by Leah Fleming
‘Steady on, old girl, just calm down. I know it’s a terrible shock but first we’d better find Ella. She’s with Hazel and her family. She needs to be told.’
‘Let her stay there a while longer. Besides, there’s something you should know first. Something no amount of time is going to change.’
‘The George it is, then?’
‘Let’s leave,’ she said, suddenly weary beyond reason.
Oh, May, you know how to choose your moment, burdening me with this terrible knowledge. How could you carry such a secret for all these years? What are we going to do with this awful news?
She thought of Ella, safe with Hazel and her mother, unaware of what lay ahead. The poor girl. How could May keep such a thing from her? Celeste felt betrayed as if she’d never really known her friend. All those letters and kind acts . . . Now she was in charge of an orphaned girl from goodness knew where. How on earth would they find out who Ella really was after all these years?
87
Ella sat by the canal bank staring down at the dank water and trying not to feel sick. How could her mother just leave her like that? She had looked so peaceful in her coffin with a soft smile on her face as if she was glad to be away from them all. Now she was buried by the healing well in Netherstowe, leaving her utterly alone.
It had been a simple funeral at St Mary’s followed by a meal in a tearoom. Hazel and her family came, and Archie McAdam, and a few ladies from the college. Everyone was being kind to her but there was no one left for her now.
It wasn’t the same at Red House without Mum there in the kitchen. Ella was glad to escape to college, where no one kept asking how she was feeling. Keeping busy stopped her hands from shaking. Sometimes she felt like a limp rag but she forced herself to make notes, to read, to study, anything to blot out the pain of returning home to the cold empty house.
There was a bit of stone she was working on which she was sure had a figure within it bursting to come out, but she couldn’t bring it to the surface. Her tutor kept going on about art being an emotional response to the visual world. It was just words to her. Her emotions were all over the place and her hand kept slipping and spoiling her attempt to catch the spirit within the stone. More than once, she threw her tools across the room in frustration.
Her carving was in danger of looking like a statue in the local cemetery, sentimental and ordinary. This was a piece intended for the end-of-term exhibition, a chance to prove her skill. She was floundering in indecision, one minute wanting to do one thing and the next another.
At dinner that evening Archie asked about her day and she poured out her frustration, unable to eat. ‘I can’t do it, I can’t think,’ she moaned. ‘It’s hopeless.’
‘Then don’t think,’ said Archie. ‘Forget about it, do something to switch off and relax.’ He was trying to be helpful but how did you relax when you’d just lost your mother? All she could think about was wandering around the city retracing the places where they’d walked together, a pilgrimage to comfort herself and remember all the little details of their life.
On Saturday morning she found herself walking from Lombard Gardens, where they’d roomed in the old house, to Dam Street, wandering up towards the cathedral as if she was going to see Canon Forester. Her feet took her to the West Front again, to the shelves of statues that were her old friends by now: the rows of saints, Old Testament prophets, Moses, and the small statues of the archangels Gabriel, Michael, Uriel and Raphael.
There were so many faces to examine inside, so many gargoyles, Francis Chantrey’s wonderful The Sleeping Children.
Sitting in the corner of the cathedral, she knew her subject would be an ordinary face, a lived-in face with sorrowful lines. She thought of Captain Smith’s stern sad face looking far out to sea, landlocked in Museum Gardens. How many times had her mother stood in front of him with tears in her eyes? Ella never knew why his presence there moved her so. When she had once asked her, she had brushed her off saying, ‘One day . . . when you are older, I’ll explain.’
Now they would never talk again and so many questions in her head would remain unanswered. It was there, among the stone effigies, that she began to think that perhaps she could carve the one face that she’d known all her life. What subject better than her mother’s face to find in the stone? She would scrap all those over elaborate ideas and carve the one she really knew.
She looked up at the arching ceiling. This was a good place to think. How many times had she sat here alone, waiting for Mum to come off her shift? How many times had they walked the aisles together?
