by Marie Joseph
Five
AT TWO O’CLOCK Simon woke abruptly, switched on the light and saw with dismay that he had slept for only two hours. Wide awake, he lay with his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling.
The barmaid, Patty Bamford, looked as if life had kicked her in the teeth once too often. Simon frowned. There was something…. He tried to bring her to mind as he had seen her that evening, strangely subdued in her mauve, woollen, short-sleeved dress. He had watched her as she turned to ring the change up on the till and thought….
Suddenly he sat straight up in bed. Her belt! The narrow grey crocodile-skin belt round the waist of the mauve dress. A beautifully fashioned belt with a twist of gold chain forming a clasp.
‘Never spoil good material and design with inferior buttons and belts.’ He heard his father’s voice as clearly as if he had been standing beside the bed. ‘Here’s what the smart women do. They buy cheap, mass-produced suits and dresses, then replace the buttons and belts with the real stuff.’ He had thrown a grey skin belt down on his desk. ‘Now, with Delta Dresses the quality’s there right from the start. Take a look at this, son. Specially made for an export deal that went wrong for some poor chap. I’ve had a word with our designer and she agrees they’ll work in fine with some of our spring models. Always one step ahead, that’s your old man!’
Simon got out of bed and switched on the electric kettle, one of the hotel’s amenities, then opened a sachet of instant coffee and poured the powder into a cup.
It was too much of a coincidence to suppose that Patty Bamford had bought the belt separately. It had been a one-off job, and his father had taken the lot. Simon poured a stream of boiling water on to the coffee and pierced a hole in the triangular carton of milk.
And if Ben Bamford had taken the belt, then it followed he had taken the dress…. Simon took the cup of coffee back to bed. Those dresses retailed at eighty-five pounds with the quilted matching boleros…. He narrowed his eyes, trying to remember exactly the lines where items had gone mysteriously missing.
The file was in Harry Gordon’s office. Simon restrained the impulse to get dressed and drive to the factory. The belt was merely one item. There had been blouses, the odd lined skirt, and then, as the thief gained confidence, the more expensive suits and dresses.
He lay down again and switched off the light, his mind clicking over with the competence of a programmed computer. Tomorrow … no, today he would do what he had to do. Ben Bamford would have to go.
The talk with Sharon had to come some time. Emma knew that. And yet, all during the day she asked herself if it was any concern of hers. Who had said she was to be responsible for her family? Who? Legally she wasn’t responsible, not at twenty years old, surely? But morally? Emma tried to bring her stepmother’s thin face to mind, and remembered how she would lash out quickly at the boys when they were cheeky. Just the once, with a resounding slap that silenced their bravado, even as it brought tears of humiliation to their eyes.
Mam had known how to deal with Sharon too.
‘Take that muck off your face,’ she’d say quietly. ‘Go on! Upstairs. Right now. Going to school of a day, then dolling yourself up like a tart at night. An’ if you land yourself in any-trouble, lass, with them boys you’re always hanging about on street corners with, then don’t bring it back here! And take that look off your face! One of these days the wind will change in your direction and that sneer will set. And wipe that smile off too. You’ll be laughing the other side of your gob before the day’s over!’
Oh, yes, that had been Mam. Coming in from work, straight to the gas stove. Standing there sometimes forgetting she still had her outdoor coat on, flipping bacon over in the frying pan, seeing without turning round if the boys were putting their feet on the settee, holding out her hand for her husband’s wages of a Friday, and once hiding his shoes when he wanted to go down to the pub and the gas bill hadn’t been paid. Tempering the rough edge of her tongue with kindness, and treating her husband as if he had been one of her small boys, and Emma as if she were her own daughter. Making no difference, even to cooling the praise when Emma brought a good report home from school.
‘There’s more to life than being a good scholar. Some of them clever ones who go to university only smoke drugs and hang themselves sometimes when they don’t pass their exams. You can think too much,’ she was fond of saying. ‘It sets the brain in a fever, thinking too much does.’
‘Oh, Mam….’ Emma talked silently to herself as she hurried the boys out of the bathroom and into their beds. ‘What would you have done if you’d found what I found last night? An’ on the very day Dad went away to prison!’
