An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘How can you help me?’ Cissy said, her haughtiness unintentional.

  Daisy didn’t flinch. ‘Well, if you really are intent on keeping this baby, there’s a home for you here. God knows, the place is big enough. There’s plenty of room for a dozen people.’

  Again Cissy smiled. Daisy and her exaggeration. She remembered how they had made such plans to leave home. In the end it had been her to go first, with Daisy following after. And now they were both here – friends still. And it was such a depth of relief knowing they were.

  Thoughts of Langley still hurt like a knife wound, the love she thought she’d had for him still too painful, too real to shrug off, and she knew that were he to ask, she’d go back to him immediately like the silly fool she was. But he wouldn’t ask. That was obvious now. She had been just a passing thing, and no doubt he and Margo were laughing over her this very minute. That vision was the worst hurt.

  ‘What about your husband?’ she asked lamely, in an attempt to push the dismal thoughts from her. ‘Won’t he object?’

  ‘Teddy? He’d be only too happy. He’d even help you to get started up in something. He’s that kind of person. You know, compassionate.’

  The apparently unintentional comparison between Daisy’s and her own recent relationship brought a pang of jealousy which, in spite of Daisy’s offers of help that Cissy had no option but to accept, stirred in her something nearer to hatred that Daisy should be so happy with her man while she was forced to accept handouts. She had no one else to turn to, nothing to look forward to but the birth of the baby of someone who no longer wanted her. For a moment she hated everyone – Daisy, that loyal loving husband of hers, the perfidious Langley, she knew that now, and his baby…

  The hatred stopped in its tracks. She wanted the baby. Not just to show him that she wouldn’t do just what he expected. Not just to keep his money and make a life for herself to prove that no matter what his opinion of her she was her own woman, but that she actually wanted the baby. As if approving, pride flowed up like a living thing inside her.

  Daisy was waiting for Theodore as he came in, hardly giving him time to lay down his case and pour a drink before embarking on Cissy and her predicament, Cissy by that time was safely installed in a bedroom.

  ‘So you see I had to put her up for a while. And Lord knows we’ve room enough here for her to stay until she gets herself sorted out.’

  Her aim was not to make it seem an indefinite thing, but Theodore was his usual benign self, happy to lend a helping hand, and of course there was room enough in this huge five-bedroomed apartment.

  ‘God forbid I should deny a woman alone in Paris a roof over her head,’ he vowed in his faintly guttural English. Even in French, which he spoke quite a lot with Daisy so that she could learn the language, there was still that German hardness overlaying the softer French which impeded rather than helped her to speak it as she should.

  ‘The poor young woman,’ he went on, after hearing the whole story, ‘I wonder should you send to her family a letter to inform them where she is? It must be for them very worrying to not know this.’

  ‘I’m not sure. It could set the cat among the pigeons, interfering and telling them. On the other hand they must be worried not knowing where she is.’

  His dark eyebrows drew together. ‘It would be a kindness to them to know, but as you say to interfere is to set a cat among the pigeons. Such a clatter would they make flying up to dislodge the peace of mind of her family. You are right, Daisy. Best I think to let the sleeping cat lie for a while.’

  Daisy suppressed a grin. She loved this German of hers, not only for his ease in understanding another’s point of view, but for his odd misquotations of sayings that came naturally by to her, and yet making them sound wise and logical. Loving him, she deeply pitied Cissy her loss. To think that at one time she had been so jealous of her. Instantly mortified by her own self-satisfaction, which no true friend should give houseroom to when another is in trouble, she scourged herself with genuine sorrow for Cissy. If there was any help she could give, she would bend over backwards to do it, no matter if it meant turning her home upside down. Yet for all her good intentions, an inner voice kept coming back: there but for the grace of God…

  But for Teddy, she too could have come very unstuck in this lovely, captivating, dangerous city. Her mind flicked back to that week just before meeting him, her heart being stolen away as Cissy’s had – in her case by a casually handsome, rakish jazz-band singer. Flattered by his attentions as he offered her the moon, she had, innocently, nearly reached out for it as he had urged and, like Cissy, had not known how very far away that moon was and the danger of overstretching for it.

