The Four Streets (15 page)

‘How dare they run up here at the last minute and forget about me,’ muttered Alice to herself. As she took a step forward, she realized they were about to run through the doors of the register office. They had obviously assumed she was inside, waiting for them.

‘Well, there’s a mistake and make no mistake,’ said Alice, as she began to walk purposefully across the square towards the building. She was attracting the attention of office staff leaving for their lunch hour. For a few moments, Alice had forgotten she wasn’t looking in on the lives of others from behind a pane of glass; this was for real. This was her life.

The others first spotted her just as she reached the oak and glass revolving door to the lobby. They had been looking for her inside. Jerry immediately noticed something different about her face. It was cold and hostile, shrouded in anger.

Has she changed her mind? he wondered. Is that what she’s coming through that door to tell me? Is that why she isn’t already in here? Am I to be let off? Relief hovered expectantly.

The revolving door ejected Alice into the lobby. The hostility fell from Alice’s face as she gave Maura a tight and brittle smile in response to her overly effusive greeting.

‘Good morning, Alice, that’s a beautiful outfit ye are wearing and would ye look at them gloves, go on now, let me take a closer look.’

The three of them smelt of the two hot rum toddies they had each just downed in the Grapes. Maura was nervous, talking too much and too fast. Alice knew that she could possibly risk everything if she remonstrated with Jerry for smelling of alcohol. He looked less than happy.

As Alice turned to show Maura the gloves, which Maura was by now just about peeling off her arm, Jerry realized that it was over. All done. The wedding would be going ahead. He was still in his twenties and the best of his life was already behind him.

They called into the Lyons Corner Tea Rooms for lunch afterwards, where they had shepherd’s pie followed by apple crumble and custard with two large pots of tea. Most of it was eaten in silence although Maura did her best to keep the conversation alive, in order to find out as much as she could about Alice, the Protestant cuckoo who had forced herself into their Catholic nest. Tommy smoked more cigarettes than usual. A man unused to social niceties, he found the whole day extremely uncomfortable. If he had a Cappie in his mouth, no one would ask him a question, or expect him to talk.

As the waitresses bustled around them in their black uniforms, they would never have guessed that the very quiet party on the table in the corner had just been to a wedding.

When lunch was over, they took the Dockers’ Umbrella back to the four streets. As they entered their own houses, Jerry, Tommy and Maura closed their doors on each other and their shared past. No longer would Jerry be able to raise in conversation some of the fun nights they had shared together. Maura wouldn’t call round with her letters from Killhooney Bay and news of her own and Bernadette’s family. That was the past; a new future was about to begin.

‘You would have thought she’d have been grateful to have me standing for her and not be so snooty with it,’ said Maura to Tommy, in indignation, as they walked into their house.

‘Ah, let it go now,’ said Tommy. ‘We’ve done our duty, so we have, we can sleep easy tonight. Not that yer man will be doing much sleeping, I shouldn’t think!’

Maura grinned and slapped him on the leg. She was thankful she had her Tommy. They might not have had the most exciting life, but they were secure, emotionally stable and, for what little they had, always grateful.

Within thirty minutes of arriving home, Maura had curlers back in her hair, her floral overdress apron on, and was away next door to Peggy, to recount the activities of the day.

‘Quick as yer like, I’ll put the kettle on,’ shouted Peggy, out of the open kitchen window, as she heard the latch rise on the back gate and saw Maura walk up the path.

She picked up her mop, which was leaning against the wall, and ran with urgency back into the kitchen, where she used the end to bang hard three times on her kitchen wall adjoining the house next door. This was to alert Annie to hurry away in; it was the code that Maura was back with news.

‘Get ye away here now, quick, missus, O!’ shouted Peggy at the wall, when she finished banging, and was reassured to hear her neighbour’s back door slam shut in acknowledgment, as Annie rushed down her path to join them. But not before she had used her own mop to bang on the kitchen wall to alert Sheila, who in turn used hers.

In the absence of telephones, it was an efficient system. Within five minutes, six women were sitting round Peggy’s wooden kitchen table, in front of the range where a tiny fire burnt, just enough to boil the kettle slowly.

