by Jessie Keane
They both jumped at the sound of a knock at the front door, Clara more than Hatton. She shot to her feet. Had the police found out where the Dolans were hiding, and come to take them?
Hatton lumbered up and went down the hall to the door, flinging it open. A man charged in and came straight along the passageway. Not the police, but a man of middle years in a tatty suit and waistcoat, his face flushed to the colour of corned beef, his breathing harsh. completely oblivious to Clara, he fell into one of the chairs, took out a dirty handkerchief and mopped at his brow.
‘What the fuck’s up with you?’ asked Hatton, following the man into the kitchen.
The man’s watery blue eyes took in Hatton at a glance. ‘Me? What the fuck happened to you? Looks like you done ten rounds with Jack the Ripper.’
Hatton glanced down at his bloodstained and split-open shirt. ‘This? It’s nothing. Knife slipped, that’s all. What’s up?’
‘I’ve been asking around and it’s true, what they’re saying: Lenny Lynch is gone. Marcus Redmayne has taken over.’
20
The wedding was a small affair, deliberately low-key; a man in his late fifties, a girl of sixteen. There seemed, to Clara, nothing to celebrate. She was doing what was necessary, that was all. The bridal gown was nothing fancy, just a big-skirted cream dress with a tight bodice that she’d bought in a department store; she’d put some sugar-stiffened net petticoats underneath it to make it flare out just right. She didn’t bother with a bouquet.
She didn’t draft Bernie in as a bridesmaid or Henry as a pageboy; they were still in mourning for their mother, as was she. In fact, Clara didn’t even tell them she was getting married. Why would she? It was enough that she had to go through it – why drag them into it too?
Frank dusted down his one shiny suit, combed his hair, called on two old drinking mates to witness the wedding at the registry office . . . and so the day passed. There was a modest wedding breakfast in the Bear and Ragged Staff. Sausage and mash and a pudding, a few beers, and a small sherry for Clara. Then it was done and Frank drove them home in his old Ford Anglia as Mr and Mrs Hatton.
Bernie had tucked Henry up in bed, and when they came back a married couple Clara sat her sister down and for the first time told her the news.
‘We’re married, Bern,’ she said. Frank had his arm around her shoulders. He smelled of old sweat.
Bernie looked at her in astonishment. ‘You’re what?’
‘Married. We decided to make it legal. Frank’s going to look after us.’
But Mum’s only been gone a couple of months, Clara could see Bernie thinking.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Bernie.
‘There’s nothing to understand,’ said Clara crisply. ‘We’re married. That’s an end to it.’
‘You ought to congratulate your sister, girl,’ said Frank.
Bernie looked stunned. Slowly she stood up and came to Clara. ‘Congratulations, Clar,’ she said stiffly, and kissed her cheek.
‘How about a peck for your new brother-in-law?’ said Frank, smiling.
Clara saw Bernie almost shrink back, then obediently she leaned in on tiptoe and kissed his leathery cheek.
‘You can lock up,’ said Frank. ‘Mind Attila’s got water. We’re off to bed then.’
And this was it; the bit Clara had been dreading for weeks. Still, she followed Frank up the stairs and into his bedroom – not the one she’d been sharing with Bernie and Henry, which was where she really wanted to go.
More than anything, she didn’t want to do this. Up until now, the whole thing had seemed merely an idea; not entirely real. But now, seeing the double bed made up with fresh sheets, seeing Frank eagerly peeling off his clothes as she stood there frozen at the bottom of the bed, she knew that it was going to happen; she was going to give up her virginity to keep her family safe.
It was hideous, a nightmare; he took everything off, but left on his long johns. She was relieved at that. The sight of Frank Hatton in the nude wouldn’t be a pleasant one, she felt sure. Then he climbed into bed and patted the pillow beside his.
‘Come on then, Clara Dolan. Clara Hatton, I should say.’
He was beaming, slightly drunk; he was happy, she thought.
Clara didn’t know what to do. Go to the bathroom, undress in there?
