Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  The Express had followed up its early reports on the case with an expression of righteous indignation on the subject of lawlessness and the evil of wrongdoers such as Ernest Parsons, who made it unsafe for respectable women to walk the streets at night. They looked forward to his punishment with ghoulish pleasure.

  ‘Don’t take no notice,’ Dolly consoled her. Florrie’s flamboyant style had taken a knock this last week. Her rouge was put on crooked, her black hair showed grey at the roots. ‘They can write what they like, no one round here thinks he done it!’

  Florrie raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘Thanks, Dolly.’ In private, she thought the touching faith might make things worse. She heard Sadie sobbing her heart out night after night, and Hetties prayers, and Jess questioning everything, urging Frances to work on Sewell for an appeal. Florrie sighed. ‘We’re worn out with worry, I don’t mind telling you.’

  To make things worse, she had noticed a severe falling off in trade at the pub, since the government had decided to restrict opening hours for the duration of the war. It was to encourage sobriety and to concentrate people’s attention on the war effort, but Florrie’s point of view was that folk needed to drown or share their sorrows up at the Duke. She worried about the empty bar stools and full barrels in the cellar, the dwindling takings in the till. But she wouldn’t trouble Duke with it, as Christmas approached, and the dreaded New Year.

  Annie was one of the customers who stayed loyal, and she dealt with Duke in a dear, matter-of-fact manner which encouraged him to talk things through. ‘Ain’t no need to put on a show for me, Duke,’ she advised. ‘I don’t expect it.’ A couple of draymen had just finished rolling fresh barrels along the corridor to the cellar, and Duke had helped heave them on to the gantry. Now he stood at the window watching the men jump on to the cart, raking up the reins and positioning the splendid shire horses, ready to set off and merge into the busy traffic on Duke Street. He didn’t shift position as he felt Annie come up alongside.

  ‘Will they get rid of them in the end and all? What do you think, Annie?’

  ‘What you on about?’

  ‘The horses. Will they put them out to grass and go for the motor car?’ He watched them take the strain and lift their huge hooves. They were great dappled grey beasts, with creaking leather straps, silver bits, golden brasses.

  ‘Not before you and me are six feet under, if you want to know. I say they can keep their electric tramcars and their motor omnibuses for all I care. No, them drays is a sight for sore eyes, and they’ll see us out, Duke.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ He seemed happy to reminisce, briefly caught up in the shallows of memory, ignoring the approaching tidal wave. ‘My old man brought us up over a carter’s yard up in Hackney. Did I ever tell you that, Annie? There was one old grey in the yard, a bit like them two out there, and we called him Major, and my pa would hitch him up to a cart of a Sunday and take us kids out in the country for a day, riding back high on a load of hay, just smelling the sweet smell of the countryside all the way between the factory walls, down the cobbled streets back home. I could lie on that hay at the journey’s end and stare up at the stars. Then Ma would come out with a face as long as a poker and shout where the bleeding hell did we think we’d been. I remember once Pa told her we’d stopped for a dog that he ran over on the road. He tried to save it, but it was too far gone. He had to bury it. Ma said never mind burying no stray dog, our bleeding supper was burnt to cinders. She made us pay for that day out, make no mistake.’

  Annie smiled. ‘We never got no days out in the country when we was kids. My old man was a bootmaker, and poor as a bleeding church mouse, with eight mouths to feed.’ She stared down at her old standbys. ‘That’s why I knows a good pair of boots when I sees one.’

  ‘Ain’t it time you gave those up to the rag-and-bone cart, Annie?’ Duke turned and frowned down at Wiggins’s ugly legacy.

  ‘Waste not, want not, I say,’ came the gruff reply. Then she drew a small, slim wallet out of her pocket and showed it to her friend. ‘Now look here, Duke, I had an idea what Ernie might like.’ She opened the small brass clasp on the blue velvet wallet. It opened to reveal a concertina of small, framed photographs. ‘I went up and down the court and I asked your girls and all, and they dug out a photograph for me, and I stuck them in here so we could get Ernie to remember that all the folks round here are thinking of him and praying for him. What do you think?’ She handed the album across. ‘I know he ain’t one for books or letters, or nothing like that. But I thought he might like photographs. He can sit and look at his friends in a picture, can’t he?’

