by Marie Joseph
‘Come in for your mother’s brooch, have you then, chuck? It’s all ready wrapped up for her, and you can tell her it’s on the house. It were nobbut the pin at the back needed replacing.’ He reached underneath the counter and produced a small parcel. ‘Soon be the wedding, won’t it? My wife’s nearly driving me mad talking about what she’s going to wear. Who’s going to look at you, I keep saying, but it makes no difference. She’s out now with a piece of stuff in her handbag trying to find a pair of shoes what matches.’
Dorothy picked up the parcel and put it in her blazer pocket. Her fingers tightened round it as she tried to make her voice sound casual.
‘Nobody at our house talks about anything else but the wedding.’ She hesitated, then plunged on. ‘You’ve met our Margaret’s fiancé, haven’t you, Mr Adamson? He’s a very nice person, isn’t he?’
‘Out of the top drawer right enough, chuck.’
Dorothy glanced around her in desperation. The door-bell tinkled and as a woman with a loaded shopping basket came into the shop the Saturday assistant came out from the back with her little tripping step.
‘The cuff-links,’ Dorothy said feverishly. ‘The ones Margaret bought him for their engagement present . . .?’ Her voice tailed away as she realized her chance was almost gone. Already the woman customer was glancing over in their direction, making it quite clear that she, too, wished to be served by Mr Adamson, and the assistant’s nostrils were dilating in disgust.
Then, as Dorothy was to tell Stanley afterwards, fate intervened.
The jeweller leaned forward confidentially.
‘So you’re in on the secret, are you then, chuck?’
Dorothy nodded, holding her breath.
‘Lovely thought to come in here and buy a replacement for the ones he’d misplaced. Long before he’d had a proper chance to look for them, really. “She mustn’t know,” he kept saying, and I was only too happy to find him a pair almost the same but a bit bigger.’ He winked. ‘Good business for me and a perfect solution for him, though I have said of course that should the others turn up I’ll take them back. Knowing your father so well and everything.’
The assistant came over, and with her black-clad bosom a mere few inches away from the jeweller’s gaze, whispered to him.
‘You’ll have to excuse me, Dorothy love,’ he said, then placed a podgy finger over his mouth. ‘Mum’s the word now. All right?’
‘All right,’ Dorothy said, and walked from the shop, her smile as false as the string of pearls Mr Adamson kept draped over the silver-framed photograph of himself in his mayoral robes of three years before.
It was as if something she had always known but never admitted had suddenly taken shape in her mind. As if the reason for her instinctive and unexplained aversion to Gerald Tomlin had suddenly been justified. As if Grandpa Bolton had suddenly materialized, telling her that first impressions were usually the right ones. She could still recall the feeling of distaste when she had first met Gerald’s shiny blue gaze.
She walked slowly away from the shop, past the Home and Colonial Store with its smell of freshly ground coffee, at that very moment being poured into little dark brown bags by the counter assistants in their clerical grey cotton coats. Past Blake’s café with its tray of cream fancies displayed downstairs, and its winding staircase leading to the upper floor, where the well-to-do matrons of the town met on market days for a pot of tea and a well-buttered sultana scone.
On across the road to the market place, with the stall-holders already packing their unsold wares; past the open entrance to the fish market, with its overpowering smell assailing her senses.
Walking slowly, seeing nothing, thoughts too complex for understanding zooming round and round in her mind like a moth caught in a basin-type light fitting. Actually muttering aloud, halting and giving a small cry of alarm as she felt a sudden light touch on her arm.
And seeing Stanley standing before her, tall and pale, with a carrier-bag held shamefacedly in his hand, a head of celery and sticks of rhubarb protruding from it.
Eleven
THERE WAS SOMETHING essentially sensual, primitive and wanton about all the mounds of fruit and vegetables so lavishly displayed on the market stalls, Stanley had always thought. Especially as he had calculated that only roughly a quarter of the town’s population could actually afford to spend with any kind of freedom. There was a family up at the top of his street with a father who had been out of work for eight years. His mother had told him once that they ate meat (a shilling’s worth of stewing beef) only once a week, and drank out of condensed milk tins.
