by Marie Joseph
‘Oh, it’s you, Dadda.’ She smiled, and as she did so the upcurve of her lips turned into a grimace. She swayed where she stood, blinking at him as if the soft light from the gas lamp hurt her eyes.
‘I feel sick.’ She clutched her stomach. ‘Oh, Dadda, I’m proper sick.’
Seth managed to lead her over to the slopstone just in time. Holding her head as she vomited, his glance was caught by the two cups on the draining board. Disbelieving, stunned and shaken, he sniffed at the dregs, his own stomach heaving in disbelief as he realized the truth.
Filthy, evil drink! And two cups! Seth closed his eyes for a moment, drawing a long breath. The shock was sending waves of prickly heat all down his body.
‘Clara!’ His voice was a shout. ‘Look at me!’
Her small face when she lifted it was pitiful to behold. Eyes, nose and mouth all running moisture, a sour stench coming from her, and yellow stains marking the front of the white cotton dress.
‘I will ask Jesus to help me. To keep my heart from sin.’
From somewhere inside his head Seth heard the words she’d sung just a few hours before, standing on the stage like an angel from heaven. A cold hard anger was growing inside him, but gently he wiped her face and led her to the foot of the stairs.
Upstairs in the tiny back bedroom he undressed her, fumbling with the buttons down the front of her high-necked flannelette nightgown, and tucked her into the narrow bed.
‘Joe West’s been here, hasn’t he?’ The question was asked in Seth’s normal quiet voice, but his heart was hammering in his throat fit to choke him.
‘I love Joe. He’s going to get me on the stage.’ Clara’s green eyes were wide and trusting. ‘Joe’s my friend.’ Even as she spoke she was asleep, childish mouth drooping open on a slight snore. The ends of her long hair were sticky with vomit, and with ice-cold control Seth dipped her flannel in the water jug on the marble-topped washstand and wiped the worst away. Then, taking the candlestick in his hand, he limped from the room, reaching the bottom stair before he realized he was still wearing his thick melton overcoat.
The fear was in him. The fear that had never really left him since the day he first heard Clara sing. Shaking now, he tore the coat from his shoulders and flung it to the farthest corner of the room.
His Clara was special – special and different. As different from the girls in the street as chalk from cheese. But she was growing up. He squeezed his eyes tight shut at the recollection of her rounded hips and the high firmness of her young breasts as he’d helped her into her nightdress.
Most Lancashire lasses were bonny. The cold damp climate gave them milk-and-roses complexions, hard work sturdied their limbs, and a down-to-earth humour brightened their eyes.
But his Clara was beautiful. Her distinctive colouring of white-blonde hair and that sun-kissed look to her skin set her apart.
And Joe West had seen all that. He had seen it, and he had followed her home and given her drink. A lifetime of prejudice, of shunning the evils of the flesh, held Seth in a rigid grip of loathing for Lily West’s favourite son.
He couldn’t pray. For the first time in his life he could not take his worry and cast it at the feet of his Lord. Going over to the high mantelpiece, he gripped it with both hands and laid his head down on them.
Joe West had got mixed up with stage folk. Actresses, no better than whores. Painted Jezebels. Oh, Seth knew them for what they were … Never having set foot in a theatre, he still knew them for what they were.
There was a mill lass from Rochdale. Seth frowned as he tried to remember her name. Gracie Fields. Aye, that was it. There had been a piece in the paper about her not long back. On the stage since she was ten with her mother encouraging her, and singing now in a revue. With a voice as good as any opera star, but burlesquing her songs to get laughs. Living in lodgings no doubt, and mixing up with the kind of folks Joe West counted as his friends.
‘Joe West!’ Seth spat out the name as if it was an obscenity. If he could have got his hands on Lily West’s fourth son at that moment he would have swung for him gladly. ‘Cheating, lying,’ he muttered. ‘Walking into my house as bold as brass, giving Clara drink and putting wrong ideas in her head.’ Knowing that Seth would see his child laid to rest beside his dead wife in the cemetery before he’d let her leave home and go on the stage.