  Duke studied the brownish photographs. There was Tommy O’Hagan standing behind his fruit barrow, a grin splitting his face. There was Charlie Ogden on the back row in a Board School picture, with Sadie, neat in her white smock and black buttoned boots, sitting cross-legged at the front. There was a hand-tinted, glamorous head and shoulders one of Amy. Frances had provided a photo of the whole family, taken four or five years earlier, of them standing on the front doorstep of the pub. Ernie stood in the centre of the group, between Duke and Robert. And Mary O’Hagan had given up her favourite picture of Daisy, onstage, with white flowers in her hair and a sparkling laugh lighting up her face.

  Annie grew uneasy at the long silence. ‘If you think it’ll only upset the poor boy, I’ll take it back,’ she suggested.

  But Duke shook his head. ‘It’s just the thing, Annie.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘I’ll take it in to him tomorrow.’

  Now Hettie prayed fervently each morning and night, and went over to Lambeth to see her Army friend, Freda Barnes, as often as she could. Freda still helped to run the industrial home, dishing out soup and blankets to the poor creatures who came in off the streets at night. She was a plain-featured, grey-eyed woman in her mid-thirties, broad-faced beneath her navy bonnet, very down to earth and not at all smug. She encouraged Hettie to throw in her lot with them. ‘“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”’ Hettie clung to her belief, seeing that it bolstered Ernie in his hour of need. She even invited Robert to attend an Army meeting with her.

  Robert went once, but he preferred his old haunts. He allowed Walter to wheel him down to the gym, where Milo devised some weights which Robert could lift from a sitting position in his wheelchair, and a special punch-bag to exercise with. The hospital hoped he would soon progress from chair to crutches, and they promised an eventual artificial limb which would restore him in many ways to his old lifestyle. He worked at his recovery with fierce fanaticism. Nothing, nothing in life could be as bad for him as being treated like a cripple. They looked down at him in a wheelchair, and saw him as something less than human, so his pilgrimage took him through terrible pain on to crutches, too soon, and with several relapses before he could stand face to face with the next man once more. Now they admired him at the same time as they shied away from him. His experience was too raw, too recent, and he raged against each day as it brought him closer to the one set for Ernie’s execution.

  Maurice came in whenever he could, and took over some of the heavy tasks in the pub which Robert had once helped Joxer with. It gave him time with Jess, when the doors were closed and she came down into the bar, sometimes with Grace, sometimes alone.

  She’d relented in this run-up to Christmas over her intention to keep her life with her baby daughter separate from her life with her lover. Maurice was especially tender after the verdict. She decided to trust him with getting to know the child.

  She brought Grace down one day when she knew Maurice was at work in the cellar. She called him into the bar. ‘Shh!’ she said. ‘Try not to wake her.’

  His footsteps were heavy on the stone steps. He stared at the child, who was indeed stirring in her sleep. She opened her dark eyes and turned her head towards him.

  ‘She can see your watch chain shining in the light.’ Jess smiled as Grace freed
one tiny hand from her fine white shawl and stretched it out towards him.

  Maurice, mesmerized by Grace’s dark stare, dare not move. At last he reached in his pocket and released the chain from the watch. He swung it gently towards her and let her catch its cold, shiny links. He glanced shyly at Jess. ‘She looks like you,’ he said.

  There had been a sudden and drastic change from his freewheeling, quick-thinking pattern of old, which still had to operate while he was at work, or out and about. With Jess, however, things took on an intensity; not because she made much of Ernie’s tragedy, rather because she was determined not to be defeated by it. She battled on for him, and seemed to Maurice to be living and breathing in a different sphere from mere mortals, where all trivialities fell away, leaving only her true self, pure and unadulterated. He was in danger of worshipping her, he realized, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself.

