by Maureen Lee
‘Yes, Mam?’
‘That’s the last lie I’m telling Micky Lavin on your behalf. He’s a nice lad and he’s obviously mad about you. If you don’t want to see him again, then tell him so to his face. D’you hear me, our Orla?’
‘Yes, Mam.’ In the bedroom, Orla buried her face in the pillow so no one would hear her cry. It had been awful listening to Micky’s anguished voice. She tried not to imagine him walking down Amber Street, as miserable as sin – as miserable as she felt herself, if the truth be known. It was all she could do not to rush out of the house and call him back. But look what had happened when she’d called him back the other night! Jaysus! It had been out of this world, totally wonderful. She ached for it to happen again.
But, she reminded herself, she wasn’t the sort of girl who made love in back entries. She was going to be someone one day, someone dead important. Why, only yesterday Bertie Craig had suggested she practise her shortand, make it faster, so that she could become a verbatim reporter.
‘When you’re interviewing a politician, say, it helps if you can take down every word. If he later denies he said a certain thing, you can flourish your notebook and prove he did.’
A politician! One of these days Orla Lacey might actually interview a politician, beside which marrying Micky Lavin came a very poor second.
Oh, but if only she could get him out of her mind!
‘I didn’t realise until yesterday that you were the mother of the genius,’ said Neil Greene.
‘Eh?’ It was Saturday and the salon had just closed. Alice was transferring the takings to her handbag to tot up later.
Neil had obviously been shopping in town. He was carrying several Lewis’s and Owen Owen’s carrier bags. ‘Cormac Lacey, he’s your son, right?’ He raised his perfect eyebrows.
Alice swelled with pride. She nodded. ‘He is so.’
‘Going to pass the scholarship with flying colours, so I understand. They’re always talking about him in the common room. I knew you had a son at St James’s, but I thought it was the other Lacey, Maurice. He has the look of Fion.’
‘Maurice is me nephew. We don’t know who Cormac takes after.’
Fionnuala emerged from the back where she was washing cups, eager to bathe in some of her brother’s reflected glory. Alice felt slightly irritated by the look on her face, like a sad little puppy waiting to be noticed by its lord and master. Fion was useless on Saturdays, on edge waiting for Neil to pop in and out.
‘Ah, Fion!’ Neil’s smile was wonderful to behold. The customers claimed it made them go weak at the knees. ‘I’ve bought you a present.’ He rooted through one of the bags and took out a little red box.
Fionnuala almost collapsed with gratitude before she even knew what the present was. ‘Oh, ta,’ she gasped. She opened the box and took out a large silver brooch in the shape of an ‘F’. ‘It’s lovely,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, and it’s got a little diamond in.’ She clasped the brooch against her chest. ‘I’ll treasure it all me life,’ she said shakily.
‘I’m afraid the diamond isn’t real. It’s called a zircon.’ Neil beamed as he handed Alice a green box. ‘And one for you. It’s an “A”.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Alice deliberately didn’t look at her daughter’s face, knowing that she would be shattered that Neil hadn’t bought a present just for her.
‘That’s by way of an apology,’ Neil said.
‘Apology for what?’
‘For not putting “Mister” on my letters, for inadvertently letting you think I was a woman. With the flat, situated as it is over a hairdresser’s, you might have preferred having a female of the species upstairs. You showed admirable restraint when I turned out to be the wrong sex.’ He grinned. ‘Another person might have given me a good bollocking and told me to take my bags elsewhere. I just hope I don’t disturb the customers too much when I come in and out.’
Alice assured him he was no bother and he went upstairs. ‘That was nice of him, wasn’t it?’ she said warmly to Fion. ‘And he must think a lot of you, buying you a brooch as well as me. I mean, if it’s by way of apology like he ses, there was no need to include you, was there?’
Fionnuala’s face brightened – she was very easily pleased, Alice thought sadly.
‘Not really, Mam.’ Fion couldn’t wait to show the brooch to Orla who didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment, having gone completely mad and ditched that gorgeous Micky Lavin.
