Charlie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘He cheated me,’ she said in a low growl. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

  Charlie sensed her mother wasn’t prepared to say anything more, and in all probability she would start finding fault with her if she stayed any longer.

  ‘I’m glad you told me all that,’ she said cautiously. ‘Perhaps next time I come you’ll feel up to telling me a bit more. But I have to go now, Mum, Ivor’s expecting me back. Shall I wheel you back into the day room?’

  ‘No, leave me here,’ Sylvia snapped. ‘I can’t stand any of those morons, they’re all so fucking cheerful.’

  Charlie shook her head sadly. She didn’t like her mother swearing, she’d always been so ladylike before she was hurt. ‘Bye, Mum,’ she said, bending to kiss her. ‘I’ll come again next week. Try not to be grumpy with the nurses. They are trying to help you.’

  ‘Grumpy! Who do you think you’re talking to?’ Sylvia snapped back. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be in pain constantly, to be dependent on someone for everything, even going to the toilet? How dare you swan in here when it suits you and tell me not to be grumpy?’

  Charlie tried to calm her mother down, but she couldn’t. She left after a few minutes with a tirade of abuse following her – that she was heartless, selfish and just like her father.

  Staff Nurse Dodds came into the hall as Charlie was putting on her coat. By her sympathetic expression Charlie guessed she’d heard the shouting.

  ‘Don’t take it too seriously,’ she said gently. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘I think she wants me to run out on her too,’ Charlie said, and a tear trickled down her cheek. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘You give as good as you get, but still keep visiting,’ the nurse said. ‘I think she’ll run out of steam before long. I just wish she’d put a bit of that energy into helping herself. She could walk again, you know. She just doesn’t choose to try.’

  ‘Thank you for being so patient with her.’ Charlie wiped her eyes with her hand. ‘If I was in your shoes I’d slap her.’

  ‘I’ve been tempted.’ Staff Nurse Dodds smiled and patted Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Now I’ve found what a lovely daughter she’s got I’ll be tempted to shake some sense into her. But a psychiatrist is coming to see her tomorrow. We have every hope he’ll sort her out.’

  As Beryl had told her that morning that she wouldn’t need any help with washing-up in the evening, Charlie went round to see Ivor rather than returning to the pub. All the way home from Kingsbridge she’d been crying. It was lucky there were so few people on the bus.

  Ivor took one look at her pink-rimmed eyes and gave her a hug. He smelled terrible – fish, bait and pipe tobacco – but it was his reassuring usual smell and his big arms around her felt so comforting.

  ‘Just as well that I made enough fish stew for both of us,’ he said, lifting her chin up and smiling down at her. ‘It’s one of my specialities and not to be missed. So sit yourself down and I’ll see how it’s doing.’

  He made her a mug of coffee. Charlie had developed a real taste for his favourite drink. He used Camp coffee, which was made from chicory and in a bottle. He added a couple of large spoons of condensed milk, three spoons of sugar and gave it a vigorous stir. Ivor said it was even better with a tot of navy rum in it, but he claimed she was too young to try that.

  Her feet were wet, she felt sad and dejected, but the coffee warmed her inside, and when Minnie came and sat by her, her chin on her knee, dark, soulful eyes fixed on her adoringly, she began to feel better. Little by little she told him about the afternoon. Although she had a natural reticence to discuss private affairs with anyone, especially such shocking things in her mother’s past, she had to get it off her chest. Ivor never sat in judgment on anyone, he didn’t divulge confidences, and he was the most worldly, understanding person she’d ever met.

  ‘So what are you actually upset about?’ he asked once she’d told him everything. He put a large bowl of steaming fish stew in front of her. Charlie sipped cautiously at the somewhat grey-looking mass. To her surprise it was delicious. ‘Are you disgusted because she was a stripper? Angry that she didn’t tell you about herself before, or just hurt because she rounded on you after revealing so much?’

  Charlie half smiled. Ivor had an amazing knack of being able to lay things wide open.