  One sunny weekday morning before Christmas, he took her and Grace off to the park. Then he invited her along to a new Gaumont talkie, and got Hettie to back him up in making her go. He told her he was worried she would make herself ill over Ernie. ‘You done everything you could. You done your very best,’ he said.

  ‘And it weren’t good enough.’

  They walked together after the picture had finished, back up Duke Street in a world of their own.

  ‘Jess, you gotta stop hurting yourself over it. Sewell’s working on an appeal, ain’t he?’

  ‘We need new evidence.’ She thought of Ernie in the condemned cell. He was gentle with visitors, asking for news, never talking of his own situation. He’d told Frances that, when it came to it, he’d want her to write down a letter from him to Duke.

  Maurice held her close. They stood outside the lively yellow warmth of the Duke. Strains of music filtered through the closed windows and doors. ‘Come home with me,’ he said softly.

  In the empty house they made love again, with great passion between them. The ache of grief made her cry in his arms, and her tears healed the loneliness of his youth. He loved her clean smoothness, the slant of her shoulders, the curve of her back. She took his strong body to her, a little afraid of its power. They entwined. She was all softness until she pressed back against him and returned her female desire for his longing. Then she vied with him for pleasure, stroking and kissing him, and sighing as he held her. He looked down at her; her eyes looked deep into him with full consciousness of what she desired. What he could give, he gave, overjoyed by their union, their clinging limbs, their warm touch.

  This time, the way back to cold reality was slow and gentle. They lay in each other’s arms, murmuring to one another. He told her she was the best thing to happen in his life, kissing her eyelids, her forehead. She said she’d been wary of him at first.

  ‘Too pushy?’ he asked.

  Jess nodded. ‘I ain’t used to all that attention. I lived a life below stairs, remember.’

  ‘And wasted you were too, girl!’

  She laughed.

  ‘What about your pa? Ain’t he made a fuss of you when you was little?’

  ‘Not much.’ She remembered winning the school races for him and bringing home the prize. ‘It was all Rob, Rob, Rob with him, ‘cos he was the first boy. Who wants three girls on the trot?’ She said it without bitterness. ‘I ain’t complaining.’

  ‘Well, you got plenty of attention from me from now on, if you want it?’

  ‘Is that a question?’ She turned on her side and propped herself on one elbow.

  ‘If you like.’ He was teasing, stroking the corners of her mouth and reaching across to kiss it.

  ‘Funny sort of question. What was it again?’ Her laugh, so rare of late, lit her up.

  ‘Let’s get married, Jess.’

  She fell suddenly serious. ‘You mean it? You don’t want no more time to think?’

  ‘I been thinking about it since I first clapped eyes on you.’ He wanted to sweep her along. ‘Say yes, Jess. Just say yes!’

  She sat up in bed, hair tumbling about her shoulders, spreading her arms wide. ‘I ain’t gonna say no, Maurice, am I?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Ain’t I sitting here in your bed thinking we’re bound to get married some day?’ Strangely, it hadn’t been a large question in her own mind. Then she realized that it was because she trusted him. ‘Just as soon as you got round to asking me!’

  ‘Say yes!’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes’.

  He lay back flat on the pillow, speechless. It was Jess who kissed him and got up, got ready to go home to Grace. ‘It ain’t all plain sailing,’ she warned.

  Maurice’s arm circled her waist as she sat again on the edge of the bed. ‘No need to remind me.’

  ‘But I love you, Maurice. Just remember that.’

  ‘Then I’m happy,’ he said simply. In his direct, optimistic way, he didn’t see what could possibly go wrong.

  Frances had arranged to meet up with Sewell in the prison. It was the Friday before Christmas. She greeted him in a subdued mood, and, it seemed to him, defeated.

  ‘Never say die, Miss Parsons,’ he reminded her as the warder showed them to Ernie’s cell. They’d come for one last try to break down the barrier in Ernie’s mind about events on the night of the murder. ‘The doctors tell me that sooner or later it will all click into place,’ he said. ‘Like a camera shutter; click, as sudden as can be. And it will all be in place in perfect detail.’