‘Tea, tinned milk, margarine, bread and potatoes,’ his mother had said was all they ate. ‘Six children and another on the way, and bugs crawling over the bedroom walls. She’s stopped even trying to keep the place clean.’
Food as luscious as locusts, he thought bitterly as he waited in a small queue at the salad stall, watching the quarters of shiny dark green watercress and tender spiked lettuce leaves being lowered on to the wide scales. Pale firm tomatoes, blood-red radishes, green-tufted spring onions, and beetroots steaming from a recent boiling. And right behind him the fruit and vegetable stalls. Oranges piled in tempting pyramids, red Delicious apples, with the ones at the front polished to a shining brightness. Potpourris of root vegetables ready bunched together for the stock-pot, and tiny new potatoes needing only a rub of the thumb to rid them of their thin skins.
Food for the gods; food to enjoy, to sink your teeth into a juicy pear, to taste the soft white flesh . . . He remembered the way Ruby would bite into an apple when his mother came back from the market on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wiping it first, then biting with her sharp little teeth, eating it right to the core, pips and all. To his dismay he felt the sting of tears behind his eyes.
Then to control himself he fingered the money in his pocket, doing little sums in his mind, as carefully as any conscientious housewife.
Past the fruit stalls, at the very edge of the market, with their little tables set out on the pavement, he could see the shrimp women from Southport in their flowered pinafores and their poke-bonnets, with the tiny pots of buttered shrimps set in rows. He nodded to himself . . . He must somehow work out his budget so that there was enough money left to buy a pot for his mother. Funny the way he kept on thinking about his father since it happened. With force of habit he tuned into his subconscious. Maybe it was because he was trying, in his own way, to stand in for his father in an attempt to help his mother? Trying to think what the quiet man would have said, would have done.
Every Saturday dinner-time, on his way home from work, his father had stopped at the shrimp women’s tables and bought his wife a pot of the pink tiny shrimps crowded together beneath their solidified lid of butter. And on a good week he would add a carton of rum butter, gritty with sugar, warm tasting, a reminder of her Cumberland upbringing.
Oat-cakes drying on the rack, shrimps in a pot, and rum butter spread thickly on the toast. Saturday evening round the inevitable coal fire, with Ruby sitting on the rug between her father’s knees as he rubbed her newly washed hair dry. Dark, springy, curly hair, that he would never recall without seeing that leaf caught up in it as she lay on a slab at the mortuary with a sheet over her naked body. He swallowed hard on the lump in his throat, a lump as big as a hard-boiled egg.
‘A quarter of loose lettuce leaves and one medium-sized beetroot,’ he told the white-coated woman behind the stall, then counted his change carefully before passing on to the fruit and vegetable stalls, where, after concentrated comparisons, he bought a cauliflower, and noted with satisfaction that the rhubarb was reduced in price in deference to the lateness of the afternoon.
And there was enough, just enough money left for a pot of shrimps. He fingered the coin in his pocket, exchanging it already in his mind for the tiny white pot, noting with relief that the shrimp women were still sitting at their tables, poke-bonnets nodding as they counted out their day’s takings.
Then tu
rning swiftly in the right direction he came face to face with Dorothy.
‘Well, hallo,’ they said together, then said it again, blushing to the roots of their respective hair-lines, staring at each other in delighted amazement, as if their meeting was unexpected enough to qualify as a miracle.
‘I’ve been shopping for me mum, for me mother,’ Stanley said, explaining away the shame-making carrier-bag.
‘Me too,’ Dorothy told him, patting her pocket, then she put out a hand and gripped his arm tightly. ‘Stanley, seeing you like this was meant to be. Honestly.’ She glanced quickly from him to the milling crowds of late shoppers thronging the narrow alley-way between the stalls. ‘I’ve got to talk to you. It’s about your – it’s about your Ruby. I’ve found something out, but we can’t talk about it here.’ She lowered her voice dramatically. ‘It’s awfully serious. Honestly.’