  ‘The last bit really. I thought we were really getting somewhere at last. If she’d told me about her past before all this happened I would have been disgusted, I expect. But looking at it logically, it explains a great deal about her. She didn’t have much choice, did she? In her shoes I might have done the same.’

  Ivor sat back in his chair and began to clean out his pipe, looking at her over the top of it. ‘Exactly. Becoming an adult’s all about learning to understand others,’ he said. ‘A few people are born with it, but most of us only learn that through having some sort of crisis ourselves. Looking back at when I was very young I can remember doing things that I’m a bit ashamed of now, but at the time it was the only course open to me.’

  ‘Like what?’ Charlie asked. He had told her a little about his life. She knew about him losing his wife and daughter, and that he sank very low afterwards. He’d often spoken too of the old man Joseph who used to own this place and had taken him in. But he’d never talked about when he was young.

  ‘Well, I was born into a very poor family, in Plymouth,’ he said with a bashful grin. ’Dad was a fisherman and Mum took in washing. There were seven of us, and not much to eat when Dad didn’t get a good catch. One time when I was about nine it had been too rough for Dad to put to sea for days. There was absolutely nothing in the house to eat and the two youngest were crying with hunger all the time.

  ‘I went out up on to the Hoe, there’s a lot of fine big houses there and I had the idea of begging at doors. As I wandered around I could smell this wonderful dinner smell and I was so hungry I kept going up and down until I located it coming from a kitchen in a basement. I crept down the stairs and peeped through the window. There was this big fat cook with a bright red face just getting a huge pudding out of a pan. It was in a china bowl, tied up with a rag on the top. She lifted it out and put it on the table. I didn’t stop to think when she disappeared out the back, I just slipped in through the door, grabbed the pudding and ran out with it.’

  Charlie laughed. She could imagine the ragged little red-headed boy running through the streets holding the hot pudding by its cloth.

  ‘Was it good?’ she asked.

  ‘The best thing I’ve ever eaten,’ he said, rolling his eyes and rubbing his big stomach. ‘It was steak and kidney. Mum never asked any questions when I ran in with it. Just divided it up between us all and we wolfed it down. Now the moral of that story is a bit shaky. It was stealing, by rights we should have all got belly-ache, but we didn’t. It stopped the little ones crying. It gave Dad enough strength to go out fishing the next day. It made Mum smile again. For all we know the cook up at that house might have got the sack for losing her pudding. But none of us thought beyond our own needs.’

  ‘Surely you aren’t ashamed of that now?’ Charlie laughed. ‘It wasn’t so terrible.’

  ‘Maybe not. But it made me steal other things after that. A dress for Mum off a washing line, vegetables down the market, milk off doorsteps. There but for the grace of God I might have taken to a life of crime and ended up in prison. Now your Mum’s situation wasn’t so very different. She only did what she did to survive. So maybe dancing without any clothes in front of men shocks you, but as she so rightly said, you’ve never been that hungry.’

  ‘But I didn’t like what she said about using men,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘What she said is honest,’ he said gently. ‘And it’s the same the world over. Women use men as providers, men use women to give them comfort. While I was in the Far East I saw streets full of brothels and I have to admit I was like all the other sailors, I used to go in and buy a woman for the night. Maybe you think that men wh
o do such things are animals and ought to control their urges, but if it wasn’t for me and those other men, how would those poor girls and their families live? It’s just the same up in Soho. The men go there for a good time, the women charge them for it. It’s a fair exchange.’

  Charlie pondered on this for a moment. She thought she’d sooner die of hunger than sell her body, but she could understand the point Ivor was trying to make. ‘Mum said that Dad cheated her in the end. What do you think she meant by that?’

  Ivor looked at Charlie and felt a deep sadness. It seemed to him that this innocent girl was in danger of having all her happy memories of childhood eroded beneath her, because her parents had built a life together which was based on dark secrets, underhand dealings and lies. It was like a dormant volcano. Today there had been a small eruption which had spewed up some of the muck below. He thought that before long the entire thing would blow up and then she’d find a great deal worse. He wished he knew a way to spare her that.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘Maybe when she fell in love with Jin she believed he was different to other men, and that he was free of any vices. But few men are entirely pure, Charlie, there is a darker side to most of us. You must remember that when you fall in love, and try never to place anyone on a pedestal. That way you spare yourself the pain of seeing them tumbling off.’

