by Maureen Lee
‘I’d sooner you didn’t, Ben.’ He might take it as a sign of encouragement.
‘Oh, well.’ He shook hands formally. ‘See you around some time, Jose.’
2
Josie had told Dinah about Laura years ago, when she was still too young to understand, to grasp the concept of death and the passage of time, and the things that had happened before she was born. Josie had thought this the best way, rather than spring the fact of a dead sister later, right out of the blue.
Dinah was eight when she began to plague her mother with questions, about Laura, about Jack. She demanded pictures, descriptions. Why didn’t Jack come to see her? Was Laura clever, was she nice, was she pretty?
‘Not as clever as you, luv, but every bit as nice, and just as pretty, though in a different way. She was dark, like your dad. You take after my side of the family.’
‘I’m like Auntie Ivy’s mummy. Was she me grandma?’
‘No, luv, she was mine. Your grandma … gosh!’ It was impossible to imagine Mam being a grandma. ‘Your grandma was dead beautiful. Her name was Mabel. She was only twenty-two when she was killed.’
‘Did you love Laura better than me?’
Josie gasped. ‘Of course not, luv. I loved her exactly the same way as I love you.’ She reached down to stroke the creamy hair, but Dinah shrugged the hand away.
A fire blazed in the black metal fireplace with its fancy tiled surround. The Tiffany lamp was on, casting jewel-coloured shadows on the walls and ceding of the small room. Dinah lay face down on the mat, drawing. Josie held a Sunday paper on her knee. It was a gloomy December day, but cosy inside. She might put the decorations up later. It was only a week off Christmas.
‘What are you drawing, luv?’
‘Laura. I remember what she looks like from the photo you showed me. The one she had done at school.’
‘Ah, yes.’ It had been a state school, but the children had worn uniforms. Laura’s tie was crooked, her hair a mess, but she was grinning from ear to ear. She’d been such a happy little girl. The only time Josie could recall her otherwise were those final two days when Jack had disappeared.
Dinah looked over her shoulder. ‘Will me dad send a Christmas card from America?’
‘I doubt it, Dinah. He never has before.’ There’d been no reply to the letter she’d sent three years ago, telling Jack he had a daughter and enclosing her photograph.
‘I think that’s rude,’ she said primly.
‘So do I.’
‘I don’t think me dad is very nice.’
‘Oh, he’s all right. But I’ve told you before – he’s got another wife now, perhaps more children. I reckon you and me are very far from his mind.’
‘He’s still rude. If he comes, I won’t speak to him.’
‘Join the club, luv. I mightn’t speak to him meself.’ She knew she was talking rubbish. Hardly a day passed when she didn’t think of Jack Coltrane. She was still as much in love with him as she had ever been.
Dinah got to her feet. ‘Can I ring Samantha? Auntie Lily took her to town yesterday to buy her a dress for Christmas. I bet it’s not as nice as mine.’
‘Tell Auntie Lily I’ll be round tomorrow after work. Say about one o’clock.’
‘Okay, Mum.’
Josie had got the job with the accountants, only a minute’s walk away but tedious beyond words, typing never-ending columns of figures. She would never get used to figures, but the wages were good and had paid for the installation of a telephone, and the subsequent bills which she tried to keep small. Lily looked after Dinah in the school holidays. It would be nice, she thought wistfully, to have a job you could get your teeth into, something stimulating. But all she could do was type!
She went over to the window. The view was dead miserable – the back of someone’s hedge and the path, which ended outside her house so no one ever walked past. Still, it looked pretty in the summer when it was almost like living in the heart of the countryside, instead of busy Woolton. Perhaps it was the weather, or talking about Jack and Laura, but today Josie felt unusually discontented. She wished the house were somewhere else, somewhere busy, where there were cars and people to be seen, noise. She wished everything about her life was different.
With a sigh, she returned to the settee. Dinah’s drawing of Laura lay on the floor, and her heart turned over when she picked it up. Dinah had drawn her sister with a great deal of skill, particularly the dark, tousled hair, the pretty mouth, but why had she felt compelled to spoil it with a stark, black, jagged cross, completely obliterating Laura’s smiling eyes?
