‘I don’t mind. I’ll like it, honest,’ Jack assured him.
Harry stayed for a while longer, answering questions, telling Jack about what he could expect. When he rose to go, Tom stood up too and gripped his shoulder.
‘Thanks again, mate. It’s the best thing that’s happened to us for a long time. I’m beholden to you for this.’
Harry brushed aside any suggestion of an obligation. ‘It’s nothing, Mr Johnson. Your Jack’s a bright boy and there’s a lot I’d do for your family. A lot.’
For a moment his eyes rested on Ellen, only to flick away as hers met them. He was ushered out with the gratitude of the whole family ringing in his ears.
A few days after his fourteenth birthday, Jack was scrubbed and brushed, dressed in clothes acquired by much scrimping and sent off with Harry to Watermen’s Hall to be apprenticed. The day after, he started work. He survived the inevitable teasing and practical jokes and took to life on the water like the proverbial duck. Being apprenticed to Harry did not necessarily mean that he always worked under him. Sometimes he was set to rowing the freemen out to their barges or taking the foreman from one wharf to another; sometimes he was mate to whoever needed an extra hand. But Harry often figured in his animated accounts of each day’s work. Harry’s sayings were repeated as holy writ, his odd words of praise treasured. Ellen listened, taking it all in and trying not to let on that the mention of his name made her stomach tie itself in knots.
Summer crept over the city, and as usual the water supply became unreliable and the river stank. The soft-fruit season meant hours of overtime in temperatures of over a hundred as the currants and berries were jammed and bottled. Ellen came home exhausted each evening, with only a shilling or two extra money at the end of the week as compensation for the twelve- or thirteen-hour days. She had no energy for going out with the other girls, but sat on the front step reading while the children played in the street and the mothers gossiped. She was sitting there one Friday when Gerry came by with a handcart.
‘’Evening, Ellen.’
She looked up, still living inside the story.
‘Mm?’
A group of boys were gathering round the cart, begging to be allowed to play with it. Gerry chased them off.
‘I got a favour to ask you,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
Reluctantly, Ellen put a finger on the page to keep her place and gave him her attention. She had been wary of Gerry ever since the time he had asked her out. She liked him as a friend but had no interest in being anything closer.
Around her, she could feel the sharpening of interest up and down the street. The two women nearest to her stopped even pretending to talk to each other and unashamedly listened.
‘Yeah. You see, I got a bit of a problem. There’s this place closing down over Newham way and they’re selling stuff off, real good stuff, just what I want, but I got to get there tomorrow before it all goes. So I got to have someone to mind the stall for me. I thought of you. You’re good with numbers, ain’t you? And I know you wouldn’t cheat me.’
The prospect of working in the open air, of feeling the sun, talking to people, not being under the eye of the forewoman, was unbearably tempting.
‘I got to go and do overtime tomorrow. It’s the fruit. We’re doing the blackcurrants.’
‘I’ll pay you better than what Maconochie’s do. Three bob for the day. How does that sound to you?’
Ellen gulped. ‘Three shillings!’ It was a fortune.
Gerry misunderstood her. ‘Well, all right, seeing as it’s you and I know I can rely on you, three-and-six.’
That clinched it. As long as he understood that this was strictly business.
‘You’re on,’ she said. ‘What time do I start?’
The market was wonderful. They set out at the crack of dawn to haul the stock down three flights of stairs from the tiny room Gerry rented off Chrisp Street, and went back and forth with the handcart to his stall. Then it all had to be set out artistically. She enjoyed doing that, and Gerry seemed more than pleased with her efforts. He ran through the prices with her, gave her a money apron, told her all the dodges she was to look out for, then left her in charge.
‘Not sure when I’ll be back, but it’ll be in time to help you pack up. Best of luck!’
‘Thanks, and to you.’
She loved the noise and the backchat, the smell of fruit and foreign sausages from the neighbouring stalls, the colour and the ever changing flow of humanity. She developed a line of patter, enjoying persuading people that they really did want the things that they had
only stopped to look at. Most of all she liked the responsibility. She was in charge, and it was up to her to sell as much as she could. And if she wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea or chat to someone she knew, then it was entirely up to her. No sergeant major of a forewoman came bearing down on her, demanding to know what she thought she was doing.