Mr McAdam was right. You had to wait for things to rise up to the surface. Let them speak to you in their own good time. Was this what the tutor had meant by an emotional response to a subject? She’d no idea how it was going to turn out now, but it was worth a try. She couldn’t wait for Monday now.
88
1927
Term was almost over and the long summer holidays were looming as Celeste sat savouring the late evening sunshine in the garden. Selwyn had gone into Lichfield for his usual night out with old comrades, and Ella and Hazel had gone to a dance and were staying at Netherstowe. Celeste turned to Archie, watching the rays of setting sun lighting up his craggy face. He looked relaxed, sated by a good roast and the first of their strawberries.
‘Have you given any thought to what I told you the other night?’ She’d blurted out May’s confession to him after months of indecision. He sat sucking on his pipe listening but saying little. ‘I have to find out if it’s true,’ she said, ‘but where does one even start?’
‘At the beginning,’ he smiled. ‘Go back to where May was born, find out if anyone there remembers them. It’s not that long ago, there’s bound to be a record of the baby’s birth and a baptism. Ask friends still in the town.’
All I know is that she came from an orphanage near Bolton where she met Joe and they worked in Horrocks’s cotton mill. They gave her sheets when she left; she kept going on about losing those sheets on the Titanic. I don’t want to stir up trouble but the more I think about it, May did seem defensive. She never went back to Bolton, which I thought strange at the time. Too many memories there, I thought, but what if her confession’s true? I hate to think she’d deceived us all and took advantage of us.’
‘Come on, that’s not the May we knew. She was so loyal and protective of your friendship. The poor woman took a wrong turn and couldn’t go back, I reckon. The lie just grew and grew until it was out of her control. We could take Selwyn’s jalopy to Bolton and make a few discreet enquiries. Just to put your mind at rest.’
‘We?’ Celeste felt her heart beat faster. ‘You’d come with me?’
‘Of course, what else is a lecturer to do in his vacation but travel? Perhaps we could go onto the Lake District. I’d love to see Ullswater and Borrowdale again. Let’s make a holiday of it, strictly legitimate . . . separate rooms . . .’ he said in all earnestness.
‘Oh,’ she replied, feeling her face slump with disappointment. ‘Of course.’
‘I’m only thinking of your reputation,’ he laughed.
‘I’m not. In fact I’m fed up with the whole idea of sitting it out until Grover deigns to agree to a divorce. It’s never going to happen.’ She looked him straight in the face. ‘But you and I, we’ve waited a long time, haven’t we? Life can be so short and cruel. May and the Titanic taught me that. It’s time we started living our own lives, don’t you think?’ She reached out his hand with a sigh. ‘If only we’d met all those years ago.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. You can’t turn the clock back. I was married then. There was a war and then Alice and Rupert died . . .’ He paused, clutching her hand tightly. ‘You’re right, though. This is our time now, a second chance for happiness, darling girl, but I won’t have your name dragged through the mud.’
‘Who’s to know if we go on holiday together? It’s no one else’s business,’ she suggested.
‘There’s Ella. What sort of an
example is it for her?’ he replied.
‘Believe me, that young lady is seeing it all at college. Only yesterday she told me that one of their lecturers arrives so drunk, they often put him to bed in a side room and one of the older students reads his notes until he sobers up. But there is your college post to think about.’
‘How I conduct my private life is my business as long as I deliver a good syllabus and get them through the exams. But it’s you I really worry about. This is a small city with some small minds ready to make your life a misery.’
‘Archie, I love you for this concern. I don’t know how I would have held up after Roddy left and Grover made things so difficult. And now May and all this mess about Ella.’ She recalled that first chance meeting on board the Saxonia. Fate deals a hand once again, she mused. ‘You’ve been my rock. When I think how I treated you when we first met.’
‘Ah, the frosty Mrs Forester . . . I always knew you’d melt one day,’ Archie smiled as he looked at his wristwatch. ‘Look at the time, I ought to be shifting to my billet.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.’ He got up to leave but she pulled him back down onto the chair.
