by Marie Joseph
She climbed into bed, comforted.
Five
THE CONCERTS PUT on in the Methodist Hall at the top of the street were the highlights of the dark winter months. There was a raised stage at one end of the big room, with curtains that sometimes swished open and shut, but more often had to be dragged across by unseen hands. The upright piano had a tinny ring to it, but Mr Cronshawe, the organist, played it as if it were a Bechstein grand.
Every single seat had been filled for the Thursday and Friday evenings, and on the Saturday chairs had been brought in from the houses over the street and set in the aisles.
The newsagent’s shop had sold out of coloured crepe paper. Anxious mothers had gathered it into frilly skirts, and fashioned poke bonnets out of a circle of cardboard plus a lot of imagination.
Miss Dobson from the potato-pie shop always filled the spot before the interval to sing the same song, with her tiny notebook of words clenched beneath her jutting one-piece bosom.
‘Come into the garden, Maud!’ she implored in her fruity contralto voice. ‘I am here at the gate alone!’
‘An’ no bleedin’ wonder with a mug like that!’ Walter West, sitting between his mother and Clara’s father, whispered so loudly that the two rows in front and two behind had to stifle their giggles.
Lily West had shrunk since the ending of the war two years before, in 1918. First Jim, then Bert lay buried over in France. When Joe had been reported missing the week before the Armistice, the flesh had fallen away from Lily’s beaky nose and her once magnificent breasts hung like elongated sacks.
Though Joe had come back after the Armistice – turning up like a rotten penny, as he said himself – he had never lived in his mother’s house again. Now and then he’d walk down the street with his slight swagger, impressing the neighbours with his camelhair coat, ordering his mother to hold out her hands so that he could fill them with pound notes. Before disappearing once again.
The interval had passed without Lily noticing. If she’d turned round in her seat just before the lights were dimmed for the second half of the performance she would have seen a tall young man standing at the back with his arms folded and his trilby hat pushed to the back of his head. But this was the moment they’d all been waiting for; this was the only reason Lily had deserted her own fireside to sit on a rock-hard chair with a lot of mealy-mouthed Methodists – Mr Haydock excepted, of course.
Lily fidgeted through a drawn-out dancing display, with five small girls attired in bright yellow crepe paper pretending to be sunbeams. But when Clara came on, walking slowly to centre stage, Lily glanced sideways and saw Mr Haydock’s face light up with an expression of pride that brought tears to her own eyes.
The five small girls grouped themselves round Clara, looking up at her with wobbly smiles. Mr Cronshawe played a single opening chord and Clara began to sing.
At thirteen she was not quite a woman but definitely no longer a child. The young man at the back pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. By all that was holy, little Clara Haydock had grown into a raving, heart-stopping beauty! His mouth, beneath a recently acquired moustache, dropped open in astonishment. Why had he never seen it before? How could she have been living all those years right across the street from his mam without his seeing how she would be some day? Small high breasts were accentuated by the too-tight bodice of the long white dress, run up by a woman in the next street for last year’s Anniversary Sunday services in chapel.
‘Them tucks should have been let out,’ Lily chuntered to herself through her protruding teeth.
‘Lower the neckline of that ruddy awful frock and take that ribbon out of her hair, and she’d knock them for six at the Metropolitan down the Edgware Road,’ the man at the back told himself. ‘Marie Lloyd? She’d’ve been wasting her time!’
Clara’s voice poured out from the rickety stage over her audience, every single word clear as a bell.
‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,’ she sang, her green eyes sparkling. ‘To shine for Him each day. In every way to please Him. At home, at school, at play.’
Loving her audience, knowing most of them all her life, her warmth and natural affection seemed to draw them to her through the glorious sound of her voice, so that, closing their eyes, they could almost imagine she was reaching out to touch their faces with a gentle hand. Worried frowns smoothed out, tense shoulders relaxed; even Lily West’s chin lifted and her eyes lost their lacklustre look.
‘I will ask Jesus to help me. To keep my heart from sin,’ Clara sang, and the centre-stage light shone down on her hair so that it glistened and glittered as if it had been powdered with gold dust.