  Just in time Teddy had come along, offering stability, wealth, love and loyalty, his gentle companionship that following week eradicating the smooth jazz-band singer from her mind.

  Yes, she had been indeed fortunate to escape the trap into which Cissy had fallen – with no Theodore Helgott to rescue her. And by that token she sternly pushed aside all feelings of smugness in the face of her friend’s misfortune.

  Had Eddie been on hand, he might have been to Cissy what Teddy had been to her. But Cissy had actually left Eddie for that suave, pampered ladykiller, so there really was no comparison, and of course, as Teddy had agreed, it would set cats among pigeons by interfering and letting her people know of her whereabouts without consulting her first. Later perhaps, but not yet. Not with Cissy pregnant and all.

  *

  Bobby Farmer, hunched over a pint in the Prince of Orange, had been bemoaning his lot to Eddie and Eddie’s father for half an hour.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going ter do. No use tryin’ ter talk to me mum and dad about something like this. They’ve ’ad enough with Cissy going off the rails without me addin’ to it all. I can’t say anything to Ethel’s people neither. They’re dead against me.’

  Listening, Eddie felt he couldn’t care less about Bobby’s entanglement with this girl who’d had his baby, his head filled with the ring of Cissy’s name on her brother’s lips a moment before as Bobby moaned how he wished she were here to talk to and give him advice. No one could have wished her here more than Eddie himself.

  ‘Has she never got in touch with you since that last Christmas?’ he asked suddenly and saw Bobby’s expression go blank, his train of thought interrupted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your sister.’

  ‘May?’

  ‘No…er, Cissy.’ The name came awkwardly to Eddie, aware of his father’s disparaging glance at his alluding to her.

  ‘Oh…No, not since that Christmas we got that card. Wasn’t no card this year. I often wonder…But as I was saying, I couldn’t go on leading a double life. It wasn’t fair to Ethel, and it was killin’ me. She – Vera, that is – the one who’s had my baby, knows about Ethel, but Ethel didn’t know about her until last week. I mean, Vera’s baby’s more’n six months old now. I couldn’t keep it to meself any longer.’

  ‘You know what you are, don’t yer?’ put in Alf Bennett, draining his pint. ‘You’re a bloody fool, and that’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bobby said dismally. ‘If I could only turn the clock back.’

  If only I could too, thought Eddie, feeling equally as dismal.

  ‘So what’re you goin’ ter do?’ asked Alf.

  Bobby shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Fat’s really in the fire now.’

  ‘I reckon you’d ’ave ter divorce. If you’re unhappy with your Ethel and she’s miserable with you, then you two are best done with it all, and you’ll ’ave to marry this, what’s-her-name. Mind you, divorce, even if there’s a guilty party, could take two years or more.’

  ‘It ain’t as simple as that. I can’t leave Ethel and our own kid to fend for themselves. But I don’t want to leave Vera in the lurch with hers. I’m at me wits’ end.’

  Bobby had thought about it long and hard these last monhs, but there was still no answer. What hurt most was the way
Ethel kept going on about his family, as if they were dirt.

  ‘I should’ve known,’ she’d said in her fury. ‘I should’ve been warned when you got me pregnant what you was like. It’s in the blood if you ask me. Your sister’s no better than she ought to be, running off and leaving that poor Eddie like she did. And your other sister, May, she ain’t none too fussy about the blokes she goes out with either. And that brother of yours, Sidney – hardly been in work since he left school last year. Didn’t want to go on the river like you an’ his dad. Oh no, wants to go his own way, and always out of work. A fine bloody family to go turning up their noses at the likes of my folks for being dockers. Well, my family do have some respect for themselves. And don’t you think I’m goin’ ter move over for your tart and ’er baby, Bobby Farmer.’

