by Maggie Ford
Instead, Mr Bryant had nodded and said, ‘Yes, I s’pose one on us should pay for what we’ve done to our kids.’
Mrs Bryant had pulled herself up to her full height, a good inch taller than him, with a display of injured dignity. ‘You’re not the one at fault, Dick. You never were. Why should you take all the blame for what was an accident? Creeping about all them years ago like you’d done it purposely. If you’d stood up for yourself, but not you – just crept around like a criminal, taking all that swine dished out on you. He nearly landed you in court, remember? If anything, it should be them taking their daughter in.’
George had stepped forward. ‘Stop it, Mum. If it hadn’t been for you, Dad would never have gone near that bloody boat. You’re my parents and it’s me what’s asking for help, on behalf of my wife and child. As my parents I think you’ve a bit of a duty to help me out, don’t you think?’
Standing aside, Pam had pleaded silently for him to consider who he was speaking to, wondering how he could talk like that to his own mother and expect to get away with it. As well, she’d been confused by this talk of accidents. She’d heard it said before, but the mortification of having to stand by while he begged for a roof over their heads – that was what it amounted to – was such that everything else was pushed out of mind.
With his son to bolster him up, Dick Bryant had taken the initiative. ‘All right, we don’t want to start up any blessed rows, do we? Bad enough other people’s. What’s important is you two. I say you can move in today. Milly, we can clear out the spare bedroom for them, can’t we?’
So it was done. All Saturday was taken up trundling a handcart with her and George’s few belongings out of what Mrs Carper had grandly termed a furnished flat to his parents’ house. Some of their stuff was installed in the bedroom they’d been given in the two bedroomed house, the rest, what there was of it, stacked up in the Bryant’s small smelly shed in the yard.
Sunday had possessed a dream-like quality, Sunday dinner with his parents made Pam feel they would depart for home afterwards as they had done on occasions, very rare occasions, because she’d never enjoyed going round there for Sunday dinner. Now she was here for good, or at least for a pretty good while by the look of it.
George, however, had no trouble settling in. Pam envied him, felt a little out on the perimeter. But one good thing was coming out of it. Mr Bryant had agreed to his son going back with him on the boat, for all the profits would hardly go to keeping two families.
Mr Bryant’s bawley had once been a fine craft twenty years ago, one of the old clench-built types, heavily timbered and able to stand up to the fiercest gale. It now had a sad look about it and stank of rotten fish from years of the catch cooked on board as shrimp had to be; left for even a short while uncooked it became unfit for market.
George was to have one third of any profit. ‘Better than me without a job at all,’ he said when Pam pointed out how little money would be coming in. ‘And we won’t be paying out rent, just for our food. That’s all they’ll take.’
It was better than nothing, and it was generous of his dad, especially now. No one had money to throw around any more. A few with half a crown to spend on a day return ticket from London or a couple of shillings on a charabanc did come, but gone was the thronging of Southend’s promenade and Kursal and the swarm of people making for Leigh for its cockles and shrimps and whelks and mussels.
‘We’ll manage, son,’ Dick Bryant said over the Sunday dinner, his small lips beneath the bristly moustache curling into a grin, glad to see his son back with him. ‘You won’t go short, either of you, and our little Beth’ll be much better off with us all to look out for her. She’s a dear little thing, ain’t she, our first little grandchild.’ His small age-faded blue eyes turned to Pam as he chewed stubbornly on a piece of stewing beef that these days took the place of a Sunday roast. ‘You’ve done well by her, love, in spite on the times. Let’s just hope we’ll be seeing a little brother or sister for her afore long, eh?’
He no doubt meant nothing by it, but the remark somehow didn’t sit right with her, him talking of more babies, to her ears alluding to the sexual side of the procedure. Dick Bryant was a pleasant enough man, but Pam felt her flesh creep a little as he smiled across at her. She couldn’t forget how he had kissed Beth those times when she’d had her at her breast. She could still recall the light prickle of the tip of that moustache against her exposed flesh. She told herself it had been done in all innocence, a grandfather taken by the sight of his tiny granddaughter, but the embarrassment remained in her mind no matter how nice and kind Mr Bryant was.
