Chrissie's Children (3 page)

Tom would not yet be working at Ballantyne’s. He had said, ‘I don’t want to start as the boss’s son,’ so Jack had found him an apprenticeship in a yard on the Tyne
and Tom would be living in lodgings close by. That, too, had been Tom’s idea, and he had said it was to be near his work, though he could have travelled there daily by train in little more
than a half-hour. But it was also to prove to himself that he could manage on his own. Chrissie had guessed that last and accepted it.

Now she was not finding it easy.

On the opposite platform stood a little group of men in their suits and carrying cases, their wives holding on to their arms. They were waiting for the southbound train to go looking for work
because their yards had shut down. Chrissie’s fears for Ballantyne’s returned, a spectre that had haunted her for twelve years.

She watched and waved as Tom’s train took him from her, he leaning out of the window and flapping a hand. Then she walked out of the station and across the road to the Railway Hotel.

She pushed through the swinging doors into the foyer and started across the deep-pile carpet with its scattering of leather armchairs and small, light oak tables. She caught the scent of the
flowers in the vases on the tables and glimpsed her reflection in the huge mirrors set in the panelled walls, a slender, long-legged woman in her early forties. Her dress was rayon and expensive
and her hair with a tinge of copper had been washed and waved by a hairdresser.

She checked in her stride as Susan Dobson, the receptionist, smiled and said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Ballantyne. There’s a young lady who would like to see you.’

The girl had been sitting by the desk, stiff and straight, her hands in her lap, feet tucked under the chair. Now she stood up quickly. The print of her cotton dress was faded and Chrissie
guessed it had been made from another; she had experience of that. She thought this slight girl was younger than her own daughter, and seemed frightened. Chrissie smiled and asked, ‘You are .
. .?’

‘Sarah Tennant, miss – Mrs Ballantyne.’ Spoken in little more than a whisper – and still remembering her school manners.

Chrissie thought she knew why the girl was there and sighed to herself, but she said, ‘Come along, then,’ and led the way into her office.

Chrissie’s office was comfortable with thick carpeting and a rug before the fireplace, which was covered by an attractive floral screen in this summer weather. A big
window let in sunlight which reflected from the polished desk. Behind the desk was a swivel chair and before it two armchairs. Two more stood on either side of the fireplace.

Chrissie sat behind her desk and gestured to Sarah to take a chair before it. Sarah complied but only perched on the edge of it. Chrissie asked, ‘So what did you want to see me
about?’

‘My mother thought you might give me a job. She worked for you years ago: Isabel Tennant?’ That ended as a question. Did Mrs Ballantyne remember?

Chrissie did. Isabel Tennant had been a good worker, and she had been a grown woman and familiar with the workings of a hotel. But Chrissie had no vacancy for her now, while this girl . . . She
asked, ‘What can you do?’

Sarah answered quickly, ‘Anything.’

Chrissie suppressed a sigh again and changed the question. ‘Have you worked in a place like this before?’ When Sarah shook her head she went on, ‘Have you worked anywhere
before?’

‘No, Mrs Ballantyne.’

Chrissie looked down at the desk, not wanting to meet that pleading gaze. She could have taken on a dozen girls like this every week if she had the work for them. But she ran a business that
employed over thirty people – so long as it was profitable. It had to stay in profit or none of them would work, and that meant she could not pay passengers.

Chrissie asked absently, remembering the Isabel Tennant of all those years ago, ‘What is your mother doing now?’

‘She’s poorly.’ When Chrissie looked up Sarah went on, ‘The doctor says it’s consumption. She can’t get out now.’

Chrissie knew about tuberculosis, the disease that carried off so many. She was silent a moment then asked, ‘Who looks after her?’

Sarah said simply, ‘Me.’

‘I mean when your father is at work.’

‘Dad died when I was two years old.’

Chrissie probed, ‘How long has your mother been ill?’

‘Over a year now.’

‘And you’ve kept up with school.’

‘I’ve never been absent.’

‘And the housework?’

‘I do it all. Mam used to try to dust round a bit but it just made her cough so she had to stop. I do all that, and the cooking and the washing.’

