Authors: Helen Forrester
Mike staggered out of bed the next morning. The house was still enough for him to hear Moggie scratching his flea bites, while he waited by the front door to be let out. A bit bewildered because there was not a heaving deck under his feet, he teetered downstairs as quietly as possible so that he did not wake Joey. The boy was asleep on his back, mouth wide open, a bolster clasped to him as if it were a teddy bear.
The living-room fire was out, and on the floor near the front door were scattered pieces of broken china. He unbuttoned his shirt and scratched his chest while he contemplated the scene. Moggie continued to scratch, too, as if he knew that no male of the house was going to be bothered opening a door for a cat.
Where is Daisy? Mike fretted.
Thinking that she might have gone to the privy, he went to the back door, peered into the brick-lined yard, and called, “Daise! Are you there?”
There was no reply. Moggie shot between his feet and through the door, and he cursed the impatient animal. From over the high yard wall came the sounds of the city waking up, a rumble of lorries, a clanging of trams, screeches of children on their way to school, the slow squeal of a bridge being swung across a dock.
“Bugger everything,” he snarled.
He stumped back into the living-room. It felt cold and dank, and he shivered. Where was the bloody woman? What a welcome home! He was clemmed and needed his breakfast. He
reckoned she must have gone out to borrow something from a neighbour or to Mrs. Donnelly’s shop.
He inspected the grate. It was choked with cinders, so he sought in the hearth for the poker in order to rake it out.
There was no poker.
Bloody Jaysus! He turned to go into the kitchen to look for something else to poke out the dead fire with; and suddenly spotted the missing tool lying on the table across an opened packet of sliced bread, its point buried in a lump of margarine.
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” he muttered, as he went over to get it. He stood looking at its greasy point for a moment before he started to clean out the grate; but the poker offered no clue as to how it had managed to arrive in such a peculiar place. He shrugged, and then raked out the cinders. He found a bundle of wood chips lying above the oven, and the coal hod was full. He soon had a fire going and then filled the kettle and put it on to heat.
While the kettle sang, he stripped off his shirt in the scullery and washed himself under the running tap, the icy water splashing out at him from the old, soapstone sink. This cleared his head and removed the smell of vomit from him. He took a piece of towel from a nail on the back of the door, and, rubbing himself vigorously, he went back into the living-room to warm himself by the newly made blaze. He put on his shirt and slicked his thin, black hair with a pocket comb he took from his jacket pocket.
Where was Daise? He opened the front door. The street was empty. A weak sun was making the river’s heaving, grey waters almost silver, and a morning mist was dissipating rapidly. He stood outside and stretched himself, thankful for the moment to be away from a boat’s cramped quarters and a weary, quarrelsome crew. It would be good to have a wife to sleep with; Daisy had always been obliging in bed — bed was the only place in which he was king, he thought irritably, in a home which had always been his mother-in-law’s. But where, in the
Name of God, was the girl?
He turned back in, his eyes dazzled by the daylight. It seemed uncanny that Daisy should be in the room, standing over the fire warming her hands. It was as if she had materialised out of nothing, like a bloody ghost.
She looked like a ghost, too, when she glanced up at him. Her face was like paper, the eyes two black rings drawn with ink.
“’lo, Daise. Where you bin? I bin lookin’ for yez.” He advanced towards her. She shivered and held her shawl closer. I bet you’ve been looking, she thought; you’ll have but one idea now you’re home.
“I was with Nell. Did Meg tell you about her?”
“She did. It was so quiet I didn’t think of you being in there.” He went, with a hopeful smile, to put his arms round Daisy, but she pushed him off mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere.
She shivered again and looked at him with such despair that he felt for the first time in his married life a real concern for her.
“What’s to do?” he asked.
“It’s Nell, Mike. You’ll have to go up for the doctor.” She glanced up at the clock. “Before his surgery — that’s at half-past nine.” Her voice had a sob in it. “She’s terrible ill this morning.”
He drew in his breath exasperatedly. To be sent for the bloody doctor, when you haven’t been with your old woman for months, even before you’ve had your breakfast.
He scowled.
Daisy looked at him imploringly. “I can’t help it, Mike. She’s dying, I think. I’d go myself, only I don’t want to leave her.” A great sob wracked her.
Without another word, he reached for his jacket, his face suddenly blenched at the idea of a death in his own age group.
“Where’s George?”
“At their house, I think.”
“Right. I won’t be long. Put some tea on — I’ll get George at the same time.”
“Ta, Mike.” Her gratitude was so apparent that he immediately forgot his impatience and felt like a hero.
While he was out, Daisy ran upstairs again, took the high-necked blouse out of the chest of drawers in Nellie’s room and hastily hooked herself into it. Nellie seemed to be in a coma and was breathing with slow, shallow inhalations as if to avoid further pain.
