by Maggie Ford
‘You must think it holds some substance?’
Tony’s repeat of the question dragged her mind back to him and she nodded miserably. That woman who’d been in here taking a little comfort from a mug of practically undrinkable tea, what were her fears? Maybe she didn’t have any beyond the uncertainty of how long before she died of cold, or for want of food or from some illness, or probably she was too dim even to give it a thought but lived from day to day no more than an alley cat or a stray dog roaming the streets might. Who was the luckier? Quickly she shrugged off the dreary thought. There was no comparison. She pulled herself together and looked at Alan. ‘I’m just being silly.’
He held her gaze as though physically compelling her to look at him. ‘You’re not being silly. What your husband is doing is bloody dangerous. Not just because of what he’s doing, though that comes into it, but because of the people he’s in with. And you could be too. You’re his wife. You assist in his shop. You could be seen as knowing everythink he does. If somethink went wrong, Gerry, all sorts of things could ’appen. To him, to you.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
‘Then why are yer so scared?’
‘I don’t know.’ She dragged her gaze away from his and concentrated on slowly pushing her still almost full mug of tea from her. Then she turned her gaze to him again, this time adopting a look of confidence, even a little smile. ‘I’m all right, Alan, really. I just feel a bit down in the dumps. End of summer, I suppose. Only winter to look forward to.’
‘With parties and celebrations and loads of socialising and Tony to buy you everything you want?’ It rang of scepticism, he fully aware she was putting on this act, avoiding reality. He sounded almost angry. ‘Don’t give me all that rubbish, you’re bloody scared stiff,’ he rushed on savagely, then suddenly mellowed, leaning towards her, his hand reaching out and covering hers. ‘Look, I don’t blame you fer feeling like that. I would be too. And I’ve got a feeling your Tony is too but he won’t let you see it. I bet he’s bluffing it out all the time, but underneath …’ He let the rest go unsaid, then with his fingers tightening about her hand, he went on slowly, ‘Listen to me, Gerry. If ever you felt the need to get in touch with me, you know where I live. If things ever get a bit dicky, don’t ever hesitate fer one second to let me know, you understand?’
He was being so earnest that Geraldine at last found her voice. ‘I don’t know what you could do,’ she said lamely.
‘Neither do I. But I’d do something. I’d never sit back and say, oh, what a pity she’s in trouble, I wish I could ’elp. I’d do something!’ His tone lowering so considerably that she could hardly hear it, he added, ‘There ain’t nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Gerry, no matter what it was. Please remember that.’
She found herself nodding her assent. ‘I’ll remember,’ she murmured, suddenly aware that she had an ally at last, that she could go to him with anything that might be worrying her and he would listen.
She went home with a far lighter heart and something else besides. Was it knowing she had someone she could trust in this world of mistrust she seemed to live in? In this make-believe world where those she mixed with were basically false, cultured like some of the pearls Tony sold to those not able to afford the real thing – peal away the layers to find just a thin nacre about a man-induced piece of grit in the oyster – Alan was an anchor. Or was it something more. Love? She could have loved Alan, quite easily.
Despite Tony’s obvious reluctance, Geraldine insisted that Christmas Day would be spent with her family.
‘I don’t want to spend it with a lot of strangers,’ she burst out, on the verge of an argument about it when he told her he’d already planned to go to this huge house party in Chelsea and that everyone would be there.
‘They’re not strangers,’ he shot back, his voice impatient as he put down his pen from the accounts he’d been doing. ‘They’re our friends.’
‘Your friends.’
‘Our friends. Mine and yours. We’ve been invited and I’ve promised now. I can’t break it. I can’t let them down.’
‘Then you go!’ Fear as well as anger made her shout.
It was only a party after all. They wouldn’t be missed. But the very words ‘promised’ and ‘can’t let them down’ sent shivers up her back. ‘Can’t’ she interpreted as ‘daren’t’, as though he was obeying an order rather than an invitation, as if he was in the grip of these people he called friends. Yet she always found them nice, enjoyed their company when she was there. It was only afterwards, or when invited to join them that she’d experience this vague sense of dread. No doubt she was being silly but in her mind she could still hear Kate Meyrick’s oblique warning.
