When the game was over and the boys had gone to get changed, Sister Gabriel, the games mistress, approached Jimmy. They resisted the urge to throw their arms around each other triumphantly, and allowed themselves a sedate handshake. ‘We never dreamt we’d get as far as the semi-finals, Mr Quigley,’ Sister Gabriel said gleefully. She was a wiry, pugilistic woman in her sixties with a lively face and enormous energy.
‘Well, it’s all thanks to Dominic Reilly, Sister. You’ve got a cracking player there,’ Jimmy said modestly. There were times when he felt as if he’d invented Dominic all on his own.
‘It’s thanks to you, too,’ Sister Gabriel said warmly. ‘Your support has been very evident and Dominic said
you’ve
been coaching him. In fact, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind coming into school before the next match to coach the entire team?’
‘I wouldn’t mind a bit,’ Jimmy agreed, chuffed out of all proportion.
‘As long as it doesn’t overtax your legs.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ promised Jimmy, wondering where he’d left his stick. He still used one occasionally, just to remind people it wasn’t long since he was an invalid.
A young woman with a large chest came up. Jimmy had noticed her at previous matches. She was the mother of one of the centre backs, a solid little chap who did his best with two left feet and was in the same class as Niall Reilly.
‘Ah, Theresa,’ Sister Gabriel beamed. ‘They’re nearly changed.’ She turned to Jimmy. ‘Mrs Beamish has kindly offered to wash the kits for us.’ She wandered off in the direction of the changing room.
‘That’s a task all on its own,’ said Jimmy. The kits were sort of new, having been run up out of old sheets, some dyed blue, by one of the nuns. Until the quarterfinal, the team had been playing in a collection of scarcely matching odds and ends. Now, they wore the same colours as Everton, and in Jimmy’s eyes looked almost professional, especially since the nuns had organised a raffle to raise the funds to purchase footy boots, so the team no longer had to use their own shoes.
‘I don’t mind. I like hard work,’ Theresa Beamish said seriously, ‘particularly washing and cleaning.’
‘You sound like a woman after me own heart. I like everywhere to look spick and span meself. Unfortunately, since me daughter took up nursing a couple of months ago, the house has gone to rack and ruin.’ Jimmy entirely overlooked the fact that although the place looked the worse for wear by the end of the week, poor Kitty spent every Sunday cleaning it from top to bottom – and doing his washing.
Theresa tut-tutted. ‘Your lad’s a fine player,’ she said in her rather flat voice. ‘Takes after his dad, I reckon. Someone said you used to play for Everton.’
‘He’s not my lad, though I wish he was. I would have loved a son. No, he’s a neighbour’s. His dad’s away in the Merchant Navy. Hasn’t been home in months.’ Jimmy felt flattered to be taken for the father of an eight-year-old.
‘Me husband, Frank, was in the Merchant Navy. His ship went down with all hands in the first month of the war.’
‘You’re awful young to be a widder.’ She was a rather plain young woman, with an enormous square white face, an even more enormous chest and short brown hair cut in a sensible style. Her eyes were like wet stones, a dark unsmiling grey, and her clothes were as sensible as her hair, a brown belted gaberdine mackintosh and flat, lace-up shoes.
‘I’ll be thirty soon,’ she said grimly.
A boy of about five came running up and grabbed her arm. She shook him off impatiently. ‘What do you want?’
‘I wanna go home, Mam,’ the boy whined. ‘I’m cold.’
‘We’ll go home as soon as Georgie’s got changed and Sister’s given me the clothes to wash. Now, go away. Can’t you see I’m talking to someone?’ The boy obediently departed.
‘How many kids have you got?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Just the two. Billy’s six and Georgie’s eight. They’re a handful, the pair of them, I can tell you, particularly since we moved in with me mam and dad after we lost our house in Tennyson Street in the raids.’
‘Here we are.’ Sister Gabriel came panting towards them with a large, bulging drawstring bag.
‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Jimmy said with alacrity, worried he might get landed with carrying the bag. ‘Dominic’s grandad is working in the garage across the road. I’ll pop in and let him know what the score was.’
‘Tara, then,’ Theresa said laconically. Her lads had both appeared as if by magic at her side and were quietly waiting for her to leave. They seemed to be well-disciplined boys, Jimmy thought approvingly, and anything but a handful, unlike Dominic and Niall who were swinging on a goalpost.
‘See you at the semi-final in two weeks’ time,’ he called to Theresa as he went to collect them.
