They hugged and exchanged kisses and Celeste held on to her friend to examine her face.
‘Just as I thought. You’ve cried all through the night, haven’t you? Look at your poor eyes and your hair’s gone all dry and dull. Where’s that swine you call your husband?’ She glared fiercely round the farmyard, paying attention to dark corners and the slightly opened barn door as if she suspected Spencer was hiding from her. ‘I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.’
Laura had sat up in bed hoping Spencer would join her but her hopes had been fruitless. The scene of him felling Ince had replayed itself relentlessly over and over in her mind, as had all his angry words, his unforgiving attitude. She had tortured herself thinking about how this must be affecting Vicki. The little girl wouldn’t know if she was coming or going, as Daisy often said over dilemmas. In the past, Laura and Spencer had had vicious rows, one of them inadvertently in front of Vicki. Spencer had banned Laura from the farm, from even speaking to his daughter; now he had done the same to Ince. It was a nasty quirk in his character, one Laura had hoped was gone when she married him. Spencer had soon come round after banning her that time, but the grudge he had against her and Ince now was far worse. What if he never came round? She couldn’t bear the thought of how that would make Vicki suffer. Laura had heard her cry out in her sleep and had gone in to her twice to stroke her hot brow and soothe her… And if she and Spencer were never reconciled, how would she ever have that longed-for baby?
To combat her wretchedness Laura had hardened her resolve to make her marriage work. She’d panicked when she’d realised that her plan to help Spencer with the manual work meant she’d need someone to stay at the farm and look after Vicki. Then common sense told her that although the wish not to embarrass her or interfere might keep some people away, at least Celeste would turn up the next day. Now she was relieved to see her friend but frightened of Celeste’s indignant tongue.
Drawing on the reserves of her wilting strength, Laura made Celeste promise not to fire off and make things worse. ‘Anyway, Spencer’s out haymaking. If you haven’t come to help me, Celeste, then I’d rather you went home.’ She told Celeste about her plans to make her marriage work.
‘What? You mean you’ve forgiven him? You aren’t going to drub him for humiliating you like that? I’d kill the swine if I was married to him. I suppose all this is for Vicki’s sake as usual. But what about you, Laura? When are you going to think about yourself?’
Laura gazed a moment over the top of the farm buildings and the few wind-bent trees in the direction of the field where Spencer would be working. When she’d heard him moving about in the kitchen in the small hours, getting himself something to eat and preparing for the day’s work, emitting the odd grumble and pushing things angrily out of his way, she’d wanted to run downstairs to him, fling herself into his arms and beg him not to despise her, to forget his jealousy, suspicions, to hold her like he had done before on warm and loving occasions.
In a wistful voice, she murmured, ‘It is for me.’
Celeste tossed her mane of red hair disbelievingly and groaned. ‘Oh, don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with him? You couldn’t have. Laura, the man’s… well, he’s despicable.’
‘It’s my life, Celeste. I have very strong feelings for him. If you’ve come to help me then come into the kitchen.’ Laura turned on her heel and stalked away.
‘So you want me to play house-mother while you go off after his lordship and play skivvy?’ Celeste said drolly after Laura had filled her in on her plans for the day. ‘I hope you can cope, my girl.’
‘I’m quite tough and strong.’
‘I meant cope with Spencer’s rebuffs. If he hasn’t climbed down off his high horse yet then he’s not likely to make things easy for you.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Laura was packing lots of food in the crib bag – Spencer had left without it. She was feeling weak, trembly and vulnerable and wasn’t at all sure she would be able to cope with another straffing from his tongue. ‘But I still want to put things right with him as soon as possible. I’ll fetch Vicki from the garden and tell her what’s happening.’
‘Well, do what you think you must, but I still think you’re mad. Have you considered how Vicki’s going to feel with you leaving her with me?’
Laura ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach. It would be a wrench leaving Vicki and the little girl had made no bones about disliking Celeste.
‘But you’re my mummy,’ Vicki had whispered at breakfast when Laura had brought up the possibility that Celeste might look after her today. She dropped her toast on her plate. ‘I want you to stay with me.’
