‘She needs to be in hospital – they could control the pain better.’ The old lady was now too weak to groan or cry.
‘They’d finish her off and she wants to be at home. We promised her, pet. Even if she doesn’t talk, I reckon she knows where she is.’
Not for the first time today, Agnes realized that her old Pop was on his way back. Since the stroke, he had acted in a way Nan might have described as ‘yon-derly’, a term invented to describe someone who was present in body, but not in mind. ‘Would it be a bad thing if the hospital gave her a helping hand?’ whispered Agnes.
He shrugged and asked if she knew where his baccy and pipe were. So his thoughts were still skipping slightly, though he seemed capable of concentrating for several seconds, at least. And he had remembered Glenys Timpson’s sons for about two minutes, so that was a good sign. ‘Behind the clock,’ she answered.
Fred disappeared, came back almost immediately with the postcard that marked the year. ‘What’s this?’
‘The year. Your pipe’s behind the clock.’
‘Right.’ Off he went once more.
Agnes held a withered claw that had once been a hand, a hand that had fed and clothed her, a hand belonging to the only mother she had ever known. ‘Please, please go,’ she wept.
The front door opened and Nurse Ingram stepped into the room. She studied the scene for a few seconds, then stood behind Agnes, squeezing the young woman’s shoulder in a way that was meant to be supportive and encouraging. ‘Let me get the ambulance, love,’ she begged.
‘I promised she’d die here.’ The words were fractured by sobs.
‘I know that. But we want what’s best for her, don’t we?’
Agnes nodded.
After a pause of several seconds, the nurse spoke again. ‘Get me a bowl of water while I wash her face.’
‘I just did that.’
The nurse walked a few paces and stood eye to eye with Agnes. ‘Get me a bowl of water and a towel. Go on. It’s what I need.’
Agnes looked into the sorrow-filled eyes of a person she had come to know and trust in recent weeks. Although no words were spoken, she heard what the woman was not permitted to say. Unsteadily, she rose to her feet and dried her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘She’ll be all right,’ said the nurse. ‘Just let me see to her.’
Agnes filled the bowl and ordered Pop to follow her. They re-entered the front room just as the nurse stamped a heavy foot onto a phial.
‘I get clumsier all the time. Second piece of equipment I’ve lost today,’ announced Alice Ingram, her eyes fixed on Agnes’s face. ‘She’s going now. Stay with her.’
‘Where’s she going?’ asked Fred.
‘To Jesus,’ Agnes replied.
So it came about that Sadie Grimshaw left her body and went to meet her Maker. The only evidence that she had been awarded an assisted passage was ground into a pegged rug beside the bed. With Fred on one side and her granddaughter on the other, Sadie breathed her last. Free from pain and all other earthly shackles, she floated away on a cloud of morphine, her ravaged features relaxed for the first time in months.
Nurse Alice Ingram wiped the patient’s face. ‘I’ll get the doctor to sign the certificate,’ she said, her voice shaky. She had done the right thing. Sadie would not have survived the journey to the infirmary, she told herself repeatedly. ‘I’ll lay her out myself.’
Fred looked at Agnes. ‘Is that it? Has she gone?’
Agnes nodded.
His chin dropped and he stared at his dead wife. ‘I’ll have to pull myself together now, Sadie,’ he said. ‘I’m all our Agnes has left, aren’t I?’
He left the room.
‘How can I thank you?’ Agnes asked.
‘By saying nowt. I’ve done wrong, but it was right in my book.’
‘And in mine. I know you’re not supposed to . . . But sometimes, it can be a kindness.’
In the back living room, Pop was weeping quietly in the fireside rocker. Agnes squatted down and took his hand. ‘It was time. Every day was worse than the one before. That wasn’t Nan any more. She needed to go.’
He smiled through his grief. ‘Your mam wasn’t a bad girl, you know. And when she died, me and Sadie got you. Eeh, you were lovely. You kept us going, gave us something to fight for. Losing our Eileen were the worst thing that ever happened to me and my Sadie. But she wasn’t bad, your mam. She didn’t mess with all kinds of men.’
