The Corner House

by Ruth Hamilton

  Majorca, Alicante, Venice, Rome – Bernard had taken his two girls on holiday in recent years. In Rome, Liz had discovered her lump, that tiny, hard pebble beneath sun-touched flesh. ‘It’ll be summat and nowt,’ she had declared over a plate of pasta. It had turned out to be summat and everything, the very ‘summat’ that had finished her happy, selfless life.

  A tear escaped and trickled down Bernard Walsh’s ruddy cheek. With a numb hand, he dashed it away and steeled himself against its brothers. If he was going to cry, he would do it later, loudly and in private.

  ‘You all right, mister?’

  Bernard blinked. It was one of the mop-headed hopefuls, just an ordinary lad with longish hair and a few baby freckles lingering on his nose. ‘Aye, I’ll be better in a minute.’

  ‘Can I … Do you want anything?’

  He wanted Liz. He wanted his life back, wanted to be the same age as this copy-cat Beatle, wanted the moorlands, the camaraderie of Bolton market, a pie and a pint in the Wheatsheaf for his dinner. ‘My wife died today,’ he said. ‘Thanks for being so kind.’

  The boy frowned. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own. When my old gran died, we all stuck together. Have you got somebody?’

  Bernard nodded.

  ‘Do you want a lift? I can take you on the scooter – the lads’ll look after my stuff. We were only on our way to practise, anyway.’

  ‘My car’s across the road, thanks.’

  The boy continued to look puzzled. ‘I’ve got you now,’ he announced after a second or two. ‘Mr Walsh – wet fish on Scotland Road.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  The youngster grinned. ‘Fridays, we always have fish.’

  ‘Is that Jimmy Morris?’ Bernard peered beneath the thatch and into eyes as blue as a June midnight. ‘Well, I’d never have recognized you.’

  Jimmy laughed, then remembered the sadness. ‘Look, I’m sorry about Mrs Walsh. I met her the odd time—’

  ‘Aye, it would be odd and all,’ said Bernard. ‘She hated the smell of raw fish. I had to go in the back way when I got home, then straight up for a bath. Even then, she’d tell me I stank like fifteen stone of cod.’ He shook his head. ‘No, she didn’t often help in the shop. I had to be at death’s door before she’d give me a hand.’

  Jimmy reached out and touched the fishmonger’s shoulder. ‘If you ever want me, we still live over the barber’s.’ He wandered off to rejoin his companions.

  There was hope for the future, Bernard Walsh decided. Jimmy Morris and his crew might look like a lot of big girls’ blouses, but the heart was still there. Terry Morris was a barber. He and his wife had raised two boys in the rooms above what he called his ‘saloon’. Terry was a good Catholic and a strong believer in cut-throat razors and hot towels. Terry Morris should pin their Jimmy to a chair and give him a short back and sides before the lad crashed his scooter due to impeded vision.

  Bernard walked towards his car, waving at the disappearing would-be pop band. He sat for a while, fingers tapping the Rover’s steering wheel, mind racing about as he worked his way through the list of things to be done. At the back of his consciousness, the truth kept its counsel, remained hidden behind names and addresses of those who must be invited to the funeral.

  Liz hadn’t wanted to come to Liverpool. She had pleaded to stay in Bolton, but Bernard, anxious to be away from the scene of other people’s crimes, had dragged his wife and young daughter down the East Lancashire Road. And they had settled, had thrived on the Scousers’ love of fresh and salt fish, had become comfortable members of the nouveau riche middle class.

  And then, after a short lull of relative peace, the woman had arrived and Bernard had suggested another move, perhaps to Bury or Blackburn. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Liz had screamed. ‘Why must we be forever shifting about? We’ve survived the bloody war, we’re doing all right, so where’s the flaming sense in taking off again?’ Liz had made friends in Crosby, good friends, the sort she would not have left easily.

  ‘I just feel like a change,’ Bernard heard himself replying. The truth was unspeakable, so he could furnish Liz with no reason for his desire to leave Liverpool, the city which had become the new love of Liz Walsh’s life.

  ‘Well, I don’t. I’m changing no more than my underwear, you great lummox. I like it here. The shops in town are great and our Katherine’s made a lot of new friends.’

