She had seen Michael a number of times, at first only occasionally and seemingly by chance, after their first meeting. Seeing him there had truly delighted her.
‘Michael!’ she’d cried in wonder. ‘You’re alive. All this time you’ve been alive!’
He’d laughed at this, bending his strong body down to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Oh, I’m alive all right. Even survived the River Po and that’s saying something, I can tell you. Sea of corpses it was when we crossed.’ His expression lost its exuberance at the memory. ‘But that’s long in the past, and we both came through it, eh?’
I was never in much danger down there,’ Rose said. ‘Hell of a lot quieter than it was here really.’ She stood staring at him, amazed at the thought that the last time she had seen him had been outside the stables at Caserta. And it was so precious, that memory, that link with the war. Just those few minutes when they had stood together with Tony. Someone else who would remember him, remember the place.
‘You living round here?’ Michael asked.
‘No. Been to school.’ She outlined briefly what she was doing, told him about Alfie and Hilda.
Michael let out a whistle of sympathy. ‘That’s really rough. You poor kid. I thought you wasn’t looking as bonny as when I saw you in Italy. But you always did have guts, I’ll say that for you, Rose. Can’t see my wife getting out earning a living.’
‘You’re married then?’ They were still standing where he had caught up with her, Michael pressing one of his shiny black shoes up against the wall facing him as they talked. A tram made its way noisily along the road.
‘Oh, yes. The wife and I live on down there a way. Edge of Hall Green.’ He pointed down the Stratford Road. ‘Mary her name is. Good Irish girl. I’ve a lad too – Joseph. He’s two.’
Rose felt a pang at the name Joseph. For a second she calculated how old her own Joseph would have been now. Fourteen this year. A grown lad, perhaps just starting out on a job.
‘I’ve got the bookies down the road,’ Michael was saying proudly. ‘My own little outfit. Gillespie over the door. Doing well. You know how it is with a growing family. We’ve another on the way – due in October.’
‘I’m glad. It’s really good to see you.’
‘Listen – come for a drink with me,’ Michael urged. He went to put an arm round her shoulders and usher her along. ‘Jesus, you’re skinny! We can have a quick one in the Mermaid.’
‘I can’t,’ Rose told him regretfully. ‘Sorry Michael, I just can’t. I’ve left my husband and kid all day.’
‘OK,’ Michael said easily, removing his muscular arm from her shoulders. ‘Then let me walk you home.’
‘Well . . .’ Rose hesitated. ‘That’d be nice. But what about your wife? Weren’t you on your way home?’
Michael made a quick, dismissive gesture. ‘Oh – she’ll be off to bed any minute. She gets tired, what with the babbies and that. Anyroad, I’m out most nights to tell you the truth. She never kicks up a fuss.’
All the way back to Catherine Street they chatted and reminisced. Michael told her he had met Mary, his wife, three years ago.
‘It was one of these Irish dos. Lots of booze and the music going and all the couples dancing and all the old’uns getting sick for the home country. She was fresh over here and she stood out. Really pretty face she had – well, she still has, except she’s got a bit of fat on her after having Joseph, of course. But she’s a good lass. Looks after me all right.’
‘Bet that takes some doing,’ Rose teased him. She realized, as ever with Michael, that she had begun to flirt with him. ‘Not sure I’d fancy the job myself!’
‘Would you not?’ Michael sounded mock wounded. ‘I’d’ve said we’d have made a pretty fine team, you and me, Rosie.’
Rose realized he was not entirely joking, and she blushed in the dusk. Guiltily, she knew she had not felt so alive, so stimulated by anyone’s sheer presence, in months and months. She steered the conversation on to less personal things.
When they said goodnight at the end of Catherine Street, Michael gave her another kiss on the cheek.
‘Come for a drink another time,’ he called, turning back towards Sparkhill.
Inside, to her surprise, she found Sid dozing in the chair beside Alfie, who was also asleep. She crept in, and Sid roused himself as she closed the door.
‘ ’Bout time,’ he said, looking up at her with the bleary eyes of an old man. ‘Our Grace has gone home to bed.’
Rose looked at the clock. She had taken half an hour longer than usual to get home. Had she and Michael really spent so much time talking? It had seemed to pass in seconds.
She saw Sid out, giving herself a ticking off when she remembered how much help they were giving her.
