The Corner House

by Ruth Hamilton

  ‘Who was it?’

  Eva kneaded and rolled, kneaded, divided, and set the dough in her tins. ‘That’s not a question I can answer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not my place and I can’t tell you what I really don’t know, can I?’ It was probably Chorlton. According to Theresa, he had been the first. But who could say which of those creatures had produced the fastest swimmer, the winning ticket?

  ‘Will she tell me one day?’

  Eva didn’t know the answer to that one either.

  Jessica went out into the lobby, pulled on her hat and coat, wandered into the street. The snow had almost melted, leaving in its wake a few slag-heaps of greyish matter piled against walls. There were no children playing, no doors open. Everyone had remained inside to enjoy the fireside and indoor games. Most had sisters and brothers, most had someone who would listen and share a table to draw or make a jigsaw.

  Irene hove into view, her pale, expressionless face framed by a red woollen scarf. She stopped and looked at her beautiful cousin. Mam liked Jessica. Jessica was pretty and clever and she never got told off for being a little rat. ‘What are you doing?’ Irene asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Irene wiped a dewdrop from the end of her nose. ‘I’m going to see her.’ She nodded towards her mother’s house. ‘I don’t know why I bother, like. She couldn’t care less about me.’ She pondered for a second or two. ‘We’ve not been lucky, have we, me and you? Mine knocking seven shades of the rainbow out of me, yours leaving you to Eva Know-it-all.’

  Jessica shrugged. ‘Mam went to earn money and save up.’

  ‘She left you.’

  ‘She couldn’t help it.’

  Irene shrugged. ‘Your mam ran away from the hospital. They’ll drag her back there. She can’t go piking about with TB. Folk with TB gets locked up.’

  Jessica decided that Irene might know things. She had the sort of eyes that knew everything, glassy but wise, empty but hiding a huge store of secrets. ‘Who was my dad?’ she asked.

  The older girl stared blankly at Jessica. ‘It were rape,’ she answered eventually. ‘That’s what your mam said, anyroad. Grandad didn’t believe her, so he threw her out. Mam says your mam was held down and forced, if you get my meaning.’

  Jessica got her meaning. In a girls’ convent school, a rich seam of gossip seemed to develop about forbidden topics, dark whispers in grey corners of hallowed halls. While nuns floated along on a sea of prayer and self-denial, their charges investigated life to the full, bent, it seemed, on avoiding nunhood at all costs.

  Irene was enjoying herself. She watched her cousin’s face, saw the pain and bewilderment. ‘You haven’t got a dad,’ she explained. ‘Mine’s no good, but I do know who he is. Mind you, we don’t know where he is. Good job, because Mam would kill him if she could catch him.’ The older girl delivered as near a smile as she could manage before marching off to do battle with the harridan who had borne her.

  Jessica saw Irene going into the house, noticed the statutory entrance fee of ten Players clutched in Irene’s disappearing hand. ‘Oh, heck,’ muttered Jessica. Dr Blake had probably found Mam. Mam would be hauled back to Williamson’s, would be prodded and photographed and shoved in a freezing room.

  The whole concept was terrifying. Had Mam travelled home to die? Was there really no dad to come along and rescue Jessica from Ruth McManus’s clutches? Alive, Mam had a say in where Jessica stayed, but … No, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  Jessica Nolan went back to Auntie Eva’s to comfort herself with new bread, plum jam and a roaring fire. When a person was only twelve, she had no real say in anything important.

  Drinnan’s was at the top of Cannon Street, a corner building, slightly wedge-shaped. A row of tables flanked the Derby Street side, affording occupants a view of the road and its ongoings. Theresa gazed through steamy glass and watched a brewery horse on his way home after carting beer. Soon, there would be no horses on Derby Street. Lorries were all the rage these days, noisy, rattling monsters spluttering and backfiring all over the place, blue smoke pouring from exhausts.

