Paid Servant

by E. R. Braithwaite

  Chapter

  Six

  THE NEXT CASE I tackled concerned a girl, Brigid Sweeney, whose daughter, Patricia, aged three years, was in a residential nursery. According to the previous Welfare Officer’s report, Patricia had been taken into the Council’s care because, following the birth, her mother was without fixed residence and unemployed. Miss Sweeney was now working as a waitress at one of a well-known group of self-service restaurants, but resisted all efforts at encouragement to have her baby with her, although she visited the child regularly, at least once a week. Patricia’s father, a West Indian from Barbados, also visited the child, but separately from Miss Sweeney, taking her ‘extravagantly expensive gifts’ from time to time, although he made no contribution to the child’s maintenance. The Welfare Officer had not been able to have any discussion with him, because Miss Sweeney ‘either did not know or refused to divulge’ his address or any other information about him. No mention was made of either parent’s age.

  Miss Sweeney lived in a rooming house near Clerkenwell Green. I called there about five o’clock in the evening. There were no name plates of the occupants, so I pressed the only push button. After some delay an elderly woman opened the door. Big face and neck, short-sleeved and shapeless overcoat, a yellow headkerchief kept tightly curled hair firmly in place.

  She opened the door and stood there completely filling the doorway, regarding me through pale grey eyes which seemed grim and staring, probably because of the thin fringe of pale blonde eyelashes.

  “Who do you want?” There was no mistaking that lilt in her voice. Irish, without a doubt.

  “I’m looking for Miss Sweeney.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  My immediate reaction to the clear hostility of her attitude and tone was to ask her very rudely, ‘What business is it of yours?’ But I did not know if she was the young woman’s friend, relative or neighbour, and with an effort I kept my temper controlled.

  “I’d like to see her on an important personal matter,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you. Is Miss Sweeney in?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea when I might find her in?”

  “Did that Mr Man send you here?”

  “What Mr Man?”

  “Him as used to come here; a feller like yourself.”

  “I don’t know whom you mean. I’m here to see Miss Sweeney on official business.”

  She stared at me through those eyes which seemed disturbingly transparent and lifeless, and finally said: “You wait a minute.” She left the door open, turned and walked down a narrow passageway, moving her bulk lightly and gracefully, now I noticed that she wore small, high-heeled mules which seemed surprisingly out of character. After about five minutes she reappeared, accompanied by a somewhat younger edition of herself; the same broad face and thick, wide-hipped body. This one had about her a certain attraction, an animal ripeness, full-bosomed, pink-cheeked, wide mouthed, strong.

  The younger one came to the door and examined me with a cool, comprehensive sweep of her eyes. “Who are you from?” she asked.

  “Are you Miss Sweeney?”

  “Yes.”

  In my mind I had conjured up a picture of a young, inexperienced, rather helpless person. This woman was, I felt sure, at least on the shady side of thirty.

  “I’m from the Welfare Department.”

  “Oh,”—she did not smile, but her face became relaxed. Perhaps she, too, had thought I was on some other errand.

  “Won’t you come in?” I followed where she led along the passage. The other woman had remained standing nearby, within easy earshot; now she drew herself nearer to let us pass, still fixing me with those hostile eyes.

  Miss Sweeney led me into her room, small but well-kept. At her invitation, I sat down in a high-backed chair, while she sat on a settee. She was composed and friendly.

  “For a moment I was afraid your friend would prove difficult,” I said—anything for an opening line.

  “She’s my sister. After my trouble I came to live with her. Have you come about Pat?”

  “Yes. The Department is rather anxious that she should not remain much longer in the Council’s care. I understand that you are in regular employment and we’d like to think that you are making plans to have her with you.”

  “I can’t have her yet,” she replied, “I’m staying here with my sister and she won’t let me bring the child here.”

  I looked about me; it seemed very unlikely that two such well-favoured women could be accommodated in so little space. She interpreted my glance and said: “We don’t both live in this room; my sister has this downstairs flat and she lets me use this room.”

  “Wouldn’t it be possible for you to find some other place where you could have the child with you?”

  “Well, I work shifts, sometimes from seven to three in the day, or from three to ten at night. I couldn’t look after her all the time.”

  “Miss Sweeney, many young women have the same problem. Some of them have solved it by taking jobs which leave them free during the evenings and weekends; the children are placed in a day nursery and can be with their mothers each evening.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll do that as soon as I can find a better job, working days only.” Somehow I had the feeling that this was merely an excuse.

  “Another thing, Miss Sweeney. It seems that so far you have not been making any contribution to Patricia’s maintenance. She is being cared for at public expense, and either you or her father should take some responsibility in that direction.”

  “I’ll pay something as soon as I can.”

  “And her father?”

  “What about him?”

  “If he is employed he should make a regular payment. I understand that he visits Patricia.”

  She sat quietly for a few moments.

  “He’s like you.” I was somewhat unprepared for that; it was not clear whether she meant that he looked like me, or was of the same colour. On such short acquaintance I could think of no other basis for comparison.