She’d had to tell him to his face eventually. She’d taken him into the parlour because she didn’t trust herself in a place where he could take her in his arms and touch her the way he’d done before. They’d only end up doing that crazy, wonderful thing again and she’d be lost.
Oh, his expression when she told him! She would never forget it – shocked, disbelieving, close to tears. His eyes were black with despair.
‘But I love you,’ he’d said, as if this were the end of the matter.
‘Well, I don’t love you,’ Orla said spiritedly.
‘You do! Of course you do. You know you do. I can tell. What we did together was magic. Wasn’t it, Orla?’ He shook her arm. ‘Wasn’t it?’
She looked straight into his eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was all right, that’s all. I quite enjoyed it.’
‘You’re lying. You thought it was magic, same as me.’
Orla shrugged and longed for him to go, get out of the house, out of her life, for ever. She folded her arms and wished him goodnight.
‘And that’s it, then?’
‘That’s it.’
‘So it’s tara?’
‘Tara, Micky.’
‘You’ve broken me heart,’ he said in a cracked voice.
‘It’ll soon mend,’ she said carelessly.
The front door slammed. Arms still folded, Orla began to rock backwards and forwards on the settee. Tears dropped on to her knees, her skirt, made wet patches on her shoes and the floor around them.
It was Cormac who found her, rocking like a maniac and flooding the parlour with her tears. ‘Why have you told Micky to go away when you want him to stay?’ he wanted to know, which only made Orla cry even more. Her alarmed mother came in, did her best to soothe her, then sent her to bed with cocoa and a couple of Aspro.
That was weeks and weeks ago, and Orla still couldn’t forget Micky’s face, though now she hated it. She hated every single thing about Micky Lavin.
His face was in front of her now, staring at her from the sheet of paper in the typewriter. She resisted the urge to pull the paper out, rip it to shreds, because the face would only appear again when she put more paper in.
Another woman worked with her in the small office, Edie Jones, Bertie Craig’s secretary. Edie and Orla didn’t get on. The older woman seemed to resent the younger one being such a favourite of her boss.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Edie asked as Orla sat scowling at the typewriter.
‘There’s nothing the matter with me,’ Orla snapped.
‘Then why do you look as if you’ve lost a pound and found a sixpence?’
‘Perhaps I have, that’s why.’
Edie shrugged. ‘I was only asking.’
Orla wondered what her reaction would be if she shouted, ‘I think I’m pregnant, that’s what’s the matter. I bloody well think I’m bloody pregnant. And I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be bloody pregnant more than anything in the world. I hate Micky Lavin. Men are supposed to take precautions, wear things. But Micky didn’t and now I’m bloody well pregnant.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Orla?’ Edie sounded worried. ‘Now you look as if you’re about to burst into tears.’
‘Wouldn’t you if you’d lost a pound and only found a sixpence in its place?’
‘I’m only trying to help, dear.’
Perhaps it was the ‘dear’ that made Orla start to weep. ‘I’m sorry for being rude,’ she sobbed. ‘There is something wrong, but I can’t possibly tell you what it is.’
‘Wh
y don’t you go home? I’ll tell Bertie you weren’t feeling well. He’ll understand.’
‘I think I will. Ta, Edie.’
She wandered along Liverpool Road towards Bootle. She’d missed two periods, which had never happened before. She was definitely up the stick, had a bun in the oven, as some people crudely put it. Approaching Seaforth, she passed a doctor’s surgery and contemplated going inside and asking the doctor to examine her. But she looked so young and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. What would the doctor say?
Orla had never cared particularly what people thought, but having a baby without a husband was just about the most shocking thing a girl could do. There was a girl in Opal Street who’d done it. That was ten years ago and the girl was now a woman, but it was still talked about as if it were only yesterday. The baby had been sent to an orphanage.