Stanley fingered the single coin in his jacket pocket, and without a moment’s hesitation suggested that they went into the nearby Market Place and had a cup of tea at the railed-off cafeteria set amidst the stalls. Well, his mum would never know that she had nearly had a pot of shrimps for her tea, would she? And the rhubarb had been a decided bargain. What he’d lost on the roundabout he had gained on the swings, so to speak. It was all relative, he told himself as they walked side by side into the covered Market Place, past the stalls laden with Miss Muffet prints, sixpence a yard, the bales of unbleached calico, the edge-whipped flannelette sheets, the pink and blue directoire knickers, the winceyette nightgowns, the combinations displayed with embarrassing showmanship.
And the small cafeteria was deserted, the two girls behind the counter busily wiping down the wide surface with damp cloths.
‘You sit here,’ Stanley said, hiding the carrier-bag beneath a table, and going over to the counter.
‘We’re just shutting,’ a girl with dolly-rouged cheeks told him, and he blushed and laid the coin on the damp counter.
‘Two teas, please,’ he said firmly.
‘I said we’re just shutting,’ the girl told him again.
He looked her straight in the eye. ‘It’s not half-past five yet, and we won’t be long. You don’t have to brew a fresh pot. All right?’
Sighing, she picked up the huge brown tea-pot and slopped tea into two thick white cups.
‘Does your mam know you’re out then?’ she said, and her friend said, ‘Shut your gob, Mavis. Never let it be said that we stood in the way of love’s young dream, eh?’
Blushing so that his ears glowed pink, Stanley looked round to see whether Dorothy had heard, but she was sitting hunched over the table with a look of such misery etched on her face, that when he sat down opposite to her, he stretched out a hand and gently stroked her cheek. The girl with rouged circles on her round cheeks grinned and drew a heart in the air with an arrow through it for her friend.
‘Juliet and her bloody Romeo,’ she said, and they giggled together as if it were the joke of the year.
‘What is it then that’s so important?’ Stanley said, pushing a big glass bowl of sugar in Dorothy’s direction.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t take it. Oh, Stanley, it’s so awful I don’t know how to begin.’
He ladled three spoonfuls into his own cup. ‘Well, try, then. Come on.’
She lowered her voice to a soft whisper. ‘I’ve found out that Gerald Tomlin, you know, the chap our Margaret’s going to marry next month – oh God, I’ve found out that he could have been somehow involved with your sister. With your Ruby.’
Stanley stopped stirring the sugar round in the thick dark tea and let the spoon clatter back into the saucer. ‘Say that again.’
‘He . . . well, he lost a pair of cuff-links, and made a great to-do of swearing our Margaret to secrecy, and then he said he’d found them, but I’ve just been in Adamson’s jeweller’s, and I tricked Mr Adamson into telling me that Gerald hadn’t found them at all; that he went into the shop and bought another pair almost the same. As much like the first pair to fool Margaret anyway.’
Stanley blinked, picked up his cup, drank from it, discovered it was only lukewarm and put it down again. Always quick to see the point of any statement immediately, he would have smiled had it not been for the look of intense misery on Dorothy’s face. He answered her with caution.
‘But how does that tie in with our Ruby? What I mean to say is, how does the fact that he lost a pair of cuff-links, and if he lost them from his shirt he would only lose one, surely? And wouldn’t it be a quite natural thing to do to try to replace them rather than upset your Margaret? I suppose she bought them for him in the first place, then?’
Dorothy nodded. ‘They were her engagement present to him.’
‘Then where’s the mystery?’
She bit her lip and spoke so quietly that he had to lean towards her, almost to lip-read to decipher what she said next.
‘But he’s still looking for them. Desperately searching for them – or one of them – as if he wasn’t sure where he’d lost them, or it, and as if it was vitally important that he found out. He was lifting the carpet in his bedroom. My cousin Beryl spies on him because she has a crush on him, and she saw him, and as far as I can make out he got flustered and told her not to tell anyone. But she couldn’t resist telling me not half an hour ago because Beryl doesn’t get secrets told to her you see.’
Stanley tried to see. ‘Well, I can understand him lifting the carpet. Maybe he’s the kind of person who can’t bear to lose things. I’m a bit like that myself. If they’d rolled off the bed or off his tall-boy, then under the carpet is a perfectly normal place to look. I honestly don’t follow . . .’