Agnes patted his hand. He could go back twenty years, but he struggled to remember yesterday. ‘Is Sadie all right now?’ he asked.
She swallowed hard. ‘Nan died a few minutes ago.’ This had been a long day. Nan was gone, the job was gone and Pop was on his way back.
He stared hard into the blue depths of his beloved little girl’s eyes. ‘I’m not that daft, lass. I know she’s dead. I were there when she went. Nay, that’ll stick.’ Red-letter day. Why had this been a red-letter day? It was black now, dark, clouded over, miserable. He had pencils and a notebook; he had returned the polish; his wife was dead. This had become a black-letter day and he had to keep going for Agnes. It had always been for Agnes, because Agnes deserved the best. ‘I wish we could have got you educated, love. You’re cleverer than your friends, but you work in a mill.’
‘No, I left the mill and went to clean the pub, but the pub’s closing.’
‘Closing time already?’
‘Closing for good, Pop.’ Like Nan, the Dog and Ferret was about to become just another piece of local history.
They waited for the hearse. Denis, who had been given a day off, was smart in his dark suit and white shirt. He paced about, uncomfortable in new shoes. Outside on the cobbles, Judge Spencer’s Bentley gleamed in morning sunlight weakened by layers of dust and smoke from nearby mills. The judge had lent his precious motor so that Sadie’s family could travel in style to church and graveyard.
Denis kept a keen eye on his calm wife. Agnes took things in her stride, but this stride had been a mile long, because she had adored her grandmother. She had no job, little money and the old man to care for. If only Denis had enjoyed health good enough for a proper job, things would have been different, but he was a manservant on low wages and he hated to see his beloved wife so poor. Her navy suit was clean and pressed, but shabby shoes told the world how impoverished Agnes was. The new shoes had been for him and should have been for her. His love was so strong that it hurt, especially now. ‘All right, pet?’ he asked for the third time. The judge had paid for Denis’s shoes – they were part of the uniform.
She smiled at him. Here she sat, surrounded by Nan’s furniture, Nan’s rugs, Nan’s memories expressed in photographs on the mantel. Every pot and pan in the place was Nan’s, but that lovely woman was dead and Agnes felt numb and chilled right through to her bones. How could a person be cold on a nice June morning? Could she carry on here without the woman who had formed and nurtured her? Could she live among Nan’s little treasures, those constant reminders of better days?
Pop was quiet. He was scribbling again in his little book, brow furrowed as he struggled with spelling, never one of his strong points. Since the death of Sadie, the notebook had been his constant companion. Every meal, every walk, every memory got space on the page. He was going to bury his beloved today, and each move would be recorded.
Denis sighed. He knew full well that Fred would make notes through the requiem and at the graveside, but that was the old fellow’s way of coping. If the system worked, it must be employed. Agnes hadn’t wept properly yet; Denis hoped that this would be her day for tears.
A sudden commotion in the street caused all three occupants of the room to move towards the front door. Hearses were quiet vehicles, but tyres screeched and someone ran quickly down towards Deane Road. They stood and watched as police dragged Harry Timpson into a car. His mother, turban dangling loose from curlered hair, was screaming and pulling at the nearest officer. ‘Leave him,’ she yelled. ‘He’s done nowt.’
&n
bsp; The drama was over in seconds. As the police car drove off towards town, the hearse entered the other end of the street, moving slowly towards Sadie’s house. It stopped and two men stepped out to collect the floral tributes and place them on the coffin.
Agnes felt a hand on her arm. She turned and saw a dishevelled Glenys Timpson with a bunch of flowers that had seen better days. The woman was weeping. ‘For your nan. Sadie, God rest her,’ she sobbed. Then, for the first time within living memory, Glenys apologized. ‘They’ve took him away,’ she added. ‘He’ll be in jail. Seems you were right.’
Agnes offered a weak smile. ‘It’s a bad day for all of us,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Fred and his granddaughter occupied the rear seat of the Bentley while Denis drove. Without the chauffeur’s cap, he looked like any other car owner, but the vehicle had to be returned and garaged by this evening.