  At the kitchen table, Bobby had sat slumped and sullen with no defence for himself or his family against Ethel’s flagellant tongue, knowing himself entirely at fault but silently praying she would soon exhaust herself. But she’d had plenty more to say.

  ‘I bet you think you’re a real stallion. Me ’ere with your kid, and that tart over the river with yer other. And ’ow many more I don’t know about, eh? In the blood, that’s what it is. A real chip off the old block. Cissy gone off to Lord knows where, prostituting herself all around France I don’t doubt, most likely carting around someone’s bastard. And that Eddie Bennett, the silly sod, still moping after her after two years or more, working himself to death for his business, dreaming of the day he’ll meet ’er again. I know. Some ’opes, that!

  ‘And that’s another thing – made a proper success of it. Him and his father rolling in it. And where’ve you got, you feckless bugger? Still a bloody lighterman, working fer others, in and out of work, grovelling around fer jobs when Eddie Bennett what ain’t even got a wife to support can make his way in the world. And all you can do is get some trollop in the family way and sod how I feel.’

  It had been no use telling her that work was becoming increasingly harder to get. All he could do was sit there as she’d railed on, his family’s good name laid in the mud, his sister lambasted, and Eddie lampooned for a simpleton for clinging to her memory. But that part he didn’t speak of to Eddie.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘I think I would like to sell hats,’ Cissy said, giving Daisy and Theodore a hesitant smile to cement the statement.

  It was perhaps the first time in six months, since Langley’s departure in fact, that she’d been halfway able to make any proper decision of her own and feel easy in her mind about it.

  After the first days of weeping she had withdrawn into herself, on the surface trying to behave normally in their presence because it would have looked churlish not to after all they had done for her, opening up their home as they had. But she had felt more lonely in their company than if she had indeed been alone. In the isolation of her own bedroom she had felt bitter, her heart filled with empty hatred of Langley, for his careless outrageous disregard of what he had done, hating even more the knowledge that were he to come asking forgiveness and for her to return to him, she’d still forgive and return.

  Those following months her heart ached for him even as it hated him. But slowly, as with all wounds that must heal unless worried by a desire to be kept open, the hurt diminished little by little. It did not go away entirely; the scar, red and angry, would take far longer to fade to the white line that could be forgotten most of the time, noticed only on the odd occasion, the wound distantly remembered as if happening to another. It had yet to reach that stage, but was diminished enough to now and again allow her a moment of lighter spirit.

  It was one of these moments now, as she sat at the dining table in the Helgotts’ gold and brown salle à manger. The meal on this November evening had been largely ignored in the interest of Cissy’s future. Now, the art deco table lamps and wall lamps had been switched on to glow upon a wealth of Lalique glassware, gold and brown walls and the brown gauze curtains at the tall windows that were not yet drawn against the twilight. The last lingering arc of luminescence, which Theodore said was called dammerschein in German, throwing an unreal light over all three people, they were again engaged in the debate that had been discussed on and off these six months on how best Cissy might use her money for her future when finally able to go her own way.

  Not that either had ever hinted she should. It worried her that they were so patient, never betraying any weariness of her being here. Daisy’s husband, mostly at his office, had little need to see her and she kept to her room as much as possible in the evenings so as not to infringe on his privacy when he came home. Daisy enjoyed having someone to talk to and shop with and was always saying how she would miss her when she finally went her own way, which in itself spoke of an eventual and understood termination to her stay here, although it was accepted that this wouldn’t be for a while yet.

  It had been taken for granted that she wouldn’t find herself a job until well after the baby was born, but now, her middle swollen and heavy with only four weeks to go to the event, talk of what she would do when all was back to normal had become a nightly discussion.

  ‘It’s going to have to be a shop of some sort,’ Daisy had sparked off this evening’s dinner debate. ‘That’s all I can think of.’

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about running a shop,’ Cissy hedged, but Theodore had been a calming influence as always.

