As they went in through the back door, Alice took off her coat. She was wearing a dress that evening that she had bought in town that day. It was cut lower than she would have ever dared wear before and she was self-conscious about the fact that she was displaying too much cleavage. All evening she had wished there was spare material she could pull over her breasts and she regretted not wearing a cardigan. She had spent the entire night trying to draw the neck of the dress closed. She had bought the dress only because she remembered Bernadette’s beautiful figure and how the hotel porters used to comment about it when they thought she was out of earshot.
Whilst Jerry hung up her coat, she took another huge leap. She put her hand inside her dress and lifted each breast up and out to make it more prominent, pushing the material aside to display more cleavage. She took a deep breath. She had no idea what came next but hoped something would give her a clue. She wanted him to look at her breasts, which she had boldly presented, and then kiss her. That must be how it went.
Alice hadn’t been round to the house for a couple of weeks, because she knew Nellie had been sick. Any child was bad enough, but a sick child was intolerable. She realized that while Jerry was trapped in the house with Nellie, Alice was safe and no other papist whore would be getting her nose in. She calculated that to stay away would be a good thing. It would make him see how useful she had been over the last two years and how much her involvement in Jerry’s life made sense.
She was wrong.
She had almost overplayed her hand.
As Jerry switched the lights on, she looked around at the kitchen. The floor was disgustingly dirty. She shuddered. Filthy dishes met her eye, and mouldy remains of dried egg and fat clung to the greasy oilcloth on the table. It looked as if it hadn’t been wiped once in the two weeks since she was last there. Jerry’s and Nellie’s dirty clothes were piled up on the corner of the kitchen floor, not even in a basket or a box. Jerry had spent all day washing the sheets and hadn’t got round to the clothes.
A white enamel bucket of cold, pungent, dark-brown water sat under the sink, full of Nellie’s soaking dirty nappies. In the dim light from the overhead bulb, the indoor washing line had been pulled out across the top of the range, on which were pegged the few nappies Jerry had managed to wash out that day, now filling the room with steam. Its smell, and that of the enamel nappy bucket, mingled with that of Jerry’s sweat-soaked work clothes and made Alice’s stomach heave. She just about hid her revulsion.
Pull yourself together, you are nearly there, she told herself, as she forced another smile and looked Jerry straight in the eye. She wanted to leave the service of the hotel and begin planning a new life with the man she hadn’t stopped thinking about since the day she first saw him. Having seen him treat another woman and even his repulsive child with so much kindness, she was determined to have him for herself.
Jerry opened the bottles and drank deeply from one. He looked at Alice as, without a word, he handed her hers. Alice took it from him before picking up his free hand and placing it on her breast. Jerry was stunned. Repelled. No. He didn’t want this at all.
He could feel that Alice was shaking, as abruptly she moved his hand down and onto her abdomen and then slid it between her legs. This is what she had seen the girls do at the back gate with the men who walked them home to the back of the hotel. They didn’t know Alice watched them every night. She had seen them put their hands down men’s trousers and undo the buttons as they got down onto their knees, or sometimes if the men were in a hurry they raised the girls’ skirts and almost lifted them off the floor as they pinned them against the wall and took them quickly.
They always reminded Alice of animals. Of the roaming dogs she had watched in the street when she was a girl. She had seen neighbours run out with buckets of cold water to throw over those that were locked together, howling and snapping, stuck in mid-copulation. She had only to step away from the window to remove herself but she never did. She had watched every chambermaid who had been taken at the back gate since Bernadette had left. Voyeurism had been Alice’s life.
In those few seconds, whilst she moved Jerry’s hand between her legs, a switch flicked on in Jerry that had been shut down for a long time. Suddenly, in the passing of a single second, he knew what he was about to do. He pulled away from her abruptly and staggered from the door with his back to the range. He stood looking at this plain, skinny woman, whom he didn’t really know. Was this really about to happen?