  ‘I hope so, Mr Sewell.’ Frances went and sat by Ernie’s side of the table. His face lit up to see her. Then he fixed his attention on Mr Sewell, screwing his gaze on the solicitor’s face.

  Frances noticed that Ernie held the little photograph album sent in by Annie. It was open at the picture of Daisy with white flowers in her dark hair.

  ‘Now, Ernie,’ Mr Sewell began. ‘You understand why we’re here?’

  He nodded. ‘To remember what happened to Daisy.’

  ‘That’s right. Let’s just think about that. We’re standing outside the stage door. What colour is it, Ernie?’

  ‘Green. Dirty green.’

  ‘Good. Is it closed?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ernie’s eyes crinkled with concentration.

  ‘Good. Is there anyone there in the alley with you, Ernie? I know we’ve asked you before, but you’re doing very well this time. Just take things slowly. Now, is there anyone in the alley?’

  Frances put one hand over Ernie’s and stroked it softly.

  ‘No, I’m by myself. I’m waiting for Rob. I know he’ll be mad at me.’

  ‘He’s not mad,’ Sewell reassured him. ‘He’s worried about you, but he’s busy. He’ll be back soon. He won’t be mad.’

  Ernie nodded. ‘I never meant to do it,’ he whispered; the old refrain.

  ‘Do what, Ernie?’ Sewell too lowered his voice.

  ‘I never meant to get lost. Tell Rob.’

  ‘He ain’t cross,’ Frances said. She grasped his hand tight. ‘You never meant to get lost. We know that.’ She glanced up at the solicitor, a light in her eyes. ‘Now, Ernie, what happened while you was waiting for Rob? Did something scare you?’

  Ernie’s own eyes fogged over. He sighed heavily.

  ‘What do you see?’ Sewell leant forward across the table. They’d met up with the same invisible wall, the boy was giving in.

  ‘What can you hear?’ Frances urged.

  ‘A noise. Someone’s screaming.’ He gripped the photograph. ‘Daisy. Daisy’s screaming. I can tell it’s her. She’s shouting. There’s something wrong!’

  ‘Daisy’s inside and she’s screaming. The door’s closed, Ernie. What do you do?’ Sewell pushed hard.

  ‘I open it. I have to go in there, even if Rob comes along and I’m not there waiting for him. That’s right, ain’t it? I have to go in. Daisy needs me.’

  ‘That’s right, Ern.’ Frances could hardly breathe. There was a moment when she thought, No, we can’t go on. We can’t make him live through it all again. It’s a cru
el torment. Once was enough. But Sewell was firm. He pressed on.

  ‘She does. She needs help. Do you run inside, Ern?’

  Ernie nodded. ‘The screams are loud now. I have to run. They’re coming from her dressing room, where they get changed. No, now they’ve stopped!’ Ernie jolted to a halt. He was trembling. His eyes filled with tears.

  ‘The screams have stopped, Ernie. Where are you now?’

  ‘In the corridor,’ he said, dazed and slow.

  ‘Good. Do you see anyone?’

  ‘No. I can hear someone running off. I turn the corner. But I don’t see no one.’

  Sewell let out a sharp breath. What do you do now? Now that Daisy’s stopped screaming and you’ve heard someone run off?’

  ‘I go in.’

  ‘Go in where?’

  ‘Into the dressing room –’ He paused.

  ‘Who’s there, Ernie?’

  ‘No one.’

  Sewell nodded. ‘How do you feel now, Ernie? Daisy’s not there. How do you feel?’

  ‘Scared.’

  ‘What of? Is someone in there hiding?’

  ‘No. He ran off. I heard him.’

  ‘But you’re still scared?’

  ‘Something’s wrong. Something’s happened to Daisy. I have to find her.’

  ‘Where? Where do you look?’

  ‘All over. I can’t see her. But I know she’s still here.’

  ‘Do you find her? Where is she?’ Sewell glanced at Frances, willing her to keep her own nerve.

  ‘No, I can’t find her!’ Ernie looked wildly round, his eyes streaming with tears.