  “Oh, really?”

  “He’s from your part of the world. Barbados.”

  “I’m from British Guiana.” I don’t think the slight geographical variation was of much interest to her. Silence.

  “Is he working?”

  “Yes, he’s on the Underground.”

  “Probably if I have a talk with him it might help,” I said.

  She stood up suddenly, crossed to the door, and opened it, as if half-expecting that someone may have been listening outside. Satisfied, she resumed her seat.

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  Again there was a pause as she considered the question. Then she said in a rush, “Yes. 34 Glencastle Street. It’s off the Bayswater Road, near Notting Hill Gate Station.”

  If she knew where he lived and worked, why was it that the other Welfare Officer was unable to contact him? Miss Sweeney seemed willing to talk, so I asked: “How is it that you did not tell the other Officer where to find him?”

  Silence again, then: “We weren’t speaking to each other then.”

  I felt her reluctance to talk about it any more, so I changed the subject: “I haven’t yet seen Patricia. How is she?”

  Now she literally glowed. “She’s fine. She’s more like her daddy than me, ’cept perhaps her eyes. Would you believe it, she has eyes like mine. Grey.” She said this with a sort of wonder, as if she’d never become fully accustomed to the fact. We laughed.

  “I’ll pay her a visit as soon as I can. If she has eyes like yours she’s not doing too badly.” We were getting along fine now, and when I was leaving we shook hands at the door, quite an improvement on my arrival. There was no sign of the sister.

  I thought I’d press on to
Notting Hill; perhaps I’d find him at home. Considering this, I suddenly realized that I did not know the young man’s name; somehow in our discussion I’d completely forgotten to ask it. I hurried back and rang the bell. The sister answered the door, saying: “Well, what now?”

  “I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve forgotten something.”

  She moved aside to let me pass and I hurried to Miss Sweeney’s room.

  “I’m afraid I forgot to ask the name of Patricia’s father,” I told her.

  “Jason Griffiths. After you’d gone I wondered if I had told you, because I didn’t tell the other one.”

  I couldn’t understand why she needed to be so mysterious about the man, but hoped I’d get on well enough with him to find out.

  Years ago I worked in East London; each day to reach my school I passed through a succession of dingy streets in depressing neighbourhoods, and wondered at the dignity and self-respect which grew and nourished there together with the other things, like wheat among the tares; it always seemed to me that each instance of honesty, graciousness and love must have been the result of a gigantic struggle against the general conspiracy of poverty and its attendant evils. I had the same feeling as I walked towards my destination from Notting Hill Gate Tube Station. This was what would probably be called a coloured community. The old terraced houses continued in nearly unbroken line along both sides of the street. The original paint had long ago disappeared under countless coatings of grime and soot, which summer’s sun and winter’s rain and snow had transformed into an ugly, greenish, scabrous skin, now curling away from the crumbling plaster in long, irregular flakes.

  It was a lively street. People everywhere, nearly all of them black, and nearly all of them men. And cars. Some shiny new, being lovingly polished by their owners; others old, ramshackle, with their bonnets up, from which protruded denim-covered backsides and legs, as if the ancient vehicles had patiently waited for this moment and were now casually devouring those who had once mistreated them. Other men sat on the steps and casually joked with their neighbours, now and then erupting in a burst of laughter coming from deep within them, sweet to hear, a kind of bugling, richly defiant of the grime and poverty.

  Someone once told me that these new citizens chose to live in these places. I think that is true, but, for reasons other than my informant preferred. On this balmy evening they could enjoy a short period of togetherness before retiring into their individual one-room castles; in the face of general discrimination and exclusion, there was some small measure of security among others similarly beset. But I knew that, for most of them, this was merely a staging post, a hold-over where one husbanded one’s resources and planned the next move forward. Sometimes the hope and the planning were protracted to the point of inertia, but many of them still went through the motions out of sheer habit.

  Several men sat on the steps of No. 34 and observed my approach, but with half-averted faces. I stopped, bade them “Good evening,” and inquired for Mr Griffiths.

  “Don’t know if he’s home,” someone answered. “He lives below there, in the basement.”

  A short flight of stairs led downwards at right angles to the street. As I neared the bottom, a young man began mounting upward. He was dressed in the dark blue uniform of London Transport, neatly pressed and brushed and with shiny black shoes. He carried the uniform greatcoat folded over one arm and in the other a brown briefcase of plastic material.

  “Excuse me,” I addressed him, “but I’m looking for Mr Griffiths.”

  He looked up at me. “I’m Griffiths.”

  I had expected an older man, someone of perhaps thirty years or more. It seemed to me that this young man could be hardly more than twenty-two or three. Perhaps there was more than one Griffiths.

  “I wonder if I may speak to you for a moment,” I said, keeping my voice low; conversation from above stairs had slackened somewhat, and others might be interested in my business here.

  “I’m just off to work,” he replied. “What’s it about?”

  I stepped down until we were close together. “I’m from the Welfare Department. I’d like to talk to you about your little girl Patricia.”