  ‘Dear woman, it is a matter of common sense and a natural ability to sell. Also to buy. Wisely. Any dummkopf can buy. But in buying and knowing how to sell at a good profit what is bought, that is the part that matters. If you should wish, I will advice give you at any time. I will charge nothing. Ha! Ha!’

  His sharp raucous laugh made his listener jump, but Cissy smiled her gratitude of the offer. She knew herself in safe hands with these people, but more and more she looked forward to the day when she could finally go her own way. All the time she dallied here her money was dwindling, no matter how frugal she tried to be.

  ‘I don’t think I would like a shop here in Paris,’ she said. ‘I’m still not good enough at French to get by trying to sell things.’

  Theodore gave another explosive laugh. ‘Practise it every moment you have. By the time you are ready, you can sell to the sharpest Frenchwoman. Am I not proof? I came to this country a foreigner, and here have made my fortune. Although times I have when I wish very much to go back to Germany, to Dusseldorf, to see my father’s grave, and when the time comes for me to die, to be buried beside him…’

  ‘Teddy!’ Daisy’s face was a picture of fear. ‘Don’t talk like that!’

  He leaned across the table and patted her rigid hand. ‘Not for many long years yet, mein liebling. Not for many long years. Together we grow old. But there – we get off the subject. Cissy, my dear young woman, why so especially do you want to sell hats?’

  Cissy played with her sweet. ‘Like Daisy said, I can’t think of anything else. I don’t want to go back to dressmaking. I did it before I came to Paris. In a factory. It’s drudgery, and I’m sick of it.’

  ‘There are too many dressmakers, anyway, in Paris,’ Daisy said.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Theodore said, ‘it is what you know. What do you know of selling hats?’

  ‘Women’s hats,’ Daisy put in quickly. ‘Cissy is acquainted with the height of fashion, and she knows what we want.’

  ‘Knowing, selling…’ Theodore gave an expressive shrug. ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘She could get a job in a ladies hat shop until she knows a bit more about all that. And, of course, the sooner she starts…

  ‘She must wait until the suckling of her child is completed.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And who is to look after the child when she begins to work?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Why not?’ Daisy giggled. ‘It’ll give me some experience for when I have my own babies.’

  ‘Which I hope soon
if God is willing,’ Theodore said fervently, his dark eyes filling with a loving light.

  Daisy gazed back at them. ‘I hope so too. But until then, I could look after it for Cissy. I’d love that. I’m sure it’s the best idea?’

  ‘You are, of course, right.’ His proud expression deepened to be matched by Daisy’s own as she clasped his hand across the table.

  ‘Of course I’m right. It’ll give her a chance to sort things out.’

  Excluded from all this talk about her future, Cissy looked from one to the other. The way they consulted together like two happy children making plans; the way their faces softened in response to each other’s ideas; the adoration glowing in Theodore’s eyes and the certainty of being adored shining in Daisy’s; her heart seemed like a brick beneath her ribs. Who’d ever want to love her, a child at her side as proof of her tarnished state? She had been out of her mind to continue with this pregnancy. Langley had been right all along. It wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing to have terminated it, an operation so small it would hardly have been remembered, and she would still have been his. In time, perhaps, his high ideals about marriage might have modified to embrace her. She would never know.

  She wanted to burst into tears, to cry out that she didn’t care what they proposed as to the direction her life would take, it was all pointless, all a waste. But she didn’t. She just sat listening to her life being discussed, and whatever the decision she would abide by it.

  *

  The first twinge was felt as she got into the taxi to go shopping with Daisy. Huddled into her coat against a brief snow flurry, she ignored it, putting it down to the way she was holding herself against the cold.

  She shouldn’t have been going out, but being closeted in the flat for two weeks awaiting the now well-overdue birth – Daisy had heard it said that the first were often late coming, or maybe Cissy had miscalculated somehow – Daisy suggested a short shopping trip might help brush away the cobwebs if nothing else. But mostly Daisy wanted to Christmas shop.