Then she shook her head. Dad would never have gone to prison if his wife had been alive. For one thing, those boxes could never have been stacked on top of the wardrobe like that for weeks. Not with Mam cleaning the house from top to bottom at the weekends. And Sharon wouldn’t have been allowed to stay out late every night, nor bring that boy into the house – just the two of them, with the boys asleep upstairs in their beds.
‘Just a minute before you go out, Sharon.’
Emma caught her stepsister with one hand actually on the door catch, and knew she had crept down the stairs whilst the boys were playing up and refusing to get into bed. ‘It won’t take a minute. I know Ricky’s waiting for you outside, an’ I don’t blame him. If he’s embarrassed, then it makes two of us.’
‘Yes?’ Sharon stood by the door, wary and defiant, her eyes studying the toes of her boots.
Emma tried to think of the right thing to say. Oh, hell, she was always searching for the right thing to say.
‘Sharon.’ She held out a hand as if pleading for understanding. ‘Look, love. I’m not going to interfere but, well, you are only sixteen an’ if you get pregnant now you could ruin your whole life. And how old did you say Ricky was? Seventeen?’
‘Nearly eighteen, and when he’s had his birthday we’re getting married. Remember?’ Sharon stared at her defiantly, poised for flight, both hands busily tying a pink patterned headscarf into a bow beneath her chin. ‘Flaminenry! Who said anything about getting pregnant? I’m not that daft, our Emma. Who do you think is on the throne? Queen Victoria?’
‘What do you mean?’ Emma kept her voice low. ‘There’s no need to shout. I wouldn’t like the boys to hear this conversation. An’ besides, what if they had come downstairs? Suppose Joe had walked in like he does sometimes? You know what a restless sleeper he is. Don’t you think he’s had as much as he can take just now without you adding to it?’
‘Well, he didn’t come down, did he?’ Sharon’s tone was flippant. ‘An’ to set your mind at rest you might as well know I’ve been on the pill for months. Got a prescription from the doctor when I told him nothing would stop me sleeping with my boyfriend, so you can stop worriting.’ Her face softened for a moment. ‘Flaminenry, our Emma! Haven’t you got enough to bother about? I can take care of meself, and always have been able to. We’re being responsible citizens, me and Ricky, and besides, his mam knows and she hasn’t said nothing.’
‘Ricky’s mother knows?’ Emma swallowed hard. ‘How do you know she knows?’
Sharon answered with infinite patience, raising blue eyes ceilingwards as if seeking tolerance. ‘She knows because she found out what we were doing – never mind how – and it was her what suggested I go to the doctor. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’
‘I’m trying to think what Mam would have said.’ Emma raised her head as the sound of a motorbike shattered the silence outside in the avenue. ‘But then, Mam wouldn’t have said anything. She’d have merely knocked your block off, that’s all. And as for that little lad wanting to marry you, well, she’d have knocked his block off too!’
‘But Mam’s dead, isn’t she?’ There were tears in the shouted defiance as Sharon’s small face crumpled. ‘She got killed when we all needed her, didn’t she? An’ I’ll tell you something else, our Emma. Ricky isn’t the first, not by a long chalk
. I’ve been with other boys, lots of them, and sometimes without using anything, an’ I got away with it.’ She rubbed her eyes with a clenched fist. ‘An’ Ricky was the first boy to care whether I got pregnant. An’ his mother cared too. She says she’ll be glad to get me away from this house with what goes on. She’s not the same as Mam, but she’ll be my Mam, can’t you see? An’ when me and Ricky get married it will be like it used to be, with me coming home from work and smelling me tea cooking, and her doing me washing, and telling me what to do. Flaminenry! Can’t you see?’
Oh, yes, Emma could see, and her heart ached with the seeing, but there was one remark she wasn’t going to let pass.
‘What do you mean: “what goes on in this house”? Tell me! What does go on that Ricky’s mother finds so shocking?’