Kicking out at the dying fire, Seth sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. The anger was seeping from him now, but he wasn’t ready yet to go up to his bed. Sitting down in his chair, he lowered his head into his big hands and turned at last to prayer, God had given Clara into his keeping and with His help that trust would never be denied.
‘I know she’s going to grow up and meet a young man and marry some day,’ he whispered, talking as naturally to his Lord as he did to his friends and neighbours. ‘But let him be decent and hard-working; maybe with a trade in his fingers, and a good and kind heart to keep and protect her from the Joe Wests of this world. And if there’s bad blood in her, may the influence of this house keep her from sin.’
The prayer was a long one, and the tiny red glimmer from the fire had faded into grey ashes before it was finished. But when Seth finally climbed the narrow stairs to his bed his mind was in its normal state of peaceful acceptance once again. Prayers were answered, he told himself as he folded his best trousers and laid them neatly beneath his mattress to nip in the crease for chapel the next morning.
Mebbe prayers weren’t always answered in the way the supplicant wanted. Kneeling by his bed in his shirt, Seth acknowledged that the prayers for his wife to recover from her illness had gone unheeded. But wasn’t it written that ‘if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us’? And wasn’t it also written that no mischief shall happen to the righteous, but that the wicked shall be filled with evil? And wasn’t it true that ‘the way of the Lord is strength to the upright: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity’? Didn’t the Good Book come up with the answer to everything?
Seth rose to his feet. And was comforted.
He was very weary. It had been a long day and tomorrow was the Sabbath. Closing his eyes for sleep, Seth suddenly opened them wide again.
Joe West would get his come-uppance. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Seth’s normally soft voice was rough as he spoke the words aloud, hearing the echo of them in his ears as he drifted off into a troubled sleep.
The very next week, walking home from work, Clara was hurrying along the street, head bent against a driving wind, when she bumped into a tall young man walking just as swiftly in the opposite direction.
‘Sorry!’ They both spoke together, stepping backwards to move round each other.
‘Clara! Little Clara Haydock! It is you, isn’t it?’
She hesitated, but only for a second. There was no mistaking the thick fair hair, the twinkle in the amber eyes. But since she’d last seen him, John Maynard, the son of the Church of England minister, had grown to well over six feet in height. Clara had to lean her head back to look up at him.
‘It’s me all right.’
Having been brought up with the West boys as her constant companions, she showed no sudden blush, not a trace of self-consciousness in her manner.
‘Just look at you!’ she laughed. ‘Long mop and bucket, that’s me and you. You’re even taller than Joe.’
‘Joe?’
‘Joe West. You remember. He was in the same class as you before you took the scholarship and went on to the grammar school.’ Clara’s woollen tam-o’-shanter was dropping over her eyes so she pushed it back impatiently. ‘He was a prisoner-of-war in Germany, but he’s back now. Working in a job to do with the stage. He knows all the stars.’
She looked so bossily important that John laughed out loud. Of course, that was it. This was the kid with the unusual singing voice. The one his father still talked about. Suddenly he made up his mind. It was cold standing there on the windy street, but he wanted to go on talking to her. She was only a kid
, but more lovely he reckoned than any of the stars she was so obviously struck on. What colour would you call her hair? Silver? Blond? And her eyes were as green as the sea with the sun shining on it.
‘I live just round the corner. Up that street with the Toc H building on the corner. Why don’t you come home with me and say hello to my pa? He was only wondering the other day what had become of you.’ He grinned. ‘What has become of you, Clara? What are you doing now?’
She looked down at her feet, frowning. She had told her father she would be late home, but the job they were working on had finished earlier than her boss had calculated, so she wouldn’t be missed. Not just yet awhile.
‘Might as well,’ she said cockily. ‘But I mustn’t stop, else me dad’ll come looking for me. With a big stick!’
As they walked along she glanced sideways at the tall figure in the light grey flannels and navy blue blazer. She’d always liked John Maynard, ever since he stuck up for her on that first awful day at school. He talked posh, too. His very difference intrigued her and always had, she reminded herself, recalling the way he’d stood out against the other boys in his shirt and tie, worn with and not instead of a pullover.
