‘Don’t, don’t, you mustn’t say that.’ Ellen was racked with guilt and remorse. ‘I chose you. I never said you wasn’t good enough. Of course you are. You’re my husband, the father of my children.’
It was all her own fault. She had always thought she was different – too good to go to Dock Street school like the others, too good to work in a factory. Now she was making Gerry unhappy with her mooning over what she couldn’t have. She rolled over and put her arms around him.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, and meant it.
He held her tight. ‘The thing is . . .’ he said.
A few feet away, Teddy moaned in his sleep and Jessica turned over. From the next room came steady snores. They were surrounded by people. There was no privacy. Gerry’s whisper dropped so low that she could hardly catch what he was saying. He spoke hesitantly, the words coming out through a suffocating barrier of embarrassment.
‘The thing is, when I was a kid, when we was all living in one or two rooms in tenement blocks, my mum . . . We was poor. Really poor, I mean, like we went for weeks on just bread and scrape. No boots in the winter, that sort of thing. I mean, my mum, she just wanted to keep us out of the workhouse. And she brought – there would be men coming in – and sometimes she used to turn us out, Charlie and me. We used to sit on the stairs until they’d gone, like. Once I was older, I stopped it. I got rid of them. But when we was kids, sometimes we’d be asleep when she came in, and then – well, then we’d hear it all. And I couldn’t bear it, Ellen. I couldn’t bear it. It was horrible. The noises.’
He was curled, rigid, a small boy once more, hiding from what was going on.
Ellen stroked his head and made soothing sounds. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’
They lay face to face, foreheads and noses touching. She could feel his lips moving as the words came haltingly.
‘You mustn’t think I don’t love you. I do. I do love you. You’re soft and sweet. It’s just – I don’t want it to be like those men . . .’
‘You’re not. You could never be like them.’ Ellen could hardly speak for the ache in her throat.
‘But I’m letting you down.’
‘You’re not. Of course you’re not. I love you just like you are.’ She kissed his lips.
‘Oh, Ellen.’
She felt the tension go out of him. They cuddled together until he fell asleep with his arms round her.
Ellen shut the door tight on the part of her that still yearned for something more.
THE HEATWAVE HELD
the city in its grip. All those who could leave had gone to the country or the seaside in search of shade and clean air and a breath of breeze. But for hundreds upon thousands of souls there was no getting away. They were trapped there, living in small airless houses and tenements, working in factories and shops, forced to carry on through temperatures that soared into the nineties.
‘At least there
is
work,’ Tom Johnson said when people complained. ‘Puts us in a better position.’
Trade, and therefore employment, was on the up. To the men at the calling-on stands it meant that the riff-raff that drifted down to the docks in hard times had disappeared, leaving only the regulars. Just when they would have been glad to have some time off, there was plenty of work. Tom looked beyond this.
‘Don’t you see?’ he said to his son. ‘When there’s full employment and ships waiting to be discharged, they need us. That means we can start to bargain with the gov’nors. God knows, we need to. Sixpence an hour is what was fixed in eighty-nine. Look how food’s gone up since then.’
Will did not need to be told about the rise in prices. That was Maisie’s excuse every time he complained about the paltry teas she provided for him.
‘That’s all I could get, Will. You should see what they’re charging for potatoes now. I don’t know what way to turn, that I don’t.’ She lumbered about the kitchen, pregnant again.
‘Got to go,’ he would say, getting up as soon as he had finished. ‘Working overtime.’
Thank the Lord for overtime. Eightpence an hour and cooler working conditions, and with the extra money he could go and see
her
. She was back in town again after a tour of the provinces.
The moment his back was turned there was a fierce scuffle. Tommy knocked his brother out of the way and grabbed the used plate. In a trice, he had it licked clean. Maisie thought about the food she could buy with the extra earnings.
Down the road at the Johnsons’, Martha confided her worries about Tom to her daughter.
‘It’s all starting up again, this union business. He’s not a young man any more. He can’t take it, not working all the hours God sends and going to meetings as well. He’s never been the same since that time he was set upon.’