Sharon was crying openly now. ‘Well, our dad of course. Mrs Rostron is the superintendent of the junior Sunday school at Marston Street Chapel, and Mr Rostron is a Mason. How do you think they feel about their son’s girlfriend’s father being in prison? They tried to stop him going out with me at first because it got back about Dad being up before the magistrates, an’ him drinking an’ everything. They never have a drop in the house, and Mrs Rostron works three afternoons in an Oxfam shop. They’re different from us, Emma. An’ when I am there I’m different too. They talk about things, and do things. Like Mr Rostron taking forms round to houses last week asking which people were interested in the … the reclamation of household rubbish. To do with the ratepayers, Emma.’ She glanced round wildly. ‘What do we ever talk about, Emma? What did our dad ever talk about apart from grumbling about the rubbish on the telly, and whether he had enough money for his whisky and his fags? He didn’t care nothing as long as the boys were kept quiet an’ his meals were there. And you! Some days you look about thirty, our Emma, an’ I’m not going to be like you. I’m getting out, an’ if sleeping with Ricky and marrying Ricky is the only way then I don’t care! I don’t care!’
The injustice of it made Emma feel sick, and when Sharon turned to go she put up a hand. ‘Just two things, Sharon. Have you ever stopped to think what would have happened to this family if I had taken your attitude?’ She sat down on the nearest chair, her legs suddenly weak. ‘We both knew that Dad, for all his kindness – and he is kind, you know that – we both knew he hadn’t got the guts to take over when Mam died. She carried him, Sharon. She thought for him and kept him decent, and without her he just gave up. So somebody had to do something. An’ if doing it has made me look thirty years old, then it’s too bad.’ Her head lifted. ‘An’ I can’t quite understand Ricky’s parents’ strict Chapel ways matching up with you being on the pill at sixteen. The two don’t go together, not in my book they don’t.’
Sharon blushed and edged a step backwards. ‘You don’t know Ricky. But they do. An’ if what they did was the alternative to me getting pregnant, then they were prepared to turn a blind eye.’ Her voice rose in defiance again. ‘Is what he’s doing any worse than getting mixed up with bad company? He was a right tearaway before he met me, Ricky was.’
Emma tried to imagine the slight, foxy-faced, spotty boy as a tearaway, and failed.
‘All right, Sharon,’ she said quietly. ‘You seem to have it all worked out. But I hope you realize what you’re missing.’ She turned her head from side to side. ‘You should be having fun, love. Going out with girlfriends, and saving up for holidays, not getting married at sixteen.’
Sharon opened the door and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of a gloved hand. ‘You are you, and I am me,’ she said, and just for a brief moment her face softened. ‘Perhaps I have more of Dad in me than what you have, our Emma. Perhaps I just want the easy way out.’ She glanced up the stairs. ‘An’ Alan’s the same. He wants things on a plate, an’ I don’t just mean his dinner.’
The feeble attempt at a joke evoked a response in Emma’s heart far more than all the shouting, the tears and the defiance had done. For once in this house two people had communicated, actually said what was in their hearts, and in a strange way it all made sense. She smiled and nodded as Sharon closed the door behind her.
‘Have a good time, love,’ she said softly, and they stared at each other, closer than if they had put their arms round each other.
And as Sharon climbed on to the pillion seat of the enormous motorbike and put her arms round Ricky’s waist and smelt the familiar smell of his black leather fringed jacket, she failed to see the car drawn up at the kerb a few yards behind. Failed to see the fair boy sitting at the wheel smoking a cigarette, the stub of which he threw from the car window as the bike roared away up the avenue.
Emma stood quite still until the sound of the motorbike had died away. Inside her she was grieving, not for the Sharon who now seemed to have got her life sorted out all of a piece, but for the fourteen-year-old girl who had thought so little of herself that she had gone from one boy to another in an attempt to assuage the deep sense of loss after her mother had been killed. Somebody ought to have known, somebody ought to have seen. But who? Not her father, too wrapped up in his own self and his sorrowing to even guess at what was going on. That left herself. Emma Sparrow, eighteen, forced overnight into the role of mother to a bewildered five-year-old Joe and to Alan, two years older, whose mourning took the immediate form of aggression.
The loud knocking at the door tore at her ragged nerves so that the blood drained from her cheeks, and when she let Ben in she failed to notice that the violence in him was so ill-contained that it seemed to be striking from his body like sparks.