  Back at the Victoria Inn later that night, Charlie lay in bed thinking about everything her mother had revealed and Ivor’s words on the subject. She was aware she couldn’t be totally objective, she’d never been hungry, or in love. She didn’t suppose she could even think of herself as poor either, she might have absolutely nothing left in her purse right now, but tomorrow was pay day and she had a wardrobe stuffed with expensive clothes and shoes. On top of that she had the hidden box of treasures and money.

  What was she going to do about it? Mr Wyatt had said the Official Receiver had placed a seal on the door at ‘Windways’ and no one but the officials would be allowed in there until after the bankruptcy hearing next month, so she was very glad she’d grabbed them while she had the chance, but when was she going to own up to her mother about them? She hadn’t even dared tell Ivor.

  Thinking back to his tale about the stolen pudding, she had a feeling it would have his full approval. Perhaps she should tell him tomorrow and ask his advice about telling her mother?

  ‘No, you won’t,’ she whispered to herself, ‘you’ve leant on him too much already. Grow up and work things out for yourself.’

  A couple of days later, on Sunday morning, Charlie had the first real panic attack since she’d arrived in Salcombe. Ivor didn’t expect her to work on Sundays and usually she stayed in bed until late, then collected Minnie for a walk, or caught the bus down to Slapton Sands if it was warm enough for sun-bathing. But it had been raining when she woke at about ten, so she’d walked along the main street to buy a newspaper. Suddenly she felt acutely lonely.

  Despite the rain there were lots of people about, and everyone but her seemed to have someone. Young lovers holding hands, married couples with their children, even the old ladies going off to church seemed to be in twos or threes. She saw other girls around her own age, giggling and laughing as they dodged from doorway to doorway, keeping out of the rain. It struck her that she’d give anything to see June again, just to have one day being silly, laughing at everything, following boys and chattering.

  She knew June would be back now from her holiday in Scotland, but she had a feeling she wouldn’t really be welcome if she caught the bus to Dartmouth to go and see her. After leaving the Mellings’, Charlie had written them a thank-you letter and enclosed her new address, but June hadn’t even sent her a postcard while she was away.

  Charlie’s eyes prickled with tears. The saddest thing of all was that she knew in her heart that she and June had nothing in common any more. School had been the main bond between them in their long friendship, and now she knew it was unlikely she could return there in September, the cracks that had appeared while she’d been living in the same house had grown too wide to bridge.

  But what was she going to do if she couldn’t return to school? By the end of September Ivor wouldn’t need her any more. Now she came to think about it, there wouldn’t be any other jobs then either. Everything died in autumn, the hotels and shops would be sacking rather than hiring new staff.

  It was then panic overtook her. What if she ended up sleeping rough like her mother had done when the barrister and his wife threw her out? Visions of her mother living rough on the streets of London came to her and her heart began to pound with fear. Instinctively she turned down towards the harbour to find Ivor.

  As always, he was sitting by the door of his shack smoking his pipe and watching the boats coming into the harbour. Charlie ran to him like a child, for once even ignoring Minnie who came hurtling enthusiastically towards her.

  Ivor jumped out of his seat in alarm. ‘What on earth!’ he exclaimed, and as she threw herself into his arms sobbing wildly, he drew her inside the shack out of the rain.

  ‘There, there,’ he said holding her tightly. ‘Now, calm down and tell me what’s happened. Is it your mum?’

  It was some minutes before she was able to tell him and almost as soon as she’d blurted out her fears, she felt foolish.

  Putting his arm around her shoulder, he led her out the back of the shack, across the tiny yard and into his cottage. He sat her down and put the kettle on. Minnie sat looking at Charlie, clearly puzzled by her distress.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charlie sobbed. ‘I’m being silly.’

