It was on a Thursday night. We’d had our teas and I was washing up. I did most of the washing up and in spite of my short arm I rarely broke anything. There had been no conversation at the tea table: Mother was talking less and less to George, and they weren’t fighting openly any more like they had done when they were sleeping together in the big bedroom; for a long time now George had slept in the back room.
Our house was quite big. It had five bedrooms, the bathroom and a small storeroom, with a long attic above; and downstairs there was a big kitchen, a sitting room, a dining room and a smaller room that my mother always referred to as the study, because her father’s books were arrayed on shelves all round the room.
When my mother came downstairs this night she looked very pretty. She was dressed in pale blue and her face was made up, and as I looked at her I wished I loved her like I did Gran Carter.
‘I’ll be back at half past nine,’ she said. ‘You be in bed by then.’ She rarely looked at me when she gave me orders. When I come to think of it she rarely looked at me at all if she could avoid it.
She did not speak to George, but as soon as the door had closed on her he looked towards it for a moment, then went upstairs.
I finished the dishes; then I, too, went upstairs and into my room, because I had to do my homework and I always did it in my bedroom. But on that night I stood looking out of the window because the sun was still shining brightly. It was early September and it had been quite hot all day. As far as I could see there were deckchairs in most of the back gardens. I could see as far as the Stickles’ garden and the top of Mr Stickle’s head that came well above the back of the deckchair.
The Stickles had only lived in the terrace for about six months. They rented their house, which in a way made them different, for most in the terrace owned their property. But the Stickles weren’t common. Mr Stickle lived with his sister, and was looked upon as a sort of gentleman. He was a little old, being twenty-three, and he dressed very smartly. Katie Moore’s mother said he’d have to because that was his job, being assistant manager in a high-class gentleman’s shop, which Katie’s mother said wouldn’t last very long because men weren’t wearing suits now.
It’s funny about that, I mean the things that people say: men weren’t wearing suits now. When Katie told me that, my mind did a funny little skip and I saw men going about in their shirts and underpants. It made me giggle inside. I had the habit of doing this, but nobody knew about it. Oh yes, they did, George knew. I had told him once and he had laughed and laughed.
I couldn’t get down to my homework this night and I sat scribbling in my spare book—it was an exercise book that I wrote things in such as names and things I wanted to remember, and also sayings that sounded funny to me—when George’s voice came from outside the door, saying, ‘Maisie.’
I ran and opened it, and he came in and sat on the edge of the bed. He had his best suit on and his hair was wet and well combed back. His big face was shiny and somehow as I looked at him I thought he did resemble Oswald. That’s what I called the bear he had bought me when he first married my mother.
I sat on the bed beside him and, when he didn’t speak, I said, ‘What’s the matter, George?’
He still didn’t speak for a time, but then he muttered a blasphemy: ‘Christ Almighty!’ he said.
I didn’t flinch as my mother might have done because Gran Carter often said things like that. Gran Carter was always calling on God. She could do it in so many ways too. And now George turned to me and caught hold of both my hands, and I looked down on them as they became lost inside his, and he looked down on them too as he said, ‘I’m going, Maisie.’
‘Going where?’ I said stupidly, knowing that there was only one place he would be going to and that would be his mother’s. And he said this: ‘To me ma’s.’ Then he looked into my face and his eyes were sad as he went on, ‘I can’t stand it any more, Maisie. You know what I mean. This isn’t life, this isn’t living, it’s hell. I suppose I’m to blame for part of it but not the main part. She’s hopeless…your mother. Well, you know that, I don’t have to tell you, you’ve had her longer than me. And God help you from now on. You know something, Maisie?’
I gulped in my throat and told myself not to cry, but then I started to cry and he said, ‘Oh, pet, pet, come on. But look—’ He brought my head towards his shoulder and as I sniffed I inhaled his particular smell of cigarette smoke, soap, and body sweat that was so comforting, and his voice came to me now, muffled as he said, ‘I might as well tell you, Maisie, I’ve stayed as long as I have just because of you. Me ma knows that an’ all, ’cos as I said to her, that woman isn’t human where you’re concerned. I want to tell you something.’ He put his broad thumb under my chin and lifted my face up. ‘If she ever gets physically cruel, I mean with her hands, she’s an expert with her tongue we know that, but if she should take up the other way, you come straight over to us. Now promise me?’