‘I can’t come out tonight, Ben.’ She went over and closed the door between the living-room and the foot of the stairs. ‘I doubt if the boys are asleep yet. I can’t leave them, and Sharon’s gone out. You must have seen her go, she’s only been gone a minute.’
‘I’ve not come to ask you to go out with me. We’re finished.’ Ben spoke in a low, rough voice, and as Emma turned to him in surprise she saw that he was clenching and unclenching his hands in a rhythmic motion.
‘What’s the matter, Ben?’ she asked quietly.
He laughed, a loud bark of a laugh. ‘You have the nerve to ask me what’s the matter? Good God, Emma Sparrow, you lose me my job without so much as a reference, and you have the bloody nerve to ask me that!’ He kicked at the leg of the television table so that the set wobbled dangerously. ‘I knew you were up to something last night when I saw you whispering to the gaffer’s son, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but I never thought you would pretend to know nothing.’
For the second time in ten minutes Emma sat down on the edge of a chair feeling her legs weak and her mouth dry.
‘Me responsible for you losing your job? What are you talking about, Ben? I saw you go into the office this morning, but I thought it was just….’ She tilted her chin. ‘I thought you’d been caught larking about downstairs like last time. Why did you get the sack? Why? Mr Martin wouldn’t do that just for a bit of horseplay. He’s not like that.’
‘Hah!’ Ben came a step closer, standing over her in a menacing attitude that made her shrink back in fear. ‘An’ you know exactly what he’s like, don’t you? He’s been coming here, and you’ve been seeing him, and oh, yes, I can see it all. You told him about the dresses, all three of them, because I was daft enough to hint to you what I was doing. An’ when he told me he wasn’t going to bring the police into it, it was as though you yourself were doing the talking.’ He gripped her shoulder hard. ‘That would be just like you, Em, wouldn’t it? I can just see you telling him you knew I was up to something, and persuading him to let me off with a warning. To save me from my bloody self, Em. That’s the way you talk, isn’t it? An’ why did he agree not to send for the law? Not because he’s that kind of man, but because you had made it worth his while, eh? Eh?’ The fingers were vice-like in their hold, and Emma winced with pain.
‘You are wrong!’ She tried to speak firmly. ‘I didn’t know you were taking stuff from the factory! Y
ou hinted you were up to something, but I never thought….’ She forced herself to look into the blazing eyes. ‘An’ if I had known I would have talked to you, not to Mr Martin. What d’you think I am?’
‘I don’t know, Emma Sparrow.’ Ben’s tone was silky soft now. ‘I’ve never really known, but I’ll tell you something. That precious Mr Martin of yours isn’t going to get away with it, I can promise you that. An’ when I’ve finished with him you won’t want to gaze in his eyes like you were doing last night.’ He let go of her and pushed her back so roughly that the chair almost fell over.
There was a pounding in his head, and now his hands were aching with the effort of keeping them off her; if she had been Patty he would have belted her till she cried for mercy. He stepped back.
But she wasn’t Patty. This girl was like no other girl he had ever known. She was so beautiful that at times his guts felt like they were turning to water as he looked at her. She was full of spirit too; if he did lay about her she would try to fight back, he knew that. An’ if he did touch her, then she would be lost to him for ever, an’ he would regret it till the day he died.
If Mr bloody Martin hadn’t spotted the belt, he would have denied everything, and brought him up at an industrial tribunal. Ben knew all about industrial tribunals. It wasn’t as easy as all that to get rid of workers these days; the law was on their side, an’ it was old Gordon’s fault for being so slack an’ not having every step of the manufacture signed for. The first time he got Patty on her own he’d show her what for, but it wouldn’t be in front of the kid. Not that kid with her moon grin and devotion to her Uncle Ben.
‘He had proof,’ he said sulkily, ‘but he wouldn’t have noticed, the proof wouldn’t have registered if you hadn’t put him wise, hadn’t hinted.’ His mind continued its reasoning. ‘Your dad got caught, and you tried to square it so that the same wouldn’t happen to me. Why else would he let me go without reporting it to the law? Why else, Em, unless he was doing you a favour? He’s a hard nut, your friend, like the rest of them. His sort don’t do anybody no favours, not to my kind they don’t.’