The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Peggy had no idea what she had meant; the words had exploded from her in pure anger, without foundation. ‘Just let me pass,’ she blustered.

  It was impossible for Peggy to force her way past the larger woman, who continued to rail. ‘I want to know what you meant by that – help ourselves. We’ve never had any thought of helping ourselves to anything. What’s our George got to give us, him been out of work all these months and a wife and baby to look after? And what’s his wife brought to her marriage that we can help ourselves to? Nothing but trouble, that’s what she brought into this marriage. But we ain’t complained. We understand the love ’tween them two and no blinking arguments can alter that. So I don’t know what you mean, help ourselves.’

  It would have been proper for Peggy to apologise, her words totally uncalled for, but the old long-festering wounds had broken out afresh as though they had happened yesterday. Peggy could see it as if on a cinema screen: Dan staring desolately at his boat, burned beyond salvage; the bleak days that followed trying vainly to take the culprit to court, unable to pay the cost of a solicitor’s fee unless prepared to take a risk with the insurance, which was more needed for a replacement for their livelihood. They’d dared not risk everything on such skimpy evidence. Someone said they’d only thought they’d seen someone who they thought looked like Bryant running from the fire, though Dan knew all too well who the culprit was and had spent years wishing he had taken that swine to court after all as he fought to make ends meet. But the way Bryant had made himself scarce for months after, it could only have been him. Without proper evidence, or money for solicitors, legal people shrugged their shoulders and left it to the warring parties to settle their own scores. Dan had been all for seeking Bryant out and beating him to a pulp, and who would have blamed him but those very people who had refused to fight his case for him. They would have clapped Dan in jail for assault and battery, maybe manslaughter, whereas Dick Bryant should have been put in jail for what he did.

  And here was this woman, Bryant’s wife, yelling at her like a fishwife in Pam’s flat, Pam now in tears, hurt by what had been said about her and by the way her mother was being yelled at; little Beth screaming and choking and no one going to her aid. Peggy wanted to but when she did, she was barred by her adversary.

  ‘You leave my grandchild alone! I was the one stood by her when she gave birth to that child. Where was you? Don’t you bloody touch her!’

  ‘I’ll touch my own grandchild whenever I want without your leave.’

  ‘Mum! Mum! Both of you!’ Pam was shouting, the argument unreasonable.

  ‘Don’t you call her Mum,’ raged Peggy, not looking at her as she found just enough strength to push the woman back to the still-open door way. ‘I’m your mum. Not her. It was her husband, your father-in-law, what put your own father out of business. A deliberate act of wickedness.’

  ‘Wickedness!’ Mrs Bryant’s voice had risen to a scream. ‘It wasn’t my Dick’s fault. You don’t know the half of it. You never wanted to know. He tried to explain when your Dan came round after him, but Dick had to run for his life when he came at him with a great big iron rod or he’d ’ve been beaten to death.’

  Peggy had never heard this part of it. But the woman was lying.

  ‘I don’t want to hear none of your excuses,’ she yelled. ‘Dick Bryant’s a snivelling coward, that’s all I can say. Now get out of my way, you cow!’ The word just came out unbidden, shocking even her.

  Footsteps were hurrying up the stairs, light and urgent. Neither of them saw the landlady approaching along the landing as Mrs Bryant’s outraged hand landed with a resounding slap upon Peggy’s cheek. For a moment the hurt stunned her, but rage gave her strength and she pushed her hands out in front of her, handbag and shopping basket swinging, and thrust past the woman, knocking her against the wall, collided with another figure, in her haste not recognising it as Pam’s landlady, not even hearing the gasp the woman gave, and was off down the stairs before anyone could see the tears that had begun to spurt from her eyes; not even turning as Pam called frantically after her: ‘Mum! Mum!’

  How she got home through the busy Friday streets she had no real idea except that the moment she let herself inside the sanctuary of her own house she burst into tears that had been pent up all the way here.

  Josie was there, giving eye to her father. Josie remained out of work and moped around the house a lot. Hearing her mother, she ran from the back room.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened? You ain’t ’ad an accident, have yer?’