‘Mine won’t.’ Orla clutched her stomach. It was no use asking a doctor, because she knew in her bones that there was a tiny baby curled up in there waiting to be born. She also knew that she had to keep it, that to have it taken away would be wrong. And if she didn’t want her baby growing up with the stigma of having an unmarried mother, the equivalent of having a sign saying ‘bastard’ hung round its neck, then she would have to marry Micky Lavin. Furthermore, she was only seventeen and needed her parents’ permission, so she would have to tell Mam and Dad.
A young woman approached, pushing a large, shabby pram. The baby inside was shrieking, as if it was being severely tortured. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut your gob,’ the woman said in a despairing voice as she passed by.
Orla turned and watched her walk away, bent and weary. ‘That will be me in a year’s time,’ she thought with horror. ‘I’d sooner be like them.’
She glanced across the road at two girls, slightly older than she was, strolling along arm in arm, talking animatedly. They were smartly dressed in tweed costumes and little felt hats. One carried a big grey lizard handbag that Orla badly coveted. The girls were everything that she had one day planned to be herself.
Horace Flynn had taken to dropping in at the hairdresser’s at least once a week. ‘Just to see how things are going, Mrs Lacey,’ he would say.
‘Things are going fine, Mr Flynn. Thanks for asking.’
‘He’s got a crush on you,’ announced Fionnuala. ‘What on earth did you do on Boxing Day when you went round to ask about the lease?’
‘I just fluttered me eyelashes a bit, that’s all,’ Alice replied uneasily.
‘If you’d fluttered them some more, we might have got the lease for nothing.’
‘Oh, Fion, don’t!’ Alice squirmed. ‘Anyroad, it’s your fault he comes so often. There’s no need to make quite such a desperate fuss of him, taking him into the kitchen, plying him with cups of tea.’
‘I feel sorry for him. He’s got sickly skin. He probably comes because we’re the only people in the world who are nice to him. Everyone else hates his guts.’
‘With good reason, luv. He’s a horrible man.’
‘Horrible or not, I prefer having him on our side rather than Auntie Cora’s.’
‘There’s no need to talk about sides, Fion. There isn’t a war on.’
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ Fionnuala said darkly. ‘We’re on one side, Cora’s on the other. One of these days we’re going to win.’
These days, John Lacey considered the world darn near perfect. He rarely thought about his face. It had happened, there was no going back. He felt no guilt about having two families. It had been a question of survival and Clare had given him the ability to live with himself.
At six o’clock he locked the yard and went down Crozier Terrace to the end house where he let himself in. Robby came running towards him from the kitchen, demanding to be picked up. John hoisted the little boy on to his shoulder.
‘Been for walk in park, Dad,’ he gurgled. ‘Lisa cried all day. She’s growing tooths. Did I cry when I was growing tooths?’
‘All the time,’ John assured him. ‘Hello, luv.’
Clare emerged from the kitchen looking slightly harassed. She wore a gingham pinny over a plain brown frock. Her long fair hair was pinned back with a slide. She rolled her eyes towards the stairs and made a guttural sound, which John immediately understood. His daughter, Lisa, was upstairs, asleep for once.
‘Been getting you down, luv?’
She made a face and nodded furiously, then suddenly smiled, folding both him and their son in her slim arms. ‘But happy,’ she said. ‘Very happy. Tea ready.’
He had learnt to read the expressions on her face, translate the strangled sounds that came from her mouth into proper English. ‘Good.’ He smacked his lips. ‘I’m starving, and I think I can smell liver and onions.’
She nodded again and he followed her into the tiny kitchen where the table was set for three. As they ate, John wondered if he had ever felt so blissfully contented during the first years with Alice and remembered that he had. The memory disturbed him. He was doing a terrible thing, betraying his wife and their four children with a woman who had once been a prostitute.
Clare lightly touched the back of his hand with her finger. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes.’
She seemed able to read his mind as easily as he understood her awkward speech and facial expressions. On the pad she always kept beside her she wrote, ‘Conscience?’ There were some words she didn’t even attempt.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Go home early,’ she wrote. ‘See your family.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘You’re a saint.’
Her eyes sparkled. ‘I’m anything but.’
