by Maureen Lee
“Don’t forget to give me the address before I go.”
“I won’t, luv. I’ll ring and tell Gran later. She’ll be pleased.”
After the meal was over and the dishes washed, Trudy produced the bottle she’d painted for me. It was exquisite, an empty wine bottle transformed into a work of art.
The glass was covered with roses and dark green leaves edged with gold.
“It’s beautiful!” I breathed, holding it up to the light.
“I’m not sure where to put it. The other one’s in the bedroom.”
“I’ll do you another,” Trudy offered. “I’m running out of people to give them to.”
“I suggested she have a stall in a craft market,” Colin said proudly. “I could look after the kids if it was a Sunday.”
I waved the bottle in support. “That’s a great idea, Trude. You’d pay ten pounds for this in a shop.”
“Millicent.” Mum came sidling up. “Have you got much to do this afternoon?”
I was immediately wary. “I’m in the middle of a report.”
“It’s just I’d like to go and see Alison.”
“Can’t you go yourself?” The only reason she’d learned to drive was so she could visit Alison in the home.
“There’s something wrong with the car. Your dad promised to get it fixed but he never got round to it.”
He’d probably not got round to it deliberately. He would prefer to think his youngest child didn’t exist.
“Sorry, Mum. As I said, I’ve got this report to write.”
“We’ll take you, luv.” Colin must have overheard. “It’s a couple of weeks since we saw Alison.”
Mum looked grateful. “That’s nice of you, Colin, but there’s nothing for Melanie and Jake to do. They get fed up within the first five minutes.”
“You can leave the kids here with me,” my father offered.
“No, thanks,” Trudy said, much too quickly.
“I’ll take them for a walk once we get there, and you and Trudy can stay with Alison,” Colin said.
In the midst of this discussion, I went upstairs to the lavatory. The bathroom, like everywhere else in the house, reeked of poverty, the linoleum cracked and crumbling, the plastic curtains faded. I was well into my teens before I discovered we were relatively well-off—or should have been. My father’s wages as a toolmaker were high, but the family saw little of the money. He’d been a betting man all his life and a consistent loser.
As usual, I couldn’t wait to be back in my own place. I felt guilty for refusing to visit Alison, pity for my mother, angry that the pity made me turn up for the monthly get-togethers then guilty again, knowing that I would get out of coming if I could. When Stock Masterton had begun to open on Sundays, I’d hoped that would provide a good excuse, but George, a workaholic, insisted on looking after the office himself with the help of a part-timer.
After saying goodbye, I went outside to the car. Several boys were playing football in the road, and someone had written “Fuck off in black felt pen on the side of my yellow Polo. I was rubbing it off with my handkerchief when Trudy came out with the children. She ushered them into the back of the family’s old Sierra and came over to me. ‘Thank the Lord that’s over for another month.’
“You can say that again!”
“I can’t get me head round this kindly old grandfather shit.” Absent-mindedly she rubbed the scar over her left eyebrow.
“I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies.”
Trudy regarded me keenly. “You okay, Sis? You look a bit pale.”
“Mum said that. I’m fine, been working hard, that’s all.” I eyed the car. I’d got most of it off and what was left wasn’t legible. “Look, Sis, I’m sorry about Alison,” I said in a rush, “but I really have got work to do.”
Trudy pressed my arm. She glanced at the house where we’d grown up. “I feel as if I’d like to drive away and never have to see another member of me family again, but we’re trapped, aren’t we? I don’t know if I could bear it without Colin.”
As I started the car, I noticed that the house opposite had been boarded up, although children had broken down the door and were playing in the hallway. There was a rusty car without wheels in the front garden. As I drove away, the sun seemed to darken, although there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. Unexpectedly, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of alienation. Where do I belong? I wondered, frightened. Not here, please not here! Yet I’d been born in a tower block less than a mile from this spot, where nowadays Gran lived like a prisoner: Martha Colquitt rarely left home since she’d been mugged for her pension five years ago. My own flat in Blundellsands was a pretence, more like a stage set than a proper home, and I was a fake. I couldn’t understand what James saw in me, or why George Masterton was my friend. I was putting on an act, I wasn’t real.
And what would James think if he met my slovenly mother and chain-smoking father, and if I told him about my brutal childhood? What would he say if he knew I had a sister with severe learning difficulties who’d been in a home since she was three, safely out of my father’s way?
A scene flashed through my mind, of my father slapping Alison, knocking her pretty little face first one way then the other, trying to make her stop saying that same word over and over again. “Slippers,” Alison would mutter, in her dull monotone. “Slippers, slippers, slippers.” She said it still, when agitated, although she was seventeen now.
Even if I were in love with James, we could never marry, not with all the family baggage I had in tow. I reminded myself that I didn’t want to get married again, that I wasn’t capable of falling in love. I belonged nowhere and to nobody.
Nevertheless, I had an urgent desire to see James. He was calling for me at seven. I looked forward to losing myself in empty talk, good food, wine. He would bring me home and we would make love and all that business with my family would be forgotten, until the time came for me to go again. Except, that is, for the dreams, from which I would never escape.