He realized he had no idea how this situation had come about. He was deviating from his path of strict emotional control, a path he had walked in a steady line for two years. Now that he had stepped off he was beyond help. At that moment, his love for Bernadette turned to hatred. His anger at her leaving him bubbled to the surface for the first time since she had died.
He had drunk too much to control his fury. He felt hatred for God, the world, the priests, his neighbours who pitied him, for his parents for being elderly, for the life he had inherited and for the impossible job of being a father. He felt hatred for this scheming devil woman who was not the shy and proper Alice he knew. He hated himself. He hated everyone and everything and he was about to explode with anger.
‘Come here,’ he said roughly as he moved away from the range and towards her.
Alice stood frozen to the spot. If she did move towards him, she didn’t know what to do.
‘Come here,’ he said again, only louder, with impatience and irritation.
For a second this shocked Alice, terrifying her into silence. This was the opposite of kindness, this was not what she had planned. This was not the fumbling she had seen at the back gate of the hotel. She was rooted to the spot, as he took the few remaining steps to stand in front of her. Without even kissing or touching her, he roughly pulled her dress up to her waist and her panties down over her suspenders and stockings. He took the bottle out of her hand, and placed it on the draining board. Jerry was an Irishman. He might have been about to have sex for the first time in almost two years, he might have been angry and have lost all reason, but he wasn’t going to spill the Guinness.
Afterwards there were very few things Jerry remembered about that night. It would take too much time to go through the niceties and get Alice to bed, so he took her over the kitchen table.
He couldn’t make love to her and look at her face at the same time, and so he turned her over. He could do this only if he couldn’t see her eyes. He couldn’t kiss her. Kissing her was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted only sex, not affection. He wanted to punish her, badly. He remembered holding the back of her hair and accidentally pressing her face into the table without meaning to. His instincts were basic and animalistic, and if Alice hadn’t deliberately engineered this, his lovemaking would have bordered on rape.
Making love to Bernadette had been nothing like this but that was what he wanted right now. No affection, no loving conversation, no kissing, no laughter. He wanted nothing to be like it was with him and Bernadette. Nothing. His anger with Bernadette for leaving him with a child and his intense hatred for life spilt out of him and into Alice as he pounded and punished her. And she didn’t make a sound.
So angry was he and so consumed with loathing, he didn’t notice the tears he cried all the way through. He didn’t hear his own sobs.
She was relieved when he finished, staggered backwards against the range and picked up his bottle again.
‘Oh God, for feck’s sake,’ he said, as he wiped his mouth with his hand.
Was that a good thing for him to say, she wondered? Did that mean he enjoyed it? She had never imagined she would lose her virginity, ever. But when she had, she had not imagined it would be like this. She was horrified and in shock, but she was tough. She was repelled by the surroundings and the smell, by the fact that nothing tonight seemed to be going to her plan. She knew what she was aiming for and if this was how to get there, so be it. She saw the tears pouring down his face, but pretended she hadn’t.
&nbs
p; Alice felt physically sick. She felt worthless and abused. She had thought that Jerry would at least kiss her the way she had seen him kiss Bernadette, night after night, from her bedroom window. That her first time would be less brutal than this. Tears pricked at the back of her own eyes and she willed them to stay where they were. If this was what she had to do to get his ring on her finger, she would go through it in silence. If it took her one step away from her single room in a hotel attic, if she had to endure this night, she would do it.
Pushing down on the table with her hands, she levered herself up from where he had left her. Her dress was around her waist and she frantically pushed it back down.
She turned round and looked at him. So acute was her embarrassment that it was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her life. He wouldn’t meet her gaze, as he wiped his tears away with the back of his hand. Not looking at her was, in a way, a relief as he drank from the bottle.
‘Get undressed, Alice,’ he said as he undid his belt. ‘Get all your clothes off now.’
For a second, with horror, she thought he was going to beat her with the belt but realized it was to further loosen his trousers. She had walked into enough hotel bedrooms and seen enough men naked not to be shocked, but she knew he would never have spoken to Bernadette in that way. Alice was jealous of a ghost.