  No longer a hotel receptionist with nicely controlled diction, some of Arthur’s dialect had more and more begun to rub off on to her.

  ‘No. I’ve not had an accident.’ Her mother shrugged away from her consoling cuddle, straightened her back and bore her shopping off to the kitchen. Josie followed at a distance, mystified. ‘Where is your father?’

  ‘Having a lie-down. Mum, what’s the matter? Why’re you crying?’

  ‘I’m not crying, I’m just tired!’ The words were terse, sharp, filled with anger. Josie watched her begin to unpack the goods she’d bought, hands trembling over the task, the canvas shopping bag unsteady on the edge of the kitchen table and becoming more floppy and unbalanced as she unpacked the bit of meat, sugar and tea, fats, cabbage. Suddenly the weight of the loose potatoes took it over the table edge as they spilled out and rolled over the floor. ‘Oh, God! Oh, sod it! Sod everything! Sod her and everyone!’

  It was the final straw. She fell back on to a chair by the table, doubled herself forward over her knees, her face hidden in her hands, her whole body convulsing in a welter of weeping. Josie stared, shocked by the sight, then rushed forward and put her arms about her mother. ‘Oh, Mum, don’t.’

  From the back room, her father’s voice called, a deep querulous demand. ‘What’s going on out there? What’s the matter with your mother? Josie, help get me out of this bleeding bed. I want to see what’s wrong.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Dad,’ Josie called back, her mother slumped in her arms. It was something she had never experienced before. Mum was always so staunchly herself, propping up the family, dealing with their crises, dealing with her own, a pillar of strength when anyone needed it. If she cried at all, no one ever saw her. Now this. ‘Mum’s a bit upset, that’s all.’

  It was an understatement. Mum was crumpled, sobbing her heart out. She seemed to possess no strength, weeping like a young uncontrollable girl, great gulping sobs.

  ‘Let me see her,’ came the demand from the back room. ‘Josie, get me out of this bloody bed. I want to see your mother.’

  ‘Don’t … don’t let him see me … like this.’ The broken plea came muffled by Josie’s consoling arms.

  ‘No I won’t, Mum.’ Her mother was recovering her composure with amazing speed, lifting her head, dragging the heel of her hands across her wet eyes. She sniffed back the tears, a hard determined sniff, smiled at Josie then turned away, almost herself again. ‘Get me a hankie out of me bag. Silly bitch, going on like that – and all over nothing.’

  ‘It don’t look like nothing to me, Mum.’ Josie eased the handbag off her mother’s arm, as Peggy looked at it with surprise to see it still there, fished inside and brought out a clean and folded white handkerchief. ‘What upset you?’

  ‘Just me being silly.’

  ‘It must be something bad ter make you be like this.’

  ‘I said get me out of this sodding bed!’ Josie looked imploringly at her mother, torn between her two parents.

  She saw the understanding in her mother’s face as the swollen eyes turned first to her then down at the still-folded but now wet hankie then at her again. ‘Let him wait. I don’t want him to see me like this. He’ll start asking questions and he’s the last one I want to tell.’

  ‘Tell what, Mum?’

  Her mother took a deep shuddering breath and got up from the chair to collect the scattered potatoes from the kitchen floor. She was more herself again though st
ill not quite. Suddenly she let the potatoes drop and sat back down on the chair. ‘I can’t tell your dad, but I can’t keep all this to meself.’

  As Josie listened, on her haunches before her mother, she told her all that had occurred. ‘I’ve never been smacked round the face before, not in all my life. I feel humiliated. I’ve always thought I knew how your dad felt about that man, what he did to us, but now I know first-hand. And with our Pam married into that family, I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do, but I can’t ever go back to that flat. I couldn’t bear coming face to face with that woman again. I feel so humiliated.’

  ‘But you must keep on seeing Pam. Don’t you want to see her at least?’

  ‘I do, love. But not there. I couldn’t …’

  A roar from the back room interrupted her. ‘Come and get me up!’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mum,’ Josie implored. Her mother took a deep breath.