  They had stayed and had been lucky. The woman had moved to Waterloo, a mere couple of miles from the Walshes’ house. ‘God must have been on your side,’ Bernard told his dead wife. ‘Because you never knew.’

  She knew now, though. Somewhere above these mucky clouds, a woman with a new halo was looking down on him. He should, perhaps, call in at St Anthony’s, should get down on his knees and pray in the church before visiting his daughter’s classroom. ‘I did it all for you, Liz,’ he said. And for Katherine. Yes, it had been for Katherine’s sake, too.

  He drove slowly through the city, as if trying to postpone Katherine’s inevitable tears. Liz’s death had been expected – even hoped for in the darker hours, but every child was shocked by the final disappearance of a parent.

  Outside St Anthony’s, Bernard turned off his engine and sat perfectly still. In ten or so minutes, the children would dash out of classrooms and Katherine would be free to talk and to listen and to weep.

  The broader, merciless exodus from these largely Catholic streets had begun, leaving the area sad and much quieter. Families were relocating to pastures new, nasty little houses built on unloved land. The green that surrounded Kirkby was scrubby, pale and heartless, as if it had given up hope long ago.

  ‘I might as well retire,’ he whispered. ‘There’ll be nothing much left here for me in a year or two.’ Katherine would get wed. She had been through so many suitors that Bernard had sometimes considered making a rota just to have things fair and square, equal time and attention for all comers. But now, there was Martin, who had bought an engagement ring, who would be Katherine’s husband in a few months.

  He entered the church, knelt and prayed for Liz’s repose. He prayed also for the woman he had feared, that other poor creature whose soul had departed some years ago. She had left her mark. Theresa Nolan’s mark had smudged its path right across Lancashire from the inland foothills to the coast. Her fury had destroyed families, had made grown men cry, had affected innocent children. Yet she, the truly injured party, had simply looked for justice.

  ‘What’s it all been about?’ he asked his Maker. ‘Did I do it wrong from the very start?’

  Bernard Walsh closed his eyes. A knock at the door; a woman standing in the street, a newspaper parcel in her hands. Upstairs, Liz sleeping. Someone else’s sin. Fish scales beneath his fingernails, gas lamps doused against possible invasion, silent skies, no bombs yet. Liz too ill for air-raid shelters; instant decision, instant lie.

  His eyelids raised themselves. Were there good lies, then? Were there degrees of untruth, some types more acceptable than others? He blessed himself, heard the school bell ringing in celebration of another finished morning.

  Genuflecting, he turned his back to the altar and walked slowly down the aisle. Soon, he would face his living conscience.

  ONE

  By 1940, Bernard and Daniel Walsh were the last surviving remnants of a dynasty that stretched back through more than a century. Their father and grandfather had sold fish on Bolton Market for at least a hundred years, while the Derby Street shop had been in the hands of a Walsh since 1897.

  Danny, older than Bernard by seven years, was a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, unlovely of face, lean, sound in wind and limb. Although he remained blissfully unaware of the fact, Danny Walsh had a sweetness of nature that charmed many women into hovering on the brink of infatuation. But Danny knew exactly what he wanted from life. With a hoe, a rake and a bed of weeds, he was armed and in his natural element.

  This older Walsh brother had chosen to live outside the town, in a place where the moors and fields could be
viewed and appreciated. His back garden was bordered by a low privet hedge, but it seemed to continue onward and upward for ever, stretching through pasture and arable land, climbing softly, gently, eastward towards the Pennines. The weaver’s cottage in Bromley Cross was small, yet its setting was pure magic to a man whose boyhood had been spent among factory chimneys and dark terraced streets.

  With his pipe, his baccy pouch and his predictable life-pattern, Danny existed quite happily like a man twice his age. He went to the same public house each evening from nine o’clock until ten, then rose at the crack of dawn, travelling to meet the incoming fish trains or to run the Derby Street shop. Catholic to the core, he attended mass every Sunday and on most saints’ days unless such items on the calendar of Rome interfered with the progress of business.