Daisy took the dirty bowl into which Nellie had spat her life blood down to the scullery and washed it out. A reluctant iddy Joey was hauled out of bed and hurried off to school. He paused on his way out of the front door to kick a piece of the china dog cautiously with his toe. He took a bite out of the jam sandwich he was carrying, and asked, “How did you break your china dog, Anty Daise?”
Daisy had done her best not to show any distress while she hastened him off to school, but now she snapped, “It got dropped last night. Now away with you. Go on, now, duck, or you’ll be late.” Her pain at the breakage of the ornament for a second obliterated her grief over Nellie. I’ll kill that Meg; I’ll kill her, she promised herself savagely. By God I will.
Joey grinned at her wickedly, took a bite from his sandwich again, slammed the door after him and ran happily up the street.
During that terrible day, Daisy held Nellie in her arms practically the whole time. The doctor, Father Patrick and a truly concerned Mike seemed to Daisy to float on the periphery of a world which held only Nellie and herself, a world which Nellie was preparing to quit. In the late afternoon, under pressure from Great Aunt Devlin, she yielded Nellie’s wasted body to a distraught George. But she would not go further away than the top of the stairs, where she sat with her head on her knees in an agony of misery. Mike brought her a strong, hot cup of tea, but she would not raise her head and he set it down by her on the stairs, where it went cold. When, with rough concern, he put an arm round her shoulders, she shook it off, and he slunk away.
Around four o’clock, while iddy Joey played in the side street
under the kindly eye of Mrs. Foley, his mother slipped quietly out of a life which had held little but sorrow; and Great Aunt Devlin led a weeping George out of the room.
When she saw them emerge, Daisy leapt to her feet, her hand to her mouth as if to hold back a scream.
“She’s gone,” announced Great Aunt Devlin.
“Oh, Mother of God, no,” mourned Daisy, and she pushed past them and rushed into the bedroom.
Great Aunt Devlin had lifted the sheet up over Nellie’s face, and when Daisy saw this she began to scream. She flung herself passionately on her knees beside the corpse and rocked herself backwards and forwards before it, her forehead touching the bed with the forward movement. Scream after scream came from her in hopeless hysteria.
Mrs. Foley heard the first shriek, borne by the wind, and with considerable presence of mind called iddy Joey in to share her children’s tea.
Mike sat George down by the fire and let Daisy shriek on, while he poured a glass of gin out for him from a bottle proffered by Great Aunt Devlin. Then, whistling under his breath, he ran upstairs with the quick short steps of a sailor, head tucked down between shoulders as if traversing a narrow com-panionway.
“Daise,” he called her firmly.
She ignored him and shrieked again.
He strode round the bed. Though smaller than her, he shovelled coal for a living and was a bundle of muscle. He seized her by one shoulder, half swung her round and administered the hardest slap he could on her face. It stung so sharply that she stopped immediately, gazing up at him with appalled, black-ringed eyes, her toothless mouth another black shadow on a white face where the mark of his hand was already apparent in bright scarlet.
“Come on, Daisy. There’s nothing you can do for her. Come on, now. She’s at peace.”
She allowed herself to be helped to her feet and Mike put his arm round her ample waist and led her downstairs. He persuaded her to sit with George to comfort him.
While Great Aunt Devlin laid out the body, Mike, feeling the need for more female support, called Mrs. Foley from her seat on the front step of her house. She dispatched her eldest boy to call the rest of Daisy’s family.
Agnes arrived, streaming with tears, accompanied by her lugubrious-looking husband, Joe. Mike immediately sent Joe up to the Ragged Bear for a large bottle of whisky.
John came soon afterwards. Instead of Meg, he brought with him his eldest daughter, Mary, who was whimpering quietly to herself.
George sat, elbows on knees, his face buried in his huge hands; his great shoulders heaved with his stifled sobs. From time to time, Daisy would give a little sob and lean forward to pat his knee. He did not look up at the arrival of his relations.
John did not tell him of the fight he had just had with his sister, Meg. She had said, “There’s nowt I can do for our Nell. God rest her soul, poor dear. And George deserves to lose her. And as for our Daise, she can rot in hell for all I care.”
Nothing would persuade her to enter Daisy’s house again, she had announced in final defiance.
Nobody wanted to tell iddy Joey, still playing with Mrs. Foley’s children in their kitchen, that he was now motherless. Finally, Daisy said, between little, quivering sobs, “I’ll tell ’im. I promised Nell I’d be a Mam to ’im,” She mopped her face with her apron and sobbed more loudly into it, while the menfolk stood round uneasily. “I’ll come up to your house, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Foley?”
“To be sure, Mrs. Gallagher.” She put her arm round Daisy’s shoulders and, thus supported, Daisy went round the corner and up the street to fulfil her promise to Nellie.
