by Marie Joseph
Fifteen
‘THE MINUTE,’ PHYLLIS said, ‘the very minute we get into the house, Matthew, you must have a good talk to Dorothy. No wonder she’s walking on in front of us like that. Just look at her slouching along and scuffing her best shoes. You’d think she was seven and not seventeen.’
They crossed the road from the church, and automatically Matthew did a little skip behind his wife to place himself on the kerb side of the pavement. Manners, he knew, mattered to Phyllis even when she was in the highest of dudgeons. And something had upset her good and proper this time. Her face was set into seething lines of anger, her mouth a thin grim line, and yet when the curate’s wife rushed past en route for her kitchen and the Sunday dinner, Phyllis gave her a dazzling smile and even agreed that it was indeed a lovely day.
By heck, but she knew how to play to the gallery, Matthew thought wryly. There were times when he’d back his missus against Greta Garbo any old day.
‘First she argues with our Ethel. Telling her she wants to see their Beryl, when all the time Ethel was explaining that Beryl would have gone over to Laurel Road to Raymond’s sister’s for their dinner. “She promised me she’d be at church this morning,” she kept saying, as if Beryl could help waking up with one of her funny turns.’
‘But if Beryl’s well enough to go out for her dinner, surely she was well enough to go to church,’ Matthew said mildly, feeling in his bones that he was missing the point, as usual.
‘You’re missing the point, as usual. Where Beryl had gone didn’t come into it. The thing was that Dorothy should have accepted it, not gone on and on. I never thought she was all that close to Beryl, anyway.’
A woman in a yellow dress, holding a child by the hand, came out of a gate as they walked past, and Phyllis gave her a dazzling smile. ‘She’ll be our next president of the Inner Wheel,’ she said in her normal voice, then resumed in a careful whisper. ‘And then when our Margaret tried to persuade her to get into Gerald’s car to go with them to the house, she actually knocked her hand away. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that.’
‘I was talking to Raymond. Things are bad down at the yard. He says there’s no orders coming in at all.’
‘I don’t blame Gerald entirely for saying what he did, though I must say I was surprised. The worst thing was that our Ethel heard him, and that was bad enough. Her eyebrows almost disappeared underneath that atrocious hat.’
‘What did he say?’ Matthew felt obliged to ask. ‘Raymond says he had to lay off four more men last week.’
Phyllis sniffed. ‘Raymond exaggerates, always has. Gerald, for your information, looked at Dorothy and said, “Either get in the bloody car, or stay out; either way makes no difference to me.”’
‘And what did our Dorothy say to that?’
‘She told him to go to hell.’
‘Are you sure it’s not you who’s exaggerating now, love?’
‘I only wish I was.’ Phyllis increased her pace to keep up with her rising anger. ‘I’ve never been so humiliated in my whole life. And outside church too. Fancy coming straight out of church and using language like that.’
‘Well, Gerald hadn’t been to church,’ Matthew said mildly, ‘though I admit there’s no love lost between him and Dorothy. Still, he’s a lot older than she is, and he shouldn’t have spoken to her like that.’
‘She provoked him. She’s always provoking him. She’s one on her own is our Dorothy. I can’t think who she takes after . . . If she didn’t look so much like Margaret I’d wonder sometimes if they gave me the wrong baby in the Nursing Home. I can’t think of anybody on either side who she takes after. Did you see her in church? Down on her knees praying as if she was half way to a nunnery, then behaving like someone not in their right mind outside.’
They turned the corner into their own tree-lined road, and Matthew did his little sideways skip again as they crossed to the other side.
‘And I wish you’d stop twiddling about like that,’ Phyllis said ungratefully. ‘It gets on my nerves. First I’m talking to you, then you’re gone. No, it’s the company our Dorothy’s been keeping . . . and before you remind me about that boy out of Inkerman Street having won a scholarship to Oxford, let me remind you that breeding can’t be learnt from books. It’s inborn. And if she thinks I’m going to have him up to the house, she’s another think coming. And if all she wants to do with her life is to mix with the working class, snogging on the back row of the pictures on a Saturday night, and standing in shop doorways, doing goodness knows what – oh yes, I wasn’t born yesterday, Matthew – well, all I can say is that we’ve failed. We’ve given her everything, and all she wants to do is to throw it all back in our faces.’
