At her request, the waiter led her to a table near to them, along with Janet and a heavily pregnant Brenda. Graham’s rapturous expression was gone in an instant, and the wide-eyed look of horror that replaced it brought laughter bubbling to Lynn’s throat. She managed to suppress it, but couldn’t have wiped the smile off her face to save her life.
Janet and Brenda sat down, leaving the chair nearest to Graham for Lynn. She leaned towards him. ‘Hello, Graham.’
He seemed too shocked to answer.
‘So this is your new mushroom. Aren’t you going to introduce us?’
Still no response from Graham. Lynn turned her beaming smile on his companion. ‘Never mind. You remind me very much of Mrs Senior – so I guess you must be her daughter. Lucy, isn’t it? I suppose you could do my husband a lot of good at the company. Graham loves the company.’
‘Shut up, Lynn,’ Graham warned.
Lynn went on as if she hadn’t heard. ‘I say, I like your earrings,’ she said, darting admiring glances at the gold and sapphire studs in Lucy’s ears. ‘You must be glad to have got the one I found on the rear seat of our car back. I thought it was Mrs Orme’s at first, but I’ve got to admit they look much better on you than they would on her.’
‘Poisonous bitch,’ Graham muttered.
Lynn turned her ear towards him. ‘What? I didn’t quite catch that, Graham.’
‘I did. He called you a poisonous bitch,’ Brenda announced, and attracted a few surprised glances from some of the nearby diners.
‘Oh, dear. Graham hasn’t a good word for his wife, these days. Probably since he met you, Lucy,’ Lynn said.
Lucy’s cheeks turned a delicate shade of pink. ‘It’s not what you think,’ she said, ‘It’s purely platonic. We play tennis.’
‘What do I think, Lucy?’ Lynn asked, scanning the room. ‘Well, I didn’t realise there were tennis courts here. We should have brought our racquets.’ She turned to Graham. ‘Another year gone by, Graham, and we’re back to square one, by the look of it.’
He gave her a look of smouldering resentment. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he muttered.
‘Good luck with him, anyhow, Lucy,’ Lynn said, her smile disappearing as she turned to Brenda and Janet, with all expectation of anything even approaching a decent family life with Graham totally annihilated. She no longer loved him. She no longer even liked him, and she had lost all respect for him long ago. This was how her father must feel about her mother, she guessed – except it had come to him a lot sooner.
‘It’s a shame Anthony sailed this morning, but your dad’s still at home.’ Brenda looked towards Graham, and left the rest unsaid.
‘Not worth it,’ Lynn said. ‘Absolutely not worth it.’
When the waiter arrived with meals for Graham and Lucy, he found an empty table. He stood with the plates in his hands, looking round for them.
‘They’ve gone, and I don’t think they’ll be back,’ Brenda told him.
He shrugged, and took the plates back to the kitchen.
‘I think we’ll invite Alec to stay for a few days this summer,’ Brenda said, looking at the door Graham and Lucy had left by.
Lynn shook her head. ‘Don’t bother for me; I’m joining a nunnery. I need a long rest from men.’
‘Huh!’ Janet scoffed. ‘Are you calling that little twerp a man?’
Brenda suddenly caught her breath, sat up straight, gripped the edges of the table and held on tight for a minute. ‘Ooh. Ooh, dear,’ she said.
Lynn and Janet looked at each other and grinned.
‘What an eventful evening. I reckon we’ll have a little bundle of joy before tomorrow morning,’ Lynn said.
Brenda sighed, and relaxed. ‘Oh, it’s gone.’
‘Better have a good feed, then; you’ll need something to keep you going,’ Janet consoled her. ‘They don’t call it labour for nothing, and seeing it’s your first, you’re in for hours of it.’
Chapter 55
On Monday evening Graham was back from work just before the children’s programmes were finished. He booted the kitchen door open, and stood leaning on the jamb. ‘I wondered when you’d condescend to come home!’
‘I’m surprised you noticed we were gone,’ Lynn snuffled, turning to him with her eyes streaming from the pungency of the onions she was slicing.
‘I noticed you were gone all right. I was home early, and I waited up for you till three o’clock – and on Sunday night, as well. And you can turn the waterworks off; they won’t do you any good. I could cheerfully kill you for your performance on Saturday night.’