  She turned slightly and looked at Stephen Blake. He was tidier, scarcely older, quite handsome. There was a slight cleft in the square jaw, while his eyes remained as eloquent as ever. Whatever she had felt for him during her stay at the sanatorium remained very much alive. Was this love and did it matter? Still clumsy, he rattled coins in his pockets, jangled a spoon in its saucer, almost upset the cutlery tray. Smiling in spite of everything, Theresa looked through the window again, watching another horse slip-sliding its way to stables on the icy road. She must not think about Stephen Blake. The man was too close for comfort and she longed to touch him, to make sure that he was real.

  He was buying coffee and biscuits, was probably preparing the inquisition. It was no longer of any consequence. She should keep her mind on Jessica and on … the other business. A gun in her handbag. She was sitting in the best ice-cream parlour for miles with a pearl-handled, loaded lady’s gun. She calmed herself by thinking about her savings. Even if the three men didn’t pay up one last time, Theresa had enough to buy the house, enough to leave Jessica in reasonable comfort. Katherine was fine. Katherine was a member of a proper family. She was loved, educated, well dressed and well fed. Theresa continued to fantasize about murder. About three murders. And her insides were weak and fluttery because the one she loved was here, was struggling against the possibility of spilled coffee. Strength, firmness of resolve – how she needed those commodities.

  ‘There we are.’ He placed the cups on the table, went to fetch a plate of biscuits.

  Theresa sighed, hoping that this fine doctor would give her some time, some leeway. She had to follow through what she had started, needed to stand in control in front of her attackers and … At this point, when she reached the ‘and’, her thoughts occasionally lost their clarity. She wanted to kill, to deliver three bullets into three blackened hearts. Stephen should go away. Stephen softened her, made her falter.

  He sat down. ‘How have you been?’

  Too tired to argue, she spoke slowly and clearly. ‘I have a cough, but no blood. I get exhausted and my limbs ache. Sometimes, my hands and feet are a bit blue and numb.’

  He nodded encouragingly.

  ‘I had to go.’

  ‘Did you run from me?’

  She shook her head, lowering her eyelids in case the lie showed. He had not been the reason, though he had sat on the edge of her decision, had probably tipped the scales. ‘No. I wanted to work, to leave something for Jessica. I needed to make use of the years instead of lingering palely in some hospital.’ Theresa raised her chin and forced herself to look at him. He remained attractive, to say the least, had probably struggled to give up the drink. ‘I helped to run a seamen’s mission in Liverpool – I was the housekeeper. It wasn’t a terrible job and it paid well.’

  ‘I see.’ He drank some coffee, grimacing. So, she had worked, had saved every penny for the child. He frowned into his thick, white cup. ‘How do these people manage to believe that we all want this stuff made with boiled and burnt milk?’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ she replied.

  He cleared his throat of the thick substance. She was still beautiful: too lovely to look at. Her near-transparency terrified him.

  ‘Will you report me?’ she asked.

  He thought about that. ‘I don’t know. You need testing again – for your own good.’

  She nodded. ‘Give me a month, please. I’m buying a house for Jessica. She’ll be living there with a friend of mine – Maggie Courtney.’

  ‘Oh.’ He stirred the coffee, dragging off a layer of half-set skin. ‘And where will you be?’

  In prison or worse, she replied inwardly. For his ears, she answered, ‘In your hospital, I suppose.’

  At last, he managed to look her in the face. ‘I never forgot you.’

  ‘No.’

  He rubbed a hand across his brow. ‘And I ne
ver married.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  The ensuing silence was acutely painful. Stephen sought a change of subject. ‘What’s wrong with Eva?’ he asked. ‘Hasn’t she done a good enough job?’

  Theresa nibbled at the edge of an anaemic-looking biscuit. All her life, she had been answerable. Firstly, her father had ruled her life. Michael Nolan, a monstrous bigot, had chased all his children, had forced them into early marriages. Theresa, deeply wounded by the rapists, had been cast off. Eva Harris had helped her and had helped herself to Jessica’s twin sister. Again, Theresa had enjoyed no say, no control.

  ‘Theresa?’

  Everyone was answerable, she supposed. To bosses, to families, to God. She knew people with lives worse than her own had been. With unwelcome but familiar suddenness, her skin began to crawl. The second rein on her had been held by Betteridge, Hardman and Chorlton, who still sounded like a firm of solicitors. ‘I should have sued them at the time, should have got the police in.’