She and Michael met for a brief drink some weeks later, but then it was months before she saw him again. There was no English class on the Thursday evening before Christmas, and they arranged to meet then. Rose knew she was deceiving Grace, who would spend the evening with Alfie. But sometimes she thought Grace would be lost now without her role in Rose’s house. It had become part of her life. And Rose hungered for company, for interest and someone to have a good talk with.
As she sat opposite Michael in the busy Mermaid pub, she found all her doubts disappearing, and relaxed back into enjoying his company. They made an attractive pair, Michael in what looked like a new dark blue suit, his hair cut perfectly and greased back, and Rose with her long hair curling down prettily over her shoulders. She looked beautiful, especially when animated by her conversation with Michael.
They started talking about general things: Michael’s business, the way money was so tight still, and of Michael’s satisfaction that Winston Churchill had been re-elected to office in October.
‘Now things’ll get back to rights again,’ he told her, with the almost superstitious regard in which some people still held Churchill. ‘All that Labour lot messing about. What we need is a proper government – someone who knows what they’re doing. Been like rats from a sinking ship, all these people looking to go abroad to work. What good’s that to our country?’ He pushed back his stool. ‘Another?’
Rose watched him going to the bar. He still walked with the trace of a limp which had stayed with him from his injury in Italy. He was a fine-looking man with strong features and those direct blue eyes, always a hint of mischief in them.
He’s a bit of a chancer, she thought. Bet he gives that poor wife of his the runaround. But she couldn’t resist being with him this evening. He was a connection with the past, and being able to go out and meet him made her feel she could laugh and be her age again, for a short time at least, instead of driven, worried and overworked.
‘I was just thinking,’ he said, sitting down with their drinks, a pint for him and port and lemon for her. ‘If you’re out working all day, who looks after your husband?’
‘Neighbours. I moved back to the Birch Street area again when Alfie was taken bad. They all help mind Hilda, my little girl, too. Me and Grace do the shopping between us – I mean, who’s got the time to stand in a queue for hours on end? Anyroad, that’s all that’s left of the family now. My brother George is . . .’ Blushing, she looked down at the table. ‘He’s in Winson Green.’
‘Jesus! What for?’
‘Burglary. He went bad on us during the war. I was away of course, so I hardly saw it coming. But Grace had him all through. She’s done with him. She don’t even go and visit.’
‘But you do?’
‘When I can. Only every month or two, and he’s due out soon anyroad. He’s my brother. I always had a soft spot for him as a kid. I s’pose it was after the evacuation – he ran away, and he was never the same after he came back. It’s as if—’ She looked up at Michael, and he saw that tears had filled her brown eyes. Gently he leaned over and laid one of his large hands over hers, which were clasped tensely together on the table.
‘It’s as if he went off like a pint of milk. You can’t get through to him any more. When I go over there’ – she grimaced at the thought of the dark stone walls and towers of the prison – ‘he sits there, all pinched in the face. All hard-looking. I don’t know who he is any more.’ Slowly she pulled her hands away.
‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing,’ Michael told her. ‘Though God knows, with all you’ve got on your plate no one’d think bad of you if you didn’t go.’ Then he asked gently, ‘And your husband – Alfie, isn’t it? How much can he do?’
‘Nothing.’ Rose sounded very matter of fact. ‘It’s got to him very hard and very fast. He doesn’t move out of bed. Can’t do anything for himself at all. Someone has to be about all the time.’
She took in Michael’s appalled expression, realized that he was reaching for her hands again, but she kept them under the table. At that moment she felt that if he touched her she might just turn into his arms and cry out all the worry and tiredness and frustration of the past months. She longed for such comfort, to be able to lean on someone as solid and kind and reviving as Michael.
‘Oh, Rosie,’ he said. ‘You poor, brave kid.’
She could think of nothing else to say to him, and was relieved when after a few moments he started talking. As she wiped her eyes she realized that her telling him about her own life and worries had released him and he was now able to disclose to her his own.
‘When I met Mary, I thought I’d found the best woman ever,’ he told her. ‘She was pretty and sweet. She looked up to me and I loved her. I really thought the world of her, Rosie . . .’ He hesitated, and as she looked across at him she saw confusion in his face.
‘But . . . ?’ she prompted.