‘But you won’t – and don’t you dare take it out on Lassie, either. And I certainly won’t be crying any tears over you this time, Graham,’ she said, sniffing back the flow. ‘From now on I’ll be here Monday to Friday to take Simon to the school you wanted him to go to, and I’ll do the housework and shopping – and we’ll be spending our weekends at my dad’s. You’ll be very pleased to know we won’t be getting in your way.’
He burst into laughter. ‘Give me enough rope to hang myself, you mean? Well, please yourself where you go at the weekend, Lynn, but don’t think I’ll be sitting here with Lucy, just waiting for your private dick to show up. We’re just good friends, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Shame. Still, you’ll be able to spend every weekend with your just good friend without us cramping your style. Like you’ve done for weeks, ever since you were on that skiing holiday together.’
It had been a wild guess, but his face told her she was spot on target.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, her eyebrows twitching upwards. ‘I might never have been invited to the golf club, Graham – but I sometimes get a snippet of information, here and there.’
Simon slid under Graham’s arm, and into the kitchen. ‘Auntie Brenda’s got a baby, Dad!’ he said.
‘Great! Another addition to the tribe!’ said Graham. ‘Did she get it in the restaurant?’
Simon looked puzzled. ‘No, in the hospital, Mum took her and I stayed with grandad. Why are you crying, Mum?’
‘I’m not crying.’
Simon rounded on his father. ‘Don’t you make my mummy cry!’
Lynn laughed, and sniffed tears back. ‘I’m not crying.’
Graham turned puce with anger. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that! Get to bed! This minute! There’ll be no tea for you today,’ he snarled, and Lynn really thought that had he dared, he might have kicked Simon. Simon flinched, yet doggedly stood his ground.
‘Go upstairs, son. I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’
Simon hesitated, but after a reassuring nod from Lynn he went, dodging smartly past Graham.
‘I’ve taken it from your father, but I’m not having it from him. Time I kicked him into touch,’ Graham said, when he’d gone.
‘I wouldn’t do any kicking there, if I were you,’ Lynn said, quietly.
‘Really? I’ll do as I like, in my own home, with my own son. Anyway, we’ve got common interests, me and Lucy – and that’s all there is to it. Bear that in mind, because she won’t stand for her name being dragged through the mire, and neither will her parents. You’ll probably get a solicitor’s letter if you try it.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Lynn said. ‘And if I’m sued for slander I suppose you’ll have to pay the damages, Graham. Lucy wouldn’t do that to you, would she? But even if she did, I don’t think she’d win her case, seeing you were on a skiing holiday together – so not much to worry about there, eh?’
A change of subject was Graham’s only response to that. ‘I’m giving you too much bloody housekeeping money if you can afford to eat at the Continental Restaurant,’ he said. ‘And if you’re clearing off to your dad’s every weekend, I’m cutting it by a quarter.’
‘I’ll have to manage as best I can then, Graham,’ she said, apparently defeated.
She didn’t mention the ‘weekends only’ job coming up in the labour suite that she’d heard about while at the
hospital with Brenda. Nor did she tax Graham with his visit to her mother, not having the stomach for it – and unwilling to be swamped by a deluge of lies.
Chapter 56
‘So how’s it feel to have your own ship, you lucky bugger?’ Anthony said.
Alec was standing on the bridge with the third hand, talking to him on the VHF radio. He laughed. ‘It’d feel a lot better if it weren’t a leaky old coal burner built in ’thirty-six. Moves like a snail, nearly capsizes in a breeze, and the fish room’s not cooled.’
‘What’s the crew like?’
‘About as good as the ship. Half of them are past it, and the other half still wet behind the ears, but we’ve managed to make a decent trip,’ Alec said. He’d driven the crew hard, not as hard as some young skippers might have done, but hard all the same. He couldn’t afford to be soft; he wanted three good trips in straight away or he’d be sidelined, and another young hopeful given a chance. The owners were neither patient nor forgiving. If he succeeded he’d be promoted to a better ship, maybe an oil burner built in the forties. For now, he’d have to manage with what he had, and failure was not an option. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been given the chance in June, and not in January.