  ‘Yes, you should.’

  She scarcely heard the man who had been another jailer, wished he would go away. Deadened senses were coming to life in his presence. She had always wanted love, to be loved for herself and in spite of herself. This doctor had loved her instinctively, unconditionally. His soft, gentle eyes were clouding her own vision. ‘I saved most of my wages,’ she told him now. ‘For Jessica. Maggie will take care of her, you’ll see. I’ll probably die young, not of TB, but because of the rheumatic fever.’

  His hand crept over the tablecloth and enclosed her fingers. Startled, she stiffened, then felt the ice thawing in her veins. Warmth crept along her arm and into her chest. This was a mess. She had no room for complications, no time for dalliance. How could one town contain such a man alongside slime like the other three? ‘Do you still dream of your brother?’ she asked. Her breath, already shortened by disease, contracted even further. He was so wonderful, so kind.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he answered. ‘And I dream about you, too. Like my twin, you were becoming a mere shadow.’

  ‘I’m still a shadow.’

  ‘Very thin,’ he agreed.

  It was as if she had been given a pill, a sedative of some kind. Her body, unused to total relaxation, threatened to keel over. Was he a healer as well as a doctor? Could he make her well?

  ‘Spit it out,’ he said.

  ‘For analysis, doctor? Or are you trying to relieve me of this horrible coffee?’ His presence illuminated their table, trimming the hem off a dark brown day. No-one else existed. Drinnan’s drifted off into a mist. The two of them were no longer restricted by mere masonry.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked again.

  Barriers between them had slipped off quietly, had gone the same way as the ice-cream bar’s walls. ‘It’s too awful, especially for you.’

  Stephen fought the urge to catch her up in his arms and remove her from an unkind world, to take her somewhere else, somewhere clean and fresh. The Alps. He could get work there among richer consumptives. A month. She had asked for a month.

  ‘I lost someone, Stephen.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘A lover?’

  ‘No. A long, long time ago. Someone was stolen from me.’

  ‘Ah.’ He waited. ‘Go on.’

  Theresa went on. ‘After the attack, when I knew I was pregnant, I wanted to die there and then. Eva saved me, took me in, found me somewhere to stay. She blackmailed my house out of Maurice the Mole, Roy Chorlton’s father. Eva and the Walsh brothers – they’re fishmongers – got money out of the three families. I was grateful.’

  He watched her as she remembered the gratitude, but he dared not speak. He feared that she might bolt like a frightened filly if he interrupted.

  ‘My Jessica and Liz Walsh’s baby were born on the same night. Eva was the midwife in both cases.’ Theresa clung to his hand, her lifeline. ‘Liz’s child died. It was a little girl, small enough to be buried in a shoe box.’ She placed her other hand on top of Stephen’s, making sure that contact would continue while she spoke. ‘During labour, I fainted a couple of times. I know now that I gave birth to identical twin girls. One was removed and swapped for a shoe box.’

  His mouth opened, but the words took their time. ‘By Eva?’

  Theresa nodded.

  ‘Good grief.’ He shook his head slowly, as if kicking his brain into a gear that could accept such news.

  ‘She never told me, Stephen. In all these years, she has said not one word.’ The fear was gone, while the anger was damped down past embers, almost to a heap of warm ashes. ‘I think Eva persuaded the Walshes to move to Liverpool. Danny, he’s the older brother, keeps the Bolton end of their business going, with his wife to help him. Well, I suppose Eva got a real shock when I, too, ran off to Liverpool. She visited me, brought Jessica with her.’

  ‘And kept your secret—’

  ‘She kept her own secret, too,’ said Theresa softly. ‘Guarded it so well. Then I saw Jessica on Bold Street in Liverpool. Except it wasn’t Jessica. It was Katherine Walsh, daughter of Bernard and Liz.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Theresa smiled sadly. ‘What could I do? I’ve not been much of a mother. I’ve concentrated on Jessica’s future, on her adulthood. I think I distanced myself so that she would not get too reliant on a mother who is guaranteed to die young. But now, after the deception, I’ve decided to take Jessica away from Eva. Perhaps it’s a form of revenge, because I’ve been very angry. As for Katherine – well, I made sure I met her. We spent about twenty minutes together in a café in Waterloo. Bernard Walsh must have been scared to death in case I spoke up. I didn’t, of course. Katherine has a proper family, parents who will look after her.’