‘Yes, George.’ My voice sounded like a squeak, and he smiled wryly now as he dried my eyes with his handkerchief, saying, ‘You’ve not only been unlucky with your mother, you’ve been unlucky with your fathers, although that poor bloke has my sympathy. Wherever he is, good luck to him, I say. He got away in time: he had only two years, I’ve had six of ’em.’
‘He got away? You mean he isn’t dead?’
‘No. Well, I don’t know, lass; he wasn’t dead when he left her. Went to Australia, I understand. Well, now she’ll be divorced for the second time. Oh, Maisie.’ He now stroked my hair back from my face as he said, ‘I wish to God I could take you along of me. I do. I do. You mightn’t have the bloody cold elegance you’ve got here, but you’d know love, and appreciation, aye.’ He smiled widely now as he tapped my forehead, saying, ‘People don’t know what goes on in there, do they? I think I must be the only one that’s discovered what you’ve got up top. Anyway, what you’ve got to do, Maisie, at least for the next three or four years…What are you now? Thirteen? Aye, well until you’re sixteen and you leave school, what you’ve got to do is don’t answer her back, let her get on with it. But then you don’t answer her back, do you? Perhaps it would be better if you did. Oh God, I don’t know…Anyway try to make the best of it, because you can’t do anything now as she’s legally got the right over you.’
We sat staring at each other. Then, all of a sudden, he sprang up from the bed and pulled me into his arms and kissed me before going quickly out; and I turned to the window, and the sun had gone in and the world had changed.
I sat down on the dressing table stool and looked in the middle of the three mirrors. Because I was crying so much I could make out only the outline of my face. But I knew what it looked like: two small round eyes, a nose that would have looked all right on anybody else’s face but didn’t seem to fit mine, and my mouth too, too big for the size of my face. My teeth weren’t bucked, but still I had a job to keep my lips closed all the time. And my hair like tow, neither fair nor brown, mousy-coloured. Again it would have looked all right on somebody else’s head because there was plenty of it, and it was thick and coarse, but there wasn’t a kink in it. As for my figure, I was straight up and down. Gran Carter said it would be all right, I was a late developer and I’d have a bust like nobody’s business in a couple of years’ time. I wasn’t troubled about having a bust, but my face troubled me even more than my arm, because I could keep my arm waist high and put my schoolbag on it and hardly anybody noticed it then. But you can’t hide your face, and it was my face that my mother didn’t like because no part of me resembled her. She was ashamed of me in so many ways. This thought was very clear in my mind as I blinked the tears away and dried my eyes. It was as if the six years that George had been in the house were as a tick of time, they had gone; and once again I was seeing my mother in a tantrum and hearing her voice saying, ‘God! To have to put up with you an’ all and looking like you do. Why? Why?’
Two
I should really start from the time I was seventeen, and
yet what happened between when I was thirteen and that time set the pattern for all the years following.
The effect on my mother of George leaving was varied. When she returned that night and read the note he had left, she laughed and laughed. I hadn’t gone to bed as she had ordered, because I had felt in some strange way she would need comfort. But what she did was to throw herself on the couch in the sitting room and laugh. In amazement I watched her lift her slim legs from the carpet until they were on a level with her hips, spread her arms wide, then throw her head back. Her small mouth was wide open and I could see her tongue wagging in the cavity. If she had cried and thrown things I’d have been less afraid. But this reaction of hers seemed to give me an insight into the complexity of her character.
Within days her reactions changed. Perhaps it was the neighbours that caused the different eruptions. Yet how could she know what they were thinking because she wouldn’t let them into the house. I knew what they were thinking because of Katie. Katie said her mother said some folks thought it was the best thing that could have happened, because George was a big drunken slob. But others said that it was a wonder he had stuck to her so long, because they were oil and water.