By late afternoon the money apron was getting satisfyingly heavy. Mostly it was coppers, but there were odd shillings and half-crowns in there as well. Ellen was tired, but it was not the draining exhaustion of a day doing the same thing over and over again in soaring temperatures. She pottered around replacing things that had been sold, trying to remember just how many of each she had got rid of.
‘So it is true, then?’
Ellen started and whirled round. There was Harry, standing staring at her with undisguised anger.
‘What’s true?’ she countered, immediately on the defensive.
‘That you’re working for Gerry. I didn’t believe them when they told me.’
‘Why ever not? What’s wrong with me working for Gerry? It’s a whole lot better than slaving in that factory, I can tell you.’
‘So you’ve given up Maconochie’s, have you? Gerry’s your boss now?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just for today.’ She could not understand why he was being so aggressive. ‘And anyway,’ she said, straightening up and thrusting her fists on to her hips, ‘what business is it of yours? I can work for who I like. I don’t have to ask your permission, thank you very much.’
He ignored this. ‘So it’s not permanent?’ he persisted.
‘Might be. D’you want to make something of it?’
‘Somebody ought to.’
‘Look’ – she could not believe this – ‘if I want to do a day’s work for Gerry, I can, right? I’m helping a neighbour out of a hole and earning myself a bob or two into the bargain. I don’t know what you’re getting so hot under the collar about.’
He was silent, holding her eyes as if trying to see past the words to what she really meant.
‘As long as it’s just for today.’
His physical presence made her throat dry and her heart flutter. She wanted to submit, to agree that working for Gerry was foolish, to see his hard gaze soften into a smile. But pride kept her defying him.
‘Whether it’s today or the rest of my life, it’s none of your business, Harry Turner.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, and strode off into the crowd.
‘The cheek! The blooming cheek of it!’ she said out loud.
She found her hands were shaking. It spread to her knees. She pulled out the rickety stool from under the stall and sat down.
The woman from the next pitch came over and put a sympathetic arm around her shoulders.
‘Your brother, is he?’ she asked. ‘Think they can run your life for you, don’t they?’
‘No, no, he’s’ – she sought to describe the relationship – ‘he’s a sort of brother-in-law. His sister’s married to my brother.’
The woman shrugged. ‘So what’s he doing up here telling you what to do?’ Then she chuckled. ‘Here – he must fancy you. Lucky girl! Nice, he is. I’d go for him if I was twenty years younger. I like a man with a nice set of muscles. Mind you, young Gerry’s not going to like it much, is he?’
‘Like what?’
‘You going out with that other feller.’
‘But it’s none of Gerry’s business, either.’
‘Oh.’ The woman was perplexed. ‘I thought you was – so Gerry’s some relation of yours, is he?’
‘No, he’s no relation at all.’
‘So he
is
your young man?’
‘No, he’s just a neighbour.’
‘Ah.’ A customer was waiting to buy some apples. The stallholder moved over to serve her. ‘Well, dearie,’ she said over her shoulder to Ellen, ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing.’
It was at that point Ellen noticed a cup was missing from the display. While she and Harry had been arguing, someone had stolen it. Anger welled up again, flooding the churning confusion that Harry had left behind. She held on to it, fed it. Anger was easy and clean-cut; it did not raise difficult questions.
‘It’s all your fault, Harry Turner,’ she muttered out loud. ‘Everything was all right till you came along.’
The fun had gone out of the day. She was glad when Gerry reappeared, full of news of his day’s dealings and eager to hear how she had got on. He was delighted with her sales, dismissing the stolen cup as one of the hazards of stallholding. She did not tell him the circumstances under which it went. She was called upon to admire the goods he had bought, and together they served the last customers and finally packed everything away and carried it back up to the storeroom.
‘That’s what I call a good day’s work,’ Gerry said.
‘Yes,’ Ellen agreed. She just wished she did not keep hearing Harry’s objections over and over again in her head.