Laura had hugged her close. ‘I know, darling. But you remember Mummy and Daddy had cross words yesterday? And Daddy was cross with Uncle Ince?’
A disheartened nod of the head.
‘Well, Daddy has been left very unhappy and Mummy wants to go to him and try to make him happy again. Then we’ll all be happy. I won’t be away all day, I promise you that. Celeste is a nice lady when you get to know her properly. Will you let Mummy go and be a good girl for Celeste?’
Vicki nodded mournfully, looking about to cry, but she was sparky enough to use the situation to her advantage. ‘Can Celeste bring Alfie over to play with me one day? She’s friends with him and he makes me laugh.’
Laura wasn’t sure that Spencer would like the mucky child playing with his precious daughter but she readily agreed. Vicki had brightened and run off to make her playhouse more fit for her hero.
‘Vicki doesn’t like the idea of me going off to the fields but I’m sure she’ll co-operate with you,’ Laura said. Having regained a little confidence since her friend’s arrival, she put on some make-up. ‘She understands that it’s important her father and I make up the quarrel. Harry and Tressa have rung this morning. Harry would have come over but he feels obliged to stay with Felicity. I told them both I’ve got everything under control. Daisy will either ring or come over but I’m not expecting anyone else.’ Worry creased her brow suddenly and she hesitated at the door. ‘Are sure you’ll be able to cope, Celeste?’
She was holding up two aprons, one floral, the other a paisley design, deciding which was the less drab to wear to protect her clothes. ‘Oh, you go off and don’t worry about us. I quite like the idea of having children round me these days.’
* * *
‘Looks like Jacka’s words hit home yesterday,’ Joy Miller’s neighbour of two doors away, a woman in her mid-sixties with small close-set eyes in a wide face, said over Joy’s privet hedge. She was patting the hat she had put on for church.
‘What was that, Mrs Grean?’ Joy asked absent-mindedly. She had come outside for some peace from her four children’s noisy squabbles, and because these days she couldn’t stand the sight of the ungainly Bert. She had been thinking over the time she had spent with Bruce last night and ahead to her assignation with him this afternoon and didn’t appreciate being interrupted.
‘Her in between us – Dolores Uren. She’s got washing out on the line, on a Sunday too. Didn’t you see her throwing out all that rubbish last night? Made a huge bonfire, on a fine summer’s evening when me and my Len wanted to sit out in the garden. Stank the place out, she did. I heard her asking that lazy husband of hers, if he is her husband. Did I tell you that my cousin, Vi, who lives at Liskeard near where they last lived, reckons they’re not even married? Vi said he’s much too young for her too. She was married to somebody else apparently, he was killed in the war, but they’ve always been a dirty family. Then she took up with this other fellow. No wonder that madam can’t face the vicar and refuses to have her children, poor little souls, baptised. Well, anyway, she was talking loudly, asking her husband to get off his backside for once and come and give her a hand, but Gerald, whatever his name is, must have refused to budge as usual because there was no sign of he all evening. Do you realise, Joy, that no one in the village has set eyes on that man? I was beginning to wonder if he really existed.’
Mrs Grean twisted her face, making it appear to shrivel up. ‘Still, things are looking up round here, it seems. With a bit of luck she’ll tidy up the mess in her garden, the back and the front. My Len said if she does, he’ll offer to give her a hand, be worth it to see the place looking respectable again.’
Mrs Grean made to go back inside and fetch her Len who would be sitting in the kitchen listening to his wireless until she collected him. Reminded of where they were to go, she added with a twinge of guilt, ‘Mind you, you have to feel sorry for the woman, don’t you? Can’t be easy having all they children to care for. It’s all right for me to speak but then I only had one, my Bernard, and I found he handful enough. I baked some nice currant buns yesterday. Do you think she’ll be offended if I offered some for their tea?’