When the clapping had died down, the yellow paper sunbeams, at a signal from Mr Cronshawe, ran from the stage. Left alone, Clara held her hands clasped together, waited for the softly played introduction and began her encore.
The war had been over for merely two years. Almost everyone in the audience had lost a husband, a father, a brother or a son. The world was slowly getting its breath back from the memory of the slaughter in the mud of Flanders’ fields. Men coming back from the trenches were without jobs; some of them without homes. Lily West had taken in her widowed daughter-in-law and the three children, and the walls of the terraced house bulged with little boys and bigger ones, usually in a state of combat. Pushing, shoving, rolling on the floor when they could find a space, Lily trod the path from the fire oven to the table all day long, growing scrawnier and more top heavy with every passing day.
Now, in the warm darkness with her hands folded on her lap and nothing to do but listen and watch, her face took on an expression of touching serenity. Clara was singing like an angel come down from the heaven Lily didn’t believe in. Suddenly her bolster-shaped bosom gave an enormous heave and a tear rolled down Lily’s beak of a nose to hang suspended there.
‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding …’
The silvery voice rose and fell. Clara was enjoying herself now. She could see the white blur of upturned faces and sense their rapt attention. She had been nervous just before she came on, but the minute she began to sing all trace of nervousness had gone. She could do anything she wished up there alone on the stage. She could sing so softly the people out there would lean forward in their seats. She could throw her voice and sing so loudly they would fidget with surprise.
‘Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams …’
It was tempting to look up and point when she sang about the moon and, although Clara had followed the minister’s wife’s instructions at the rehearsals, she knew now that the moment had come to stand perfectly still without moving.
‘Till the day when I’ll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.’
Softly, softly she ended the plaintive song. Gently Mr Cronshawe let his hands slide from the piano keys. And the seconds of silence before the clapping began told their own tale. Flushed with the heady taste of success, Clara moved backwards to take her place in the closing tableau, standing apparently humbly in her place at the back, but hearing her own voice soaring above the others in a spirited rendering of ‘God Save the King’.
Joe West tried the door of the shop twenty minutes later, walked through into the back room and gave Clara what she declared was the fright of her life. She was standing in front of the little round shaving mirror over the slopstone, still in her white dress, holding her long hair up on top of her head and smiling at herself.
‘Joe!’ As if she was still the child he remembered she ran into his arms, hugging him, covering his face with eager little kisses. ‘Oh, I wish you’d seen me tonight!’ She stepped back, throwing her arms wide in a gesture that was pure theatre. ‘I’m going to go on the stage, Joe. Just as soon as I’m old enough.’ She pouted. ‘In about two years. Marie Lloyd was a star when she was sixteen. I’ve read all about her in a book.’
‘That’s nothing.’ Joe grinned at her, stroking the embryo moustache with the tip of a
finger. ‘She’s old now, at least fifty, and she’s no beauty, but when she sings “My Old Man Said Follow the Van”, you can hear her right to the back of the gallery.’ He pretended to consider. ‘You weren’t bad tonight, Miss Haydock. Room for improvement, of course …’
‘Joe! You heard me!’ Clara flopped down in a chair, to sit with knees apart, looking up at Joe from beneath long dark eyelashes. ‘You were there all the time!’ She glanced towards the door. ‘Sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing, Joe. Me dad’ll be back soon. He’s counting the concert money with the chapel treasurer.’
‘So you won’t be short of a bob or two for a few weeks?’
‘Oh, Joe! You’re still a comic, an’ I do luv you.’
He smiled at her through narrowed eyes. Still the same young Clara. Saying straight out just what came into her head. Living with a man like Seth Haydock had left its mark, and yet when he’d watched her singing up there on that Methody stage there’d been a something smouldering in her eyes, some star quality, that Joe had recognized at once.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said, meaning it. ‘One of these fine days I’ll come for you an’ scoop you up in me arms, like the Red Shadow, and carry you off to me tent in the desert.’ He shot out an arm and glanced at the silver watch strapped to his wrist, a present bought at Mappin and Webb’s in Oxford Street, London, by the only girl in a quartet of novelty cyclists now playing at the Empire Theatre – the girl he now shared a room with in London’s Bayswater.
