to report him missing to the police, wouldn’t she, just as we did our Ruby?’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t come from this town? Perhaps he’s just in digs here?’
‘Then his landlady would report it. Mum, that still doesn’t explain why she didn’t smuggle some of her clothes out of the house. You know what she’s like about her things. She creates every time anybody touches anything. No, I can’t believe she would leave the lot behind.’
‘Are you trying to prepare me for the fact that she’s dead?’
Stanley quickly denied this. ‘No, of course I’m not. I just feel that by talking round it we may dig up some reason. It’s making us think, Mum, the way the sergeant asked us to do.’
Ada still hadn’t put the cup to her lips. She was staring into the fire now, wrinkling her brow as she tried to concentrate.
‘She didn’t take anything out with her because it was unpremeditated. That’s why. She met this chap and they decided to go away on the spur of the moment, and when they think the dust’s settled a bit Ruby will write to us. She always did get carried away. Look how she thought she was madly in love with Eddie next door.’ Ada turned towards Stanley eagerly, willing him, willing herself to believe she had stumbled on a rational explanation. ‘And why did she finish with Eddie? There were never a proper reason for that now, were there?’
‘She was . . . is only sixteen,’ Stanley corrected himself quickly, horrified at his slip of the tongue. ‘She told me herself that she thought the girls at the mill were daft, drifting into marriage with the first boy they went out with. She told me a lot of them are back at their looms now, with their mothers looking after their babies.’
‘She wanted better than Eddie,’ his mother said as if he had never spoken. ‘His mother came in for a minute while you were out, and she says that when Eddie came home for his dinner he told her the police had been to the shop asking him questions. She said the manager was quite upset and insisted on shutting them in the store room at the back to talk.’
Stanley watched her with love, ready to take the cup from her hands.
She was so tired, he realized, she scarcely knew what she was saying. But she was drinking the tea now, taking great gulps of it, and the glow from the fire was bringing back the colour to her cheeks. Perhaps he could persuade her to eat something? A boiled egg? Stanley felt he could manage that without too much difficulty.
‘Are there any eggs, Mum?’ he was saying when the knock came to the door, a knock followed by Mrs Crawley’s voice calling out ‘Can I come in, Mrs Armstrong?’
She was already in, a bright yellow headscarf covering the curlers in her hair, holding a basin covered with a tea cloth out before her. ‘Now I don’t want no refusals,’ she said, putting the basin down on the table next to the basket of unironed shirts. ‘And you can call me an interfering old bugger if you’ve a mind to, but I reckoned you wouldn’t be feeling like cooking for your teas, not just now. So I’ve been down to the chip shop, and there’s two two’s and a pennorth of dabs each, all salted and vinegared, ready to eat, and I wouldn’t bother with plates if I was you. Just get ’em down as they are. Fingers was made before forks, as Shakespeare said.’
To his dismay Stanley saw the way his mother’s face crumpled, and the way she looked down at the cup in her hands, biting hard on her lips. That was his mum all over . . . worry she could take, poverty she could cope with, heartbreak too, but kindness – that was another thing altogether. Kindness demoralized her. It seemed as if she was at a loss to know how to deal with it; so over the years she had armoured herself against it. Built a dirty great wall up around herself, making it plain that independence was all, that a kindness could only be accepted on her own terms.
‘I’ll get me purse,’ she said and walked over to the top drawer in the sideboard.
‘That’ll be eightpence then, Mrs Armstrong,’ Mrs Crawley added, knowing her neighbour too well to protest, and holding out her hand for the money. ‘By gum, but there’s been more steps mopped in this street today than I’ve seen in all the years I’ve lived here,’ she told Stanley as he walked with her down the lobby to the front door. ‘Any more news yet, love?’
He shook his head. ‘Thanks for the chips, Mrs Crawley.’ He hesitated. ‘And thanks for not asking her any questions.’ He jerked his head backwards.
Nellie Crawley’s usually gruff voice was soft. ‘How’s she bearing up then, lad?’
‘She’ll have to get some sleep tonight or she’ll crack. I’m wondering if I ought to go down to the chemist’s and ask him for something to give her before he closes.’
