‘You sure, lovey? I can come along with you, if you like.’
‘No. I’m only going to the shop. That’s all. Just up the shop.’
She had not held such a prolonged conversation for weeks. For a moment that felt like half a lifetime, Martha hesitated. Then she gave Milly’s arm a squeeze.
‘That’s all right, then. Can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you out again, lovey. We missed you, y’know. It’s really nice to have you back.’
Milly hardly heard her. She just knew that she was no longer in danger of being stopped. The exchange had exhausted her powers of speech, so she began to walk on up the street. When she reached the corner, she felt as if she had achieved a great goal. She had escaped from her prison.
Through the dust-laden streets she walked, enclosed in her cocoon. She did not have to think about which corners to turn, for she had walked along these pavements, past these factories, every day of her life. She had been born, gone to school, worked, courted, been married and raised her children within the confines of North Millwall. She had gone months at a time without leaving the Island at all. So without any conscious effort on her part, her feet took her where she was going. She did not notice the grimy walls or the dirty cobbles; she did not see the sweating faces; she did not smell the reek of leather and chemicals and oil and rotting fruit. The noise of hoofs and iron wheels, steam engines, machinery, hooters and human voices came only faintly through the fog that surrounded her. The fierce sun burnt through the pall of smoke and made the sweat run down her body so that her clothes began to stick to her, but Milly did not notice.
She plodded mechanically, one step after the other. She was nearly there now. Certain signs began to penetrate her consciousness: a stationary queue of buses, trams, carts, delivery vans and innumerable heavy drays; the pavement clogged with pedestrians; a rumble of half-resigned grumbles, dotted with curses and complaints.
The bridge was open. The lock was in use. Milly’s heart beat thunderously in her chest. It was a portent. It was meant. Oblivious to protests, she pushed her way through the gathering crowd.
And there were the lock gates, huge, solid walls of oak. On one side, greenish-brown and floating with filth, was the great basin of the West India dock, lined with tall-masted ships and busy with cranes and tugs and lighters and the strain of human muscle power. On the other, fifteen feet down, was the water of the lock, jostling with lighters and barges, for the tide was low and the big ships were trapped. At the river end of the lock, the other pair of gates was closing.
Milly reached the edge of the quay. Just in front of her, a step up, was the hazardous plank walkway attached to the lock gate. A few adventurous souls, unwilling to wait for the bridge, were making their way across it. She fixed her eyes on the halfway point, where the pair of gates met. Beyond that there was nothing. She set her foot upon the walkway. Like a sleepwalker, she made her way along. In the middle, she stopped and turned.
A clanking of iron ratchets sounded as the men opened the sluices. Beneath her feet the water foamed yellow. She watched the churning cataracts, mesmerized by the roar and motion, until her ears and eyes were filled with it. She swayed and her knees buckled, then she pitched forward and gave herself up to the water.
Harry knew there was something wrong even before he got back to the quay. The news passed amongst the watermen’s fraternity like wildfire, first that some woman had thrown herself off the West India dock lock gate, then that it was Harry Turner’s mother. Harry, coming downriver with the last of the ebb, was hailed by a hoveller sculling his boat home after a spell piloting a barge.
‘You better get along home, lad.’
‘Why? What’s up?’ Harry demanded.
The man just shook his head. ‘Think you might be needed, like.’
Harry glanced at his brother, who was resting on his oar at the stern of the lighter. The boy looked tired, there were great smudges of circles under his eyes. It had been a difficult trip and they had not got a great deal of sleep last night. With the weather so sultry, the little cabin had been unbearable stuffy, so they had bedded down on the decks; but passing traffic had kept them awake for much of the time. He had been letting the boy take it easy up till now.
‘Bring that sweep up here, Johnny. I think we better get a move on.’
With both of them rowing, the laden lighter moved rapidly down with the tide. As they passed the entrance to the Shadwell dock, a foreman from one of the other companies waved at them, standing up in his skiff as a sweating apprentice rowed him along.
‘Harry Turner?’
‘That’s me.’
‘You’re wanted back home, mate.’
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
But still he did not get a proper answer.