‘Get that dress off, Clara,’ said Frank. ‘I’ve waited for this, dreamed of it. Strip off for your husband, there’s a good girl. Few minutes from now, you’ll be a woman.’
His words saved her from fleeing the room. Suddenly anger replaced uncertainty. Her father had brought her to this pass. Fucking men! But she was going to win. This was a low point, admittedly, but it would pass, she would make it pass.
Angrily she approached her side of the bed. She glared into his eyes and doubled over, pulling down her stockings, her girdle, her net underskirts. Then she undid the front buttons of the dress, one by one, top to bottom, all the way down.
‘Come on, let me see those lovely titties,’ Frank wheedled, fingering his groin under the sheets.
Jesus, thought Clara, and in fury at him, at her father, at the Fates, at the whole miserable stinking world, she wrenched the dress open, yanked off the pointy-cupped bra. Frank’s eyes were like saucers as they drank in the sight of her full naked breasts with their large coral-coloured nipples, her long slender torso, the thick black thatch of pubic hair at the juncture of her thighs.
‘Satisfied?’ she snapped, flinging the dress off, hating the damned thing. She glanced at the cheap gold ring he’d bought her on her left hand, then at the one on the right, her mother’s wedding band. Then she stood there, upright as a soldier.
She knew she could do this. She could close her mind to disgust, to revulsion, to anything. She would do what had to be done.
Frank gulped. He patted the bed again. Clara braced herself and knelt up on it. His hand trembled slightly as it went to the pale skin of her thigh and rested there, smoothing over its velvety softness.
Then he pushed the sheets back and she saw his pale pink erection, jutting out from the fastenings at the front of the long johns.
God, this is how babies are made . . .
Her mother had explained it all, so she knew this was how Kathleen had become pregnant with the child that had killed her. She prayed that no child would result from this. Begged for it. She just wanted it over, as quickly as possible.
‘What do you think, eh?’ said Frank, moving the column of flesh with his hand, waggling it about as if he was proud of the bloody thing. At the same time, his free hand slid upward, higher up her thigh, moving in between her legs. ‘Come on then, my darlin’, come and sit on him, he wants yer.’
Be brave, thought Clara. Just do it.
‘With my body, I thee worship,’ chortled Frank. ‘Jesus, ain’t that the best bit? I’ll say it bloody is.’
Do it. Go on.
Clara hoisted her leg over her husband’s middle and clasped the thing between both hands. Frank lay back with a sigh as she positioned him, found the exact spot, and sank down, taking him inside her.
‘Oh,’ said Clara as she met resistance, felt a tiny hint of pain; but then Frank pushed up and it was done.
Her virginity was gone.
So was her youth.
So was her life.
21
1958
Ivan Sears knew he was no beauty: neither were his two brothers. The Three Little Pigs, Ma had called them when they were small. Well, smallish. Jacko, Fulton and Ivan Sears looked like triplet porkers even when they were in the pram. There was a year between each of them, but they could pass for identical, born on the same day. They were that bloody ugly, all three of them. Ivan knew it, and it didn’t bother him in the least.
‘Ten pounds each they weighed, it was like passing three fucking bowling balls,’ Ma always said.
The Sears boys had matching weights, matching features; they were never going to be handsome, that much was obvious. Dad was huge and fat, Ma
was wallowing around in the shallow end of the gene pool – so their kids were never going to challenge Einstein’s theory of relativity or win Mr Universe. The best you could say of them was that they were big.
The brothers were all over six and a half feet tall, and they were broad across too, solid as barn doors. All three had a little dark hair to start with, but like Dad they lost it in their twenties and shaved their heads.
‘They are different, though,’ Ma would insist to anyone who asked. ‘In nature. And you can see it in their eyes, too. Jacko’s the youngest, he has a wild look. Fulton is in the middle and has more heart than the other two. He can be soft, sometimes.’
‘Yeah, and Ivan’s a bastard,’ said Dad, who’d discovered that your own son can and will give you a whipping once he’s big enough.
Dad was right: Ivan was a bastard; he knew it and he was proud of it.