It wasn’t until Thursday that I managed to get to Toxteth. James had tickets for a jazz concert at the Philharmonic Hall on Monday night, which I had forgotten about. Tuesday, I’d promised to go to dinner with Diana Riddick, a colleague from the office whom I’d never particularly got on with, but then few people did.
Diana was thirty-five, single, and lived with her elderly father, who was a “pain”, she claimed, particularly now that his health was failing. She was a small, slight woman, permanently discontented, with a garishly painted face, a degree in land and property management, and an eye on the position of manager of the Woolton office. She didn’t realise that I nursed the same ambition and when we were alone together she openly discussed it. I’d suspected she had an ulterior motive in inviting me that evening and it turned out she wanted to pump me about George’s plans.
“Has he ever talked to you about it?” she asked, over the Italian meal. There were red and white gingham cloths on the tables and candles in green bottles dripping wax.
The walls were hung with plastic vines.
“Hardly ever,” I replied truthfully.
“I bet you anything he gives the job to Oliver.” She pouted. Oliver Brett, solid and dependable, was the assistant manager, in charge when George was away, which was rare.
“I doubt it. Oliver’s nice, but he’s proved more than once he couldn’t handle the responsibility.” I sipped my wine. On nights like this, Kirkby seemed a million miles away. “Remember last Christmas when he rang George in the Seychelles to ask his advice?”
“Hmm!” Diana looked dubious. “Yes, but he’s a man.
The world is prejudiced in favour of men. I shall be very cross if it’s Tweedledum or Tweedledee.”
“That’s most unlikely.” I laughed. Apart from June, who’d taken my old job as receptionist, the only other permanent members of staff were two young men in their mid-twenties, Darren and Elliot, startlingly alike in looks and manner, which accounted for their nicknames.
“I might do a survey of Woolton, see how the land lies.”
Diana’s rather heavy eyebrows drew together in a frown and the discontented lines between her eyes deepened further. “I’ll type up some notes for George.”
“What a good idea,” I murmured. I hadn’t added to my own report since last week.
It was late on Wednesday when I returned to the office in Castle Street. I’d taken a couple, the Naughtons, to see a property in Lydiate. It was the sixth house they’d viewed. As usual, they walked round several times, wondering aloud whether their present furniture would fit, asking if I would measure the windows so they could check if the curtains they had now would do. George insisted that keys were returned, no matter how late, and it was almost eight when I hung them on the rack.
George was still working in his glass-partitioned office and Oliver was about to go home. His good-natured face creased into a smile as he said, “Goodnight.”
I was wondering if there was time to drive to Blundellsands, collect the cardboard boxes I’d acquired from a supermarket, return to town and start on Auntie Flo’s flat. I couldn’t bring the car to work with boxes on the back seat when I had to take clients to view.
Before I’d made up my mind George came out of his cubicle. “Millie! Please say you’re not doing anything special tonight. I’m longing for a drink and desperately in need of company.”
“I’m not, doing anything special that is.” I would have said the same whatever the case. At the moment it was essential to keep in George’s good books.
We went to a wine bar, the one where I’d met James.
George ordered a roast-beef sandwich and a bottle of Chablis. I refused anything to eat. “You should get some food down you.” He patted my hand in a fatherly way.
“You look pale.”
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me. I’ll wear blusher tomorrow.”
“You mean rouge. My old mother used to go to town with the rouge.” His mother had died only a year ago and he missed her badly, just as he missed the children his ex-wife and her new husband had taken to live in France. He was alone, hated it, and buried himself in work to compensate. George Masterton was fifty, tall and thin to the point of emaciation although he ate like a horse. He wore expensive suits that hung badly from his narrow, stooped shoulders. Despite this, he had an air of drooping elegance, enhanced by his deceptively laid-back, languid manner. Only those who knew him well were aware that behind the lazy charm George was an irascible, unpredictable man, who suffered from severe bouts of depression and panic attacks.
“Why the desperate need for company?” I asked lightly.
I always felt at my oddest with George, as if one day he would see what a fake I was, and never speak to me again.
“Oh, I dunno.” He shrugged. “It was Annabel’s birthday on Monday. She was sixteen. Thought about whizzing over to France on Eurostar but told myself Stock Masterton would collapse without me. Really, I was scared I wouldn’t be welcome. I’m supposed to be having her and Bill for Christmas, but I shan’t be at all surprised if they don’t come.”
It was my turn to pat his hand. “I bet Annabel would have been thrilled to see you. As for Christmas, it’s months off. Try not to start worrying yet.”
“Families, eh!” He chuckled. “They’re a pain in the arse when you’ve got them, and a pain when they’re not there. Diana calls her old dad everything but now he’s ill she’s terrified he’ll die. Poor chap, it sounds like cancer.
Anyway, how’s your lot over in Kirkby?”
“Same as usual.” I told him about Auntie Flo’s flat, and he said bring the boxes in tomorrow and put them in the stationery cupboard until I found time to go. He asked where the flat was.
“Toxteth, William Square. I don’t know round there all that well.”
His sandwich arrived. Between mouthfuls, he explained that William Square had once been very beautiful.