‘Get on your hands and knees on the floor,’ Jerry said and Alice didn’t recognize his voice. It was guttural and thick from the tears choking his throat.
She shook like a leaf and felt humiliated as, naked and cold, she obeyed awkwardly. Her face was feet away from the stinking pile of washing. Stale remnants of breadcrumbs and food dug into her palms and knees, stabbing into her skin like sharp tiny pins. As he pounded her repeatedly, this time for much longer, it took all her strength to keep her arms rigid to support herself. The buckle from his belt pierced the skin on the back of her thigh almost causing her to scream out in pain. She could not withstand his weight and when he finally came, her arms collapsed and her entire body crashed forward onto the floor with Jerry laid fully across her back. A virgin no more. She was at one with cold, dirty concrete. Her face was pressed downwards and she smelt urine where, earlier in the day, Nellie had had an accident while she toddled around.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Jerry sobbed and sobbed and, for the second time that night, Alice did not know what to do.
She lay perfectly still and waited for the sobbing to subside. What had she done wrong?
When Jerry finally stood up, he staggered up the stairs to his bed, saying nothing to Alice. She heard him crying, so loudly and painfully that she knew the emotion locked her out of the room. She gathered herself together, snatched up her clothes, holding them tightly in front of her, and collapsed onto the small sofa against the wall. She was scared he would come back down the stairs and demand more, but after half an hour or so, she heard the sobbing subside and knew he had fallen asleep.
Even though she hated the stuff, Alice went over to the Guinness and gulped the rest to calm her nerves and, even though she didn’t smoke, she lit one of Jerry’s cigarettes. She was in shock. But that was all. It was done now. She was no longer a virgin.
There was now something she knew she had to do. She took out of her bag the potion she had bought at the chemist’s and put the kettle on the kitchen range. She might have got what she wanted, but she wasn’t going to get more than she had asked for.
Of the two of them, only Jerry knew that there were sailors taking whores up against the dock walls with more feeling than he had felt before or after sex, with Alice in his own home. Alice had no idea that what had just taken place had nothing to do with her. That she could have been anyone.
Now she was occupying the bed he had shared with Bernadette. He had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware Alice was there, lying next to him but as far away as she could be. He felt worse with Alice in his bed than if he had been alone.
When he had been on his own, he would place his hand flat onto the mattress and slowly pass it over the bed. It didn’t always happen, but sometimes it would stop as it came up against her form. He would close his eyes and, as he breathed deeply, he would move his arm up and onto the milky-soft skin of her abdomen, which he knew as well as his own. He would run his hand up and across her breasts, over her face and into her wild hair. In the moonlight streaming in through the window he would see her eyes twinkle at him. And, just like that, he would lie and talk to her about Nellie and work, Maura and Tommy, and would fall asleep with her breath on his hand.
He knew now that would never happen again. He had never talked to Bernadette about Alice and here Alice was, lying in her place.
At first light, Alice slipped out to the outhouse to clean herself up. The sticky mess, which had spread across her thighs, had made her legs itch all night. She couldn’t get it off her skin quickly enough as she scrubbed and scrubbed until her legs were red raw.
Whilst Jerry still slept, she cleaned the kitchen and put the nappies into the boiler. When he came down the stairs, smelt the frying bacon and potatoes and saw the clean kitchen, he was grateful. He knew what had happened the night before and he knew his duty.
He was ashamed. He knew he had behaved like an animal. Catholic guilt swamped him. His emotions had been primeval. It hadn’t mattered that it was Alice, who had been good to him. He felt as though he had been possessed by something bad and vowed to himself that, as long as he lived, he would never behave like that again.
The previous night had been a passage back into the real world. He had vented his anger, which had bordered on loathing, at his Bernadette. His anger and venom extended to the hospital, the midwife and everyone else he had blamed for her death and for leaving him with the life he now had. He had been consumed by an evil rage that had been locked deep down inside him since the moment Bernadette had died and last night it had erupted with a Vesuvian ferocity.