Matthew sighed. ‘Surely things aren’t as bad as that, love? I admit she’s been behaving a bit strangely these past few days, but what can you expect? Ruby Armstrong’s murder came too near for comfort. Can’t you see? Dorothy, in spite of all your wishful thinking, was involved. She was actually talking to the brother a few yards away from where they found the body, tha knows.’ His wife’s eyebrows rose at the slip into dialect, but he took no notice. More was at stake, he felt, than him minding his ps and qs. ‘It wasn’t just a sordid crime she read about in the paper; it happened to the sister of someone she knew very well. She’s about the same age as that poor lass, give or take a year or two, and it isn’t easy to take a thing like that in your stride, love. Not at seventeen.’
He clicked open the gate, and held it wide for his wife to pass through, raising his trilby hat to the man next door who was cutting his hedge. Then, lowering his voice, he said, ‘I haven’t managed to fathom it out yet, but I feel that our Dorothy’s contrasting the fuss about the wedding with that poor lass’s fate. Perhaps for the first time in her life she’s finding out that life isn’t fair, that it never was and never will be.’ He stood back to let Phyllis go before him into the house. ‘Leave her be, love, and it’ll all blow over, you’ll see.’
‘She’s gone straight upstairs,’ Phyllis said, after a quick peep into the downstairs rooms. ‘If I hadn’t to see to the joint I’d have a word with her myself, but what I have to say will keep.’ She took off her hat and patted her hair back into shape. ‘You go up and see if you can talk some sense into her.’ She handed her coat over to him. ‘And make sure you hang this on a padded hanger, please.’ Her eyes met his in honest bewilderment. ‘And why that poor girl getting herself murdered should have anything whatsoever to do with our Margaret getting married, beats me. Margaret didn’t even know her.’ She walked with her quick light step towards the kitchen. ‘And if Dorothy doesn’t behave herself at the table I’ll send her upstairs, whether she’s seventeen or not.’
Hauling himself up by the bannister as if it were a ropeladder on a ship and not a wide polished piece of oak, Matthew went heavily upstairs. Trying to talk sense into Phyllis when she was in this mood was nigh impossible. He’d be glad when this wedding was over, by heck he would. He’d offered Margaret all the money the reception at The Pied Bull was going to cost, plus another two hundred for the fancy clothes and what not, and suggested that she eloped with Gerald.
‘Don’t be funny, Father,’ she’d said, but he hadn’t been trying to be funny. At the moment he’d meant it, from the bottom of his heart. He paused at the bend of the stairs, feeling the familiar tightness in his chest, as if there were an elastic band squeezing the breath out of him. By heck but he were out of condition, right enough. He unbuttoned his waistcoat. In a way he could side with Dorothy, if that was the reason for her behaving so strangely these past few days. It did seem all wrong to be spending money as if it were water on a fancy wedding, when the dole queues were stretching halfway round the Labour Exchange and right down Queen Street. Men with brown paper tacked inside their vests, and pieces of cardboard shoved inside their shoes to keep out the cold, working on their allotments and their hen-pens all day long to try and eke out their meagre intake of food with vegetables, and a chicken at Christmas if they
were lucky. And the way things were going, it looked as if Raymond might have to close down in the not too distant future. He sighed as he continued his way upstairs. He’d be all right, Raymond would; he’d more than a bob or two put by, but some of his men had been with the firm since leaving school, and had felt secure enough to start buying their own houses. By the heck, it didn’t bear thinking about. . . .
Wearily he went into the bedroom and sitting down on the edge of the double bed, crossed one leg awkwardly over the other and began to pick at the knot in his shoe-laces. He supposed he’d better have a word with Dorothy, partly to pacify Phyllis, and partly because he was a bit worried about her himself. He hadn’t wanted to add fuel to the fire by admitting that he had seen a bit of what had gone on outside the church out of the corner of his eye when he’d been talking to Raymond. But it were right enough that there were no love lost between his younger daughter and Margaret’s intended. For one startled moment he’d thought they were going to come to blows, matching up to one another on the pavement, for all the world like two fighting cocks. He eased his feet into his slippers. There was a lot of his father in Dorothy, and that was a fact. If the old man had taken it into his head to dislike someone, then that was it. No compromise; no being pleasant just for the sake of appearances.