‘I thought he was looking better,’ Ellen said. ‘He seemed more, well, more alive. Like what he used to be.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ her mother argued. ‘All this union stuff. Look what trouble it got him into before. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’
‘You won’t stop him.’
‘No.’ Martha sighed. ‘No, you’re right there. Nothing I say’ll make any difference. He’s a man of principles, your dad. There’s no changing him. But how are you? You’re looking peaky yourself these days. The heat, is it, or are you . . .?’ She looked at Ellen’s waistline.
‘No,’ Ellen said shortly.
Her mum gave her a brief hug. ‘Best that way really, lovey. Don’t do you no good having ’em all close together. Look at Maisie, lost half her teeth already. And she’s not as bad as some. You look at the ones what have worn the best and it’s the ones what’ve only had a few kids. Look at Alma – still acting like a blooming twenty-year-old at times, and she’s only four years younger than what I am. Only had them two boys, y’see.’
‘Yeah,’ Ellen said. After Gerry’s confession of the other night, she had mixed feelings about her mother-in-law.
At number forty, Florrie felt the same way. She liked Alma, liked her warmth and her cheerfulness, but felt crushed by her at times. She told herself that Alma caused the continual cloud over her marriage, but she knew in her heart of hearts that it was not so. She could have sailed through Alma’s loudness and ill-timed jokes, along with Charlie’s leering looks and coarse remarks, if it had not been for the secret she still carried. She had never summoned up the courage to tell Jimmy how her father had died. With every day that passed it became more difficult, until it lay there, a dividing wall between them. Time and again it seemed that the moment was right and she actually drew breath to tell him. But when it came to the point, she could not, and the knowledge dragged at her like a great black stone. It even marred her joy in the baby she carried, her child and Jimmy’s, a new life. But it would be one more person from whom the terrible secret had to be kept.
Harry had no idea that things were not quite as they should be.
‘Nice to see someone happy, sis,’ he said.
She smiled and said nothing. She did not want to add to his problems, for their mother was no better.
Alma had lost patience with her sister.
‘You got to pull yourself together, girl,’ she said, at least twice a week. ‘Bloody hell, it ain’t as if there was any love lost between you. You’re better off without him. You don’t have to worry about money. Your Harry’s a good provider, better than what Archie ever was. Only thing Archie ever done was knock you around and get you in the family way. You can do without that. And look what you still got – three sons and three daughters, all them grandchildren, and two more on the way. You’re bloody lucky, you are, girl. Not everyone’s got as much as what you have.’
Though she would not have admitted it to a soul, Alma was finally having to face the unpleasant truth that Charlie was not quite the wonderful son she had always thought he was. She still found it difficult to be civil to Clodagh O’Donaghue, though it was nearly seven years since Theresa had accused Charlie of fathering her baby. She used to be proud of the fact that neither of her boys had conventional jobs. They did not go off to factories or building sites or wait at the dock gates to be called on like all the others. With Gerry making a success of his market stall, she had been able to delude herself that Charlie was some sort of trader as well. His irregular hours and patchy income could be put down to the ups and downs of business life. But even she found it difficult to account for the long idle hours, the mysterious absences from home, the occasional extravagant gift. Still less could she think of a reasonable answer when people remarked that they had seen her Charlie in the company of some character or other with a shady reputation. In comparison with this worry, it seemed to her that Milly’s troubles were all her own making.
‘I know, I know,’ she said, when Alma lectured her, but did nothing to rouse herself.
None of them knew what to do with her.
Harry, working long hours like everyone else and often away overnight on trips upriver, wondered what she did all the time that he was not there. When he asked Ida, she shrugged.
‘She just sits there in the kitchen, looking at nothing. If I don’t clear the cups away from breakfast, they’re still there at tea time.’
Harry sighed. Even getting up was difficult for his mother. If they had not insisted that she got out of bed and dressed, she would
probably have lain upstairs all day. A vague memory of a piece from the Bible nagged at him, a remnant of some distant lesson, about a man turning his face to the wall and waiting for death. That was what his mother had done. She had turned her face to the wall.