“They’re five-storeyed properties, including the basement where the skivvies used to work. Lovely stately houses, massive pillars, intricate wrought-iron balconies like bloody lace, bay windows at least twelve feet high. It’s where the nobs used to live at the turn of the century, though it’s gone seriously downhill since the war.” He paused over the last of the sandwich. “Sure you’ll be safe? Wasn’t there a chap shot in that area a few weeks ago?”
“I’ll go in daylight. Trouble is, finding the time. Things keep coming up.”
George grinned. “Such as me demanding your company!
Sorry about that. Look, take tomorrow afternoon off. I’d feel happier about you going then. Don’t forget to take your mobile and you can call for help if you get in trouble.”
“For goodness sake, George, you’d think I was going to a war zone!”
“Toxteth’s been compared to one before now. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as bad as Bosnia used to be.”
At two o’clock on a brilliantly sunny afternoon, William Square still looked beautiful when I drove in. I found an empty parking space some distance past the house I wanted, number one, and sat in the car for several minutes, taking in the big, gracious houses on all four sides. On close inspection, they appeared anything but beautiful. The elaborate stucco decorating the fronts had dropped off leaving bare patches like sores. Most of the front doors were a mass of peeling paint, and some houses were without a knocker, the letterbox a gaping hole.
Several windows were broken and had been repaired with cardboard.
The big oblong garden in the centre of the square was now, according to George, maintained by the council.
Evergreen trees with thick rubbery leaves were clumped densely behind high black railings. I thought it gloomy, and the square depressed me.
With a sigh, I got out of the car, collected some boxes and trudged along to number one. Two small boys, playing cricket on the pavement, watched me curiously.
The house looked clean, but shabby. Someone had brushed the wide steps leading up to the front door recently. There was a row of four buzzers with a name beside each, so faded they were unreadable. I ignored these and used the knocker—Charmian Smith lived on the ground floor.
A few seconds later the door was opened by a statuesque black woman not much older than me, wearing a lime green T-shirt and a wrap-round skirt patterned with tropical fruit. Her midriff was bare, revealing satin smooth skin. She held a baby in one arm. Two small children, a boy and a girl, stood either side of her, clutching her skirt. They stared at me shyly, and the little girl began audibly to suck her thumb.
“Mrs Smith?”
“Yes?” The woman regarded me aggressively.
“I’ve come for the key to Flo Clancy’s flat.”
Her expression changed. “I thought you were selling something! I should have known from the boxes. Not only that, you’re awful like Flo. Come in, luv, and I’ll get the key.”
The magnificent hallway had a black-and-white mosaic tiled floor and a broad, sweeping staircase with an intricately carved balustrade. The ornate ceiling was at least fourteen feet high. But whatever grand effect the architect had planned was spoilt by crumbling plaster on the coving and cornices, hanging cobwebs and bare wooden stairs worn to a curve. Several sections of balustrade were missing.
I stayed in the hall when Charmian Smith went into the ground-floor room, the children still clinging to her skirt. Through the open door, I could see that her flat was comfortably furnished, the walls covered with maroon flock paper. Everywhere was very clean, even the massive bay window, which must have taken hours to polish.
“Here you are, girl.”
“Thanks.” I took the proffered key and wondered if the children stayed attached to their mother like that all day.
“Which floor is it?”
“Basement. Give us a shout if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” I returned outside.
The basement was situated behind railings down a narrow well of steep concrete steps. Little light reached the small window. I struggled down with the boxes to a tiny area full of old chip papers and other debris. To my consternation, there were several used condoms. I wondered what on earth I’d let myself in for.
A plastic mac and an umbrella were hanging from a hook inside the tiny lobby, and a brass horseshoe was attached to the inner door, which opened when I turned the knob.
The first thing I noticed when I stepped inside was the smell of musty dampness, and the cold, which made me shiver. Although it was broad daylight, I could see nothing. I fumbled for a light switch just inside the door and turned it on. My heart sank. The room was crammed with furniture, and every surface was equally crammed with ornaments. There were two sideboards, one very old and huge, six feet high at least, with little cupboards in the upper half. The other was more modern, but still large. Beneath the window was a chest covered with a red fringed shawl and a pretty lace cloth. On top of that a vase stood filled with silk flowers; poppies. I touched them. The effect was striking, as if they’d been bought to echo the colour of the shawl. It was the sort of thing I might have done myself.
I walked slowly down the room, which ran the length of the house. Halfway along, two massive beams had been built into the walls to support an equally massive lintel, all painted black, and covered with little brass plaques. An elderly gas fire was fitted in the green-tiled fireplace, and on each side of it, more cupboards reached to the ceiling, one of which I opened. Every shelf was stuffed to capacity: clothes, crockery, books, bedding, more ornaments stored in boxes . . .
“I can’t do this all on my own,” I said aloud. I had no idea where to start, and I would need more like a hundred cardboard boxes than ten.
A window at the far end overlooked a tiny yard, which was level with the rear of the flat. It contained a wooden bench, a table and plant-holders full of limp pansies. The wall had been painted almost the same pink as my lounge—another indication that Auntie Flo and I had shared similar taste. The woman upstairs had said I was like Flo, and I wondered if there was a photograph somewhere.