‘He don’t like me, and I don’t like him,’ he remembered his father saying once about a completely inoffensive little tackler at the mill. ‘And that’s bloody that.’
‘But there’s such a thing as tolerance, and live and let live,’ Matthew muttered to himself as he went out on to the landing and knocked on the door of Dorothy’s room. And the sooner this lass of his grew up a bit and realized it, the better for all of them. . . .
And, so preoccupied that he forgot to wait for Dorothy’s voice telling him to come in, Matthew opened the door and walked straight into the bedroom.
Dorothy was lying flat on her bed still wearing her shoes and her blazer, her toes pointing up to the ceiling, and her face drained of colour. She didn’t turn her head, and Matthew doubted if she’d even heard him come in. Just for a moment the elastic band tightened itself round his heart again as he looked at her. By the heck, but there was summat wrong all right. Summat serious too. This was more than one of her Bolshie moods. More than an idealistic aversion to wedding preparations taking precedence over Ruby Armstrong’s murder. His lass was in real trouble, and if that lad from down Inkerman Street had been up to owt with her, he’d tear him limb from limb, and he wouldn’t even wait till ’funeral were over tomorrow either. Matthew walked towards the bed. But she weren’t like that, not his Dorothy. She were nobbut a child, and as pure as the driven snow; he’d stake his life on that.
Sitting down on the bed, which creaked in protest, he patted her hand. ‘Now then, chuck, let’s have it. However bad it is, let’s have it straight. There’s nowt so terrible that can’t be put right. Not now your old dad’s here. Come on now, tell me all about it.’
Dorothy’s other hand, the one in her pocket, curled round the cuff-link. Slowly, as if she was dreaming, she turned her head and stared at her father. And the terrible anxiety on his red face broke down her defences, so that she sat up and threw herself against him, burying her head in the tobacco-smelling comfort of his old cardigan, at the same time as his arms came round her and held her tight.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she sobbed when the first bout of crying was over. ‘It’s so awful. I can’t begin.’
Matthew rocked her gently, backwards and forwards, knowing from experience that she would have to get her cry over and done with first. It had always been the same, ever since she was a little lass. First the explosive torrent of tears, the passionate unburdening of whatever was troubling her, then the whispered expression of her feelings. And half an hour afterwards, he reminded himself, the swift return to normality, with her pinched smile at variance with the swollen eyelids and little tear-blotched face.
Dear God, he asked himself silently, why did this one of his chicks have to be so vulnerable? Why did she have to get herself so involved? By heck, but life was going to hurt her badly. If it hadn’t hurt her already . . . He held her away from him, trying to get her to look at him, but her head dropped down to her chest.
‘Is it anything to do with that lad? That Stanley?’ he said, dreading what she might be going to tell him, but knowing that there’d be no peace for either of them till it was said.
‘In a way.’ She gulped. ‘In a way it has.’
Matthew patted her head. ‘Take your time, love, come on now, get it over with, and whatever it is we’ll have it put right. There’s nowt so bad as can’t be mended, you know that.’
‘It’s . . . it’s about Gerald. Gerald Tomlin . . .’
‘Aye?’ Matthew’s voice soothed and encouraged, showing nothing of the surprise he felt, and into his shoulder Dorothy made her confession.
‘I think I’ve always known that he was meeting girls from the mill – oh, before he got engaged to our Margaret. He used to take them for drives in his car; he almost admitted it to me himself, but that wouldn’t have mattered, because he loves our Margaret, I’m sure of that, but I think that one of the weavers he was meeting was Ruby Armstrong.’
‘Go on.’ Matthew’s voice held a grim note now.
‘I think he was meeting her secretly, right up to getting engaged three months ago, then, give him his due, he stopped seeing her, but then I think . . . I’ve worked it out that when Ruby found out for sure that she was pregnant, she persuaded him to see her. Just once.’