By the time Ivan was twenty, Dad had received a couple of hefty clouts off him. And then there was the incident with The Chair, which passed into family legend.
Dad had always had the best chair, the one by the fire – until Ivan came in one frosty day and decided that the chair should be his.
‘You’re in my seat,’ he said.
Ma and Jacko and Fulton sat there, gape-mouthed, looking from one to the other and expecting a fight. Instead – none of them would ever forget it – Dad simply got up and vacated the chair. In that moment, that brief flicker of time when Dad could have stood his ground but decided against it, power in the family passed from the father to the eldest son.
And so it remained. Ivan and his brothers were built like brick outhouses and it was a given that they would go into a trade that enabled them to put the frighteners on people. Ivan strong-armed his way into a car dealership, where he could clock motors and flog cut-and-shuts to his heart’s content; Fulton took over some doors in Manchester’s clubland. Ivan wanted Jacko around to do the grunt work for the car biz, but Jacko had other ideas. He didn’t want to be forever taking orders off Ivan and he said so. After a monumental row, Jacko fucked off down south to London, to try his luck around Soho.
Now something was bothering Ivan. Or rather, it was bothering Ma, so Ivan was getting it in the neck. It was the fact that Jacko hadn’t been in touch for a very long while. Usually, the three brothers touched base now and again, kept in touch. Met up. But Jacko’s silence had been so long-drawn-out that even his oldest brother was starting to wonder how long this latest sulk was going to go on for. None of the boys did friendship – neither did Ma and Pa, come to that – and Ivan didn’t exactly care what Jacko got up to. Truth to tell, Ivan could hold a grudge for England and he still had the hump over Jacko bailing out and going south. Who the fuck was head of this family?
But family was family, after all.
There had been a call from a Soho phone box, during which Jacko had managed to get right up Ivan’s nose yet again, bragging on about how much loot he was earning and that he’d soon be richer than any of them. Ivan had listened for as long as he could stand it, then he slammed the phone down and sat there fuming. Bloody Jacko, he wouldn’t dare taunt Ivan like that if they were face to face.
After that, there was nothing. Silence. Jacko had always been the worst of the brothers for keeping contact, but this was pretty odd even by his standards. Ivan was prepared to bet that Jacko wouldn’t turn up this Christmas either, and much as the little bastard annoyed him, that was a fucking nuisance because Ma had been upping the stakes recently, really bending his ear over it. Another yuletide no-show, and she was really going to start giving him a pain in the arse.
So one night Ivan finally caved in to all the nagging and decided to address the problem. Not personally – fuck that! If Jacko thought he would crawl down there himself, he had another think coming! Instead, he called Fulton into his office behind the car showroom when all the staff had gone home one evening and said: ‘Got a little job for you, bro.’
Fulton sat down and stared at his older brother. Ivan was The Boss. He’d claimed The Chair. Ivan had the flashy gloss of wealth, his sheepskin coat slung over the back of his chair, his gold Ford Motor tiepin gleaming against the lemon-yellow silk tie he wore.
Fulton looked round at his older brother’s kingdom and was impressed. Ivan had a big glossy walnut desk and was reclining in a thickly padded golden leather chair behind it. On top of a bank of filing cabinets, beneath a calendar showing a pouting girl in a swimsuit, was the latest radio, out of which Elvis Presley was softly crooning ‘Don’t’.
‘Want you to go down the Smoke and catch up with Jacko,’ said Ivan. ‘The moody bastard ain’t been in touch for a long while, as you know. Ma’s chewing my arse over it. The cunt can’t be doing that well or he’d be rubbing all our noses in it by now. Get down there, will you? Check he’s OK.’
Fulton nodded his big ugly head. ‘Will do,’ he said, and he went straight home and packed a bag. He was bored with the doors up here anyway, he could do with a change. He knew Ivan was getting grief off Ma over Jacko, and the only reason he was sending him to London was to shut her up; Ivan didn’t really care one way or the other where his younger brother was or what he was getting up to.
Neither did Fulton.
But it would make a bit of a break.