Chrissie thought, So she’s not without experience of a sort. But there still isn’t a vacancy . . . She recalled the girl saying gamely that she could do anything. She was just a
little slip of a thing. Chrissie had been about her age and size when she boldly asked for a housekeeper’s job with Lance Morgan who kept the Frigate public house. Her lips twitched,
picturing that girl of nearly thirty years ago, her impudence. But she had needed that job desperately at the time, to get away from a man who was a threat to her. And she had got it.

Chrissie came back to the present, realised the long silence that had drawn out as she thought back. She looked across at Sarah, saw her wide eyes and drooping mouth. She smiled at the girl and
said, ‘I can use you in the kitchen, helping Cook. Do you think you could do that?’

‘Oh, yes, please, miss – Mrs Ballantyne.’ Sarah’s face lit up in a smile and she shifted in the chair as if eager to go.

Chrissie asked, ‘When can you start?’

Sarah offered, ‘Now?’ afraid that if she hesitated she might lose this chance.

‘Have you brought an overall or apron with you?’

The girl’s smile slipped away. ‘No, Mrs Ballantyne.’

Chrissie thought, And you’re wearing your best dress. She said, ‘Never mind. I expect we can find something. Come on.’

Outside they met Dinsdale Arkley, her manager, limping across the foyer; he had lost a leg in Flanders in the Great War. Chrissie greeted him: ‘Good morning, Arkley.’ Years ago when
they had both worked for Lance Morgan in the Frigate he had told her, ‘Nobody calls me Dinsdale except me mother.’ She introduced him to Sarah and he took a note of her address;
Chrissie knew the neighbourhood. Later Arkley would enter Sarah in the wages book – she would be paid seven shillings and sixpence a week – and see to her insurance.

Chrissie led Sarah on but paused before entering the kitchen to warn her, ‘Don’t be frightened by the chef. He’s really very kind and you’ll find him fair.’

Sarah blinked apprehensively but nodded. ‘Yes, Mrs Ballantyne.’

In the kitchen Chrissie said, ‘Mr Kincaid, this is Sarah Tennant, starting as an assistant for you.’

Jock Kincaid, ramrod straight, glowered down from his height of six foot four, extended another eight inches by his chef’s white hat. His mouth was set like a trap in a bony face. He had
gone to sea as a boy and went on to cook on merchantmen and then liners. Ten years ago he had ‘swallowed the anchor’ and come ashore to work in the Railway Hotel. He said Chrissie
Ballantyne was the best skipper he’d ever had. His voice was a bass rumble that growled over his kitchen like the contented humming of bees or the menace of thunder. But now he only said
neutrally, ‘Oh, aye?’

Chrissie asked, ‘Can you find an apron for her?’

Again the rumble: ‘Oh, aye.’

Sarah blinked up at him, awed, but she could see beyond him the assistant cook, the two kitchen maids and the kitchen porter, all of them seeming cheerful. So she concluded this must be a kindly
giant and smiled up at him.

Chrissie left Sarah then, returned to her office and plunged into her work.

Chrissie told Jack after dinner that evening as they walked in the garden at the rear of the house, ‘I took on another girl today.’

‘Yes?’ he answered absently, head turned to watch Matt who was stooped over the open bonnet of the Ford, tinkering with its engine.

‘She comes from the street next to where I was born.’

He grinned at her. ‘She’ll know about you, then, “Chrissie Carter that was”.’

She returned the smile, accepting the truth: people talked. There would obviously be gossip, some of it malicious, about a girl from that neighbourhood who married a Ballantyne. She said primly,
‘She won’t know all about me.’

‘I would hope not.’ And they laughed together.

Then Jack said, ‘I’ve got to have another word with Matt. It really is time he made up his mind about a career, had an objective in life. He’s just drifting.’

Chrissie defended her son: ‘His last school report wasn’t bad.’

‘It wasn’t good, either. The only
good
marks he got were for art. On the last report he did well at literature, but not this time. He told me that was because he wasn’t
too keen on the books they studied this term. And that’s it: he won’t apply his mind, just flits from one subject to another as the fancy takes him. And that applies outside of school
as well. He likes to fiddle with the car but he doesn’t want to be any sort of engineer. He takes no interest in the yard. When I was his age—’

‘Jack!’ Chrissie laid a hand on his sleeve and stopped him. ‘He doesn’t take after you. Tom does and he will be going into the yard, no doubt of that. Just be grateful
for him.’