‘D’you think he’d like to come to one of my parties?’
Rita Mott stared at Jack Doyle’s retreating back. He was giving Niall a piggy-back and Dominic was hanging onto his arm describing the match they’d just won.
‘I doubt it very much,’ said Jessica. ‘He’s not the partying type.’
‘Are you sure he’s not your feller?’
‘I’ve told you a dozen times, Rita, he isn’t. I haven’t got a feller – I mean, a fellow.’
‘I wouldn’t want to make a move on a mate’s feller, like, it wouldn’t be nice,’ Rita said virtuously. ‘I don’t half fancy him, though. Has he ever mentioned me?’
‘Not that I can recall.’ If only the poor woman knew, thought Jessica. Jack loathed Rita Mott. He considered her a bad influence on Penny. They’d discussed her the previous Saturday morning when he’d turned up to help as promised and Rita had gone off to lunch in Chester with a flash-looking individual in a red sports car.
‘She’s got a husband away fighting in the war,’ Jack spluttered, outraged, ‘yet she flaunts herself around the garage in that negligy thing …’
‘Négligé,’ corrected Jessica.
‘Whatever,’ Jack said impatiently, ‘and she goes out with other men. It’s disgusting.’ He unscrewed the rusty top off a bicycle bell and poured oil inside.
‘Don’t be such a prude. Not everyone’s got such high morals as you, Jack.’ Jessica looked at him sideways and was pleased when she saw him go red. Jack Doyle could
be
a tiny bit hypocritical at times. ‘Rita’s terribly lonely.’
‘A lot of women must be lonely with their men away,’ he said testily.
‘Maybe they’ve got families, children. Rita’s got no-one. All she wants is friends.’
‘Friends!’ Jack guffawed. Penny, sitting on her blanket outside the office, guffawed with him. ‘That chap in the red car looked a bit more than a friend to me.’ The man had slapped Rita’s bottom as she got in. ‘It’s not good for Penny being stuck with a woman like that all day.’
‘Penny and Rita love each other,’ Jessica said calmly, ‘and personally, I like Rita very much. She’s generosity itself, and you know what they say, “Generosity covers a multitude of sins”.’
‘Since when have you been so understanding?’
Jessica pumped up a tyre and looked deliberately vague. ‘I’m not sure. There was a time when I would have disapproved of Rita, but perhaps as you get older you learn to accept people’s weaknesses as well as their strengths, particularly when you discover yourself to be far weaker than you thought.’
Jack went even redder. Jess saw and smiled – if she was weak, then so was he. She sensed he felt resentful that she was making herself out to be a better, a more understanding person than he was. He must have decided to change the subject. ‘How many bikes have you got now?’ he asked.
‘Ten,’ Jessica replied proudly. ‘I sold three last week – and I did a few small car repairs. I made enough for the rent and nearly four pounds over.’
‘That’s good,’ Jack said sarcastically.
‘I wonder what Den would say to all these bikes?’ Rita mused. She was sitting on an upturned box in her flowered dressing gown and her legs were clearly visible through the diaphanous lilac nightie underneath. On
her
feet, she wore a pair of purple fur slippers as big as cats. She was smoking, as usual, and spat out a shred of tobacco in a delicate, ladylike way.
Jessica blinked herself back from last Saturday morning to this one. It hadn’t crossed her mind to discuss the subject of bicycles with Rita before she’d gone out and bought them several weeks ago. ‘Do you think he’ll mind?’
‘I’m not sure. This garage was his life. He might think bikes are a good idea or he might think they stink.’
‘Perhaps you should write and tell him,’ Jessica suggested.
‘On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn’t. It would be best if he didn’t know, ’case he’s against it. I’d hate it if you weren’t here, Jess, and I’d really miss Penny.’ Penny was fast asleep upstairs in Rita’s bright pink bedroom.
‘In that case, don’t mention it,’ Jessica said hastily.
She’d
hate it if she had to look around for another site from which to sell her bikes.
‘I won’t, though I usually write to Den every Monday regular and tell him everything that’s going on.’
‘Everything?’ Jessica enquired with a twinkle as she levered a tyre onto a rear wheel. She was making one decent bike out of two old ones.
‘Well, no, not everything,’ Rita conceded. She took a deep puff on her cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly. ‘I suppose you think I’m a dead horrible person, going out with other chaps when me husband’s in the army.’
‘It’s none of my business what you do with your life, is it?’