Holy Mother, she wondered as she went, how long can you go without sleep? How long can you bear a pain like this?
A terrified iddy Joey, howling like a dog left out in the rain, came back to Daisy’s house, clinging close to her, his head on her hip under her shawl. He was rocked on Daisy’s knee by the fire until the howls became sobs, the sobs became sniffs, and he began to doze.
In response to a command from Daisy, Mike carried the little boy up to the landing bedroom and laid him on one of the beds. The child began to whimper again, so Daisy said soothingly, “I’ll stay with you a bit, luv.” The candle light shone on her own tear-stained face, and Joey began to cry again in real earnest.
Daisy turned to Mike. “You go down and do what you can for George, you and John together.” She heaved herself on to the bed beside Joey and covered him tenderly with an old coat. “Now, luv, you’re safe with your Anty Daise.” She took no more notice of Mike, but put her arm protectively over the child and in a second was asleep herself.
Mike glanced sardonically at George. A fat lot of good he had ever been to Nellie. Maybe he was weeping because his conscience was hurting him at last.
But George’s grief was genuine. It seemed to him that Nellie’s death was the final culmination of all the terrible things that had happened to him since the first piercing agony of the shrapnel wounds he had acquired in Flanders; he had lived, but in that moment his youth, his hope, had died. Now he felt that nothing much more could happen to him. He had no work, his strength was gone from lack of exercise, all his children, except iddy Joey, were dead from the diphtheria; and Nellie, on whom he had vented his frustration, had slipped away; and he realised that with her had gone all that he knew of love and faithfulness.
Exhausted in mind and body, Daisy slept until noon the next day. When she woke, the house was very quiet, and she lay for a little while, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. A spider was swinging from one of the beams, and a weak ray of sunshine turned its thread to silver. At first she felt completely emptied of feeling; and then, with painful clarity, memory of the happenings of the previous day swept back into her mind.
She turned her face into her pillow and bit at the material with toothless gums, to stem the anguish within her.
“Oh, Nell!” she mourned.
Great Aunt Devlin heard her turn over and the little cry. She floated out of Nellie’s room and over to Daisy’s bedside, like a black wraith.
“Ye awake, Daise?” she whispered. “Our Agnes come just now and took iddy Joey over to her house. We thought we’d let you sleep.”
“Ta, Anty,” Daisy said into the pillow. Holy Angels at the feet of God, care for our Nell.
“T‘undertaker come,” Aunt Devlin said; and to Daisy the words seemed like a kick in the side from a steel-toed boot.
“George and me fixed the funeral for tomorrer,” the old sitter went on. “T’ undertaker asked if there was any burial money. George didn’t know. Do you know? Proper upset George was. He thinks she might have to be buried by the Parish.”
Daisy turned her tear-sodden face towards her aunt. Suddenly her street-walking seemed worthwhile in every respect. She
turned over and swung herself into a sitting position, as she said pridefully. “She ain’t going to be buried by no Parish. I got enough money to give her a real funeral — with black plumes and flowers an’ all.”
Followed by Aunt Devlin’s murmurs of approbation, she walked with new-found dignity down the stairs, her bootlaces making small tapping sounds on each step as she descended.
George was seated by the fire, exactly as she had left him the night before. He had, however, shared with Mike the second bed in the landing bedroom and had had enough whisky poured into him to make him sleep heavily.
He lifted his face from his hands, in response to Daisy’s kindly, “’allo, la.”
“’lo, Daise,” he responded glumly, his eyes vacant. Then, as if to avoid further conversation, he picked up a racing paper brought in by Joe and began to read it.
As Daisy went to the scullery for bacon, a frying-pan and some plates, in order to prepare a meal for him and for Great Aunt Devlin, she asked, “Where’s Mike?”
“He went down to see the Second on his boat — see if there was any news about her, like. Wants to sail on her again when she’s ready.”
Daisy nodded, and began to fry bacon on the open fire. Presumably, iddy Joey would have his dinner with Agnes. Already her brow was acquiring the two anxious furrows across it, which seem to mark all harassed Mams with their calling.
George broke into her reverie by unexpectedly remarking, “I’ll put a bob each way on Hairpin Bend in t’ two-thirty tomorrow.”
Daisy turned a rasher of bacon, and sniffed. She opened her mouth to tick him off about wasting money. Then she thought sadly that today she should not add to his misery. She said instead, with artificial brightness, “Do you allus bet both ways?”
“Aye, You’re proper daft if you don’t. Win or place is always best.”
That afternoon a very quiet Daisy walked round to see the undertaker, to choose a coffin and pay a deposit. She wore with pride her patent leather shoes and her keeper earrings. Her fresh white apron and neatly plaited hair gave her an air of elegance, and the wind whipped a little colour into her face. She had washed her teeth and put them in, so that all together the undertaker would be able to deduce that he was dealing with a woman of substance, a woman with money in the Savings Bank.