  ‘Go and see to him. But don’t tell him anything I’ve told you. Just say I had a fall coming home. He won’t ask questions. He’s too full of himself.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘I’m sorry Mrs Bryant, I really can’t have this going on in my house.’

  Pam stood gazing bleakly at her landlady, her eyes full of tears for all she tried to hold them back. She had wanted to run after Mum, but there was her mother-in-law and her landlady blocking the way, and Beth crying in her cot. She felt as she watched her mother go that she had been a traitor to her. She still felt that as she heard her own abject voice saying, ‘I am sorry, Mrs Carper. It’s the first time anything like this has happened. We’ve always tried to be quiet.’

  Mrs Carper’s face didn’t move. ‘I know you have, but there is always the thin end of the wedge to think of. It could happen again. And then again and again. I can’t risk having my house disrupted in this way.’

  Milly Bryant who had been composing herself with the aid of a great deal of huffing and puffing after slapping the face of another, stepped in uninvited. ‘Are you telling my daughter-in-law to leave, Mrs um … Carper? Because you can’t throw her and a baby out on the street like that without proper notice.’

  ‘I’m not throwing your daughter-in-law out on the street, Mrs Bryant.’

  ‘I should damned well think not.’

  ‘I’m merely warning her that I do not enjoy shouting and screaming in my house. This is my home. I have a right to expect peace and quiet within it.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t go letting it out to people, should you, if you want peace and quiet?’

  ‘Mum …’ Pam came and took her mother-in-law’s arm. ‘It’s all right. Please, you’re making things worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ Mrs Bryant swung on her. ‘How much worse can anyone make it? It was your mother what came here making a scene, so don’t start accusing me, Pam. Your family have always started these things. If it hadn’t been for your father in the first place … I’m only trying to help.’

  Pam wanted to tell her she didn’t need her help, but that would have made things worse. She kept quiet.

  ‘I understand how you feel, Mrs Bryant.’ The landlady had turned her attention to the older woman. ‘But I’m not throwing your daughter-in-law out. A girl with a young baby, of course I wouldn’t. But I do have a say when trouble like this occurs. Her neighbours downstairs came knocking on my door complaining. I had to come and try to quieten things down a bit, for my other tenants’ sakes.’

  ‘Well, you were too late, weren’t you?’ Mrs Bryant snapped.

  Pam felt her insides leap and cringe. If anyone was going to get her thrown out it was this woman who thought she could right everything in this world with insults.

  Her own voice came strong and sharp and loud and a little desperate. ‘I don’t want anyone taking my side. I can take my own side. Mum, let me sort this out, please.’ She turned to Mrs Carper. ‘Look, I’m really dreadfully sorry about all this. I promise it won’t happen again …’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Mrs Bryant interrupted, her voice high with fighting instinct. It brought an exasperated glance from Mrs Carper and a warning one from Pam who hurried on as if her mother-in-law had become invisible and voiceless.

  ‘Please accept my apologies, Mrs Carper. It won’t happen again.’

  The woman nodded. ‘Very well, I realise it wasn’t your fault. But I do feel that if it occurs again and my tenants are disrupted by noise like that, I will really have to recommend you find other accommodation. I wouldn’t want to do that of course and I’d give you several weeks’ notice.’

  ‘How very very generous.’ Mrs Bryant’s sarcasm cut through the woman’s quiet voice, but Mrs Carper continued to address Pam.

  ‘I know you’ll give me your co-operation. You and your husband have been good tenants, even when things have been bad for him. I’ll leave you.’

  She wrinkled her nose in a friendly manner and closed the door. Pam heard her light footsteps hurrying down the uncarpeted part of the stairs.

  Milly Bryant turned to Pam. ‘Who do she think she is, when she’s about? Bloody cheek of the woman.’

  ‘She did have a point, Mum.’ Her heart still racing, the sick feeling that had arisen in her chest still lurking, Pam turned to pick up a now quieter Beth, who had quickly got over all the shouting. She was a placid child; she took after George. That was why Pam loved him, for his placidness. His father was also like that.