The effect of the day did not stop there. When she got to work on Monday, her story of illness on Saturday was patently disbelieved. At the end of the soft-fruit season, the casual workers were laid off, and Ellen along with them. She was judged to be unreliable.
Ellen was horrified. Much as she hated the place, the family needed her income. All the way home, she tried to find words to explain to her parents what had happened. Nothing was good enough. Whichever way she put it, she had got the sack. They would be right back to where they had been before Jack started work, just managing to scrape a living. With all the others who had been laid off also looking for work, jobs would be hard to find. It was going to be back to bread and marge and no hot water again until she managed to find something. She dreaded the look on her mother’s face when she told her.
‘Well, that’s their loss,’ Gerry said, when she complained that one day working for him had lost her her job. He did not sound very concerned. In fact, he could hardly hide his satisfaction.
‘It’s all very well for you to say that. I got no money coming in at the end of the week,’ Ellen told him. She had been saving up to get the beds back. Now that would have to wait.
Gerry tried to look worried. He sighed and frowned. Then his face changed.
‘I know!’ he exclaimed, as if he had only just thought of it, ‘why don’t you come and work for me full-time? With you doing the stalls and me doing the travelling and the buying, I could really get somewhere with the business.’
‘Oh!’ The thought of getting out of factory work was overwhelmingly tempting. Even in the winter, even on days when it poured with rain or there was snow on the ground, the market was better than the grind of doing the same small process a thousand times a day. But she hesitated. There was the problem of Gerry himself – and Harry.
‘Do you – er – do you think it’d work, like you being the boss and me being paid?’ she asked.
‘Work? We’d be the best! It worked Saturday, didn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
But Harry had not liked it.
Harry would have to lump it. She thrust aside the image of him demanding to know whether the job was permanent. He had no right to say what she could do.
‘All right,’ she said.
Gerry was delighted. His face broke into a massive grin. ‘You will? Smackeroo! We’ll be a great success, you and me.’
Ellen ignored the warning voice inside that told her there was more to this than a working relationship. She needed the money, the job was better than anything else she could hope to get, and she was not going to let Harry Turner dictate to her.
‘You bet,’ she said. ‘When do I start?’
She saw and heard the rumour and the speculation spreading up and down the street during the next few days. And just to confirm it, her mother gave her a warning. Gerry was all right, he was a decent sort, but Ellen must be careful. She did not like the thought of the two of them in each other’s pockets all day long. Ellen shrugged off the gossip and assured her mother that it was just a job, and anyway Gerry was not with her a lot of the time. She was not sure herself what he did, but he was out and around chasing after deals.
‘Well, I trust you to be a sensible girl,’ Martha said, though she still did not sound too happy.
It was not the neighbours or her mother’s suspicion that worried her. For all of the first week she was in a state of nerves expecting Harry to turn up at any minute. She was angry with herself for caring so much about what he thought, and even more angry when she was disappointed by his not appearing. She told herself that it did not matter. But when she saw him waiting at the tram stop on the West Ferry Road, her insides turned to water.
He was waiting for her. He stepped forward and put out a hand to help her down. Once she was on the pavement, he did not let go.
‘I’d like a word with you,’ he said.
Ellen tried hard to appear indifferent. ‘All right. Just don’t take too long, will you? My mum’ll have my tea ready.’
‘We’ll go down by the river,’ Harry told her.
They both maintained an obstinate silence as they walked down the narrow streets. Anger, resentment and something close to fear was winding up inside Ellen with every step. Of one thing she was certain, she was not giving in to any browbeating.
From a dank alleyway between the high cliffs of warehouses, they emerged on to the riverside. The tide was low, so only the host of smaller craft were moving in the slight evening breeze. The sun, not setting yet but getting low in the sky, lit the water and the grey flanks of the mudbanks with pale gold. But neither of them had eyes for the peaceful scene.
‘So?’ Ellen said, springing to the attack. ‘What’s all this about, then?’
‘You know perfectly well what it’s about. You working for Gerry Billingham, that’s what. You told me it was just one day, to help out a neighbour.’ He was keeping his voice reasonable, making her sound shrill and aggressive.