‘Been a bit o’ trouble.’
Various possibilities raced through his head – somebody ill, young
Bob in trouble with the police, the house on fire, his mother . . . In his heart he knew it was his mother.
‘What d’you reckon they’re on about?’ Johnny asked.
Harry shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he lied. ‘But we best get along and find out.’
They still had to deliver their load to a wharf down at Woolwich, but as they passed their firm’s quay, they were hailed by a colleague and his apprentice, who came alongside in a skiff.
‘We’ll take over from here,’ the lighterman said. ‘You two take the boat back and sign off.’
Normally a tyrant, the foreman actually laid a hand on Harry’s shoulder.
‘Sorry to hear about this, lad.’
Harry looked him in the eye. ‘It’s my mum, ain’t it?’
Beside him, Johnny drew a sharp breath.
Harry and Johnny hurried home through the sultry streets, fear of what they would find mounting with every footstep.
When they reached Trinidad Street, practically every inhabitant appeared to be out on the doorsteps. It seemed to Harry, as he broke into a run, that a silence fell as they passed. The eyes watched them, sympathetically, but there was no hiding the avid look.
Harry pushed open the front door. Instead of being empty and hollow, the tiny house was full to the seams. He could hardly get in the door for relatives – not just Ida and Bob, but Maisie, with all her brood, Florrie and Jim, Alma, and in the background, Gerry and Ellen. They all looked white and shocked. As one, their eyes turned to him, and a heavy silence fell.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
There was an uneasy shuffling of feet. Ida dissolved into tears, to be comforted by Ellen. Alma came forward and put one arm round him and the other round Johnny.
‘You better brace y’selves,’ she said. ‘It’s your mum. She – she – well, she’s gone and done herself in.’
‘
What?
’ His mind refused to take it in at first. It was too terrible to believe.
On the other side of his aunt, he half heard Johnny’s shocked voice saying, ‘Oh no, oh no.’
‘She –’ Alma began to repeat.
‘I heard, I heard. I just – how did it happen?’
‘The lock gates.’
‘Oh, my God!’
In his mind’s eye he saw the body of his mother turning in the turgid water like a rag doll. A numbness stole over him, slowing thought, dulling feeling, making movement an effort. An all-important question needed to be asked. He knew it was there, knew he wanted to know the answer. With great difficulty, he dredged it from his mind and formed it on his tongue.
‘Why? Why did she do it? I knew she was grieving – but to do that . . .’
‘I dunno, lovey.’ He had never heard his aunt sound so subdued. ‘She’d been down for a long time, y’know.’
‘Yeah, but not so – not that she had to . . .’
Across the room he met with his sister’s face. Florrie was ashen; lines of shock were carved into the thin cheeks and her eyes were haggard. And he knew that however much he wanted to ask questions, to lean on someone, here was somebody who needed his strength. He went to her and took her stiff body in his arms.
‘You mustn’t blame y’self, girl,’ he told her.
Florrie was shaking. It was not like when their father had died. Then she had been defiant, even a touch triumphant. Now she trembled with the pain. Harry had the frightening impression that she could shatter at a touch.
‘Yes I must,’ she said, so low that he could hardly hear her.
Ida’s sobs were mounting into a wail. ‘I’m never going to see her again. How can she do this? How can she?’
Some of Maisie’s children, not understanding what was going on, but catching the emotion, began to cry in sympathy. Maisie gathered them on to her knee and wept as well. Over Florrie’s shoulder, Harry’s glance met Ellen’s. A silent wave of sympathy and support passed from her. He could feel it wrapping round him and buoying him up. There was nothing they could say to each other with his entire family present, but he knew that she was there, giving what she could to help.
As for the others, he realized that they were looking to him for leadership. He took a steadying breath, trying to think what needed to be done. First his sister. She was always best when given a practical task.
‘Florrie, I think a cup of tea might help. It’s no use asking Maisie or Ida – they’ll just go to pieces. Can you do it?’