‘I’m a dab hand with a stapler,’ she told him. ‘A thousand sheets an hour I can do, but my boss is too mean to pay me on piecework. When he takes his wallet out on a Friday, a moth flies out!’ She was having to take little running steps to keep up with John’s long strides, but still had enough breath to keep talking. ‘You went to the university, didn’t you? Were you the top of the class at the grammar school? I know you were at my school. Are you going to be a minister like your father?’
‘No fear.’ John grinned down at her. ‘I’m not holy enough for that. Not by a long chalk. No, I went straight from college into the Royal Flying Corps, but I missed the best of the war. I’m in civil aviation now.’
‘Flying planes?’ Clara stopped to gaze up at the sky. ‘Flamin’ ’enery! Honest? You’re not ’aving me on?’
John needed no further encouragement. ‘Nothing to it, really.’ Taking her by the arm he walked her across the street to a house set back from the road, and opened the door with a key from his jacket pocket. ‘I was flying last week with my boss. A Major Watterson. A nice bloke. Got the DFC during the war.’ He spoke with a studied nonchalance. ‘We touched a hundred miles an hour, taking fourteen passengers to Paris. Two hours from taking off to landing. Quite a nice trip, actually.’
‘Flippin’ ’enery!’
Stuck for words for once, Clara followed him into the house, down a dark panelled hall, through to a large sitting room at the back, trying hard not to stare around her. A bowl of fresh flowers was reflected in an oval gilt mirror, and the overriding smell was one of wax polish and the sharp tang of some kind of disinfectant. There was actually a carpet on the stairs, she noted, crimson and blue, fastened down with gleaming brass stair rods.
‘Mother?’ John led her over to an auburn-haired woman sitting on a wide chesterfield. ‘You’ve heard Pa talk about a girl who used to sing for him on his school visits? Clara Haydock? Well, here she is.’
Elaine Maynard put aside the pile of sheet music she’d been marking with a pencil and smiled. ‘Hello, Clara.’
She lowered her eyes for a second in an instinctive attempt to hide her surprise. This beautiful young girl – Clara, the clogger’s child? Rumours, whispers, memories of a scandal – or had it been a scandal? – surfaced for an unguarded moment. Then a lifetime of discretion, first as a vicar’s daughter then as a vicar’s wife, steadied her smile. She held out her hand.
‘I’ve heard such a lot about you, my dear. My husband was so impressed by your voice. He was only wondering the other day what you’ve been doing since you left school. I think he misses you.’ She patted the cushion by her side. ‘I believe you sang a solo on Anniversary Sunday at your chapel? My cleaning lady told me she’ll never forget it.’ She picked up the sheet music again. ‘I suppose John told you I take pupils for the piano and violin?’
Clara nodded, too overwhelmed to admit she hadn’t known. John Maynard liked talking best about himself, she decided. He was standing there now, jiggling loose change in his trouser pockets, looking, she thought, like a wet weekend.
A totally uncharacteristic shyness was making her feel hot all over. She wanted to gaze round the room, but knew it would be bad manners. In the whole of her life, she told herself dramatically, she had never seen a room like this. There were long velvet curtains at the tall windows; nothing as sordid as a paper blind. There was a rose-patterned carpet beneath her feet instead of oilcloth and rag rugs. But best of all, over by the window stood a grand piano, with a vase of flowers on its polished surface, flanked by a marble bust of a man with bulging eyelids and a sad expression on his cold chiselled face.
She wasn’t to know that by any standards the vicarage sitting room was sparsely furnished on a stipend that bordered on an insult. All she knew was that sitting on the wide sofa cushions was like sitting on a cloud after the horsehair prickliness of the sofa at home. And it went without saying that anyone owning a grand piano was bound to be rich.
Elaine Maynard was at a loss what to talk about next. The girl seemed dumb-struck by shyness. What a strange little creature she was, with the too large floppy tammy perched on the back of her head. And her hair was a most unusual shade – a cross between blond and silver. For a moment she felt angry with her son for producing the clogger’s unusual child as some kind of trophy.
‘Would you like me to play something for you?’ The offer came from a kind heart, as if Elaine had known the one thing which would put the small girl in her rag-bag clothes at ease. She held out the music. ‘I’ve been scoring this for the piano.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Clara nodded again, averting her profile from John’s wink. How dare he try to make her laugh! Couldn’t he see she liked his mother and wanted to hear her play? He really wasn’t half as grown up or as nice as Joe, she decided. A bit immature. For his age, that was.