Nellie gave him a none too gentle punch in the shoulder. ‘Don’t waste your time, love. She wouldn’t take it, and I wouldn’t blame her. She’ll want to know the minute there’s any news, not be sound asleep under the influence of old Brandwood’s herbal concoctions.’
‘You’re right, Mrs Crawley.’
She started to walk away. ‘I’m always right, love. That’s what gets me old man down, the fact that I’m always right. Now you go back in and see she eats them chips while they’re hot.’
But when Stanley walked back into the living-room, his mother was weeping silently into the covered basin, holding it in her arms and rocking it backwards and forwards as if it were a child.
A child she had lost and never thought to see again.
Four
AFTER MARGARET AND Gerald had left for the second-house pictures, holding hands and smiling at each other, Dorothy helped her mother with the dishes.
‘Why don’t you just stack them and leave them for Mrs Wilkinson to do in the morning?’ Dorothy asked, and her mother said it wasn’t in her nature to leave the kitchen a mess.
‘You can always tell a woman’s character by the tidiness or otherwise of her kitchen,’ she said, and looking round at the gleaming surfaces and the hanging cups all facing the same way, Dorothy could see that this was true.
Phyllis’s character was unblemished by a single idiosyncrasy; her thoughts faced all the same way like the blue and white cups; she spoke in clichés, and even they were polished to grammatical perfection before she uttered them. She seemed to have forgotten what she would have called the argument, and what Dorothy would have called the discussion about the film at the dinner table. She wore an apron with a frill round it, tied in an immaculate bow over her high-necked woollen dress, and she washed the dishes, using both rubber gloves and a little mop at the end of a stick, and talked about the hat she couldn’t find for the wedding.
‘It’s no use. I’ll have to decide on navy blue and get gloves and shoes to match. It’s the done thing to have all one’s accessories to tone,’ she said, handing Dorothy a plate, ‘in a darker shade than one’s outfit. I think I’ll get that obliging little Mrs Pearson in the hat market to put a piece of ribbon in the same turquoise as my suit round the brim of my hat. What do you think?’ She pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead with a rubber encased hand. ‘I can’t make up my mind whether it will give my outfit a put-together look, or make it appear a bit on the home-made side.’
Dorothy dragged her thoughts back from Inkerman Street and what might be going on there. ‘It’s a good job Gerald hasn’t got any parents, or you’d be having to consult with his mother to make sure you didn’t clash.’
Phyllis held up a fork t
o the light, considered it done, and slotted it into the big white jug on the draining board. ‘The bride’s mother always has first choice as to colours,’ she said, very seriously. ‘Poor Gerald. He’s bound to feel it on the day, not having any relatives on his side. I’ve told him I’m arranging for some of ours to sit in the right hand pews to even things up a bit.’
Escaping with relief, Dorothy found her father upstairs in the big front bedroom exchanging his dark grey office jacket for the woollen cardigan he would have worn if Gerald hadn’t been to dinner. Caught off-guard he looked tired almost to the point of exhaustion, with purple sagging pouches underneath his eyes, and a too hectic flush on his cheeks.
Dorothy came straight to the point.
‘Dad. I was talking to Stanley Armstrong after school, and he told me that his sister Ruby, one of your weavers, is missing from home. He said the police had been to the mill. What do you make of it?’
Matthew Bolton yanked off his tie and gave her a shrewd glance from beneath his thick wildly curling eyebrows. No use trying to fob off this younger daughter of his with soothing words. Ask her dad a question and she got the answer straight, the way he knew she wanted it.
‘Aye, it’s a bad business, love. The police seem to be convinced in their minds that it isn’t the usual case of a young girl leaving home and catching the train down to London to the bright lights, to show her folks something or other. They’re tying it up with those two murders out Barnoldswick way last winter. They never caught whoever did them, and this case has all the hallmarks.’ He fought a losing battle with his back collar stud. ‘Pretty young girl with a recent history of secretiveness at home, telling lies where she goes of nights. But they can’t prove a thing till they find . . .’
‘A body,’ Dorothy finished for him. ‘Oh, Dad, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Did you know Ruby Armstrong? I mean did you know her well enough to sum up what she was like as a person? Did she strike you as the sort of girl who would just clear off without saying a word? Her mother’s a widow, you know.’