I learned a lot from Katie on our journeys to and from school. I liked Katie. She was my best friend; in fact she was my only friend, and because of that I had to forgive her when she hurt me saying things about George and telling me what her mother said about me looking as I did. We quarrelled once and she said her mother said a pikestaff wasn’t as plain as me.
It was on a Saturday about a week after George had left that my mother startled me by almost springing on me and taking me by the shoulders and shaking me with a strength that was out of all proportion to her size as she cried at me, ‘You go near his mother’s and I’ll murder you. Do you hear? And if you see him in the street and speak to him I’ll thrash the skin off you.’ Her voice and everything about her had ceased to be refined; in this moment she sounded as common as the people she despised for being so. She was thirty-four years old at this time and had no lines on her face. Yet such was her expression that she appeared older than Gran Carter who was very old, almost sixty.
‘Speak!’
I couldn’t speak.
‘Do you hear? Promise me you’ll never go near that house or go near him.’
I couldn’t promise.
When one hand left my shoulder and came in contact with the side of my head, my vision blurred. I heard a noise in my ear like a train choo-chooing in a station and I fell to the side and grabbed the kitchen table; and I stayed like that for some minutes. And when I pulled myself straight and looked slowly around, there was no-one there.
George had said if she started with anything physical I had to go to him. Well, if I had taken him at his word, I would have run to him at least once a week during the next six months.
It was on my fourteenth birthday when I received the card from George that she really did seem to go mad. It was a beautiful card, what I saw of it. It had a pretty girl on the front holding a bouquet of roses, and I had just opened it and read. ‘From George and Gran with love to Maisie’, when it was snatched from my hand. As I watched her tear it into a dozen pieces and without uttering one word, it was then the voice became audible, but only to me.
Oh, you cruel thing. I hate you. Do you hear? I hate you. I’ll go to Gran’s, I’ll go this very day. I will. I will.
I knew my mouth was opening and shutting as if I was saying the words, but, like her, I remained silent.
Gran Carter lived in the lower end of Fellburn, Bog’s End, where all the common people lived. She lived on a council estate. It was an old council estate. The houses looked like rows of rundown barracks, but inside Gran’s house everything was bright, cheerful and cluttered. I knew the first time I saw the furniture that it was common; but it was comfortable, and she always had a fire on, a real fire not an electric one with artificial logs like we had. And she made toast at the fire and put dripping on it mixed with the sediment from the meat. I’d never tasted anything so wonderful as that first piece of toast and dripping. And on that Saturday morning I longed with a longing that was painful in its intensity to get into that house and to sit close to Gran Carter and perhaps see George. But my mother watched me like a hawk all day, silently, no word passing between us.
On Sunday morning when Katie called and asked if I could go for a walk with her, my mother said to her, ‘Where do you propose to go?’ And Katie said, ‘Oh, as far as my cousin’s at the bottom of Brampton Hill.’
Brampton Hill was the real posh part of Fellburn. Most of the big houses had been turned into flats and Katie’s cousin lived in one of them, but the name Brampton Hill was still a passport and so I was allowed to go. But no sooner were we outside the house than Katie said, ‘Will you do something for me?’
And I immediately said, ‘Yes,’ because I would do anything for Katie. ‘Well,’ said Katie, ‘I met a boy. He…he’s nice. He goes to Paynton High School. But he’s nearly seventeen and I daren’t let Mam or Dad know ’cos he’s so old, and he looks older. He’s very tall.’ She smiled widely at me. ‘Anyway, I told him I’d try to meet him round by the lower park today. I told them I was going out with you. You won’t give me away, will you?’
I looked at her sadly: how could she say such a thing? She said quickly, ‘I know you won’t, but…but I want to be alone with him for a while.’
The idea sprang like a ray of light into my mind and I gabbled at her, ‘How long d’you want to be alone?’