Joy had slipped into shamefaced silence at talk of Dolores Uren’s sins; she couldn’t condemn the woman while she herself was having an affair and was mightily relieved when Mrs Grean changed tack. ‘I think she would be delighted, specially if she’s turning over a new leaf. I’ll have a turnout of my cupboards and pass on the clothes my lot have grown out of. Wonder I didn’t think of it before. I shouldn’t think Mrs Uren will mind, she’s accepted some baby’s clothes from Tressa Macarthur. I’ve always been glad of a few hand-me-downs for my lot.’
Mrs Grean came very close to the hedge to whisper, ‘The vicar’s getting a committee together, I hear, with that Miss Cunningham to help the family. You know anything about it?’
Joy did, she had been roped in on it, but until now she hadn’t given it a single thought. She resolved she’d work hard finding ways to help out to report to the committee on Tuesday evening. It went some way to salve her conscience at the betrayal of her own children and their boring father. It helped her look Mrs Grean in the eye and tell a lie as to why she wasn’t going to church this morning. She couldn’t face the inevitable gossip about an affair between Laura and Ince, a dreadful misconception as far as Joy was concerned, when she herself was indulging in the very same thing. In case Mrs Grean brought up the subject, she beat a hasty retreat indoors.
* * *
‘I’m fed up being stuck in bed like this, Alfie,’ five-year-old Maurice wailed again. All the boys were lying in their beds, two sheetless, thin, lumpy mattresses on the bare floor, their only covering a rough blanket to hide their nakedness.
‘There’s nothing I can do about it, Maurice,’ Alfie hissed back, exasperated. His face was as red as his hair with indignation at having to stay in the bed he shared with Colin, the next eldest. The other three boys were crammed on the other mattress – Rodney, the youngest, top to tail with Maurice and Graham. ‘I’ve told you before, you little runt, that Mum said she would whip us if we dared put our noses round the door. This time she meant it.’ Alfie already had two weals on his legs for his disobedience.
‘What’s she done with our clothes?’ Colin asked, taking his finger out of the hole he was making through the striped ticking so he could pull out balls of the rough stuffing. He was the most patient of the Uren boys, not even complaining at the brutal scrubbing their mother had subjected them to in the old tin bath from which she had tossed out their toy boats and water snails and fetched in from the garden. ‘Why have we got to stay naked like this and not get dirty? She’s not taking us to church or chapel, is she? Gerald’ll go mad.’
‘She’s not takin’ us anywhere – yet,’ Alfie replied frostily. ‘It’s got something to do with what that old fart of a farmer said to her yesterday. Now she’s gone bleddy bleedin’ mad cleaning us and the house up. The reason why we gotta stay ’ere like soddin’ freaks is because she’s thrown away all our play clothes and turned out what she calls our best ones, and we can’t wear them because they need to be soddin’ well washed first! The rate she’s goin’ on she’ll probably iron the bleddy things too! She’ll make us polish our shoes next. She’ll have us lookin’ like a right lot of soddin’ ponces. I. don’t know how I’ll dare show my face round the village then.’
‘We got some nice grub last night though,’ ventured seven-year-old Graham, impressed with the amount of swear words his brother had thrown into his tirade.
‘Nice eggy,’ added little Rodney, smacking his purple- stained cracked lips at the memory of the one substantial tea he’d had in his young life.
‘What?’ Alfie snarled at his traitorous brothers, and Rodney ducked his head under the blanket. The boys weren’t afraid of Gerald who was too lazy even to work up a temper, but they were sometimes afraid of their big brother who was always the best fighter wherever they lived and had a specially cruel way of twisting the flesh on their arms and making it burn. Alfie wasn’t grateful to Celeste for giving their mother some money yesterday or Daisy Tamblyn who had allowed her into the shop today to spend it. Because she rarely had much money to spend on food she had a lot of food coupons saved up and had come back with supplies to last a whole week. She had made them eat cheese and salad and drink a whole mugful of milk. Alfie had an aversion to anything he was told was ‘good for him’ and although he had ravenously eaten the food, he had tried rebelliously, and unsuccessfully, to make himself vomit.
Dolores could be heard downstairs now, throwing away rubbish, sweeping and scrubbing and tidying as best she could with no proper cleaning implements. But she hadn’t started cleaning upstairs yet. Alfie took his hands out from under the blanket (he had been digging the scabs off a small boil on his stomach and one on his bottom). Sitting up, he rubbed the flats of his big rough hands in the thick dust on the floorboards then pressed the grime all over his chest and down his arms and legs.