  ‘You aren’t being silly at all,’ he said gently. ‘You had to look ahead sometime, and a wet Sunday is as good a time as any. So why don’t we sit here and discuss all the possibilities, eh?’

  He made her one of his coffees, but this time he did put a spot of rum in it, as he said, purely for medicinal purposes.

  ‘Now, let’s see what we’ve got,’ he said, pulling at his beard. ‘Right now you have a job and a home, but they will go by the end of September. That’s five weeks away. Don’t you think that’s long enough to find some alternative?’

  Charlie gave a weak shrug.

  ‘I think it’s a pretty long time,’ he said. ‘Considering during that time you are going to get your exam results, and you’ll know the result of the bankruptcy hearing. I suspect too, though I can’t be certain, the council will have found a place for you and your mother to live, because they can’t possibly let her stay at the nursing home indefinitely.’

  ‘But what if I can’t find another job?’

  Ivor looked across the table at her fear-filled eyes and smiled at her naivety. ‘The days of the workhouse are long gone, Charlie, we do have something called National Assistance these days,’ he said. ‘I suppose folk who’ve lived up on the hill in Kingswear wouldn’t be aware of such things, but it means the government will give you and your mum money for food and to pay the rent. There’s no question of you sleeping rough, or starving.’

  Charlie smiled sheepishly at his teasing words. She had known there was such a thing as National Assistance, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she and her mother would be eligible for it.

  ‘That takes care of the immediate future,’ he said seeing the relief on her face. ‘But you should be thinking a bit further ahead, Charlie. What do you want to do with your life?’

  ‘What’s the point in even thinking what I want to do?’ she said sharply. ‘I’ve got no choice, have I? I’ll have to look after Mum.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ Ivor shook his head. ‘If you refuse they’ll get her a home help. No one would expect a girl of your age to look after her alone.’

  ‘She’ll expect it,’ Charlie said. Her lip quivered and Ivor knew then that this was the real reason behind today’s panic attack, even if she wasn’t aware of it.

  Minnie moved to sit between Ivor’s knees, but she continued to look at Charlie, her head on one side, almost as though she understood wha
t was being said.

  ‘My father always expected I would stay fishing with him,’ Ivor said, fondling his dog’s ears. ‘My mother thought I would always be around to mind the little ones. But I fell in love with a girl, married her and made a home of my own. They had to accept that.’

  ‘But your parents had each other and neither of them was crippled.’

  ‘No, they weren’t crippled, but my father was getting frail and my mother’s legs were so swollen that she couldn’t climb the stairs, so I was in much the same position as you, and I had to choose. I chose to be with Sarah. I still helped out when I could, but I distanced myself, and they managed okay. You must do this too.’

  ‘But I’d feel mean.’

  ‘You’d become mean if you allow yourself to be forced into something which will make you unhappy. Perhaps that’s the reason your mother is the way she is, Charlie. As you said yourself, she didn’t ever get any choice about anything, did she?’

  The sun came out later and Ivor suggested they went out in his boat. Charlie made some sandwiches and a flask of coffee and they set off. Once out at sea Charlie’s spirits rose. The sea which had been a dismal grey just a couple of hours earlier was suddenly blue again, and the wind whipping her hair off her face was exhilarating. Ivor let her take the helm for a while while he fished for mackerel at the stern with Minnie sitting up beside him. The utter peace, broken only by the cries of seagulls and the slapping of waves against the bows, was very soothing.

  They were just about to go about to sail back to the harbour when Charlie caught sight of a sleek yacht speeding in their direction. There was something about the scarlet flash across the white bows which looked familiar and she pointed it out to Ivor.

  He shaded his eyes and looked. ‘I’ve seen it moored in the harbour but I don’t know who it belongs to.’

  Charlie sat in the stern watching enviously as the yacht came closer to them. She could see two men wearing nothing but shorts leaning out on the port side as they flew along. She thought it must be thrilling to harness the wind to drive you. Ivor’s little fishing boat was lovely, but even at full speed it only chugged along, it didn’t have that excitement factor.