It was not so bad when everyone was at home. The clatter of himself, Ida, Johnny and Bob all trying to get dressed or washed at the same time, or all swallowing down a meal, masked the underlying silence. But it was there all the same. They all felt it and shied away. Even acting all together, they did not have the strength to face such unremitting despair. Harry was glad to go to work, extra glad to be given longer jobs. Anything for a legitimate reason to escape from home.
Through the distorting glass of her depression, Milly saw them go. It did not surprise her, thought it did hurt. She knew she was not worthy of their love. They all turned against her in the end. Archie had. Archie had hated her because she was a bad wife, and now he was gone, gone because she had cried out and brought Florrie crashing in to hit him over the head. It was Milly who had brought death upon him. Now it was too late to make it up to him, to prove that she could be what he wanted. The horror of the last scene in the kitchen haunted her, coming back day and night, forever recurring in her mind. Guilt gnawed into Milly. She wanted to tell, to confess her part. It weighed upon her. Sometimes she felt that if she could just tell someone, anyone, then it would not be so bad.
Because she did not trust herself, she almost stopped speaking altogether. She kept her guilt and fear and grief bottled up inside her, until it seemed that there was nothing else to her. She was empty, worthless. She saw Ida coming in from work to get tea ready, and knew that she was failing in her duty to feed her family. She saw Florrie or Ellen come in to scrub round and tidy up, and knew she was failing to keep her home clean. She heard Alma exhort her to change her blouse or wash her face, and knew she was becoming filthy and repulsive. But she was unable to do anything about it.
Sometimes, when there was drink in the house, she would take refuge in the bottle. When there was not, she did without, for she could not bring herself to go out of the front door and into the street. She had not been outside since the day of the funeral.
The rest of the people in the street had turned against her long ago. When they came in she knew it was only to gloat over her in her despair. Women she had known all her life, like Martha Johnson and Ethel Croft, would push open the door and coo-ee at her. She flinched
from their smiles and their offers of help. She knew they despised her. Most of all she flinched from her sister and her lectures. It was all very well for Alma; she was strong. Alma did not know what it was like to be Milly.
The hot summer made it even worse. It closed in on her. Everyone else lived out in the street, playing, gossiping, doing mending or outwork. Milly stayed in the kitchen, staring at the place where Archie had died sprawled across her. She could hear them out there, laughing and calling to each other. She knew they were talking about her, laughing at her.
The day came when she would stand it no longer. She knew what she was going to do. She had known all along, but it had taken until now to come to the front of her mind. She had been afraid when it lurked there like a black dog in the core of her consciousness. But now that it had finally come out into the open, it lost its terror. She welcomed it. It was the only answer.
It was unbearably bright outside. She blinked, blinded like a mole coming out of its tunnel. Through the blur of the brassy glare, she saw the street, saw the women on their doorsteps. She heard their voices and knew that they were calling her.
‘It’s Milly! Wotcher, Milly, nice to see you again.’
‘Come over here, love. How are you?’
But it meant nothing. She was not really there. The sounds came to her as though over a great distance, the movements were heavy and distorted. Even her own body did not belong to her any more. It was simply a means to get her where she was going. She passed along the street, saying nothing, looking neither left nor right, so that as she went by she left a silence behind her, followed by a buzz of speculation.
Heavy footsteps lumbered up behind her. An arm fell round her shoulders, making her start.
‘Where’re you off to, Milly? You feeling all right?’
She stared, uncomprehending, at the face gazing at hers. Recognition filtered slowly through . . . Martha Johnson. She had to say something, had to get rid of her.
‘Yeah, yeah. I’m all right. I’m going out.’
‘That’s nice, lovey. Do you good. You want me to come along, keep you company, like?’
It was the last thing that Milly wanted.
‘No, no. I’m all right. I just got to go out, that’s all. Got to – got to get something. Something for my Harry. Got to get something for my Harry.’