‘That doesn’t stop you from having an opinion though.’
‘I don’t know what my opinion is,’ Jessica said thoughtfully. She was still not sure what Rita got up to with her numerous manfriends, but suspected the relationships weren’t platonic. ‘I’ve never met Den,
have
I? I don’t know what sort of person he was – is.’ There was a photo of Dennis Mott on the sideboard upstairs, a quiet looking young man with prematurely receding hair.
Rita sniffed. ‘He’s ever so nice, is Den.’
Jessica glanced at the woman. Without her tawdry make-up, Rita had a curiously innocent face. ‘In that case …’
‘I suppose now you think the worst,’ Rita said gloomily.
‘Not necessarily. I reckon there’s something you haven’t told me.’ Jessica began to wonder why Rita seemed so eager to confide such intimacies to another person.
‘I was ever such a little mouse in those days, Jess,’ she said in a rush. ‘I had brown hair, I never wore make up, I didn’t smoke and I only owned one frock. I spent all me time cooking and cleaning, yet Den’d only been gone a week, when this chap drew in for petrol and asked me to go to the pictures with him and I said yes.’
‘Really!’
‘Really. We saw this dead romantic picture with Joan Crawford in. She was having an affair with a married man. Afterwards, the chap – I think his name was Johnnie – brought me back to the flat and we …’ Rita paused and gave an embarrassed grin. ‘We, you know what, on the mat in front of the fire.’ She lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one. She grinned again, no longer embarrassed. ‘It wasn’t half good. I’d always wondered what it would be like with another feller. After all, they write books about it and make pictures about it, so I reckoned there must be more to it than I knew.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jessica, fascinated.
‘Do you mind me talking to you like this?’
‘I don’t mind at all.’ Jessica was anxious for her to continue.
‘The thing is,’ Rita went on, ‘when you’ve only known one feller, how are you supposed to know what’s normal? With Den, it was five minutes once a month if I was lucky. I usen’t half to feel fed up, as if I could bust, sometimes. I’d go to the pictures, and there’d be people fighting for it and killing for it, and I’d think, “What’s all the fuss about?” Then Den went away and I couldn’t wait to find out for meself.’ She sighed contentedly. ‘I discovered it was worth it, after all. I realised Den had all the right equipment, but he never learnt how to use it, not properly. That’s why we never had kids.’
‘I suppose everyone has a right to a healthy sex life,’ said Jessica.
Rita giggled. ‘That’s a funny way of putting it. One of me chaps said I was a nympho … nymphy …’
‘A nymphomaniac.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ Rita asked anxiously.
Jessica wrinkled her smooth white brow. ‘I’m not sure. Probably it’s only good if you’re married to another nymphomaniac, otherwise you’d spend your life in a constant state of frustration.’
‘Do you still think I’m a terrible person?’
‘I never did in the first place.’
‘Are you sure, Jess?’
Rita had obviously been suffering from a guilty conscience and was anxious for Jessica’s blessing or seal of approval on her rather unconventional lifestyle.
‘I’m positive,’ Jessica said firmly. ‘A person’s morals are entirely their own affair, no-one else’s.’ Which was, she thought, a surprising statement from someone who wouldn’t have passed the time of day with Rita Mott only a few short years ago if she’d even suspected the way she carried on.
Rita looked relieved. ‘Anyroad,’ she said, ‘I thought if I crammed as much of the “you know what” into the time Den’s away, I’d get enough to last the rest of me life.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Jessica. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly one o’clock and she had two bikes to see and make offers for that afternoon. She began to tidy the workshop.
‘I doubt it, too,’ Rita said with a coarse laugh. ‘Though you never know, Den might learn a few tricks while he’s away.’
‘What happens if he doesn’t?’
‘Christ knows! I’ll just have to try and teach him a few tricks meself, won’t I?’
Sean Doyle, Jack’s son, got married on the first Saturday in December. He came home from the RAF camp where he was stationed in Lincolnshire on a forty-eight-hour pass, along with six of his mates who formed a Guard of Honour when the newly married couple left St James’s Church.
Brenda Mahon had done wonders with five yards of cheap taffeta lining to make a dress for the bride. Alice Scully, a tiny waif of a girl with pale fair hair and huge blue eyes, was determined to have a white wedding. Her borrowed veil was held in place with a red velvet band and she carried a small bouquet of red roses. The hem of the dress trailed the floor in order to hide the ugly boot which Alice was forced to wear to disguise her deformed leg.