Dorothy’s blue eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Ah, but listen to this. Beryl also saw him later this afternoon. After she’d finished a game of tennis. Stanley . . . he was in the park, walking along with his head bent, obviously still searching. He’s just not the kind of bloke who goes for walks in the park. For walks anywhere. He takes that car of his even if he’s only going a hundred yards down the road.’ She ran a finger round the rim of her cup. ‘And that’s not all. I think I’ve known all along that he was seeing, well . . . taking some of the girl weavers out from father’s mill. Before he got engaged to our Margaret, I’ll give him that. And he tells lies. He’s a pathological liar if you want my opinion. He told me he only knew your Ruby to nod to, but I remembered in bed last night that once when I went down to the mill – oh, months ago, I saw him talking to her. It was probably about work. I never thought any more about it, till last night, and even then it didn’t seem to matter. But now . . .’ she lifted her eyes.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, he talked to me one day when he ran me home in his car, and he was trying to tell me something.’ She frowned in concentration. ‘He was trying to win me over to his side, to tell me that whatever he’d done before, none of it was of any importance now that he’d fallen in love with Margaret, and was going to marry her. Real sob stuff. No, don’t say anything. I’m talking it out in my mind. It’s more a feeling I have about him, a something I’ve sensed ever since he came. He’s a cad, that’s the right word. Or at least he was. Now . . . well, I don’t know . . . And since the murder he’s changed. He’s badly frightened, I know he is. He didn’t want to go to the Police Ball, and he’s got out of going to the funeral on Monday. Mother would say I’m letting my imagination run away with me as usual, but it’s a creepy sort of premonition I have when he’s around, and when Beryl said she’d seen him in the park this afternoon, well it all clicked into place.’
She fell silent, and Stanley stared at her, feeling the same way he had when an over-enthusiastic team-mate in the school football team had kicked the ball straight at him and winded him. He didn’t know what to say, and yet his mind, the part of his brain that was being trained academically to deduce, to pick out the salient points in a discussion and discard the rest, was working overtime. For a long moment they sat there, opposite to each other, with the thick white cups on t
he smeared table in front of them, knees touching, looking into each other’s faces, marooned there in the busy Market Hall as if they had been marooned on a secluded and secret island.
‘So we’ll have to go to the police,’ she said at last.
‘No!’ Stanley’s voice was husky as if he was recovering from a cold. ‘No, Dorothy.’ He reached for her hands and then stared down at them joined together with his own. ‘It’s too soon. There’s not enough. It’s not even what they would call circumstantial evidence.’ He held on and she tried to break away. ‘Listen! You can’t do that to your family. Think what it would mean. He may have met Ruby, he may well have been seeing her, but apart from the bit about Bery l seeing him in the park . . .’
‘Walking along with his head bent.’
He nodded. ‘But I always walk with my head bent. My mother’s always telling me off about it. Apart from that, there isn’t a thing really to pin on him, not a thing.’
She managed to pull away from him this time, her cheeks flushing with anger.
‘But it all fits. Can’t you see? It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in my head, with every piece fitting into place.’ She actually beat at her forehead with a clenched fist. ‘You told me yourself that Ruby had been unnaturally secretive, and of course she would be. A girl like Ruby would be, well . . . like putty in his hands. He’s what they call a charmer, Stanley, you don’t know him like I do. You don’t know him at all.’ Her voice rose. ‘He’s devious, that’s what he is. Devious and slimy and shiny and a liar. But I’ll say this for him, I really do believe that when he got engaged to Margaret he stopped seeing other girls. I really believe he intended to be faithful to her, and it might have been like that, but when Ruby found she was having a baby, found out for sure, she had to see him to tell him, and she persuaded him to see her just once, and when she told him he panicked and . . . and killed her!’
Stanley shook his head from side to side. Like a stupid tortoise, she thought wildly. Sitting there with that stupid carrier-bag at his feet, with that stupid stick of rhubarb sticking out of it, and his head shaking from side to side. As if he hadn’t taken in a word she was saying. As if it wasn’t his sister lying dead in the Chapel of Rest waiting to be buried in the windy cemetery in two days’ time.