Matthew stopped the rocking motion, and held her very still.
‘I even think it may have been the night she died, because Beryl told me he lied to the police. Not a big lie, just saying he went for a drive when really he went for a walk. She watches him go out, you know, from the landing window.’
‘Carry on.’
‘Stanley told me that a weaver from the mill was standing at the West Road gate of the park that night with a boy, and she thought she saw someone like Ruby going into the park, with a boy. Or a man.’
‘And does Stanley know all this, then?’
‘Not about Gerald lying to the police. I only found that out after he’d . . . afterwards.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And he, Gerald, he lost a cuff-link, one of the pair Margaret bought him for their engagement present.’ Her hand crept into her pocket again. ‘And he went down to Mr Adamson’s shop and replaced it. But he’s still searching for it, because I’ve figured out that he can’t think where he lost it. So he’s still searching in his room.’
‘And how do you know that, love?’
‘Beryl. She watches him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she has a crush on him. She’s like that. And yesterday she saw him in the park, after she’d been playing tennis, and she said he was walking along a path with his head bent. Near the duck pond.’
‘Bit of a long shot, chuck?’
‘Not when you’re desperate.’
‘And Beryl knows what you think?’
Dorothy shook her head. ‘I’m not that daft, am I?’
Matthew took a deep breath. ‘It’s dangerous thinking, lovey. You know that, don’t you?’
Dorothy nodded into his shoulder. ‘I know, and I haven’t finished yet.’ She let out a shuddering sigh. ‘Last night I went round to Beryl’s house when Auntie Ethel and Uncle Raymond were out, and I stole the odd cuff-link from his room.’
‘Your what?’
‘I did. I didn’t mean to take it, but I thought I heard someone coming and I panicked and put it in my pocket, and I meant to give it back to Beryl this morning after church and get her to put it back, but she wasn’t there, and then when I saw Gerald he looked at me as if he hated my guts and swore at me, and I think he may have found out what I did.’ She moved against him. ‘I think Beryl might have told him, even though I got her to swear on the Bible that she wouldn’t.’
Matthew closed his eyes.
‘And
now you’re not sure? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, then?’
She nodded. ‘I prayed and prayed in church that I’m wrong, and if I am, and if he’s found out that I was in his room last night, I still have to explain how I came to take the cuff-link, and I can’t. And I’m so mixed up I don’t know what I am, or whether what I think is real or just in my imagination any more. And don’t tell Mother, but Stanley came round last night when you were out, and he says that even accusing Gerald in my mind is dangerous. But Gerald Tomlin knew Stanley’s sister all right. Even if he didn’t meet her that night, he knew her. And he could be the father of Ruby’s baby. I know it inside me. It all fits.’
Then at last she lifted her head, and over her father’s shoulder saw her mother standing in the doorway.
Phyllis was wearing the frilly apron, tied in a neat bow at the back, looking so ordinary, so much her meticulously organized self that, when she spoke, the voice that came as a low growl from her throat startled Matthew so much that he stood up, unable to utter a word himself, moving his big head from side to side in a desperate fashion.
How long had she been there? Had she heard what had been said? And if she had, then heaven help them.
He moved towards her, holding out his hand, but she ignored him as if he wasn’t in the room at all.
Dorothy slid from the bed and faced her mother, her head up, not as much in defiance as in fear. Her mother’s face was contorted almost out of recognition with a rage so terrible it seemed to leap from her throat like a living thing.
‘You wicked, wicked little devil! You brazen, interfering little sod! How dare you suggest that Gerald had anything to do with that young whore from down Inkerman Street?’ She put up a hand as if to ward off anything Dorothy or her father might say. ‘Who, I ask you, but the devil himself could have put such thoughts into your head? You . . . you little bugger.’
‘Don’t swear, Mother.’
It was a foolish thing to say, but Dorothy never remembered her prunes and prism mother uttering so much as a ‘damn’. It was as though Phyllis was possessed. And if the devil was in that room at that moment, he was in her mother’s heart, not her own. She swayed where she stood. ‘But, listen, Mother. I don’t know for sure . . . I said I didn’t know. But I had to find out. For Margaret’s sake, I had to . . .’