She had a great need that night to hug a little reality to her. Putting Beth to bed in the bedroom they’d been given, its double bed and the cot almost crowding out the single wardrobe, dressing table, and the two fireside chairs they had managed to cram in, she waited for Beth to gradually fall asleep while she sat trying to capture this sense of reality.
Alone for a moment, she quietly tore a scrap of paper from an old notebook George had. She’d find an envelope later. In the rush there had been no time to let Mum know what had happened. Now in these precious moments alone, she would write to her, just a short note explaining, and tomorrow morning post it – if she could find an envelope.
The door bursting open made her start guiltily. George stood there, his expression one of concern. ‘You all right, love? You’ve been up here so long I wondered if everything was OK. You’ve not been crying have you?’
‘No.’ In a reflex action, she had dropped the book on the bed, the letter hidden underneath it. She didn’t know why she’d needed to hide it, but just felt she had to. ‘I was making sure Beth was well asleep. It’s a strange house and I thought she might wake up and feel frightened.’
George peeped over the cot. ‘She looks well away. Come on, come down. Don’t sit up here all alone.’
It wasn’t until Wednesday, Mrs Bryant senior in her domineering way making quite sure she didn’t have a quiet moment to grieve the loss of her home, that she had a moment to finish her letter in peace.
By that time, as the letter was being sorted for sending by the next morning’s post to the address on the tatty envelope Pam had found, her mother was making her way through the still-light streets to the Bryant house-hold. Danny’s help had been thrust aside. She felt more than capable of having things out with her daughter if she was there, the Bryants if they thought her intrusive, or anyone else who might attempt to do battle with her.
She had not forgotten Mrs Bryant’s slap on her face. She had not forgotten that she’d tried to do her best by Pam. She had not forgotten that if Pam had fled to the hated Bryants, it had been rather than come to her in her hour of need. Peggy Bowmaker was getting herself into a right old lather as her small chubby figure strode onward towards Church Street.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The knock on the door was answered by Mrs Bryant. Pam, busy feeding Beth in a chair which Mr Bryant had hurriedly converted into a baby chair complete with a small table, took little notice of the knock until she heard women’s voices raised.
George and his father were off in the estuary most probably chasing shrimp halfway to Harwich, these last days of May having turned chilly enough to send them off into deep water.
Putting the small bowl of mashed potato and gravy back on the table, Pam went to see what was going on. Mrs Bryant was one to raise her voice over any little thing not to her liking. She was amazed and shocked to see her own mother at the door.
‘Good Lord, Mum, what’re you doing here?’ The spoon she still held dripped gravy on to the passage lino, but she didn’t notice, her startled gaze trained on the small figure of her mother.
Peggy looked beyond the large woman to her daughter. ‘I might ask the same about you, my gel. Why didn’t you let me know you was coming here? I had to get all the news from your landlady. I felt a real fool standing there listening to what she had to say. Why couldn’t you have come and told us what had
happened?’
‘She didn’t fancy being slung out a second time,’ Milly Bryant put in, her voice carrying up the street. Pam leapt to the rescue, forgetting this wasn’t her house.
‘Come inside, Mum. We need to talk properly.’
‘We certainly do,’ Milly Bryant added.
‘And not out on the street doorstep.’
She watched her mother-in-law step aside to allow Mum in, who, taking a deep breath, moved on past her. Pam conducted her into the back room where she had been feeding Beth. Beth, with some of her food adhering around her mouth, was now playing with a spilled drop of mashed potato, her little fingers erratically brushing it back and forth over the wooden surface of the feeding tray into a smeared mess.
Pam saw her mother’s gaze settle upon the child as though longing to pick her up and cuddle her, but Mrs Bryant, a little taken aback by Pam asking her mother in whether she objected or not, began to speak.