‘That’s true. Strange, though,’ Jack mused, ‘him being just like a real Ballantyne.’ He went on, ‘That still doesn’t excuse Matt. He will have to earn
his living one day.’ He halted in his strolling. ‘I’ll tell you who he’s like: my mother. You’ve seen her picture.’

‘There’s a resemblance,’ Chrissie had to admit it. Hilary Ballantyne was a tall, slender woman, blonde where Matt was sandy haired, but there was no denying the likeness.

‘And not just physically,’ Jack said grimly. ‘
She
was a dreamer, never did a hand’s turn and walked out on my father and me when I was five years old.’
Hilary Ballantyne had run off to the South of France with another man. ‘I never missed her. Old Amy Jenkinson, my nurse, was a mother to me, both before and after my real mother left. I
don’t want Matt turning out like her.’

‘Glory be to God!’ Chrissie exclaimed. She lifted her gaze to the sky then returned it to Jack. ‘He’s not yet
sixteen
! He doesn’t
have
to know what to
do with his life this early just because you and Tom did!’ As Jack opened his mouth to argue she shifted her ground and charged, ‘You’d do better to have a word with
Sophie,’ knowing full well that her daughter was Jack’s favourite. ‘Now, she
does
take after her grandmother,
my
natural mother.’

Jack shrugged. ‘I never met her, as you know, but you’ve told me all about her, how she was a singer and dancer – and the rest.’

‘I’ve told you
some
of it,’ said Chrissie grimly, ‘but you don’t know the half.’ Her natural mother had been uncaring, had deserted her as a babe in
arms. ‘She was known as “Vesta Nightingale – vocals and dance”. So far as I know, she still is.
And
she rolled her eyes at every man she met. That’s Sophie all
over –
and
she knows what she wants to do, unfortunately.’

They glared at each other for a moment then Chrissie’s lips twitched and she laughed. Jack grinned, because this was an old argument and they had said it all before.

Jack said, ‘All right, I’ll take a stricter line with her.’ Chrissie remembered him saying that before, too. He asked, ‘Where is she, anyway?’

‘She went off to play tennis. She’s meeting some of her friends from school at the club, said they’d probably stay on for coffee and a chat afterwards. I said I wanted her in
by ten.’

Jack nodded agreement. ‘No harm in that.’

Sophie was just one more young girl in a summer dress at the dance, except that hers was a floral silk and more expensive than the cotton frocks around her. She had smuggled it
out of the house in her tennis bag along with the cheap high-heeled shoes she had bought, secretly and illicitly, with her allowance and extra shillings she had begged from her father. The lipstick
and make-up had been purchased the same way. Her tennis dress was in her bag in the cloakroom.

The dance-hall was a high-vaulted cavern, its floor filled with gliding couples under a blue haze of smoke. They danced to the music of a twelve-piece band in dinner jackets who played on a
stage at one end of the hall. Lights sparkled and reflected from a mirrored globe circling above the centre of the floor.

Some of the men wore dark double-breasted suits from Burton’s or the Fifty-shilling Tailors – just about a labourer’s weekly wage – and others dressed more cheaply, in
sports coats and grey flannel trousers. The hands of clerks and draughtsmen among them were pink and clean but those who worked in the yards had calloused hands, bruised or burnt, grey with
ingrained dirt no scrubbing would remove.

They made a sober background for the splashes of colour of the girls’ dresses. Shop assistants and office workers sat on chairs ranked along the walls and chattered excitedly while young
men stood in groups, eyeing the girls, smoking and talking, summoning up the nerve to ask for a dance.

One crossed to Sophie where she stood near the band and asked, ‘Would you like to do this one?’ She had danced with several already, and eagerly, but now she shook her head
impatiently and the young man flushed and strode away.

Sophie did not notice. All her attention was focused on the stage. The band’s singer, a woman in her mid-twenties wearing a close-fitting evening dress that fell to her silver slippers,
got up from her chair and stepped forward to the microphone. The bandleader, out in front, pointed his baton and she began to sing. ‘I Only Have Eyes For You . . .’ Sophie sang silently
with her, mouthing the words, and imitating the gestures in her mind.

When the singer was done, Sophie sought out the young man she had turned away, telling him, ‘Sorry, but I couldn’t dance then. I will now.’ She opened her arms and the startled
youth automatically stepped into them before he could grumble at her previous refusal. But Sophie was back by the stage again when the singer came on for her next number.