There was a large crowd outside the church of Saints Peter and Paul. Sadie Grimshaw had been loved, because she had been a caring, generous woman. The people parted and lined the path they had created while coffin and chief mourners entered the cool interior of the porch, then the large congregation of neighbours and friends filed quietly into the church. Catholics blessed themselves after dipping fingers in small fonts of water, Protestants split again into two types – those who tried to copy genuflection and the Sign of the Cross, and those who sat at the back.
It was in here that Agnes allowed everything to become real. In the arms of her loving husband, she poured out the grief she had contained for days made busy with arrangements, with the cashing of policies and the choosing of hymns. It was a long Mass and, at the end of it, a drained Agnes was helped outside by Fred and Denis. Her eyes moved away from the coffin for a moment and she saw Glenys Timpson, whose son had been arrested just an hour ago. This street gossip, although living through one of her own darker hours, had come to pay tribute to Sadie Grimshaw.
Glenys smiled through her tears.
Agnes leaned towards her. ‘I didn’t say anything to the police,’ she whispered.
‘I know you didn’t, love.’
The cortège drove through the town into Tonge Cemetery, past the Protestant graves and to the Catholic side in which Fred and Sadie had bought their little bit of England. A gaping hole was blessed by the priest before Sadie’s coffin was moved for the last time. It was done.
Fred had stopped his writing. He threw soil into the grave, mouthed a few indistinguishable words, then stepped away to make room for Agnes and Denis. The sun shone brilliantly, and happy birds flitted about in trees and bushes. ‘We can go now,’ said Fred. ‘She’d want us to have a nice cup of tea and a butty.’
People came and went all day. The Noble Street house was filled with neighbours and friends; the priest came, as did a Methodist preacher and two nuns from the Catholic school.
When daylight began to dwindle, Denis took Judge Spencer’s car back to its rightful owner. Sadie’s chair was now occupied by Agnes, just as it had been all through the illness. Fred scribbled and dozed, Agnes stared into the fire and wondered about her future. Was it time to think about going for a proper job? Pop would recover completely before long, so Agnes would be free to choose the course of her own future. Her friends would be coming back to sit with her soon and she would discuss the matter with them. Lucy and Mags had got Agnes through this day.
No matter what, it would be lonely without Nan. But Nan would be up in heaven and expecting Agnes to do her best. And Nan always got her own way in the end.
Chapter Two
Helen Spencer, a spinster in her thirties, lived a monotonous life in a grand, colourless house that belonged to her father.
Judge Zachary Spencer was a mean-spirited man whose years in the courts had served only to make him bitter about his fellows, and age had not mellowed him. He listened to advocates, heard testimony, sat on his grand courtroom throne and said very little. Murderers, fraudsters and thieves were part and parcel of his daily grind, and he expected little of his daughter when he arrived home. She was not a son; she was, therefore, one of the more bitter disappointments in his self-absorbed life.
Control was something he prized above all things, so, apart from the booming works of Wagner and some of Beethoven’s louder compositions, he enjoyed an uneventful life cocooned by domestic legislation invented and imposed by himself. He seldom spoke except to bark an order and made no attempt to conceal from his daughter the contempt he felt for the merely female. Servants had disappeared over the years, and the household was held together rather tenuously by one Kate Moores, who owned an admirable ability to ignore her employer.
Helen was lonely to the point of desperation, though she had been careful to hide her discontent with life. Quietly resentful, she attended church, worked in the Bolton Central Library and, during breaks for coffee and tea, found herself virtually incapable of enjoying conversation with colleagues, so lunchtimes were spent in a quiet, sedate cafe away from crowds and noise. She feared people and did not trust her own ability to cope in any social situation. Of late, she had begun to quarrel with herself. The steady rock to which she had clung was suddenly embedded in quicksand, and self-control was becoming a luxury.
Why? was a question she asked herself repeatedly. Had her mother survived, would life have been different, better? Would siblings have cheered her, or had she been born different from the norm? Father didn’t help, of course, all noisy music and imperious shouts, but surely other people survived such trials?