Peggy had nine children. Every penny and every lump of coal was counted. She was as sharp as a box of knives and God help the coalman if he tried to short-change her weekly hundredweight of coal. If she caught him in time, she made him wait whilst she inspected the sack to see if it was full to the top. A short-weight sack was a day’s warmth and, in winter, that mattered. Between her nine children there were five pairs of shoes. Whoever’s turn it was for the shoes would play outside, or go to school that day.

Peggy and Paddy lived an entirely different life from that of Bernadette and Jerry. Bernadette, who bought the occasional new dress, but never without giving away to someone else something she already had, had been the glamour in their lives. No one had ever seen Bernadette outdoors with her curlers in. Today wasn’t just a day to gossip about Alice, it was a day to talk about their Bernadette too.

Sheila, who was only twenty and as yet had just two children, walked through the door with a shovel of coal in one hand, a baby in the other arm resting on her hip, and a two-year-old holding onto the end of her long apron trotting along behind her. Before she sat at the table, she threw the heaped shovel of coal on Peggy’s fire and no one questioned it or batted an eyelid. She wanted to stay and hear every word of the gossip rather than be driven out by the cold and, besides, they would need the range.

‘A lot of tea will be drunk this afternoon, so it will,’ Sheila announced, as she closed the range doors to let her shovelful of coal catch.

This morning was one of those days when something had happened to lift the daily monotony and the relentless grind to pay the rent and feed a family. It required a sense of occasion and urgency. The air in the kitchen as they all settled down was tight with expectancy. Everyone needed to concentrate on Maura’s every word, each being too important to miss.

Whilst Maura had been at the register office, Annie had made oat biscuits, with syrup that had found its way from a ship into Annie’s kitchen en route to the Lyons factory. Peggy and Annie had given all the children a delicious, chewy biscuit and sent them into the front room, or out to play. This morning wasn’t about changing nappies, scrubbing floors, washing nets or making bread. The tea and biscuits around the table powwow were as important to the women on the streets as a meeting of world leaders was to global security.

Maura sat and waited for everyone to settle down, for the tea to be poured and babies calmed, before she commenced. This was her moment. She was queen of the news – and what news she had to impart! She began with the gloves and ploughed on straight through the oohs and aahs to the ceremony itself.

‘It will all end in tears, such as every ungodly marriage does, so it will,’ said Peggy with absolute authority.

This seemed to be the general opinion when discussing Jerry and Alice on any day, not just their wedding day, and no one present had talked about much else since Alice had arrived on the street. It was true that no one could find anyone who had taken to Alice, or had a word to say in her defence. She gave people good reason to distrust and dislike her.

‘That Alice, she’s no better than she thinks she is,’ said Peggy.

Everyone looked at her for a moment trying to fathom what it was she meant and then, giving up, moved on.

‘Alice is a Protestant; she has probably been in the Orange Lodge. What in God’s name was Jerry thinking of, marrying such a woman and bringing her amongst us?’ said Sheila, if for no other reason than to make her own contribution.

As different from every one of her neighbours as it was possible to be on a practical level, Alice just wasn’t the same as any other woman; she was slightly unusual, odd even. Alice would never belong. That much had been decided from almost the first time the women on the street had been aware of her existence. Each one round the table knew exactly what Alice was up to. They had all seen right through the game of the plain spinster preying on a grieving man.

‘God help me, it was so hard,’ said Maura, putting one hand onto her left breast and the other to her brow for effect. ‘I had to get meself half piddled in the Grapes with a couple of rum toddies, which went straight into me blood, so it did.’

All the women gasped. Not one of them had ever before drunk a rum toddy during the day, let alone in the morning.

‘It hasn’t even been two years since our own Bernadette was sitting round this very table with us, before she was taken,’ said Maura.