Clara jumped up, staring at him in dismay, feverishly searching her mind for some way to detain him. The adrenaline was still flowing swiftly through her veins, and somehow Joe typified all the excitement she desperately craved. He was so handsome sitting there in his double-breasted coat, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash in the vague direction of the hearth. He was a bit like Rudolph Valentino, except that Joe’s eyes were blue and his hair was curly and not smarmed back with Brilliantine. Joe had got on in the world, just as she had known he would. Joe was clever. He lived in London, far away from this boring old town with the Sunday School concert the highlight of the year.
‘Stop and have a drink,’ she said suddenly. ‘There’s a bottle of rhubarb wine on the top shelf of the cupboard. It’s been there for years and years.’ She climbed on her chair and reached up into the cupboard set into the alcove at the side of the fireplace. ‘A customer gave it to me dad instead of paying for his clogs to be mended.’ She jumped down holding the dusty bottle triumphantly aloft. ‘It’s a bit cloudy, but it’ll be all right. We’ll have to drink it out of cups, but that won’t matter.’
‘He’ll half kill you, Clara Haydock.’ Sipping the sweet drink, Joe raised dark eyebrows at the unexpected strength in the cloying wine. ‘Drink is the curse of the devil. Have you forgotten? One sip of that an’ you’re set on the road to hell.’
‘It’s only made out of rhubarb, you soppy a’ porth.’ Clara drank deeply from the cup then opened her eyes wide. ‘Rhubarb’s not liquor. Not like gin and rum and that kind of thing.’ Reaching for the bottle she refilled both their cups. ‘We’ll have to drink it all, Joe. I can’t put it back half full. Me dad’ll never miss it. He’s forgotten it’s there, anyroad.’
‘The bottle?’ Joe nodded towards it. ‘What you going to do with that, then?’
The drink was making Clara light-headed. Gulping it too quickly she ignored the feeling of nausea. Defiantly she took another long swig, feeling it run down her throat, making her gasp.
‘Nice bit o’ rhubarb gone into this, Joe,’ she giggled. ‘Come off Mr Pilkington’s allotment, this did. You know Mr Pilkington? He sings in the choir. You remember him, Joe. Told the police on you that time you lit the bonfire on the spare land the night afore Guy Fawkes.’
‘To Mr Pilkington!’ Refilling his cup, Joe held it aloft. In spite of his head for drink, the well-matured wine was making his eyelids droop. He’d been on and off trains all day, in to Yorkshire and back across the Pennines. His ambition to be a music hall manager before he was twenty-one had been thwarted by the attitude of a jumped-up pompous theatre manager from Sheffield. ‘Music halls are finished,’ he’d said, pointing the stem of an evil-smelling pipe at Joe. ‘Revues are the thing. That and picture palaces. Whoever sent you up here on spec wanted his head seeing to.’
Was the old devil right? Joe swirled the wine round in his cup before drinking deeply. Things were changing, that much was certain. And when the wind changed direction Joe West followed suit.
It was time he moved on. The girl he was living with was twenty-eight and well past her best. He stared at the bowed head of the young girl kneeling now on the rug in front of his chair.
The long white-gold hair had fallen forward hiding her face. Joe felt an ache in his fingers making him want to stretch out a hand to twist the silken strands in his grasp, pulling her head up so that she was forced to look into his eyes. It was three days since he’d lain with a woman, and at twenty years of age Joe’s appetite for lovemaking was at its most voracious. She would be like clay in his hands, his little Clara. Taking her innocence would be like taking sweets from a baby.
‘Your dadda … ?’ His voice was husky with the need in him.
‘He told me to go to bed. Him and the treasurer were going to the minister’s house to talk. They allus do after a concert.’
Her voice was slurred. She was halfway to being drunk, but not too drunk to know what she was doing. This was the way Joe liked his women to be. Pliant and yet in control. The heat rose in him as he looked down the sweetheart neckline of the white dress, seeing the tender hollow between her young developing breasts.