Elaine glanced at the marble bust on top of the piano. Chopin? Yes. One of his livelier pieces maybe. Her fingers skimmed over the keys.
Clara listened, her eyes half closed, her expression rapt. This was real music, the kind her untutored mind had been completely starved of. Chamber music, she supposed vaguely, the kind Joe and his brothers would have laughed to scorn. John had come to sit beside her; he was nudging her, but she refused to look at him. The music was saying things to her, transporting her to a realm of delight she’d never dreamed existed. Her fingers clasped and unclasped as the crashing chords filled the room with vibrant sound. When it was finished she sat quite still, not knowing what to say – knowing that whatever she said could never express the way she felt.
‘Now!’ Elaine swivelled round on the piano stool. ‘Will you sing something for me, Clara?’ She smiled. ‘My son is a great disappointment to me. He hasn’t a musical bone in his body.’
‘Clara doesn’t want to sing.’ John pushed the flop of his thick fair hair back off his forehead with an impatient hand. He was wishing he hadn’t brought Clara Haydock back with him now. He was wishing – why not admit it – that his week’s leave of absence was over. There was nothing to do in this godforsaken town, anyway. How his parents had stuck it all these years he didn’t know. They were developing northern mentalities, he supposed. He watched in disbelief as Clara got up and walked towards the piano. As if drawn there by a bloody magnet.
He stared down at his feet, sudden boredom settling on him like a descending cloud. The war had ended just too soon as far as he’d been concerned. Two reconnaissance flights, that was all he’d managed; and one of those a dead loss, as the Jerries had left nothing worth photographing. Sometimes he felt the blood was pounding in his veins so strongly it would blow his head off. ‘Calm down, Maynard!’ the Major would tell him. ‘There’s no call for daredevil tactics in this kind of flying. It’s passengers and mail you’ll be carrying, not bombs.’
‘I
’ll just go upstairs …’ He left the room without them noticing he’d gone.
When Clara burst into the clogger’s little front-room shop her green eyes shone as if a candle had been lit behind them. She was out of breath and clutched her side where a sharp pain stabbed behind her ribs.
‘Dadda! I’ve been to the minister’s house. You know, Mr Maynard who used to come to school on a Monday.’ Taking off her tammy, she wrestled with the buttons down the front of her coat as if she couldn’t get it off quickly enough. ‘Mrs Maynard teaches the piano, an’ she asked me to sing for her, an’ I sang “Once Again ’Tis Joyous May”, the hymn I sang on Anniversary Sunday.’ She took a necessary breath. ‘An’ she said she would teach me to play.’ Her eyes were filled with a desperate pleading as she came to lean against Seth’s knee. ‘I told her we’d get a piano, Dadda. We will get one, won’t we?’
‘Steady on, lass.’ Seth put down the clog he was mending and rubbed his eyes. ‘Now. Let’s have a proper story. You say you went to the minister’s house? To deliver some printing?’
Shaking her head so that the long fall of hair flew, Clara sighed a deep sigh of exasperation.
‘I met John. You know. He was in the same class as Joe before he won the scholarship. Now he flies aeroplanes.’ She dismissed all that with a wave of her hand. ‘His mother says she’ll give me two lessons a week for sixpence a time, but we have to have a piano. An’ I told her we’d get one. Right away!’ She patted her father’s hand. ‘Oh, not a new one. I know we can’t afford a new one. Just a piano. Any old piano, as long as it plays.’ Her eyes glowed with passion. ‘I’ll be able to accompany meself when I sing, Dadda. An’ I’ll be playing proper music. Chopin,’ she said wildly. ‘Mrs Maynard has him on the piano. Dadda! You’re not listening to me!’
Slowly Seth got to his feet. ‘Oh aye, I’m listening, lass, but what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense.’ Limping over to the door, he shot the bolt. ‘Now let’s go through and have our tea. It’s all ready. Then you can tell me again. I thought Chopin was dead, and yet you say he was sitting on the vicar’s wife’s piano?’