  Stephen Blake found himself trembling. ‘But they’re sisters,’ he said. ‘Twins, from the one egg. They knew each other long before they were born.’

  Theresa lowered her head. ‘I realize that. Jessica had an invisible friend called Lucy. When I talked to Bernard Walsh, I found out that the girls have even shared symptoms. Just one was ill, but the other felt the same pain.’

  ‘It happens, believe me.’

  ‘I need no convincing.’

  His other hand came up to join hers on the table. He held tight to Theresa’s fingers as he spoke. ‘They must be told some time,’ he insisted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did Mrs Walsh not offer to take Jessica, too?’

  Theresa shook her head. ‘She didn’t accept that her baby had died. According to Bernard, she shut herself down, lost her reason for a few hours. Liz Walsh is one hundred per cent sure that Katherine is her own, that Katherine has no twin sister. I can’t tell her. I can’t do it, Stephen.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Theresa allowed her eyes to close. ‘My heart is such a mess, too. I need treatment to buy more time. I look into the future and I see Jessica alone. While she’s a child, people will rally round, I know. But when she’s grown and in her twenties, she’ll have no blood basis, no relatives who want her. Except for my sister, who’s as mad as a hatter. And my daughter shouldn’t be alone, because she has the closest tie possible, a twin.’

  This was a good woman. She had worked herself near to death to provide for her daughter, had deliberately chosen not to interfere when meeting the other girl. ‘You’ve done your best,’ he told her. ‘In the circumstances, you have acted like a saint.’

  Her eyes flew open. Saints did not carry guns in their handbags and hatred in their souls. ‘I made my decision and details are with a lawyer,’ she said. ‘While talking to a solicitor about buying a house, I shall be making my will with regard to the care of Jessica and so forth. As for the two girls, I decided that twenty-four was about the right age, not too young, not too old. Whether Liz likes it or not, my twins will have each other.’

  ‘And Eva?’

  Theresa lifted a shoulder. ‘I’ll forgive in time. And, of course, she may have to sign documents in front of witnesses, just to prove to the two girls that the
y are related. There’ll be no case for Eva to answer, no kidnapping charge or whatever, because that would damage Katherine and the Walshes. Eva knows what’s coming – I’ve seen it in her eyes. As for me, I just want everything written down tidily for the future.’

  He blinked a couple of times. Having found her, he could not bear to imagine being separated from her again. She must not die, not yet. ‘I’ve loved you for years,’ he declared bravely.

  Taken aback by this out-of-context statement, Theresa told the whole truth. ‘I think I began to love you, too. It was frightening. I’ve no idea how to love a man.’ She almost laughed at him. ‘You’ve gone very red.’

  He could not lose her. Even if her life was going to be short, he would be a part of it. ‘When do you move?’

  ‘In three weeks.’

  ‘And then?’

  She sighed. In three weeks, it would all be over. A smoking gun, emptied of bullets, a sick woman running to this doctor for protection. Could he be her alibi? No, he was too straight for that and, anyway, she must not abuse him. ‘I’ll come to see you.’

  They disentangled their hands and ordered more coffee, this time made with water. Over the more palatable brew, they talked about all kinds of things, about Jessica’s schooling, about the sanatorium and new, exciting drugs which might just promise a speedier cure for TB. He boasted about his car, a second-hand item with no sense of decorum; described his house in the country, his washing machine with automatic mangle which actually ate clothes. ‘I’m down to five socks,’ he grumbled amiably. ‘Thank God they’re all black. I change one each day.’

  She believed him. With her face beginning to glow, Theresa drew a word-picture of the old sailors in Jutland House. ‘They treat a game of draughts like war. Dominoes can be fatal, and we put away the dartboard for obvious reasons.’