‘I’ll see how I feel.’ He knew he wouldn’t go home early to the house where nowadays he felt like a stranger. Alice had adapted very easily to his absence, he thought cynically. She never reproached him for being being away so often. His girls showed no sign of missing him. Only Cormac seemed to mind his dad not being there, a fact that caused John some heartache.
Still, there was nothing to be done. It was a question of survival, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time. He glanced around the table, at Clare, at his white-blond other son. A small cry came from upstairs, and he and Clare smiled at each other. She went upstairs to fetch Lisa. In six months’ time there would be another baby.
This was his family now. These were the people who accepted him for what he was, what he had become. One of these days he would abandon the other family altogether – once the girls were married and Cormac was old enough to understand. Alice would be all right. She had the hairdresser’s to keep her busy.
It was midnight when John rose from the bed he shared with Clare, got dressed and returned to Amber Street. To his surprise, Alice came into the hall to meet him. He’d never known her stay up so late before.
‘Something’s happened,’ she said.
He noticed her eyes were red with weeping. ‘Are the kids all right?’ he asked, alarmed.
‘Sort of. Can we talk?’
‘Of course.’
She led the way into the living room. There was a teapot with a striped cosy on the table, two cups and saucers, sugar in a bowl, milk. He felt slightly guilty. She must have been waiting a long time for him to come.
‘What’s up?’ His heart was beating rapidly in his chest.
‘It’s our Orla, she’s in the club.’ She poured tea and handed him a cup.
‘Pregnant?’ The cup jerked in his hand and tea slopped into the saucer.
‘Pregnant,’ Alice confirmed.
‘The little bitch! I’ll bloody kill her . . .’ He rose to go upstairs and drag his daughter out of bed, shake her till her teeth rattled.
‘John! Leave her. You’ll only wake Fion and Maeve, and they don’t know yet. Orla only told me tonight.’
He hadn’t realised people actually did see red when they were angry. ‘Is it that Micky chap?’
‘Yes, and it was only the once. She hasn’t seen him in weeks.’
‘It o
nly needs the once,’ John spat. ‘You should have kept a closer eye on her.’
‘Oh, so it’s my fault!’ Alice laughed incredulously. ‘You’re hardly ever here, but it’s my fault if our daughter falls for a baby. What was I supposed to do, follow her and Micky wherever they went?’
He knew she was right, but wasn’t prepared to admit it. ‘Did she know the facts of life?’ he growled.
‘Yes, she did, as it happens. I told all three of them at the same time. I trust you’ll do the same with Cormac,’ she added pointedly. ‘Assuming you can find the time. Look,’ she said reasonably, ‘why can’t we discuss this like civilised people? Things have to be done, said.’
‘Such as?’
‘We have to go round the Lavins, all three of us; you, me and Orla, talk it over with Micky’s family. He hasn’t been told, but Orla’s convinced he’ll marry her. The thing is, he’s only nineteen and an apprentice welder. He earns peanuts. What are they going to live on?’
‘He should have thought about that before he poked my daughter.’
Alice winced at the coarse expression. ‘Our daughter,’ she said firmly. ‘And it’s the present we have to deal with, not the past. Orla thinks he’ll give up the apprenticeship and get a proper job – he’s a decent lad, John, no matter what you think. That means he’ll just end up a labourer like your Billy. They need supporting for the next couple of years until he’s finished his training. I wondered, could we put them up in our parlour?’ Putting aside the rather unfortunate circumstances, Alice quite fancied having a baby in the house.
He was completely taken aback. ‘What!’
‘Our parlour, John.’
‘What about me?’
‘You can sleep upstairs. I’ll sleep with the girls. There’ll be an empty bed.’
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ he gasped, outraged. ‘Why should we have to put ourselves out because Orla’s behaved like a little whore?’
‘John!’ Her eyes widened in shock. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’
‘It’s a terrible thing she’s done.’ He couldn’t adjust to the fact that the prettiest of his girls, his favourite, had actually let a man touch her in that way. It was disgusting. ‘Where did it happen?’ he asked, almost choking on the words.