Martin’s relief had turned to cold annoyance. ‘I never dreamt you could be so deceitful, Maeve. Having a baby should be a mutual decision, not one the wife takes for herself. I’m very disappointed with you.’
‘Not half as disappointed as I am with you, Martin Adams. Mind out me way while I go and collect a few things. I’ll come back for the rest tomorrow while you’re at work.’
‘No!’ Martin grabbed her shoulder. Jerry McKeown got out of the police car and leant against it, folding his arms. He watched the couple intently. Martin gasped and let go of his wife when he realised Jerry was concerned he might hurt her. He said quietly, ‘The last thing on earth I want is for you to leave, Maeve. Come inside. We can talk there.’
‘I’ll come, but there’s nothing to talk about. I’m having a baby and the sooner you get used to the fact the better.’ Maeve marched up the path.
Jerry McKeown watched them go inside. They had forgotten all about him. He got out, switched off the engine of Martin’s car, locked the doors and put the keys through the letter box. He then drove back to Stanley Road and, for the umpteenth time, asked Fion to marry him and was delighted, though slightly taken aback, when she accepted straight away.
Orla was the first person Lulu and Gareth had had to dinner in their tiny London flat. Orla watched her daughter fondly as she set the little round table in the window. It reminded her of when she was little and she’d played house with Fion and Maeve. The young couple hadn’t enough dishes and the ones they had were
cracked. None of the cutlery matched. The chairs were odd. The room smelt of oil paints and there was a half-finished painting on an easel in the corner – Gareth couldn’t afford a studio. So far, the painting consisted of several dead fish pegged, like washing, on a line.
‘What will you call it?’ she asked him.
‘I haven’t thought of a name yet.’
They sat down to a tasty chicken and mushroom casserole followed by trifle. Orla had brought a bottle of wine.
‘I’d’ve done something more ambitious, Mum, but the cooker’s useless.’
‘This is lovely, Lulu,’ Orla said sincerely. A candle stuck in an old wine bottle flickered in the draught. The window of the fourth-floor room overlooked a landscape of Camden roofs glistening icily in the moonlight. It was December and painfully cold. ‘I never realised roofs were so many different colours,’ she remarked.
‘I shall paint that scene before we leave,’ Gareth remarked. ‘
If we
leave.’
Orla looked from her daughter to her son-in-law. ‘Are you thinking of moving?’
Lulu wrinkled her nose. ‘We
might
, but not till after Christmas. Last week we met this chap who owns an art gallery in New York, only a titchy place, badly rundown. He thinks the Americans would go for Gareth’s paintings and has promised to show half a dozen on a regular basis – you wouldn’t believe the price he suggested asking, Mum.’
‘I don’t want to compromise my integrity,’ Gareth growled.
‘Painters only paint paintings in order to sell them, surely,’ Orla said. ‘The money you earn merely proves their worth. There’s no point otherwise, unless it’s just a hobby and you don’t mind giving them away.’
‘See,’ Lulu said triumphantly. ‘I knew Mum would be all for it. Gareth’s worried that if he earns money he’ll have sold out.’
‘I’m probably more scared no one will buy my work,’ Gareth confessed glumly.
Orla tried to convince him he was talking rubbish. At Lulu’s age – at any age – she would have gone to New York like a shot. She didn’t want her daughter to miss out on what sounded a wonderful opportunity.
After dinner, quite a few friends dropped in, bringing more wine: artists mainly, male and female, not all of them young. The lights were turned off, leaving the flickering candle and the brilliant silver moon to illuminate the shabby room, and they talked about a myriad things – art mainly, politics, the latest films, the latest shows . . .
God, how I would have loved this, Orla thought longingly. I’ve missed so much. I’ve missed everything.
It was midnight when she returned to the small hotel in Victoria. To her surprise, there were half a dozen men in the lounge and the tiny bar was still open. She bought a double whisky and the men suggested she join them. Orla thought of her small, cold room with its small, cold bed and agreed. Five of the men were reps like herself, much older. Their clothes were cheap, their laughter false, their voices much too loud. They exuded an air of faint desperation as if this wasn’t the life they had envisaged twenty or thirty years before. By now, they had expected an office with their name and title on the door, their own staff, respect.