‘Oo-er,’ Lily said next day when Josie told her about the drawing. ‘That’s dead peculiar, that is. Did she say why she did it?’
‘I thought it best not to mention it.’
‘I would have given our Samantha a clock around the ear if she’d done that to a picture of Gillian.’
Josie made a face. ‘I doubt if that would have been the best approach, Lil. It would have only made things worse.’
‘What things?’
‘I dunno, do I? I’m not a psychiatrist. Her feelings for Laura, I suppose. Perhaps I should have talked to her about it,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe she left it there deliberately, knowing I’d see it, like. I just put it back where I found it, and didn’t say a word.’
‘I shouldn’t take any notice,’ Lily said lightly. ‘Kids do ever such peculiar things when they’re little. I remember cutting all the buttons off our Stanley’s best suit. I’ve no idea why.’
‘I put a bad spell on me Auntie Ivy loads of times, but none of them ever worked.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. She married Vincent Adams, didn’t she?’
‘That was before I was born. It was nothing to do with me.’
‘Try not to think about the drawing. Maybe she crossed it out because she didn’t think it good enough. You’re reading too much into it. By the way, Josie, would you mind putting your coffee on a coaster, please? That’s what they’re there for.’
Christmas passed pleasantly enough. On Boxing Day afternoon, Josie threw a drinks party. Lily had never heard of such a thing before, but came willingly enough with Neil and the girls. Aunt Ivy came early to help prepare the food, and Francie O’Leary brought a new girlfriend, Kathleen, a divorcee with long, dramatic, black hair and an hourglass figure. The Spencers were there. All the Kavanaghs were home for Christmas, and the old people managed to make a joke of the fact that one could hardly see and the other barely walk. Stanley and Freya, Marigold and Jonathan, Robert and Julia – all arrived with their children, so that Josie’s tiny house bulged at the seams. Ben was the only Kavanagh absent.
It was the day Daisy and Eunice announced they were getting married.
‘To each other?’ Lily spluttered.
‘No, idiot.’ Daisy’s laugh tinkled through the house. ‘Eunice has been quietly courting for ages. He’s a teacher, same as her. I met Manos in Greece last summer, and we’ve been writing to each other ever since. He proposed over the phone last night.’
There was a chorus of cheers and congratulations. ‘I never thought you’d do it, girl,’ Stanley whooped.
Mrs Kavanagh was close to tears. ‘I’m so happy for you, Daisy, luv. Get married soon, won’t you?’
‘As soon as humanly possible, Ma.’
The Kavanagh children looked fearfully at each other. Their mother wanted an early wedding while she had the sight left to see.
All the Kavanaghs were back again in Liverpool on St Valentine’s Day, when Daisy married Manos Dimantidou. She looked like a Greek goddess, in a simple white dress with a silver cord tied around her slim waist. Manos was a tall, suntanned man, sporting an awesome amount of black, curly hair with a sprinkling of silver in the long sideburns.
‘Ah, well, that’s the last of the children off our hands,’ Mr Kavanagh said at the reception. ‘Six down and none to go.’
His wife laughed. ‘Now I can die happy. Though the grandchildren’s weddings will soon b
e starting. Our Marigold’s Colin will be twenty next year. He’s already courting.’
And Laura would have been fifteen, Josie thought with a pang, old enough to be thinking about boys. She looked for Dinah, and saw her playing with Samantha in the corner of the hotel ballroom. She’d never mentioned the drawing of Laura and, since Christmas, Dinah seemed to have lost interest in both Jack and her sister.
‘Hi. We only seem to meet at parties and weddings.’ Ben appeared beside her.
‘Hi, yourself. You’re looking well.’ He wasn’t nearly as tense as the last time she’d seen him at Dinah’s party. ‘Is Imelda here?’
‘She wouldn’t come. Too tired, she claimed. I promised to be home by four, which is a shame. Peter and Colette are having a great time.’ He regarded her soberly, and there was a message in his eyes she would have preferred not to see. ‘You look beautiful, as usual. I like your frock. You always suited blue. It goes with your eyes.’