  It flickered through Pam’s mind as she lifted Beth from her cot, how an even-tempered man like Dick Bryant could ever creep out in the middle of the night and set fire to someone’s livelihood. Maybe it was because of his quiet temper that he had done so, the revenge of a timid man who didn’t possess the hotheadedness her father had to engage in an honest fist fight. Pam didn’t think it commendable at all. Maybe Mrs Bryant’s forthright, even annoying manner was more honourable than creeping out in the dead of night to settle a score. Pam just hoped George’s placid manner would never go as far as his father’s had. She wanted George honourable, always. Perhaps he had sufficient of his mother’s blood in him to be so. She prayed he’d never stoop to doing what his father had, or even have need to.

  ‘Stupid bitch,’ her mother-in-law was saying. ‘You shouldn’t have to kowtow to the likes of people like that.’

  ‘I haven’t got no option, have I?’ Pam said a little sourly, reaching for a nappy from a newly ironed pile of them to change Beth, whose earlier crying had made her soak the one she wore.

  ‘You have got an option. George is in work now, you should be looking for another place, a better place to live than this … this hole.’

  The eyes roved around the poky little place, the lips dropped into a sneer. Pam felt a little irked.

  ‘We could, but George could lose his job as easily as be found it. You can’t bet on anything, these days. Nothing’s safe. I’m not going to count my chickens just yet.’

  ‘You can’t go on living here forever.’

  ‘It won’t be forever. But if we just up and went and found a place that costs more, if we couldn’t pay the rent and had to look for a cheaper place again, we might end up in an even worse state.’ She fell to changing Beth. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea in a minute.’

  It was hard to keep the terseness out of her voice. She still seethed inside thinking of the slap Mrs Bryant had given her mother.

  She had felt her whole body jump as if she personally had received the slap, and had it not been for the landlady’s arrival she’d have leapt to her mother’s defence, perhaps making everything worse. Now with all that had intervened, it was too late to pick up on it, or perhaps the courage to confront her with it had dwindled into cowardice that she tried to see as prudence. No point making enemies, but she did balk at the insult to her mother and how she must have felt going home with her face stinging from the slap. At this moment she hated Mrs Bryant with all her heart, could understand how Dick Bryant had become such a small man beneath the woman’s thumb, even, she imagined, since the very d
ays of their courting. Milly Bryant was the dominant partner and always would be.

  ‘I’ll make it.’ Mrs Bryant said now, taking charge. She felt the teapot. ‘This is nearly stone cold. I expect you can afford another spoonful of tea, can’t you, Pam, with George in work? Nothing like a nice hot cuppa to put things back together.’

  And not one word of regret about her mother, not one syllable of apology. Mrs Bryant was the most loathsome overbearing woman she knew.

  It couldn’t be held off any longer. As with all secrets hugged to the bosom, it erupted in a rush at the most inopportune moment. Danny and Lily were walking home through the soft April night from the Empire Palace, the fleapit of a cinema in Leigh Broadway that belied its name. Its seats were cheaper than elsewhere and all Danny could afford, still saving up for their wedding.

  Lily was being full of it as usual, once again reluctantly adjusting to another wedding delay for lack of funds. They walked slowly, savouring the quiet, unseasonably warm night air, Lily with her head on his shoulder making the two of them meander a little, the lamplight casting their wavering shadows before them, her voice soft and dreamy.

  ‘We’ll make it an autumn wedding, darling,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll give us a bit more time, I suppose, to look for a really nice house. We should be thinking of getting the wedding booked up definitely, and we really ought to start looking for a suitable house soon.’

  ‘Theres plenty of time to look for a place,’ he said, his mind entirely on just how he expected to juggle the two – paying rent on a house and keeping Mum going.

  And what would she do trying to manage Dad on her own? Dad remained so obstreperous and was becoming worse, talking about trying to walk again, at one time demanding to be left to get in and out of bed on his own with Mum forced to listen to his grunts and puffs and foul language when it didn’t go right, the next demanding her help over some small matter he could well have coped with himself. He had badgered the hospital into fitting his legs with callipers and giving him a pair of crutches. The crutches had been OK but the irons inadequate and he had taken a tumble.