He had taken it out on Alice. He had abused her. He had punished Alice for things that had nothing to do with her. Jerry had heard men talking at the docks who had treated a whore better than he had treated Alice last night. As he woke his first thought had been, Oh God, what have I done?
He was worried about facing Alice, but that was secondary to the realization that he knew what he had to do and what his responsibility now was.
‘Morning, Queen,’ he said nervously, as he came downstairs.
As he looked at the clean kitchen, it occurred to him that it really didn’t matter who took the role of a wife and a mother in his house. He didn’t love Alice but he needed routine and order back in his life, and this woman could give him that. He needed someone to share rearing Nellie with him. The women were right. It was near impossible for a man to bring up a daughter on his own. It wasn’t the proper thing to do. He owed it to Nellie to find her a mother.
Before he sat at the table she had scrubbed, the table on which she had lost her virginity, he walked over to the range where she was leaning over the pan, frying his breakfast.
‘Alice, will ye marry me?’
He said it too quickly. It was too complete a statement; he left no room for ambiguity. The hangover from the Guinness blended with Catholic guilt and a misplaced sense of duty. Prompted by loneliness and despair, he had proposed to a woman who was as far from Bernadette as it was possible to be.
Alice smiled. She had got there. Not in the way she had thought, but she had achieved her goal. Neither of them had wanted emotional contact; only one had wanted sex, as a means to an end; and she had got there. Just as she had surmised, he felt duty bound, out of decency and honour, to propose once he had slept with her.
Now she had to leave the house quickly, before any of the neighbours realized she had spent the night. If they saw her leave, they would also know the truth: that Alice had won.
She sat on the bus back to the Grand, looking out of the window. The seats were made of green leather and the windows were so dirty she could barely see outside. She rub
bed the condensation from the inside window with her gloved hand and stared through the circle she had made at the passing houses, at smoke billowing out of chimneys, at the warehouses, pump rooms and workshops.
She was sore. Walking to the bus stop had been painful. She felt as though the back and inside of her thighs were bruised. When she had gone to the outhouse, her urine had stung, and her scalp hurt, where Jerry had pulled her hair. She felt as though every breath she had taken since last night had been a shallow one.
She was tense and confused but, as always, acting and hiding it well. When she closed her eyes, she could see and smell the hard dried egg and grease on the kitchen table into which Jerry had pushed her face, as he had forced his way into her. But it was over now. She was betrothed. It had all been worth it. And here she was, thirty- two, smelling of sex and had still never been kissed.
Chapter Six
Jerry and Alice married less than a month later. Alice wore a very expensive outfit that had fortuitously been left hanging in one of the hotel rooms by a guest travelling on to America. It fitted Alice’s short and skinny frame well. The label said Moda Paris, London and New York. Alice had read the label over and over again, when she realized the outfit was going to remain unclaimed. This was now hers. Her wedding outfit.
‘How many women from the docks have married in anything as grand as this,’ she said to the head porter, who was disappointed that Alice was keeping the outfit. As Alice was head housekeeper, all unclaimed property was hers to do with as she wished. As head porter, he would have become the beneficiary of anything Alice didn’t want for herself.
The wedding was to be held in the register office and Alice had decided that Jerry needed a suit, something there wasn’t much call for on the docks. Jerry was puzzled by this and his first inclination was to pay a visit to Eric Berry, the pawnbroker’s. Not only had he never owned a suit, he didn’t know anyone else who had one either. On the day he had married Bernadette, he had worn one of his uncle’s, which his auntie had kept in the wardrobe since the day her husband had died. It had originally been bought in from Berry’s shop for his uncle’s own wedding, which Jerry remembered attending as a child. Since the day Jerry had married Bernadette, it had hung in the same wardrobe as always, with a calico cloth draped over it to protect it from the moths and dust.
The Four Streets Saga Page 10