This time, however, she pushed disquiet aside for the more needful determination to have her way. ‘I don’t mind if you want to go off with your own friends but I intend to be with my family on Christmas Day.’
‘Why don’t you stop saying my friends?’ he snarled. ‘They’re not my friends!’
She looked at him thinking, you’ve said a mouthful there, my dear, even as, going back to his account books, he added sullenly, ‘They’re ours.’
Tony had capitulated. He’d telephoned the hostess who’d invited them and made his apologies and now this Christmas night sat in a corner of Mum and Dad’s crowded front room, showing off as it were, looking visibly bored, declining conversation, except perhaps with Wally, drinking too many whiskies – and her parents ill able to afford someone taking more than his share of drink even though Dad may have come by a few extra bottles.
To her earlier annoyance, he’d hardly said anything at both the dinner table with its chicken, stuffing, pork and all the vegetables with Christmas pudding and custard for afters, or later at the tea table with its slices of cold pork, pickled onions and gherkins, the usual shrimps and winkles, its fine Christmas cake, mince pies, jelly and tinned fruit, much of that saved over the year from what Dad brought home from time to time.
The meal table had been quite a squash, Tom and Mavis and their kids, Evie, Fred, Wally and Clara, her baby mostly in her arms so that she had to eat one-handed for much of the time, Mum, Dad, Granny Glover who always had her Christmas here, Tony and herself. Despite Tony’s unsociable attitude she meant to enjoy herself and ignoring the looks, be herself for once, dropping aitches to her heart’s content.
By evening more family turned up as well as Evie’s new boyfriend, a few of Fred’s friends, a couple of them girls, and close neighbours Mum had known for years as friends, they now with no immediate family, no children, both sons lost in the war. The place was soon full of people. So was the kitchen where the beer was kept, bottles and a small barrel balanced on the draining board that kept a constant stream of men supplying themselves with beer or whisky, sherry or gin for the womenfolk; while with backs tight against the milling menfolk in that tiny space, several women helped to cut bread to spread with marge, and fill with pressed ox tongue or more cold pork for sandwiches with pickles to be washed down with a drop of drink, and later as the small hours crept up, fortifying cups of tea for the weary.
There was music in the two small main rooms. An uncle, as usual, was playing his squeezebox, to which his wife loved to sing in an uncertain soprano, not always on key on the high notes but which went unnoticed as all joined in, each priding their voice over others.
Interspersed with the music were games, some a little rude, such as Kiss The Blarney Stone with each of the unsuspecting young friends of Fred, certainly the girls, cajoled into being blindfolded in the passage and led into the room to kiss the ‘stone’. To gales of laughter a boy would roar, a girl squeal, as the soft, cleaved flesh was felt by searching lips and, whipping off the blindfold, would reveal a man completing the pulling up of his trousers. In reality it had been the crack his forearm formed when doubled up to his upper arm, the girl finally relieved to be told the truth, shrieking happy indignation at those who’d duped her. There was Buy the Donkey, again using the
innocent, led in to bid for someone on all fours under a sheet, who when bought, was given the string to lead it away, but the string was attached to a chamber pot hidden under the ‘donkey’ and drawn into view with its ‘contents’, everyone in fits to the degradation of the buyer, the contents merely a cooked chicken neck in light ale, but in its container most unsavoury-looking. The same was used for Find the Treasure, a blindfold girl’s hand guided to the ‘treasure’, her horror as fingers closed around it, the object often violently flung across the linoleum to shrieks of amusement.
More music from the squeezebox, the talented airing their tonsils or indulging in lengthy Rudyard Kipling monologues or a saucy piece of poetry, even a funny joke or two. Geraldine lapped it all up as though it would be her last time. By now Tony’s disapproval of it all no longer bothered her. But she was glad to see him several times engaged in chats with Wally who, with quite broad interests, could talk to anyone no matter who they were on quite a few subjects.