  The brothers took life in their stride. As providers of essential services, they had been excused call-up, which fact, as each was wont to declare, was a definite plus for Britain, since both men were short-sighted and inclined towards the special headaches that often accompany myopia. ‘Guns?’ they ruminated from time to time. ‘Guns? Our Danny [or our Bernard] couldn’t hit a dartboard with a crossbow unless he had a guide dog and a papal blessing.’

  During the early months of war, Danny Walsh spent many nights on a makeshift bed in a tiny room behind the Derby Street shop, returning to his cottage only when other duties did not demand his total attention. For five nights of every week, he and Bernard were stand-by firefighters. The blazes they had doused thus far had been caused by domestic accidents rather than by bombings, although both brothers had been mentioned in the press for extraordinary bravery. Bernard was the real daredevil. He had emerged from burning buildings on more than one occasion with his clothes on fire and a child or an animal in his arms.

  As January drifted its snow-softened way towards the next month, Danny declared himself to be browned off. Sirens kept sounding, but nothing ever happened. He wasn’t complaining about that, because he didn’t want bombs, didn’t want to be picking up the dead, but he could have been at home, could have seen the moors covered in blankets of silvery-white, could have been feeding his birds and providing water for them.

  He sat in his smelly little room. The brothers scarcely noticed the odour of fish unless decay had set in. Danny was of the opinion that both he and Bernard carried cod liver oil rather than blood in their veins. An ancient clock ticked uncertainly; a thin, wartime version of the Bolton Evening News lay on the floor next to a faded rug. The unmistakable sound of Liz Walsh’s carpet sweeper filtered through the ceiling. It was a waiting game – waiting for the baby, waiting for the Luftwaffe.

  Danny checked the black-out, lit a candle, stretched out on his iron-framed cot and used a penknife to prise a few stubborn fish scales from the rims of his fingernails. Upstairs, Liz continued her relentless to-ing and fro-ing with the carpet sweeper. Seven months into her pregnancy, Liz refused to sit down and rest her legs. ‘I’ll rest when bloody Hitler rests in his grave,’ the feisty woman had been heard to shout. ‘And I’ve never sat down since I married yon daft ha’p’orth.’ ‘Yon daft ha’p’orth’ was Danny’s little brother, though ‘little’ went no way towards describing Bernard Walsh. Bernard, in spite of being an active man, was inclined towards rotundity. The general opinion of folk hereabouts was that Bernard was the full fish, while Danny, tall and skinny, was the fish after the cat had been at it – all skull and spiky bones.

  The Walshes usually took turns, one remaining at the shop while the second man collected fish and then, after supplying the shop, going back to run Walsh’s stall on the market. Lately, Bernard had stuck to the shop in order to keep an eye on his pregnant wife. As a result, Danny was often tired owing to constant early rising and an excess of responsibility, yet he remained even-tempered and benign throughout the most trying of days.

  The door opened and Bernard stepped in. He wore the air of a man who had just decided on tactical retreat. ‘She won’t listen. If she polishes that sideboard again, it’ll collapse into a heap of firewood, fit for nowt but kindling.’ Because of his bulk, Bernard seemed to fill the space between bed and door, especially now, with his large arms akimbo.

  ‘No fires so far tonight, thank God,’ pondered Danny aloud. ‘Nowt for the brigade to go out for.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Danny placed his knife on a small table and waited for Bernard to let off steam.

  ‘She’s not stopped since tea-time.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ replied Danny. ‘She’s swept that carpet to within a hair’s breadth of its hessian backing this past half-hour. She’ll be coming through my ceiling in a minute. Happen you must nail her feet to the floor and chain her top half to the door handle.’

  Bernard sat in an old kitchen chair. ‘It’s this baby. She wants everything clean and shiny before it arrives. I reckon she’d Mansion Wax me if I sat still for long enough. And she’s going on and on about moving out, getting away from the shop. Says she doesn’t want her kiddy going to school smelling like somebody’s breakfast kippers.’

  Danny raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘Please yourself. Once the war’s over, we can turn this into a lock-up, let some young couple have the upstairs flat.’