‘Stay, Archie. There’s nothing to go back to your digs for, is there?’ she blushed.
‘Are you sure . . . ? What about Selwyn?’
‘Leave Selwyn to me. He doesn’t care a hoot about such things now. We’ve wasted enough time as it is. Your place is here from now on. People can think what they like, as far as I’m concerned. You can be our new lodger, whatever. I really don’t care any more. I’ve spent years doing what I thought was my duty. Please stay tonight.’
‘If I stay the night, I’ll never want to leave.’ He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
‘Good,’ she replied. Slowly, she took his hand, closed the veranda door and guided him up the stairs towards her bedroom. Why should they not steal some happiness for themselves while they were young enough to enjoy it? May wouldn’t begrudge them this time together. If she was to take up the quest for Ella’s identity who better to share the burden with than Archie?
Carpe diem, seize the moment, she smiled, opening the door with a flourish. You’re a long time dead.
89
Akron
All that his pa could talk about was the price of rubber falling on the world markets and how the industry was having to lay off men and cut wages to stop expansion programmes. Akron rubber companies had raided Africa and the Far East for new supplies of rubber to harvest, but prices were still tumbling. There was talk of new tyre trials for long-distance trucks and farm tractors. Every experiment took scientists and lots of dollars. Things were changing in the industry and Pa was finding it hard to keep up with the new men coming in who seemed to have the ear of the big bosses. He was drinking harder and was crabby most of the time, worried about his position, ranting at the staff for the slightest delay. Some of them had already left to get better jobs in the factories. Why should they keep on taking orders from a bully?
Grandma Harriet kept herself out of the house, visiting, taking sewing classes, lunching with old friends, so Roddy was left alone to study. But his heart wasn’t in his subjects.
In fact, since his mom had left Roddy had felt restless, unsettled, aware that all she’d said of Pa was true. He was a selfish user of people, charming to strangers, but when the door closed on their guests, he sat in his library, drinking bourbon until it came out of his ears.
He’d dumped Louella for another girl, and then another one, each younger than the last, showering them with gifts. But they never stayed long. The last one had looked on Roddy with interest, which scared him. How could Grover prefer them to his own mother?
Her letters were full of Archie McAdam. He’d come to lodge in Red House to help Selwyn with the garden or some such excuse. They’d been to visit May’s old home to notify her friends of her death, then gone on to the Lake District but it had been raining so hard they’d come home with relief. Ella had passed all her exams and been recommended for the Diploma course in Birmingham. She hoped to get a grant to travel with some of the other art students to France. He felt envious of their busy lives. Here he was, stuck in Rubber Town, going nowhere fast. Apart from playing baseball, soccer and tennis with friends he felt his life was aimless and without purpose.
One thing was definite: he did not want to go into the rubber industry. Those gargantuan factories with their acrid smells held no appeal, no matter how many times Pa suggested it.
What he did like was visiting the new truck depot where his buddy Will Morgan helped during his vacation. Motor Cargo had been started up to ferry tyres from the rubber factories across country to depots and garages. A few men had got together and bought one huge truck and then got licensed to transport across state borders into Pennsylvania, Virginia and beyond. They were building up fleets of contract transporters, drivers who could take any load anywhere. It sounded so simple, a brilliant idea.
Will had a head start learning how to drive these enormous trucks, and told tales of driving on the highways, testing out the new transport tyres for the rubber manufacturers. If one company could do it, why couldn’t they follow this idea too? He suggested to his father one evening after dinner that they could do far worse than start their own haulage business.
‘Whyever should I want to do that?’ he sneered. ‘It’s no job for a gentleman.’
‘Who’s that then?’ Roddy chipped in. ‘I see no gentlemen.’ The joke went down like a punctured tyre.
‘I didn’t pay out all those greenbacks to raise a truck driver.’