In his spare time, what little there was for him working as a stevedore, Wally had taken to studying, according to Clara.
‘He’s always reading books from the library on all sorts of things, science things about birds an’ animals an’ about the Earth an’ that sort of thing an’ what he calls astromony or somethink. He knows the names of all the stars.’ A brief look of pride faded. ‘Then he starts giving me lectures about it. Honestly, Gel, it bores me stiff – goes right over me head. Just lately he’s got interested in how to run a business. Gawd knows why. I don’t want ter know. All I want is to get on with me life and look after ’im and this little’un.’
She bent her face to bury it in her daughter’s fair, curly locks. ‘Why should I want ter know about business and things? We ain’t never going ter ’ave one. So why’s he reading stuff like that, wasting ’is time?’
Listening to her, Geraldine wondered vaguely if her brother harboured that secret wish. After all, Tony was in business, and young Fred was doing so well in the newspapers, in collar and tie and a nice suit, never getting his hands dirty.
Clara was still rabbiting on. ‘He was talking to Alan Presley the other day. You know him. He often comes ter see Mum. He’s still on his own, yer know – never got married again. It must be lonely sometimes, just ’is mum and dad. He don’t even live with them. Got ’is own place. It do sound like a miserable life, stuck in a place all on yer own. But as I was saying …’ she paused to take a sip of her sherry. ‘Wally was talking to him the other day. He runs his own business, yer know, a builder’s yard. He even employs a couple of blokes though Wally says he works alongside them ’imself selling building stuff. Wally said it’d be nice if we did somethink like that instead of him having ter go ter work before it’s even light and working all hours fer the sort of wage he gets.’
‘You’ve got to have capital before yer can start a business,’ Geraldine broke in knowledgeably. ‘That’s not easy. It’d take years to save up enough.’ She avoided adding ‘on what Wally earns’, instead continuing with what she knew. ‘Then you might have to go to a bank in the end ter borrow money to help yer get started, and you have to have collateral so as to convince ’em.’
She was aware of Clara looking at her as though she were speaking a foreign language, the word collateral no doubt going right over her head, though Wally would have understood. Clara had probably never been in a bank in her life, nor probably had Wally.
It was, however, as if she hadn’t spoken a word as Clara picked up exactly from the point where she’d been interrupted.
‘I expect he’s spending today with his mum and dad. By now I’d of thought he’d of been spending it with a wife and a family. Funny life fer a man if you ask me, living all on ’is own all these years.’
Geraldine let her thoughts wander. What would Alan be doing at this minute? Perhaps he wasn’t with his parents at all but surely he wouldn’t be sitting on his own? Perhaps he had gone to friends. He must have friends. One of those could even be female and unattached. Geraldine felt her skin prickle with sudden jealousy. He was still a young man, a handsome and confident young man now with his own business who, despite all he’d said, could still attract young women and one day would be attracted by one, forgetting about her, laying her aside as futile, married, inaccessible, out of reach, to be given up on. That he’d once said he would never forget her intimated he would wait for her forever, yet he was eligible to be snapped up one day.
But this was silly! To put a stop to the idiotic pricking of her skin, Geraldine leapt up from her chair.
‘I just need a word with Tony,’ she said by way of excuse to a startled Clara. ‘Be back in a moment.’
It helped sitting herself down next to him, Wally having gone off for another beer. She needed to be near Tony to disperse the inane jealousy that was invading her. She spent the rest of the evening at his side, and he in turn seemed relieved to have her there, giving her to realise that she had been guilty of ignoring him. Maybe that was why all this time he’d been sitting with a long face. Alan Presley faded into oblivion as she saw Tony buck up immediately.
From looking bored out of his head he didn’t say once about leaving early, which he might have done had she continued to leave him on his own, and she took heart that with a little encouragement from her maybe he might come around to her folks. Thus she vowed to do her utmost in future to bring him and her family together again. They’d been estranged too long and it was her fault, not theirs.