They all looked to the floor and crossed themselves simultaneously, muttering a chorus of, ‘God rest her soul,’ and then for a moment lost themselves in their own thoughts of remembrance. Bernadette, who had made them all laugh within seconds of walking in the room. Who never arrived without a plate of food she had made, for them and any little ones around. Bernadette, who had amazed them all with her ability to control her own reproductive organs, whilst unable to control her wild red hair. She had become pregnant only when she decided it was time to, thereby keeping her richer and more beautiful, and, sure, who would have denied her that?

Her soul had been as beautiful as she was. Bernadette, who if the women in the streets had their way would by now be canonized. Even if Bernadette had been a demon, she would have seemed a saint compared with Alice.

The gossip continued for well over two hours and the women savoured every minute. Grand events like this didn’t happen every day and this one would be relished for a long time to come.

When Jerry and Alice walked into their kitchen for the first time as a married couple, Alice announced that she would like her own furniture to be moved out of storage at the hotel and into the house.

‘It’s the very best quality and I’ve cared for it well. It will improve the place no end,’ she said to Jerry, walking over to the range to put the kettle on.

Jerry was taken aback. The house was how Bernadette had wanted it to be. She had lovingly invested herself in every little detail. He wanted to keep it that way. The realization swept over him afresh: marrying Alice was going to be about more than he had bargained for.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied, with a smile he didn’t feel. ‘I’ll borrow the coal wagon from Declan, after he’s finished his drop-offs on Wednesday, and get yer man Tommy to help me.’

Alice looked at Jerry without a hint of softness. ‘I want better than a coal wagon for my belongings, Jerry. I want a proper van.’

Jerry decided it was time to tell Alice a few home truths about how much he earned and how much life cost. She had been protected by having full board in her hotel accommodation and free food, and probably felt more secure than she should do with the small nest egg she had saved. She had left the Grand only yesterday and now wouldn’t be returning except for her belongings, so it was time to talk facts.

The row about the housekeeping budget began when they had been married for less than four hours, and the row about Jerry having no intention of ever leaving the four streets or the docks to emigrate to America began after five.

In his effort to put right a night of shame, haste had taken over from common sense and he had never considered the practical issues of their living together. He had just assumed that life would become easier, with a housewife at home. Alice had been very keen to leave the hotel as soon as possible. And here they were, on their wedding day, arguing. The contrast between Jerry’s two weddings could not have been greater.

The row about Nellie was the third and last on their wedding day. Nellie had blossomed over the last two years, her days spent in the midst of the hullabaloo at the Doherty house, her evenings and weekends basking in the one-to-one devotion of her father. Her hair was short, strawberry blonde and curly, but was already showing signs of darkening and taking on her mother’s wild untameable redness. She was described by everyone as a little cherub, because that was just how she looked, like a tiny angel, and she brought out the protective instinct in everyone who met her. Nellie had never carried her father’s sadness. She had never known a mother’s love, other than the next best thing, which had come from Maura. But Jerry had done more than his utmost to compensate. It was the next to best life for an only child, but all that was about to change.

As Alice was preparing their supper, she announced that she would like to eat at separate times from Nellie.

‘I also think it would be a good idea, Jerry, if just the two of us eat at my table. You could get something for Nellie to sit at. Maybe turn one of the tea chests in the backyard upside down and put an oilcloth on it?’

Alice had completely misjudged Jerry. Like a lion, he roared, ‘We will not, she eats with us, so she does, she’s not a dog being sent to eat in a kennel!’

Nellie, who at two years old joined in the rough and tumble at the Doherty house and had been brought home by a very grown-up, seven-year-old Kitty, knew full well that this argument was about her. Putting her thumb straight in her mouth, she began to cry. All was not good. Everything was different and she had no idea why. Alice was here again but this wasn’t the normal routine; she was usually gone by now, much to Nellie’s relief. Nellie knew Alice didn’t like her, but she didn’t have the words she needed to communicate this to Jerry.

The row about her raged over Nellie’s head. She had never seen her da angry before, but she wasn’t frightened when he scooped her up into his arms and held her tight, as he gave out to Alice. Nellie didn’t know why, but she understood enough to know that her da was fighting her corner. She put her arm around his neck and placed her head on his shoulder. Her fingers twiddled the hair at the nape of his neck round and round between her fingers, as the shouting continued.