  Bernard mulled this over for the umpteenth time. He didn’t go a bundle on change for change’s sake, wasn’t really struck by the idea of moving. ‘I like it here,’ he said. ‘Near enough to town, near the church and the school.’ The quarters were a bit on the small side, but they had a decent living room, an adequate kitchen, a plumbed-in bathroom, a good-sized bedroom and a boxroom for the baby. ‘We’ve even got the electric, but is she satisfied? Oh, no. She wants something better, she says.’ Liz wasn’t a shrew, wasn’t a moaner, but she knew her mind.

  ‘Children need grass,’ offered Danny.

  ‘Well, we never had grass. The only green we ever saw was Queen’s Park or the Jolly Brows. Didn’t do us any harm.’

  ‘Country’s healthier,’ replied Danny. ‘Fresh air, loads of space. A nice garden, flowers, grow your own veg.’ Danny’s garden, unlike his house, was meticulously groomed. He grew potatoes, cabbages, lettuce and carrots. In a small greenhouse, he produced tomatoes and propagated seedlings for his many flower-beds.

  With regard to the inside of the cottage, Danny’s strongly held and often stated belief was that dust settled after a while. Women tended to go into the business of shifting dirt, attacking the stuff with dusters, brushes and mops. Which was all very well, but the dust simply moved round the planet before blowing back to seek out its various sources of origin. Short of blasting the lot into outer space, there was no avoiding muck, therefore it should simply be tolerated. If a person never dusted or polished, things sorted themselves out after a year or two.

  ‘That life’s not for me,’ sighed Bernard. He couldn’t imagine scraping about with rakes and hoes, cutting and rolling a lawn into two-tone stripes, pruning roses, manicuring privets and declaring war on leaf-mould or greenfly.

  ‘Well, you can’t stop here for ever,’ ventured Danny. ‘When Hitler gets beaten up, things’ll change. Folk’ll likely expect more from life – only young ones setting up’ll want to be living above shops. Progress, you see. Our grandad sold fish down Churchgate off a barrow, then in the old fishmarket. This shop must have looked posh to him. Expectations change with every generation.’

  Bernard grunted his disapproval. ‘They should take what they can get and be satisfied.’

  Danny clicked his tongue. ‘Listen, our kid. These last few months, women have started to do men’s work as well as their own. They’ll not step back easy into flowered pinnies and slippers. I know they’ve always worked in cotton, but they’ll be setting their sights on nice houses, carpets, better jobs and better grub. Whether you like it or not, there’ll be change coming.’

  Bernard left his brother and trudged upstairs, happily unaware that Danny’s warning about change was to remain in his mind for some time to come.

  Liz was pol
ishing brasses, her small hands scrubbing furiously at the surface of some inanimate and blameless object. ‘You can see your face in this plaque now,’ she told him.

  Bernard didn’t want to see his face. It was all right as far as faces went, but it was a round, very ordinary face. ‘Will you leave well alone, Liz?’ he begged.

  She sniffed the air. ‘Shut that door tight,’ she ordered. ‘I’m not having visitors complaining about the smell of cod.’

  They seldom had visitors, though Bernard chose not to remind his wife of that fact. Liz’s aversion to the odour of fish had increased in proportion to her girth. With a seven-month belly on her, she could scarcely tolerate the scents that floated up the stairway from time to time. ‘Thank God it’s winter,’ she continued. During the summer months, the stench of fish permeated everything – even her washing out on the line.

  Bernard sat down and rattled yesterday’s four-paged Bolton Evening News into some semblance of order. There was no peace by his fireside these days. He would have to give in gracefully once the war was over, he supposed. It would be Harwood or Bromley Cross, compulsory fresh air and weeding. Liz wouldn’t want to stop here, not with a young one to worry about. But there was petrol to consider. Where would he get the extra fuel to drive to the shop? Would petrol rationing be cured as soon as the war ended? If not, he’d have to come down from the moors on buses and trams, he supposed, and leave the van here. What time was the first bus? Early enough to meet the fish trains? And what about the flat over the shop? What about Danny and—?

  ‘Bernard?’

  He sighed, lost the thread of his thoughts, and turned a frail page. ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘My waters have just gone. All over the rug and all. I cleaned it nobbut half an hour since.’

  He jumped up. ‘But you’re only seven months.’