The sixth man was very different. Better dressed than the others, quietly spoken, he exuded confidence rather than desperation. Orla gathered he was an engineer working for a French tool company, calling on firms by invitation to quote for new, highly expensive machinery.
He said very little in a quiet voice with only the suggestion of an accent. The other men called him Louis. Orla was particularly intrigued because, unlike his friends, he completely ignored her. He was a small, slender man, dark-haired, thin-lipped, with a tight, unsmiling face. She hadn’t felt so immediately attracted to someone since she’d first met Micky. She kept looking at him in the hope of catching his eye, but he never once glanced in her direction.
An hour and two more whiskies later, she announced she was off to bed. The other men bade her a noisy goodnight, but Louis merely stared at his highly polished shoes and didn’t speak.
‘This room is like a fridge,’ Vicky Weatherspoon muttered. ‘If I were a pint of milk, I’d keep for weeks.’ She glared at the ice on the metal-framed windows, wondering if it was inside or out, and rubbed her numb hands together, but they had lost all feeling.
It was useless trying to write. She threw the pen on to the desk and tucked her hands inside the sleeves of her jumper. They felt only slightly warmer.
A plumber was coming to install second-hand central heating at the end of December. He was a very cheap, highly sought-after plumber, which meant they’d had to wait months until he was free. It hadn’t been so bad in October when they’d first moved in and had spent most of their time decorating the shabby, run-down building inside and out, while Mary Gregory and Robin Hughes, both eighteen and with A levels in Chemistry, were in the workshop turning out thousands of bottles of Lacey’s of Liverpool shampoo and conditioner. A business had never been started on so short a shoestring, Cormac had said, laughing.
Lucky Cormac! Vicky made a face. Cormac was at that moment in a nice warm restaurant in Liverpool, lunching with a girl called Andrea Pryce, a model, who would become the face of Lacey’s of Liverpool in an advertising campaign in the press, starting January. It would swallow up all the profit the company had made
so far, but hopefully be worth it in the end. Andrea was startlingly pretty and ten years younger than Vicky, who wasn’t only envious of Cormac being warm. Say if he fell in love with Andrea! Say if she tried to seduce him!
Vicky tried to imagine how a woman went about seducing a man, but her imagination wouldn’t stretch that far. She thought miserably that Cormac was no more attracted to her now than a year ago when they’d gone into partnership. They couldn’t possibly have got on better. They were friends, they went to dinner together, had even gone to a hotel in Yorkshire on a weekend business course; they sometimes shared quite intimate thoughts. The only thing missing was romance. Cormac had shown not the slightest sign of wanting to kiss her – she didn’t count the triumphant kisses he planted on her cheek when they received a big order, or the hugs he gave her for the same reason. It was a sad fact that Cormac didn’t regard her as a woman, but as a mate, a business partner. He would have been just as fond of her had she been a man.
Yet with each day they spent together, Vicky only loved him more. She’d tried to make herself attractive by growing her short, crisp hair longer, but was forced to cut it off when it became a halo of wire wool. Her mother warned her she looked like a clown when she tried using make-up. ‘Stick to lipstick, Victoria, and then make it pale. You’ve got too big a mouth for such a bright red.’
Vicky blushed at the memory and wondered if Cormac had noticed her turning up for a whole week looking as if she was about to join a circus. Did he ever notice anything about her?
The new clothes had also proved a disaster. She was short and dumpy. She didn’t suit flowing frocks and pleated skirts. And, ‘Your legs are too sporty for high
heels,’ claimed her mother. By sporty, Vicky assumed she meant her overdeveloped calves. She would never know why she had acquired such heavily muscled legs when she’d been useless at games at school.
Then she’d spent a fortune on contact lenses so she could dispense with her glasses but, try as she might, she couldn’t get used to the damn things.
Still, on New Year’s Day Cormac’s sister, Fionnuala, was getting married and Vicky had been invited to the wedding. Naturally, she and Cormac would go together. If they spent enough time in each other’s company, she thought hopefully, he might get so used to her that he’d want them to get married because he couldn’t visualise another woman in his life.