It was then the shame came over him. Jumping up so quickly that the chair rocked violently, he took his cup over to the slopstone and rinsed it under the tap.
‘Give me that bottle.’ He lifted it up and grimaced at its emptiness. How on earth had they managed to drink a full bottle between them? His legs trembled beneath him, but his gait was steady. ‘Now give me that cup.’ He tried to take Clara’s cup away from her, but before she handed it over she drained it to the dregs. ‘Now go to bed.’
She fell into giggles as he helped her to her feet, leaning against him, staring up into his eyes with her face all twisted, the features somehow undefined.
‘I do luv you, Joe.’
‘Stop saying that!’ He had to hold her to stop her falling down. ‘You’re too big a girl to say that to a fella. For Christ’s sake, Clara! Stop saying that!’
‘An’ you stop swearing. It’s wicked to take the name of the Lord in vain.’
She was slurring her words, finding difficulty in getting her tongue round the syllables. He held her from him, looking down into her face with a hopeless expression. She was so beautiful, so young, so very, very young. Her skin had a warmth to it as if she spent hours sitting in the sun, and yet his mother had told him young Clara worked down in the basement of a jobbing printer’s in Ainsworth Street, stapling sheets of paper, packing orders, coming home in the evenings with her fingers stained with printer’s ink and her eyes smudged with exhaustion.
‘An’ that’s because Seth Haydock wouldn’t hear of her going in the mill,’ Lily had said. ‘At least she’d have had a trade in her fingers as a weaver. Aye, and had some young company. Fancy a bright lass like Clara working all day with two old men and a boy apprentice. I reckon it’s a crying shame.’
Putting her from him, Joe buttoned the empty bottle inside his coat. ‘I’m going now, but just you think on and grow up, our kid, because I’ll be back.’ He turned at the door. ‘And get to bed. Go on! If your dad comes and catches you like that he’ll murder you. An’ the next time you have rhubarb make sure it’s the kind you put custard on. Right?’
By the time her father came home from drinking his cocoa with the minister she would be in bed sleeping it off. And if Mr. Haydock hadn’t taken the bottle of wine down from the cupboard in all these years, then he’d more than likely forgotten its existence. Chuckling to him
self, Joe patted the bulge in his overcoat. He supposed he ought to call in his mam’s house, just to say hello and goodbye, but he’d left money for her in the usual place on the mantelpiece. And besides, the bed he had in mind would be a sight warmer than the slippery horsehair sofa in his mother’s living room.
Rhubarb wine … Joe laughed to himself as he stepped off the kerb and missed his footing. Who would’ve thought it? He bet young Clara would have a right head on her the next morning. Whistling through his teeth, Joe turned the corner without a backward glance, narrowly missing bumping into a thickset man wearing a navy blue overcoat, a hard hat set squarely on his forehead.
‘Goodnight, Joe.’
‘’Night, Mr Haydock.’
‘Nasty night.’
‘For them who have to be out in it.’
Seth walked on, shaking his head. Where Joe West was going at that time of night was none of his business, but if rumours were true then he was heading for a house a few streets away where a young war widow was said to always have a ready welcome for Lily West’s wandering boy. Seth quickened his step. It took all sorts, and as far as he knew Joe was good to his mother. He opened the door of his shop and stepped inside. It was none of his business anyroad. Live and let live had always been the code he went by. Skirting the long bench and moving round the counter, Seth walked steadily towards the dividing door, pushing it open with one hand and taking off his hat with the other.
‘Clara!’ Coming from darkness into light he blinked rapidly. ‘What are you doing up at this time?’ He unbuttoned the heavy coat. ‘You should’ve gone straight to bed, love. You’ll be fit for nothing in the morning.’
Slowly, stretching her arms above her head, Clara stood up from the chair. Her hair was falling over her face and, as Seth stared at her in shocked surprise, she tossed her head to push it back. The sudden movement made her wince and from the vacant expression in her large green eyes he guessed she was trying to get him into focus.