‘It’s only C & A.’ It was a suit, not a frock, cornflower blue wool with satin lapels and cuffs on the fitted jacket and a slightly flared skirt.
‘I expect you know what I’m thinking.’
That they’d come to the wedding together as man and wife? ‘I’d sooner not know, Ben,’ she said stiffly. ‘We all make choices of our own free will. It’s no good looking back and wishing we’d chosen different.’
She walked away, but was sorry for the rest of her life that she’d been rude. Ben remained at the reception until half past six, by which time the newly married couple had left for their honeymoon. The family decided not to tell them yet that when Ben arrived home, Imelda was dead, having taken what turned out to be a final fatal overdose.
‘She was expecting Ben back in time to save her,’ Lily sneered. ‘I’m glad he was late. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.’
‘You can be awful hard when you like, Lil,’ Josie remarked.
‘Oh, I’m as hard as nails, me. I believe in putting meself, me kids and me family first, and that means our Ben. I always said he was a soppy lad. He should have given Imelda her cards years ago. There’s no way I’d let someone ruin me life the way she did his.’
Imelda had only been buried a month when Mollie Kavanagh fell the full length of the stairs in the house in Childwall. She never regained consciousness and died two minutes before midnight the same night, with her husband and four of her children at her bedside, having been given the Last Sacraments just in time. Stanley and Robert arrived too late to be with the mother they had loved so dearly.
Josie waited anxiously by the phone. Lily had rung earlier to explain what had happened. She longed to be there, to say goodbye to the kind, loving and immensely generous woman who had been such a significant presence in her life, but would have felt in the way.
The telephone went at half past twelve. ‘She’s gone, Jose,’ Lily said in a ragged voice. ‘She went half an hour ago. Me poor da’s in a terrible state. Our Marigold’s taking him home. Oh, Josie! Why don’t nice things ever happen? Why is everything always so bloody sad?’
The funeral was held on the first of April. It rained solidly, all day, without a break. Francie O’Leary was one of more than a hundred mourners; Mrs Kavanagh had made many friends over the years. Josie was grateful for his presence beside her during the Requiem Mass and, later, in the house in Childwall in which she’d known so many happy times.
‘Can I come and see you tonight?’ Francie asked when it was time for him to leave for his printing business, now occupying a small factory in Speke.
‘Why the formality? You don’t usually ask.’ He turned up at all sorts of unlikely hours, and she was always glad to see him. Francie managed to make everything seem more cheerful than it actually was. Tonight he would be more than welcome.
He gave an enigmatic smile. ‘Tonight’s different.’
It was just gone eight when he arrived, having changed from a formal suit into jeans, a loose Indian shirt and a long, padded, velvet jacket. He’d recently had a perm, and his narrow face was framed in loose, bouncy waves.
‘Where’s Dinah?’ he asked.
‘In bed. She went early with a book. She can read ever so well, Francie. At school, they reckon she’s bound to pass the eleven plus and go to grammar school.’
‘Good.’ He settled in a chair and looked at her intently. ‘I’m not going to beat around the bush. Will you marry me?’
She smiled. ‘No.’
‘It’s not a joke, Josie. I mean it. I seriously think we should get married. We get on perfectly together, we never row.’
‘That’s because we’re not married.’ She still thought he was joking. ‘What happened to Kathleen?’
‘I ditched her.’
‘Poor girl. She was mad about you.’
‘Stuff Kathleen. It’s us I want to talk about.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m not in love with you, Jose.’
‘I’m not in love with you, Francie.’
‘Though I fancy you something rotten, always have.’
‘I quite fancy you,’ she conceded. ‘Though you don’t suit a perm. You look like a Cavalier.’
‘That’s a pity.’ He gave an amiable, laid-back grin. ‘I would have been on the side of the Roundheads. We’re both getting on, you know, Jose. I’m thirty-seven, you’re thirty-five. Why spend the rest of our lives apart when we can be together? It’s a terrible waste. I really am serious, Josie. Honest.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Don’t change the subject. I’ll have tea when you’ve said you’ll marry me.’
‘Then you’ll never drink another cup of tea again, Francie O’Leary,’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t dream of marrying you. I like you too much.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘If you really are serious, why ask now, after all this time?’