‘Now you’re here, what is it you want?’
‘What I said on the doorstep.’ Peggy did not flinch. Her hurt angry eyes now trained themselves on her daughter. ‘Pam, why didn’t you come to us, love?’
‘Because I thought Dad would turn me … us away, like he did me.’
‘I wouldn’t have turned you away. Your dad don’t have any say in the matter but to bluster and grumble. Since his trouble, it’s me what needs to sort things out in our house as much as is needed. I wouldn’t have turned you away. Ain’t I been coming regular to see you, sometimes twice a week like I would have done this week?’
‘I didn’t think, Mum.’ The impact of what she had done by coming here filled Pam with misery. She could hardly say she wished she had.
‘Well, if I’m allowed to speak in my own house,’ Mrs Bryant said, still standing in the living room doorway as though about to usher the intruder out, ‘I say you’ve got a cheek coming round here after all these years of you lot putting our family down. We don’t want nothing to do with you. And now you’ve found Pam and my son taking up lodgings with us for want of any other help, you want to help. Well, she don’t need it. Now you can leave.’
For a moment it looked as though her mother was about to comply, but she stood firm. ‘Not till I’ve had my say, now I’m here. I suppose it was you what persuaded my daughter not to let me know. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but it looks like you’re too eager to always rub our noses in it, even to getting our own daughter on your side.’
‘It’s not like that, Mum,’ Pam cried, growing angry. This feud would never stop. ‘There’s a letter in the post for you about it. I meant to write sooner but it all happened so quickly and there was the moving as well. I started writing on Sunday but I didn’t have an envelope. It went off this afternoon.’
Beth, forgotten, was reaching out with open hands, burbling for the rest of her supper. Peggy stood silent, a little chastened by her daughter’s explanation. They all fell silent, none knowing what to say. In the end it was Peggy who spoke.
‘So you’re all right here, then?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘No thanks to you!’ Mrs Bryant added vehemently.
Pam saw her mother turn to face the woman, just as she herself did. She felt merely taken aback, but her mother was calm and reproachful.
‘That was no more than I expected of you, Mrs Bryant. You’re intent on us remaining enemies, aren’t you?’
‘What else do you expect? It was your man as started this in the first place, belting in to mine like he did, and him miles bigger than mine.’
Beth was starting to whimper with tiredness, rubbing mashed potato into her eyes with her little fists, but no one noticed.
‘No, Mrs Bryant,’ Peggy was saying. ‘Who was it threw that clod of earth at my Dan – I ask you that? That was what started it.’
‘That was a sheer accident,’ the other woman blazed at her. ‘But your bullying husband belted into him without even stopping to see it was. Just as the fire on his boat was an accident, but he wouldn’t have had that, would he? Wanted to believe the worst.’
‘Don’t give me that.’ Peggy’s voice was beginning to rise, her calm melting away as all the old wounds began to tear open one after the other. ‘That pathetic thing you call your husband went creeping off in the dead of night with the sole idea on having his own back, the coward he is. He knew what he was doing, all right.’
Mrs Bryant was blustering, her own wounds opening, wounds she had never been able to share because of the accusations, the threat of court action, her husband’s freedom and livelihood threatened if she had made anything of it. It had been better to keep quiet and let the matter subside legally than drag it all out in the open and be branded a liar on top of everything else if the court had found for the injured party. All this she blurted out.
‘We never said nothing because we knew we’d never be able to prove it, that my Dick had no intention on setting fire to that boat.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘There, you see? And you never will. I don’t deny my Dick crept off in the dark to get his own back. And why not? Him a smaller man than your man what knocked him around, his nose broke and his eyes all blacked, just because of a bit of mud thrown in a lark happened to land on your husband. How could he, his size, fight back? He’d have been half killed, almost was half killed. When I saw him come home that day, a mate having to help him to walk, I nearly died. And I went on at him, said he shouldn’t stand for it. That was when I told him to hit that big bully where it hurt, and that night he went out to make a mess of your boat. That’s what he intended to do. Make a mess, pull everything about so that in the morning your man would miss the tide trying to tidy everything up.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ But Peggy Bowmaker’s tone had become noticeably less truculent.