Cora and Billy Lacey had also received an invitation to Fion’s wedding. Cora breathed a sigh of relief that she’d been accepted back into the Lacey fold. She’d buy herself a new coat and wear that diamanté brooch in the lapel that she’d nicked from Owen Owen’s a long time ago. It wouldn’t hurt Billy to have a new suit – he’d lost so much weight that his best one hung round him like a tent. Perhaps they could go to town on Saturday, have a meal afterwards.
There was an odd sensation in Cora’s breast when she thought about going shopping with Billy. Another person would have recognised it as happiness, but Cora wasn’t used to being happy and couldn’t have explained what the sensation was.
After forty years of ignoring each other, she and Billy had suddenly started to get along. Billy had more or less given up the ale and most nights they spent watching telly. One night they’d even gone to the pictures to see
The Sound of Music
and enjoyed it no end – that girl, Julie something, had a lovely voice.
Money was no longer a problem since the yard had burnt down and Billy was able to keep all his wages. As expected, Alice paid far over the odds for cleaning the salons and Cora had started collecting her pension from the post office in Marsh Lane. Maurice and Billy between them had settled all Lacey’s Tyres’ outstanding debts with the money off the insurance and Maurice seemed much happier working as a driver for Bootle Corporation. He’d come to tea last Sunday, bringing Pol and the kids, and Cora realised she was quite fond of the lad even if he was a loser, unlike her real son who was very much on the up and up. The kids got on her nerves a bit with their noise, but she felt like a proper grandma and had actually bought them some odds and ends of clothes.
In a few weeks’ time they’d be even better off. Alice Lacey was looking to buy a house and would be leaving Amber Street for ever once she’d found one. It was Billy who’d suggested him and Cora take over Amber Street from Alice who’d had the place done up dead smart. The rent was thirty bob a week cheaper than Garibaldi Road.
Cora was surprised to find she didn’t mind, not much, living in the house of the woman she’d always hated. Nowadays, there wasn’t all that much room for hatred in her heart.
Fionnuala Littlemore married Sergeant Jerry McKeown on the first day of January 1971. It was snowing and Fion wore a cream fitted coat over a matching dress – Jerry had offered to buy her a fur coat as a wedding present, but Fion didn’t approve of animals being slaughtered for their skins.
Over ninety guests had been invited to the reception at Hilton’s Restaurant. It wasn’t until six o’clock that the
newly married couple left for their honeymoon in London.
Alice waved them off tearfully, though she wondered why young people bothered with honeymoons any more. In her day a honeymoon was the time you got to know each other properly. There used to be all sorts of jokes about the first night. She remembered feeling dead nervous herself, but John had been a gentle, tender lover right from the start. Nowadays, the first night happened long before the honeymoon and people knew each other far better than God had intended by the time they condescended to get wed.
She returned upstairs to where the air was fuggy with cigarette smoke and several couples were dancing to a recording of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, which was being played loud enough to be heard several streets away.
Orla came up. ‘You look dead miserable, Mam. Have a drink. What would you like, sherry?’
‘Just a little one, luv.’
Orla looked as if she’d already had too much to drink herself and there were four more hours to go before the reception ended. She also looked much too thin, Alice thought worriedly. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. She seemed to laugh a lot at things that weren’t remotely funny. It was an unnatural life she led, particularly for a woman: on the road, staying in strange hotels in strange places. Still, it would all change in a few months’ time, when she would be based in her own office in St Helens: Head of Sales.
Alice wondered if the time would ever come when she would stop worrying about her children. At least Fion was happy, the one she’d least expected to be, and Maeve was like the cat that ate the cream since she’d fallen pregnant, though Martin didn’t exactly look too pleased.
Her son appeared on top of the world, the business doing so amazingly well, but Cormac had turned thirty a week ago and it was time he got married, started a family. Of course, he already had a daughter, Sharon, Pol’s eldest girl, but Alice wasn’t the only one who suspected Cormac had had nothing to do with the lovely red-haired child who resembled neither her mother nor her supposed father. She’d always hoped things would get serious between Cormac and Vicky, but he’d brought that model, Andrea Pryce, to the wedding. She was a nice girl, if a trifle empty-headed.
She looked for Vicky, saw her sitting alone on a chair, looking rather downcast, and went to sit beside her. ‘Would you like a piece of wedding cake to take home for your mam and dad, luv?’