‘I don’t know if it’s having the babbies that’s done it. Joseph’s a great kid, and now we’ve got little Geraldine and she’s a bonny babby. But Mary, she’s got time for nothing else. What with feeding Geraldine at night and both of them on all day. And she frowns all the time. You may smile, Rosie, but before I’d hardly seen her crease her face in that way. She was the sweetest girl . . . But now she’s got a line, as if someone’s taken a pencil right down.’ He pointed to the little bridge of flesh between his eyebrows. ‘She never had that before.’
Rose leaned across the table and pointed at her own face, so that a man at the next-door table watched with a puzzled expression. ‘Look – I’ve got one too. They ought to call it the mother’s mark!’
‘But I don’t get it . . .’ Michael trailed off, frowning. ‘You’ve got more worries than she has. She’s not got a care in the world. All women have kiddies, but they don’t go all mardy on you like Mary. She ain’t got time for me, not in any department.’
He sat in gloomy silence for a moment, his deep blue eyes staring unfocusing across the bar. Around them people were laughing and two old men had started singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’.
He brought himself up with a jerk. ‘Sorry, Rosie. Didn’t mean to bring you here and pour out all my troubles. You won’t want to come again?’
She knew it was an invitation.
‘But don’t you think sometimes, looking back to when we was kids at Lazenby’s, we were full of all we were going to do. What was it you went on about? Teaching kids, wasn’t it? And I was going to run the world, have a big business . . .’ He chuckled bitterly. ‘And now look at us.’
‘But you’re doing all right?’
‘All right. That’s about the sum of it. But I wanted more, much more than that. Maybe that’s where I went wrong.’
They talked a little while longer before Rose told him she really had to go in order to get home at the normal time. They walked back together, further into the darkened city, where the points of greatest light and noise were the pubs on corners and down side streets.
‘Meet me again, won’t you?’ he asked as they parted, and she nodded. She knew that this meeting, and the way they had found they could confide in each other, had sealed their need to see each other.
Before she could stop him, he took her in his arms briefly and kissed her hungrily on the lips.
As she walked into Court 11 she tried to push from her mind what had just happened. It was a mistake, the result of an evening of resuming old friendship and sharing emotion. She wouldn’t let it happen again.
Quietly she released the catch on the door and pushed it open. For a few seconds she stood startled in the doorway, watching unnoticed before Grace turned, conscious of the draught from the doorway.
Alfie was lying as usual, on one side in the bed. They had to turn him every couple of hours to relieve the pressure on his bedridden body, which opened up his skin into deep sores. Grace was sitting beside him, tenderly holding one of his hands in her own.
Unsettled, and feeling strangely guilty at the apparent intimacy of the scene, Rose moved in briskly, pretending not to have noticed. Alfie’s eyes opened and his face lit up as far as it was able into his lopsided smile.
Everything all right?’ she asked. ‘Hilda asleep?’
‘She’s well gone,’ Grace told her.
Rose poured some tea for all of them.
‘These sores, Rose.’ Grace pointed at Alfie. ‘They’re not getting any better, are they?’
Rose sighed, sipping the warm tea. ‘It’s a losing battle. I don’t know what else we can do.’
The two of them gently turned back Alfie’s bedclothes, and he stirred slightly, his eyes closed again. A rank smell emanated from him, a mixture of sweat and urine and the discharge from the sores.
‘We’ll turn him,’ Rose said. ‘I’m glad you waited. It’s a job on your own.’
They slid their arms under Alfie’s inert body, pulling him gently across the bed, and rolled him over on to his other side.
Grace tutted. ‘Sheet’s wet again. We’ll have to change it.’
Manoeuvring Alfie’s body from side to side, they pulled out the bottom sheet and smoothed over another one. Washing and more washing. Rose carefully wrapped his reddened heels and elbows in soft cloths to help protect them against the bed’s chafing.
They eased Alfie out of his pyjamas. His limbs kept stiffening into muscular spasms, so that for minutes at a time they could not straighten his arms enough to slide on a fresh pyjama jacket.
Before they replaced the trousers, Rose turned her attention to the worst sores at the bottom of his back. On the right side, the top part of his buttock was beginning to break up, the skin all red and cracked, and they were doing all they could to prevent it getting as bad as the other side. On the left a full-blown sore had developed into a discoloured, oozing hole large enough to hold a golf ball. It looked appalling, though Alfie said he was not aware of much pain from it.