‘Alfie,’ Colin cautioned. He had never seen their mother in a more determined mood; Alfie would get a severe stramming for doing that.
‘Shut your bloody mouth up!’ Alfie ordered, feeling in command of his heroic, daring image again. ‘Right, who’s for spit ’n’ duck?’
There was a loud chorus of, ‘Me!’
All the boys loved this unhygienic game which Alfie had devised and was very proud of, and Mum would never know they had played it.
They all lay on their backs and pulled the blankets over their heads. Then ripping the blankets down, revealing most of their naked bodies, they all spat heavily into the air and whipped the blankets over their heads again just before the balls of saliva hit their cheeky faces. They would do this over and over again, giggling uncontrollably.
Dolores had stopped her mammoth cleaning task long enough to feed her daughter and change her nappy. Kissing Emily’s soft clean cheek and smoothing the frilled skirt of one of the dresses Tressa had passed on to her, she sighed and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Listen to them. I wonder what those monkeys are up to. I’ll whip Alfie if he’s getting them up to mischief.’
Putting the sleepy baby down in her crib, Dolores took a broom, which consisted more of handle than head and bristles, and banged on the ceiling. ‘Shut up, up there, and behave yourselves, the lot of you. ’Tis a fine drying day and you won’t have to stay there much longer.’ As expected, the boys ignored her banging and shouting and she went off to tackle the other male in the family.
The stairs usually being too much for his habitually drunken head and legs, Gerald Uren slept in the sitting room on what could be loosely termed a settee. He was sleeping now. His hand clutched an empty bottle of beer. Dolores looked down on him fondly and took the bottle away. He did not stir. She pulled back the ragged curtains and opened the windows wide. Warmth and light flooded in showing that although the room was ill-furnished and drab, there was not a speck of dust or cobweb anywhere. Gerald had complained profusely when she’d cleaned the room around him last night.
Returning to the settee, she knelt down and shook Gerald’s shoulder gently. ‘Gerry, Gerry, wake up. I want to speak to you.’
Gerald slept on, looking as if it would take a force ten gale or several hours of exposure in freezing hail on the moor to wake him. Dolores traced a long fingertip over his lips.
Mrs Grean had be
en right, no one in the village had actually seen Gerald Uren, and if they had, given his reputation as a terminally lazy, hard drinker, they would have received a shock. He was little more than a youth. His eyes were small and set too close together, his nose was long and thin, his mouth a dull pink slash in a pale narrow face, his hair a ragged mousy mop. But there was something innocent, almost pure about him. Dolores had adored him when she had first set eyes on him as a sixteen-year-old boy. Recently widowed, lonely but not bereft, she had just had to have him.
Gerald had been born bone idle. His family, honest, hard-working people, had counted his beauty as nothing, and Dolores had soon enticed him into her home and bed. Scandalised, his family had driven them out of Callington and they had moved to the outskirts of Liskeard. Dolores loved Gerald uncompromisingly. She had taught him the arts of love. She slaved for him willingly. Pandered to his every whim. Supplied him with the drink he craved. She was content as long as he did not leave her. But yesterday Jacka Davey had shamed her with the neglect of her children, two of them Gerald’s. Now she hoped he could be persuaded to think differently, at least about Rodney, Emily and the coming baby.
She caressed his unnaturally flushed cheek and kissed his lips. ‘Darling… wake up. Come on, Gerry, wake up for me, please.’
A little shake and still he did not stir or moan his way back into the world of wakefulness. So Dolores shook him with all the strength required to bring him out of his deep, intemperate slumber.
His lips parted slightly, furred tongue slipped out. He licked his dry lips, gave a violent shudder, opened his eyes and groaned. ‘Mmmm, leave me alone, Dorry, go away.’ And he turned over on his side, away from her.
Dolores swung his body back to her and brought him round again. ‘Darling, you must wake up. I want an important word with you.’
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