An avid reader, she screamed inwardly with Miss Catherine Earnshaw, allowed Heathcliff to break her heart, wept over Jane Eyre and her blinded master, allowed Dickens to place her in the company of Miss Havisham presiding over an uneaten and decayed wedding breakfast. Helen also laughed when she read, though she seldom even smiled in real life. Fiction had always been a place in which she might hide, a retreat from a stale, unattractive life.
Until now. He had slid noiselessly into her pale existence, had made her giggle and told her stories of his childhood, of his life at home, of his wife. His wife. Helen poured milk into her tea and stared blindly through the window. Today he was not here, because he was burying his wife’s grandmother. Denis Makepeace was a quiet man, self-educated, willing and worthy of trust. Father had lent him the car and the good man was grateful for that. Like Helen, he had to make do with leavings from the top table. He was a servant and she was a woman. Both were treated by Zachary Spencer as peripheral characters – no, as part of a backdrop created to serve only the judge, who was the main figure on the canvas. Judge Spencer was Henry VIII all over again; Helen and Denis were two of the crowd to whom he occasionally threw a bone.
Helen Spencer, having never been in love, owned no yardstick against which she might measure her feelings for Denis. Love was in books; it had never figured on the pages of reality. Was the quickening of her heart a symptom, were the shameful dreams created by genuine affection for him or by the nagging frustrations of a lone, untouched female? Her cheeks were heated as she sipped her tea, and she wondered whether other women endured such night torments. Of course, she was younger and more beautiful when asleep. Awake, she was plain, ordinary and colourless. No one looked at her. She stamped books, collected fines, kept the reference section in order. Over the years, Helen had become part of the library, although she was not worth reading, so she remained on the shelf.
The mirror over the mantel told its familiar story – brown hair, hazel eyes, pale skin, nothing remarkable about the face. She was neither fat nor thin, yet her body had no real shape and she had never sought to embellish her physical self. Would she actually use the frivolous purchases she had made and could she change herself gradually in order to avoid comments from her father and work fellows? Suddenly giddy and young, she was about to embark on an adventure usually enjoyed by females half her age.
She took herself off to the privacy of her bedroom where, once seated on the bed, she began to unwrap the evidence of her f
olly. Silk slid through her fingers, soft, smooth undergarments in many shades – including black. Patent leather shoes and matching handbag were placed carefully in a wardrobe beneath a hanger bearing a fine wool suit in emerald green. Blouses and skirts remained in their packages, because she had more interesting objects to investigate.
Across the surface of the dressing table, Helen set out her stall. The girl in the department store had been patient and friendly, had shown the nervous customer how to attain a daytime ‘natural’ look, how to make herself up for the evenings. Evenings? Where on earth would she go and with whom? The Halle Orchestra in Manchester, perhaps? Concerts in the Free Trade Hall, a single ticket to the theatre, a lone seat in the cinema? There was nowhere to go, because she was nobody; perhaps, if she became a somebody, things might begin to happen.
Darnley’s Liquid Satin foundation, compressed powder, four lipsticks, half a dozen eye shadows, an eyebrow pencil, mascara – did she dare? A small phial of Chanel No. 5 had taken a fortnight’s wages, while the rest of the articles had cost a king’s ransom. Did she dare? Would she ever obtain the courage required?
There was an anger in Helen, a deep resentment that, since childhood, had been forbidden to show its face at the surface. It had bubbled up recently in reaction to a small event, a comment made by a child in the library. The little girl had remarked to her mother that the lady had an unhappy face, and this same unhappy-faced lady had gone that very lunchtime for a make-up demonstration in a store. Perhaps she could not change her soul – no one had the power to alter the past – but she might make some attempt to reshape her future. Yet she had cleansed herself after the event, had removed from her face all evidence of the effort made by the gentle girl who had tried to help.
Now, she unveiled cleanser, moisturizer, a tiny pot of cream for delicate areas around the eyes. Pearl nail polishes in pink and white were lined up in front of other bottles and boxes. Like a man playing soldiers, Helen assembled her troops in preparation for battle. It would have to be done gradually, but she intended to make the most of her minimal assets. Other women wore make-up and perfume, so why should she be the exception?
The Judge's Daughter Page 3