‘Well, I must be back for dinner time, that’s at one, and it’s now quarter past ten. Say an hour and a half. Would you mind, I mean, being on your own?’
‘No. No, I wouldn’t. Look, there’s…there’s some place I want to go an’ all, so let’s meet back at the market place at half past twelve, eh?’
‘Good. Yes, good.’
We held hands and ran now towards the market, and from there my feet might have had wings on them, they moved so quickly, and I was gasping when, ten minutes later, I knocked on Gran Carter’s door, and when she opened it she took a step backwards as she cried, ‘Why, pet! Why, pet! Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Come on. Come on in. Georgie, look who’s here!’
The front door led into a small hallway that gave off to a passage, and there at the far end, looking as if he had just got out of bed, was George, and he appeared beautiful to me.
‘Why! Why, hello, lass!’ He came slowly towards me, his hands outstretched. ‘You’ve flown the pigeon loft then?’
‘Yes, George.’ I gazed up at him into his shaggy bear-like face, and he put his arm around my shoulder and led me into the sitting room. It was rather untidy, but nice, and there was a smell of cooking and Gran Carter said, ‘Can you stay for a bite of dinner, hinny?’
‘No, Gran. I’m very sorry. I’ll have to get back.’
‘However did you manage to get out?’ She bent over me as she spoke. She had a round face, not unlike George’s, but her skin was softer. Her hair was a reddy brown; she had it touched up once a month; she was wearing a hair net. She flung out an arm now, saying, ‘You would catch us on the hop, wouldn’t you? This is like Paddy’s market. But it’s Sunday an’ we were both in late last night.’ She nodded towards George. ‘I was at the whist drive, an’ I won again. I’m the luckiest so…body on this earth. They’re tryin’ to say I’m a card sharper.’ She put her head back and let out a laugh very like George’s. ‘They’re green. I won the lot last night, twelve pounds. What are you gona have, hinny? A cup of tea or cocoa?…Have we got any lemonade left?’
‘We never have any lemonade left when there’s beer in the house an’ you want shandies, you know that.’ George plonked himself down on the sofa beside me and, pushing his mother with the flat of his hand, he said, ‘Go on, woman, this is a special occasion, give her coffee. You like coffee, don’t you, Maisie?’ And without waiting for an answer, he looked back at his mother and said, ‘She likes coffee. Of course’—he pu
lled a face at me now—‘it isn’t the real stuff, not like…well, in 7 Wellenmore.’
His mother went into the kitchen laughing, and he turned towards me and, his face straight, he said, ‘How is she?’
I couldn’t answer him.
‘Like that, is it?’ he said, and he jerked his chin. ‘Has she said anything about divorce?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but added, Well, if she has or she hasn’t, it makes no difference: if I have to wait I’ll wait and gladly, and put in some practice for the next time.’ Then he added quickly, ‘Well, what I mean is, I’ll shop around and not make the same mistake twice. Well, you know what I mean.’
I knew what he had meant in the first place and I knew that he thought I was too young to understand. And on the surface I was, but under it there was this other being that knew about some things without in a way having learned them.
‘Did you get our card, pet?’ Gran Carter’s face came round the kitchen door and I looked towards her and opened my mouth twice but no sound came out. It was as if I was watching my mother tearing it into shreds again. And when I eventually did speak, I stammered, saying, ‘Ye…yes, thank you.’
George must have noticed the effect the question had on me because he turned my face towards him and looked at me silently for a moment before he said softly, ‘You didn’t get it, did you?’ I nodded at him and muttered, ‘Yes. Ye…ye…yes I did.’
‘Well, she found out about it, eh? And what did she do, tear it up? Now, now, don’t upset yourself.’ He was whispering now. ‘But say nothin’ to her.’ He nodded towards the kitchen. ‘If she thought that had happened she would go round there and belt her face for her, she would that, ’cos she went into Smith’s and took a long time to pick that card for you. I was with her.’ He smiled. ‘There was something in the little lass’ face on the card that reminded me of you.’
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