‘Because I want to snap you up before Ben Kavanagh does,’ Francie said surprisingly. ‘He’s crazy about you, Jose. After a decent interval he’s bound to propose.’
‘Then I shall tell him no, same as you.’
‘Are you sure?’
Josie nodded furiously. ‘Positive.’
‘In that case, I’ll have a cup of tea. Strong, two sugars, to steady me nerves.’
‘You don’t have nerves, Francie.’ She went into the kitchen.
‘Are you still in love with that husband of yours?’ he shouted.
‘Ex-husband.’ She returned to the parlour. ‘Yes, though I know it’s hopeless. It’s strange, because we weren’t exactly happy a lot of the time.’ Even in New York, which she looked back on as having been perfect, she’d nevertheless been full of doubts and uncertainties.
He looked at her curiously. ‘What’s it like, being in love? It’s never happened to me.’
‘It’s … it’s indescribable, Francie.’ She clasped her hands against her breast, smiling, remembering the night she’d met Jack. ‘Everything seems different, the whole world. It’s agony and ecstasy at the same time.’
‘It doesn’t sound too healthy to me,’ Francie said drily.
She thought about Ivy and Uncle Vince. ‘It isn’t always.’
The kettle boiled and she went to make the tea. Francie appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘I meant what I said earlier, that we should get married. I don’t expect an answer now, but think about it, Jose. Another thing …’ He winked at her suggestively. ‘I reckon we’d be good together in bed.’
Josie thought about it, and decided it wasn’t a bad idea. Whenever Francie got a new girlfriend she didn’t feel jealous, but she was always worried she would lose him as a friend. He’d become part of her life, like Lily and Aunt Ivy, like Mrs Kavanagh had been. Francie touched a side of her that no one else did. He made the world seem funny and young. They had a good laugh together. Was that enough to make a marriage? Well, she’d never know if she didn’t try. And they might grow to love each other one day, you never knew.
‘But would you mind if we left it until next year?’ she said to him the night she accepted his pro
posal. ‘It’s been such an awful year so far. We’ve known each for half our lives, so another few months won’t make much difference. And, if you don’t mind, I’d sooner we kept it between ourselves for now.’
‘In case you get cold feet?’
Josie chewed her lip. ‘I’m not sure, Francie, to be honest. I mean, this isn’t exactly a romantic situation we’re in, is it? It’s almost a business arrangement. You might get cold feet. Say you fall madly in love with some girl next week, for instance?’
‘I don’t think I’m capable of falling in love,’ Francie said glumly. He folded his arms over his lavishly embroidered waistcoat, and looked at her challengingly. ‘Okay, so we get married next year. In the meantime, what about the bed bit?’
‘What about the bed bit?’
‘Do I have to wait for that until next year, too?’
‘Oh, I dunno, Francie. Let me think about it.’
They made love the first time in Francie’s new house in Halewood, because it would have been impossible in Baker’s Row with Dinah in the next room. He was a fervent, inventive lover, who still managed to make her laugh, even at the height of passion, and Josie felt enjoyably exhausted when it was over. They leaned against the pillows and finished off the wine they’d brought with them to bed. Francie looked even more sinister naked, with the faintly blue bones of his ribs showing through a surprisingly hairy body.
‘Now we’ve broken the ice, we must do this more often,’ he said. ‘Twice a night would suit me fine.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’ Josie stared around the bare room. ‘You could do with some pictures up, Francie. And those curtains are dead dull.’ The curtains were a sickly beige, to go with the carpet and the walls.
‘It needs a woman’s touch.’ Francie grinned. He pulled her hand under the bedclothes. ‘Like me.’
‘Nineteen-seventy,’ Lily said gloomily. ‘It’ll be nineteen-seventy in a few hours. Where have the years gone, Jose?’
‘I dunno.’ All day, Josie’s mind had kept going back to the eve of the last decade. She glanced at her watch. It was just gone six. Ten years ago she was putting on the purple mini-dress ready for Maya’s party, waiting for Elsie Forrest to arrive. Laura was running around the house in Bingham Mews, excited that she was being allowed to stay up till midnight. Jack had already started to drink.