22
Frank Hatton was no model husband. Clara imagined that model husbands didn’t hawk up yellow phlegm every morning, fart loudly in bed, or pick their nose in full view of their wives at the dinner table. But she blanked all that from her mind because he was as good as his word: he looked after them, her and Bernie and little Henry.
Frank hadn’t even moaned too much when she’d insisted they move shortly after the wedding. He’d sold the house he’d lived in all his life, the house his parents had lived and died in, and found another, a more presentable little two-up-two down in a better area, miles away from the messy Houndsditch slums where the impoverished Dolans had spent such a short but traumatic time.
Hatton had seen to it that Clara had enough for the housekeeping, that they all had plenty to eat, and after the initial shock of the realities of marriage he’d made few demands on his wife – thank God! – in the bedroom. She’d worried over that at first, sacrificing her virginity to this grey, unappealing man; but it was nothing. The fact that he was old, and often drunk, was good in one respect: it was always quickly over.
He was a good-natured drunk, only wanting to whistle as she propped him up and brought him home from the pub, and then to sleep; he was rarely aggressive. And there was no sign of a child as a result of his inexpert fumblings; something else to be grateful for.
So, all was well. The Dolans – now the Hattons – had money for food, they didn’t need to fear the rent-man’s knock at the door, there were no bailiffs hammering to be let in to take their remaining worldly goods away. Life was . . . pretty much all right. And then it happened.
Clara always knew the exact amount of cash she had in her purse at any given time, and yet one day there it was: her purse, which was usually closed and on the kitchen table where she left it to pay the tradesmen who came to the door, was lying open. There were a few pennies scattered around on the floor, as if the person who’d opened it had been disturbed in the act. Clara picked the loose change up, put it back in the purse, counted. A pound note was missing.
‘You been in my purse, Frank?’ she asked her husband over his tea that night.
In the front room, Connie Francis was singing ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ on the radio. Soon, Frank said, they’d have a television. And stereo was the coming thing in radio; they’d have one of those too.
Bernie had cooked the dinner – pie and mash. Clara didn’t mind helping with the preparation or the washing, but Bernie always threw her back into the bulk of the work around the house. She’d grown quiet, little Bernie, and seemed more jittery, more easily startled than ever, since they’d moved in here. Fourteen now, she was filling out, becoming pretty, but she wore dark long-sleeved clothing all the time.
She seemed to have no interest in fashion as Clara did.
Clara tried to encourage her younger sister, lending her Louis heels and trying out the bright red Gala of London lipsticks she wore herself on Bernie. But Bernie always wiped it off. Clara worried about her, feared she was still mourning Mum even after all this time – and what comfort could she give her? None. Not really. Bernie didn’t even seem interested, as Clara always was, in the news of the day: Donald Campbell’s thrilling exploits in his hydroplane Bluebird, or even that Hillary had beaten Fuchs in the polar trek. None of it seemed to spark Bernie’s interest at all.
Henry, on the other hand, had come out of his shell in an almost aggressive way since passing his twelfth birthday, becoming sullen and mouthy by turns. He took particular delight in taunting Frank’s dog, Attila. Henry needed a dad, thought Clara, a proper dad, not an old man who wasn’t interested in him. But there was nothing Clara could do about that, either. Their father was gone. And if Clara saw him, right now, she would spit in his face for what he’d done to them.
‘What the hell would I do that for, go in a woman’s purse?’ Frank was offended.
‘I wondered, that’s all. There’s a quid missing. Must’ve mislaid it.’
Clara tried to put it to one side, but it niggled at the edges of her mind for days. Then Bernie came down one morning. She looked troubled. She was shuddering, hugging herself, biting her lip – all normal, for Bernie. Her nerves were bad, and seemed to be getting worse.
‘I found this under Henry’s pillow while I was making the beds up,’ she said, and held out a pound note in her trembling hand.
Henry was out in the backyard, standing just out of reach of the chained, lunging Attila. It amused Henry, how the dog tried to get at him, snarling and choking itself, while he calmly played, bouncing a ball off the wall. Clara, in a rage, went straight out to Henry and smacked him hard across the face.