‘He’s at it again, our Lynn’s husband – messing about with another one, now,’ Anthony was saying, when Alec was almost suffocated by the filthiest stench that had ever assailed his nostrils, a smell nobody could have ignored. ‘Brenda was out with her the other night, and they saw him – with his boss’s daughter,’ Anthony went on. ‘She says Lynn’s had enough—’
‘Ugh!’ Alec looked down to where some of the lads were hauling giant cod, and with it a horrible greyish substance that dripped through the net and onto the deck in clumps. ‘Ugh!’ he repeated, trying to speak without breathing in the stink. ‘What the . . . ! The lads have got something in the net, Anthony! Talk about a stink – it’s enough to knock you over! I’ll talk to you later.’
He looked at his companion, and with one accord they pulled their mufflers up to their noses, attempting to shield themselves from the overwhelming, sickly smell. On the deck every man with a hand to spare was doing the same thing, shielding mouth and nose with mufflers, jumper collars, nose rags, or gloved hands. When Alec got to the deck it was like a skating rink, with men slipping and sliding about in the foul stuff. A couple of deckhands had started shovelling it overboard, as fast as they could.
Then something stirred in the furthest recesses of Alec’s mind, a memory of something he’d heard in Fleetwood when he was just a nipper sitting with his dad, listening wide-eyed to sailors’ yarns.
‘No, no, no! Stop, stop stop!’ he yelled. ‘It might be worth a bloody fortune!’ He ran towards the deckhands, slipping on the foul stuff as he ran, and regaining his balance with arms flailing.
‘What the hell is it, Skipper?’ one of them asked.
Alec couldn’t think of the name of it. ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but if it’s what I think it is, we’ll be quids in. It might be worth more than the fish – I want it all shovelled into barrels, all of it, as fast as you can.’
After most of the horrible, cloying stuff was sealed in barrels, they swilled the residue off the deck and off frocks and boots, then stood on the port rail, gasping in fresh air before going down to the galley for a cup of tea.
Ambergris, Alec remembered. They’d said it was vomited up by the sperm whale, and people actually use the stinking stuff to make expensive perfume. It was worth its weight in gold – or so they’d said.
His mind turned back to the conversation he’d been having with Anthony. So now he was a dad! Alec went back to the bridge and tried to raise him on the VHF, but had no luck. He’d try again later on. It might be worth going back to Hull, to see how the land lay with Lynn. He might go and take a present for Anthony’s young ’un. That would give him a good excuse for being there, and nobody would think anything of it – seeing he’d been the best man at their wedding. Yeah, it would be nice to see ’em all again, and maybe take Lynn for a night out on Hessle Road. She might even have got that shitty bastard out of her system, this time around.
Chapter 57
Lynn had often had reason to doubt Graham’s word, but she was quite confident that he would fulfil his promise to cut her housekeeping money. He surpassed it. He gave her no money at all.
The shortfall would have to be made up somehow, and much more besides. She needed money now more than ever. She raked through cupboards and wardrobes both in her own home and in her father’s, and then put ‘for sale’ postcards in the post office windows both in Cottingham and on Hessle Road, advertising every item they possessed which was either no longer worn or no longer wanted – except for her wedding dress and all the paraphernalia that went with it. She advertised that in the Mail in glowing terms, and sold it for fifty pounds the same day that the advert had appeared. She paid Janet back for the loan of a train fare to Scarborough and a meal at the Continental, and treated herself to a decent hair cut and a natty little two-piece, which she wore for her interview with the Matron of Hedon Road Maternity Hospital a couple of days later. She came out of the interview having got the job, and went directly to the Yorkshire Bank in Hull, to open an account in her own name. The only fly in the ointment was that it would be more than a month before she got paid.
What was it that conniving Connie had said to her spoiled boy? You can take her out of Hessle Road – but you’ll never get Hessle Road out of her. Well, since she was considered irredeemably Hessle Road, she would go the whole hog, Lynn thought. She would manage her present predicament in the traditional Hessle Road manner. On Friday afternoon after she’d collected Simon from school she rang a taxi to take them to Boulevard, and got the taxi man to help her with Graham’s golf clubs and a large leather suitcase containing his golf shoes, two good suits, two pairs of Italian leather shoes, his gold cufflinks and his second gold watch, a canteen of cutlery that had been Auntie Ivy’s and a good deal of her household linen.