Florrie nodded. Harry handed her over to Jimmy and they both squeezed their way through to the kitchen. Bob, who had been standing by himself and refusing any comfort, suddenly pushed past Maisie’s family and rushed upstairs. Once again, Harry looked at Ellen, who was still holding Ida.
‘Leave him,’ she counselled. ‘Go and talk to him later when it’s quieter.’
Alma filled him in as far as she could.
‘It was just after midday, after the kids’d gone back to school. Lot of them saw her going up the street.’
‘But didn’t no one try to stop her?’
‘They thought she was feeling better. Martha Johnson offered to walk along with her, but Milly said she was only going up the shop to get something. Poor Martha, she’s in a terrible state. Says she didn’t ought to have taken no for an answer.’
Harry was inclined to agree with this, but he let it pass.
‘Didn’t no one know she was in a bad way today? Had anyone been in to see her?’
‘I know Ellen looked in, and Florrie. But you know what she’s – she was like. You couldn’t hardly get a word out of her. Difficult to know what she was feeling like inside, really.’
That was true enough.
‘And at the lock –’ He stopped. It was difficult to talk about it. ‘Didn’t they – didn’t anyone try to stop her?’
‘Couldn’t get to her in time, so they said.’
He knew he was trying to shift the blame. What really gnawed at him was the fact that he and Johnny had been away overnight.
‘If I’d been home last night, it might not have happened,’ he said. ‘She never did like us going. And this time Johnny was with me as well. I should have tried to get the foreman to change us around. I should have seen this was a danger.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ Alma told him. ‘None of us knew she was thinking of doing this. I mean, you don’t, do you? She never said nothing, never said she wanted to. Maybe she didn’t know herself until she done it.’
‘I should have done more,’ Harry insisted.
Alma gave a great sigh. ‘We all should have done. Maybe we was all at fault. Didn’t see what she was going through.’
The guilt and the recriminations carried on for half the evening as the family went over and over the same ground, trying to decide a reason, trying to exorcise the pain, until Harry was almost glad when the police sent for him to formally identify the body. That was the start of a nightmare of official duties, made all the worse because they had been done so recently for his father. Another inquest, another funeral.
They all turned to him whenever something needed deciding or arranging, all with their stained faces and haunted eyes. Bob took to
truanting from school, and Harry had to sort it all out and make sure he got there each day. On top of that there was an ever changing makeshift of domestic arrangements, all fitted in between the demands of work. And every day when he came home there was an empty space in the kitchen, the unoccupied chair at the table, reminding him of his failure to help his mother.
At the end of another long hot week, Ida came home from work in tears.
‘I hate that place. They been picking on me again. That forewoman, she’s got her knife into me. She stands there just waiting for me to do something wrong. Every week I get fined for something, and the others, they just laugh.’
Harry tried to calm her down, but whatever he said she took exception to. He suggested finding a different job, but that would not do either.
‘You just don’t understand!’ she wailed, and took herself off upstairs.
That meant there was no tea on the table.
Harry dug in his pockets. ‘Here, Bob, you take this and go down the chip shop,’ he said. ‘Cod and chips all round.’
‘Why me? Why is it always me? Why can’t someone else go?’ Bob kicked at the table leg, his face thunderous.
Harry reached out and clipped him round the ear. ‘Because the rest of us been at work all day and we’re starving. Now get a move on.’
Bob glared at him and went, his lower lip thrust out. Harry frowned after him. The boy might be ten years old and tough with it, but he needed someone to mother him. He was probably feeling it worse than any of them, but instead of crying, like Ida, he went about trying to take it out on someone. Behind him there was a sigh. He looked round and saw Johnny slumped over the table, asleep, with his head cradled in his arms. He had grown a lot lately, but it was all upwards and the heavy work he did was too much for him. Through the ceiling came the sound of Ida sobbing on her bed. Harry ran his hands through his hair. They all needed more from him than he was able to give.
He sat on the step after tea, wondering what to do for the best. He could not see his way through the tangle of problems. Gerry emerged from next door.
‘’Evening, Harry. Coming up the Puncheon for a drink?’
Harry shook his head. It was tempting to go out and forget it in a cheerful evening and a few pints, but that was what his father had always done.