Milly Bryant seemed hardly to hear her. ‘He slung all the stuff about, and for good measure he went and spilt oil all over the deck so it’d have to be all scrubbed before anyone could walk on it. But in his hurry to get everything done before he was seen, Dick backed into the lamp he had to see with and knocked it over. Before he knew where he was it caught the oil alight and then the ropes, and he didn’t know what to do and just ran off. He was in a terrible state when he got home, but there wasn’t nothing we could do about it. We just watched the blaze.’
‘And you said nothing,’ Peggy said in a low voice. She didn’t even appear shocked, merely accepting. ‘You stood and watched it go up and you didn’t raise a warning.’
‘We was both frightened. Dick heard someone shout at him as he ran off, and he thought he’d get the blame.’
‘He did, didn’t he?’
‘It was an accident.’ The larger woman had become oddly and visibly distressed. She leaned forward. ‘Mrs Bowmaker, I’ve never said this before, but telling you on it now, I wish to God we’d done something about it. All these years … I wish we had. It’s wrecked our kids’ lives. Look at your Pam and our George. What’ve they got? Nothing. And it’s … it’s …’
Our fault. The two women, remembering a day all those years ago, the ensuing hatred, saw in each other’s eyes the truth in those lost years. Not that it concerned them any more, that they could endure, but it had all to do with their children, and that seared into them.
Pam, watching, knew that little would change, the two women would never become friends, too much having flowed under the bridge for that, but something had been laid to rest. How their menfolk would react was anyone’s guess – not so well, she imagined – but Pam began to feel sanity was at last descending on them all. She became aware of Beth whimpering and turned to take her up in her arms.
‘I’m sorry. Beth’s tired, and she hasn’t had all her food. I’ve got to get on.’ She didn’t realise she had spoken sharply, authoritatively. They both turned and looked at her as if she were a stranger in their midst.
‘I suppose I’d better go,’ Peggy said haltingly. The other woman gave a small nod and stood by as Peggy p
lanted a little kiss on Beth’s smeared cheek. ‘Come and see us, Pam,’ she reminded her simply, and followed Mrs Bryant out.
Wishing she’d replied to her mother, Pam turned her attention back to Beth, picking up the little bowl of food and began feeding her with what was left in it, her actions automatic as she thought of her mother coming here and the invitation she had offered, knew that something had happened, good or bad she couldn’t tell, but she felt no emotion except to feel drained. Only that night, lying next to George in the cramped little bedroom with Beth in her cot beside them did she give way to silent tears; even then not knowing why she cried.
It was a chastened Peggy Bowmaker who returned home. Dan sat silent, his eyes closed as she related what had been said. His silence should have been a warning – the ominous silence of a stalking lion, and only as she finished with, ‘It could be we’ve been wrong about him all these years,’ did he pounce with a roar.
‘Wrong, is that what you think? Me, wrong all these years to blame that snivelling little sod for putting me out of business? You trying to tell me I should say I’m sorry for hating him, I’m supposed to thank him for not exactly intending to burn up me boat but only messing it up? What if I’d slipped on that oil he’s supposed only to’ve smeared all over me deck and I’d broken me neck and died, would you still say we’d been wrong all these years? No you bloody wouldn’t. It makes no difference if it was an accident or not. He mucked up my livelihood and it was me what got this family through them years. Stupid bitch, you let them dupe you into believing their lies? And you coming home telling me maybe I was wrong?’
His bellowing brought Josie down from the bedroom where she’d been, reading out of Dad’s way, and Connie from the back room where she had been preparing his bed for him when he wished to retire. They burst into the kitchen together as Peggy was shouting back at him to lower his voice or all the neighbours would hear.