  He was the right person, because his slim face brightened into a smile. “Oh, look, I’ve already locked up, but we can talk as we walk along if you like.”

  That was fine with me. At the top of the steps he exchanged a few words with the other men as we walked away, then, out of their hearing, he said: “How did you find me?”

  “Miss Sweeney gave me your address.”

  “Brigid?” He exclaimed in surprise. “But she always said … ” He did not finish the remark.

  “I went to see her today. We had a long talk and I suggested that I should see you, so she told me where to find you.”

  “She’s a funny one, that Brigid,” he murmured, “a real case. She’s Irish, you know. Sometimes I just can’t figure her out. And that sister of hers. Did you meet her?”

  “I saw her.”

  “A real case, that one. Look, I report for work at seven o’clock but I usually like to get there a bit early. Not far—Notting Hill Gate Station. We could go into the tea-shop next door for a coffee and talk there if you like.”

  I agreed. We hurried along the Bayswater Road, through the narrow footways between the huge L.C.C. building project which was transforming Notting Hill Gate, and into a Lyons tea-shop; even here the clang and grind of hydraulic hammers and drills and the unceasing rattle of concrete mixers filtered through and voices had to be pitched higher than normal to be heard.

  “Funny thing,” he began. “We met in this shop. She used to work here. I’d come in for a meal or coffee or something and I’d see her over there, behind the counter. She seemed very nice, you know, she’d smile or say ‘Good afternoon’ or something. Well, you know how it is, later on we got to chatting a bit, then one day I up and asked her if she’d go out with me.” He smiled, remembering.

  “She was always laughing, at everything. She told me she lived with an older sister, but she’d never let me go to her home. Never. I wasn’t too keen for her to come to my place, you know, with the fellers always about and making cracks as soon as they see you with a woman, but there was nowhere else to go if we wanted to talk or things like that, and she said she didn’t mind. Well, everything was fine until we knew the baby was coming. Then she started acting funny. I just don’t know what came over her. She hardly wanted to talk to me. Then she told me she was going back to Ireland and wanted some money, so I asked her what about the baby. She said she’d come back when the baby was born. I argued with her but it was no use. That woman can be stubborn when she wants to. So I gave her money; I’ve saved a bit, you see. Well, my friend, I didn’t hear another word from Brigid for months. It worried me, you know, wondering how she was getting on with the baby coming and all, so one day I went around to her sister’s house.” He laughed, shaking his head from side to side as the memories came flooding back.

  “You should have seen that sister. She opened the door and stood there, like the Rock of Ages. I asked if Brigid lived there and she said, ‘So you’re the Mr Man. Well, she’s back to Ireland’, then slammed the door in my face. You know, I guess she was crazy angry because her sister was in the family way for a black man. Well, I thought, if that’s the way they feel, to hell with them. So I never went back there. But it worried me though, I can tell you, especially as she used to tell me how hard the life was back there in Ireland.”

  “Well, the next thing I know, about a year after, one night I’m at home and there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there is Brigid. Boy, women are funny! She just stands there and says ‘Hello, Jason’. Well, I invite her in and then she tells me what happened. She went home to Dublin but came back to have the child. Her sister told her to put it in the Home and to have nothing more to do with me. So I told her what I thought of her sister and that if she didn’t
like the colour of my skin to hell with her. But man, it wasn’t that. You know what all the trouble was about? Her age. She’s thirty-five, although you wouldn’t think so.”

  Like hell I wouldn’t think so, I thought, remembering the strong, sturdy woman.

  “Man, that woman went through all that, just because she’s older than me. She said her sister told her she ought to be ashamed of herself, that I was no more than a boy. She really felt ashamed. Man, you should’ve heard what I told her. After all, I was man enough to give her a child, so what was all the nonsense about being too young? That’s why she didn’t write to me when she was in hospital; she didn’t want anyone to see that a boy had got her with child. Well, she told me where Patricia was, but only after I’d promised that I wouldn’t tell any of the people there where I lived or anything. When I argued with her, you know what she said? She told me I was only the putative father, and had no real rights. Where the hell did she get that stuff? You know, sometimes I felt like belting her one. Anyway, what can you do? So I went to see the baby whenever I could.”

  Now his voice became very earnest.

  “You know, Patricia is a lovely kid, and I’d like to take her out of the place. I’ve been after Brigid for nearly two years now to let me have the child. I’ve a married sister living in Kent who’d love to take care of her for me, but Brigid said no. That Brigid. She refuses to marry me or live with me and she won’t let me have the child. Look, if she told you where to find me it means that she trusts you or something. Why don’t you tell her that for the child’s sake we ought to get married or something?”

  I was surprised by the tenderness in his voice. This was no boy. This was a man willing and ready to shoulder his responsibilities.

  “Could you support a wife and family?” I asked.

  “Why not? I earn good money and I don’t waste it. I could move away from where I’m living now and find some other place, and later on I could get a better job. I’m taking a correspondence course in electrical engineering,” he tapped the briefcase with a finger, “I don’t intend to work in the Underground all my life. Look at this.”