She wept copiously as she chose the coffin — one with a proper polish, she insisted, and good brass handles. Afterwards, she walked slowly back along Park Road. Her mind was beginning to work again now, and she pondered on how best to organise her new family — and cope with Mike, who was sure to be put out by the arrival of George to join his household.
She paused to look at the chocolate boxes in a newsvendor’s shop window. “I’ll get a box for Nell,” she murmured, and then remembered that Nellie was not there any more. She stood very still, while she allowed a surge of grief in her to subside. You’ve just ordered the last box she’ll ever need, she upbraided herself bitterly.
When a small boy pushed past her to enter the shop, she went in with him, anyway, and bought a small box of chocolates for iddy Joey and the latest racing paper for George. She blinked back her tears, as she came back into the bustling street again. George and his racing. Always bet both ways, he had said.
She continued to make her way homeward. Then suddenly she remembered her secret room. The rent was due today. What should she do about it?
She stopped in the middle of the pavement, as if transfixed. Women in shawls, old men in cloth caps, girls carrying grubby babies, pushed past her like grey waves down either side of a battleship, a tattered battered crew carrying with them the stench of poverty.
Mike was home. Could she get away with what she was doing, with him around?
He might sail again in a week, or he might be under her feet for months, unemployed like George. Two unemployed men and iddy Joey to feed, not to speak of herself, on unemployment pay or public assistance; hunger would be laying desolation between them all.
Forced to make way for a woman wheeling a pram load of coal, she moved slowly along the edge of the pavement. Good St. Margaret, help me.
Cyclists zipping along in the gutter tinged their bells. The rumble of drays and the steady clump of horses’ hooves belaboured her ears. She hardly heard the noise, as she fought with her fear of Mike and struggled to come to a decision.
If a scuffer caught me, I suppose I could say I was a poor widow woman. There must be thousands of Margaret Gallaghers in Liverpool. Who would care which one I was? And the ould fella on the bench ought to have pity on a widow. That way they wouldn’t find Mike, to charge him with living off the avails of prostitution.
The open window of a butcher’s shop caught her eye and mechanically she moved across the pavement, to look at the chops and liver, roasts and kidneys, all neatly laid out with bits of parsley between them. Behind the display huge links of pale pink sausages hung from a bar, like delicate flower wreaths. She leaned over the meat to take a close look at them. Mike loved a bit of sausage with a black pudding, and she really fancied some herself.
Unworried by the cost, she went in and demanded two pounds of the best beef sausages and four black puddings. She watched with a satisfied smile, as the butcher dexterously whipped them into a neat, brown paper parcel. Afterwards, she teetered uncertainly on the sawdust-strewn step.
Keeping that room meant having sausages for tea, like the old song said. It meant having twopence left for a glass of beer at the Ragged Bear on a Saturday evening — or for a matinee at the cinema; when she thought of the latter, she realised that
there was no Nellie to accompany her any more, and a great lump rose in her throat. She rubbed her hand across her eyes. She mustn’t think of Nellie for a while — it hurt too much.
But if she worked, iddy Joey could have socks to wear and a blazing fire to come home to, and something better to eat than conney-onney butties. She could be a real mother to the poor little lad.
And what if Mike finds out? First thing is, she argued, he’s not likely to find out. Nobody we know ever goes past Park Road — I would never have gone meself, if it hadn’t have been for me teeth. And if he
did
by a fluke find out, he’d say everything but his prayers, till I was fed up with him. And he’d use his belt till me back was sore. And then he’d ask what I’d done with the money. And I’d tell him he’d eaten it! She laughed at the thought.
There’s no reason for him to connect me with Liverpool Daisy, even if other men talk. If he ever came in search of her himself, I’d have him nailed better’n on the cross. But I’ll take care of him. I’ve learned a lot while he’s been away in that bloody boat. I’ll keep him in such a state he won’t have the strength to so much as look at anybody else. She stepped out into the street, laughing so hard, that a passing chimney sweep, pushing his barrow of brushes, laughed back at her.
She ran out into the street, almost under the nose of the leader of a team pulling a wagon loaded with bales of raw cotton. Nimbly she jumped on to a tram temporarily halted by a police constable on point duty. The conductor caught her arm and heaved her up the second step.
She grinned at him. “Ta, lad.” As she sat down on the bench by the back entrance, she produced two pennies from her placket pocket, and handed them to him. “Lime Street, lad. Nearest stop to the Legs o’ Man.”
The conductor laughed, and punched a ticket for her. “Goin’ down to Lime Street to find yourself a boy friend, Ma?” he teased.
She looked up at him quite cheerfully. “Go on with yez, you cheeky bugger. I’m goin’ down to pay me rent.”