‘Why are you bringing all that stuff, Mum?’ Simon asked, as the taxi man stowed it all in the boot.
‘Just borrowing it,’ she said.
‘You’ll be lucky to find a golf course on Boulevard,’ the taxi man grinned.
‘I shan’t need a golf course,’ Lynn said. ‘You can drop us outside the pawnbroker’s.’
‘Hell! Folk from Cottingham visiting pop shops? What’s the world coming to?’
‘It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ Lynn said, and there the conversation ended. She settled herself comfortably in her seat for the journey. When they passed the fruit shop on Bricknall Avenue, Connie’s disparaging words came echoing back to her. A top-drawer daughter-in-law like Lucy Senior would certainly be much more to Connie’s taste, Lynn thought. She would have rated herself ‘middle drawer’, but Connie probably ranked her much lower. They might already have had Lucy to tea, in the flat above the shop.
‘How long is it since you were at your grandma’s?’ she asked Simon.
‘A long time,’ he said with no sign of regret. ‘There’s nobody to play with, there.’
She left him at the house on Boulevard with Margaret and the boys while she went in the taxi to transact her business with the pawnbroker, and got back to her father’s house with enough money to last her for a month in one pocket and a bundle of pawn tickets in the other.
What a hectic week it had been, she thought.
Margaret came to Boulevard with her boys the following day, to let Lynn get to Hedon Road for the late shift at the hospital.
‘I’ll look after the lads here, I think,’ she said. ‘In fact, if my mam’s not coming back, I might move in, and give my house up. Like you said, it’ll save on rent, and seeing as I was cleaning both places, it’ll cut the work in half as well. And there’ll be more room for the lads, especially now it looks like we’ll be having Simon every weekend.’
‘I doubt very much she’ll be coming back,’ said Lynn, ‘and if she did, you could
get another house, or you could come to live with me in Cottingham. It’s nice there, in the countryside. The lads would love it, fields to run in, trees to climb. We could turf Graham out to his lady love’s, so he can give me grounds for a divorce.’
‘What about my job at Birds Eye? What about getting the lads to school? And can you really see Graham paying the mortgage on a house he’d been turfed out of?’ Margaret asked.
Lynn gave her a wry smile. ‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ll have to go, or I’ll miss the bus. There’s the pawn tickets on the mantelpiece, in case he comes looking for his stuff.’
She went with an easy mind, knowing that Simon was happy to be left with Auntie Margaret and her boys. It felt good to be back in the maternity hospital among good colleagues, especially working on the labour suite. The place felt like her second home.
The pale outline of the moon was set in a still light sky when she got back to Boulevard. In summer, when she was a child they used to play out until it was nearly dark.
‘Are the bairns still out?’ she asked Margaret.
‘No, bathed, in bed, and asleep. How was your first day at work?’
‘Busy, but it’s great to be back,’ Lynn said and went through to the kitchen to put the milk pan on.
Margaret followed her. ‘Graham’s been,’ she said, ominously. ‘He called just after you’d gone.’
‘I wish I’d been here.’
‘You don’t. I think he’d have killed you if he’d got hold of you. He was absolutely livid when I gave him the pawn ticket for his golf clubs. He was that mad I thought he’d throw a fit, and Lassie took one look at him and slunk under the table. I told him you’d gone to the pictures, but I don’t think he believed me. And he’d no money to redeem them! He won’t get them till Monday, now.’
Lynn’s face lit up with glee. She burst into laughter. Graham had been soundly punished for his transgressions against her; she had buggered his weekend and cost him several times as much as the housekeeping money he’d refused to give her. Hessle Road had always had its own strategies for making ends meet in hard times, she thought, and they worked as well as ever. The outcome could not have been more satisfying. ‘I wonder if he’s discovered his suits have gone yet?’ she said. ‘The pop shops aren’t doing as well as they used to, and the one I picked has branched out into gents’ outfitting as well. It might be handy for Graham, he’ll be able to get another suit, if he doesn’t redeem the pledge in time.’
The Would-Be Wife Page 28