Chapter Twenty-three
It hadn’t lasted – maybe for the first couple of months into 1924, consenting to have the odd Sunday dinner with her family, though she could see Tony was never truly at ease with them, nor they with him. It was more trouble than it was worth and soon she had stopped pushing him to go.
Now, six months on, he was back to his old self, eager to socialise with his own friends, glowering if she as much as mentioned their seeing her people, but apparently not too unhappy if she in turn cried out of seeing his friends. It was as though it no longer mattered to him whether she went with him or not.
True, they’d spent that Boxing Day on their own, which in one way was nice and cosy but in another rather worrying: firstly because she could have enjoyed it with her family eating up the cold meat with pickled onions and leftover potatoes and sprouts mashed together to make tasty bubble and squeak; and secondly because they’d not been invited anywhere by anyone who mattered, almost a punishment of a sort for Tony not taking up that earlier invitation to Ernie and Cynthia Bulwalk’s Christmas shindig in Chelsea – to Geraldine’s mind containing an almost ominous message.
New Year, however, made up for all that, and she was conscious of breathing a sigh of relief in spite of having chided herself. It had been a wild time, after the Chelsea Ball going on to Sam Treater’s substantial place around three in the morning. The house party had continued into the next day, everyone awash with fatigue and too much to drink but no one willing to be last to fall down. She and Tony had got home, or rather staggered home, Tony’s driving appalling, in the early hours following New Year’s Day, everyone having spent New Year’s Day itself flopping about the place that in the cold daylight stank of cigar smoke and stale perfume, indulging in idle, mostly meaningless chatter, coming out with silly quips no one particularly listened to, much less appreciated; picking at smoked salmon and caviar and drinking champagne the moment they’d sufficiently come to and getting sozzled all over again, only half aware of where they were but quite content to be there; falling into armchairs or on to some bed to doze beside whoever already occupied it.
Geraldine wandering around looking for Tony, had found him spark out beside Di Manners, she also dead to the world. She remembered standing in the centre of the bedroom trying to take in the scene. At first there had been shock seeing them together like that, then hurt, but after a while it receded as it came to her that while Di was under the bedclothes, he lay on top of the covers, fully dressed, probably with no idea of the person next to
him. Diana too was still clothed, one arm flung above the covers to reveal the glittering strap of her dress still in place. For a while Geraldine had studied that pretty face, composed even in drink, eyelids delicately closed, rosebud lips soft and yielding. Had he kissed those lips?
She had shrugged off the thought as ridiculous. Radical thinking had returned, or at least she had thought it so – though today, six months later, she wasn’t so sure but still shrugged away the thought as impossible, Tony still loving and thoughtful towards her – as she had tiptoed from the room.
That evening at the nightclub he had been so attentive, now and then she’d caught him giving herself sideway glances that had made her smile. He and Di? Not a chance. Besides she’d noted that he didn’t once glance towards the refreshed and by that time vivacious Diana.
At home she and Tony had fallen into bed utterly exhausted and very much dishevelled. Next morning it was she who’d had to pull herself together to go down to open the shop, feeling well out of sorts, and realising for all her high time that she hadn’t enjoyed herself half as much in the company of her so-called friends with their society manners, their rich food, haute couture dresses and expensive jewellery as she had having Christmas with her own family with their ordinary ideas of enjoyment, in clothes to make Tony’s friends turn aside in horror, but their common manners princely beside that of the people Tony mixed with. It wasn’t beyond any girl in those circles to entice a man not her husband to bed. And in the early hours of New Year’s Day she too had been propositioned by Paula’s fiancé Harry Sullivan, his paws all over her despite those around them.
‘That dress y’nearly wearing,’ he’d purred, well oiled by that time, ‘it’s getting me going no end. Mus’ be hard keeping it from falling down, my dear. So what d’yuh say we get together somewhere and I c’n help make you more comfortable? So what d’yuh say, eh? Yeah?’