‘But we could hire other men to do it for us,’ Roddy continued. He knew he was onto something here.
‘I brought you here to take my place one day,’ Pa replied, ignoring his enthusiasm.
‘It’s only an idea,’ Roddy said, feeling disappointed. It made common sense for them to set up their own business. If the worst came to the worst in the rubber industry there would always be other heavy goods needing shifting from one side of the state to another.
‘Time you started at Akron University studying sciences. It’ll stand you in good stead,’ his father began.
‘For what? I don’t see myself as another Mr Marks.’ Roddy referred to one of the most famous research scientists in the Akron laboratories.
‘The way you’re heading, son, with those grades you’ll be lucky if I can pull strings to get you a place anywhere. When I was your age no one gave me a hand up.’
‘But that’s not true. Grandpa Parkes made money and sent you away to college.’
Just at that moment Grandma Harriet appeared in the hallway and Pa turned to her with a glare. ‘What nonsense have you been putting in my son’s head? If the Diamond Rubber Company is good enough for me it’s good enough for him.’
‘Why should I say anything against your work? I reckon Roderick’s cut from a different cloth than you,’ she replied, looking wary of where this conversation was going.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ Grover shouted, getting to his feet.
‘Nothing, son. Roderick just wants to make his own way, that’s only fair.’
‘With his brains he’ll need all the help he can get. I didn’t bring him all this way to flunk his grades and not make college. Parkes men aren’t losers.’
‘It’s not what I want,’ Roddy protested.
‘Who the hell cares what you want? You’re my son and you do as I say.’
‘Or else?’ Roddy felt his heart beating with anger and frustration. ‘Will you drug me, drag me through the factory gate? I’m not your servant!’
‘Don’t you cheek me, boy.’
‘Or else?’ Roddy squared up to his father, eyeball to eyeball. ‘Or else you’ll beat the shit outta me like you did my mother . . . and her?’ He turned to point at his shocked grandmother, who had been quivering in the doorway and was now edging towards the stairs in horror at his outburst.
‘What lies has that English whore been telli
ng you?’
‘Don’t you call my mother that. You’re not worthy to wipe her shoes. You’re just a bully. I’ve got your measure.’
‘How dare you?’ Grover made to punch him in the jaw, but Roddy was braced for the blow, ducking to the side, raising his own hand to fend off the strike, lashing out at his father in fury. Years of pent-up frustration filled his limbs with iron and he felt himself rearing up, punching and throwing his father to the floor, beating him with his fists until the older man curled up against the blows, bleeding and defenceless.
‘How does that feel?’ he yelled as Grandma leaped in to drag him away.
‘Roddy! Roderick, stop this. You’ll kill him!’ she screamed.
‘Death’s too good for him. I hate him. I hate him for what he’s done to this family. You won’t get the better of me, not now, not ever.’
Grover looked up at him with stunned eyes. He let out one final roar of fury. ‘Get out . . . get out of my sight!’
‘With pleasure, but I’m taking Gran with me. You’ll not touch a hair on her head ever again.’ He turned to his grandma. ‘Pack a bag, we’re getting out of here. You can go to Effie Morgan’s for the night.’
Harriet stayed put. ‘No, I’m going nowhere. This is my home. I don’t want tongues wagging.’
‘I won’t go without you,’ Roddy shouted, but still she wouldn’t move. ‘I promised Mom . . .’
Harriet stood firm, looking down at Grover. ‘He is my son for better or worse. I never thought to see you, two stags rutting, drawing blood, but I guess it’s been coming a long time. You’d better go. There’ll be no more fighting in this house.’ She pulled up her son, who still looked dazed. ‘You’ve had this due for a long time, Grover Parkes. I’m glad Roderick isn’t going to be a copy of you. What a mess you make of things. You’ve lost all that’s good in your life and the pity of it is you don’t even know it yet, but you will. One day you’ll end up one lonely old man if you don’t mend your ways. Burned bridges are awful hard to mend.’