‘What have you got to say for yourself, then?’
‘Nowt much about me. You know I love your Babby and I want to marry her. It’s me dad I want to talk about.’
Violet bristled. She cradled the glass of gin in her lap.
‘Your da? You’ve come all this way just to punish me?’
Her sentences came out in short, halting bursts. In between she took deep breaths, to try and calm her rage. When she picked up a cigarette, her hands were shaking so much she couldn’t light it.
‘No. Not to punish you. Just to set you straight. As to how things are – were – between my dad and your Jack.’
Violet tutted.
‘You know they’d been pals since they were nippers. Paper boats on the boating lakes in Stanley Park, fishing in the River Alt, swimming in the Scaldies – me dad told me those stories. And I can’t promise you I know what happened that night, no one does, but I know that when my dad left, Jack was a dead man. And so, in another way, was my dad … But not being able to say sorry, that was the worst for him. And if we should be angry with anyone, it should be with the Rozzers. They were looking for someone to blame and Jack didn’t have a voice to say what happened and I know that it’s the one thing in my father’s life that he would have changed. If he could have turned back the clock, if he had walked out of the Boot the minute before it kicked off, oh, he would have given anything for that. He never meant your Jack to come to harm that night. And I’m asking you, Violet, to please, please forgive my father.’
‘Never!’
‘Don’t you think Jack would have? Da told me them days in the pen weren’t always bad. Told me about when the two of them found a snake in that banana cargo from the West Indies. And they took the snake on the tramcar to the hospital. And Jack asking for dirt money when he came home covered in muck. And one time, the other foreman, Aga Khan, he was called, said because it was white muck – a sack of talcum powder it was, had split all over him – he wouldn’t get a penny dirt money. Dirt money had to be the black stuff and he was white as a ghost, and my da kicked up a stink for your Jack and, in the end, they gave it him, and he bought everyone drinks at the Boot to celebrate their victory.’
‘They might have been pals. But if your da hadn’t stopped giving Jack work he would still be alive today!’
Callum felt a rush of blood to his cheeks.
‘It was an accident. A stupid fight that got out of hand. You can’t blame my father for being there.’
‘He could have stopped it! It was his idea to bring his pals down to the Boot Inn! Just like if he had given Jack more work at the docks he might have given up playing that monstrous instrument and drinking all day, wasting his life away on music and booze!’
‘Jack wanted to play at the Boot! He loved it! It was his passion! He would never have given it up! He was born to sing. Music was in his blood. He was a better man than those miserable creatures in the pen with only their brawn to make a crust. He had a soul. That’s why me dad loved him. He was different to the rest of us. It was his life. Just like it’s Babby’s life!’
The mention of Babby’s name sent Violet into a rage. She looked at him with fury in her eyes. Her whole body shook violently, her fists clenched, and her blood ran hot through her veins. Did he really think this would make any difference? That she would change her mind about him and her daughter? Ludicrous!
‘Look, Violet. You lied to me. You lied to your daughter – about me trying to find her. And the letters … But I’m prepared to forgive you, so why can’t you do the same?’
‘The letters? That wasn’t me,’ she snapped. ‘That was Mrs Reilly and the nuns, thinking they were doing the right thing by not passing Babby’s letters on to you. You’ve no idea how these nuns take control of any situation. You let them in – and then, wallop, they have you. It’s like they own your soul. I can’t do anything about that,’ she cried out bitterly. ‘I’m just not strong enough.’
‘And the letter that someone wrote to Babby, pretending to be me? Saying it was over?’
‘I suspect it was the nuns who wrote that as well. Or our Pat. He was the one who turned you away at our door. I admit, I didn’t stop him. I’ll take my share of the blame. But can’t you see that there’s not a soul who wouldn’t think that the best thing was for you and Babby to have the child adopted. I didn’t want you getting in the way of that! You’re children, both of you! Babies having a baby!’
Callum flinched.
‘Will you give us your blessing? For the wedding?’ he asked. It was the simplest of requests.
And when Violet said no, he could have shoved his fist through the windowpane. He jumped up and pushed his chair back sharply and it scraped across the floor, making the sound of a squealing pig.
‘Well, if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it’ll stay. Won’t change a fig though …’ he said.
Violet stared ahead, sticking a cigarette in her mouth, and sucking on it audibly.
Callum was about to leave.
‘Wait. There is one more thing. That man? The one Babby found you with before you sent her to Anglesey? It was Rex Worrall, wasn’t it? Your fancy man?’ he asked.
Violet jolted.
‘What of it?’
‘What about Gladys, his sister?’
‘Gladys doesn’t care …’
‘And you so high and mighty about me and Babby, and you carrying on with Rex under our noses? That’s why you didn’t want her to work at the Boot Inn, isn’t it? You didn’t want to have to worry about Babby finding out from Gladys that Rex has a wife. She might have buggered off to Scotland because she couldn’t stand Gladys, but he’s still married. She’ll never divorce him, so Florrie at the King’s Arms told me.’
Violet turned puce with indignantion. ‘No! It has nothing to do with Rex. You have no idea what kind of a place that is, what kind of a woman Gladys is. I never wanted that for Babby, that’s why I sent her to Anglesey. It was her last chance. To get an education. To get out of this city.’
‘And are you still …well, carrying on with Rex? He was there at the Boot that night, wasn’t he? Some say it was his fault for not calling the police soon enough, that he could have stopped it before it got out of hand …’
‘Now who’s the judge and jury? He helped me after Jack died. Not only with the rent, finding me jobs! I don’t know what Hannah and I would do without him!’
Callum expelled a long breath of air. ‘It’s time for all of us to end all of this, to stop telling lies, to stop being so concerned about what everyone thinks. What some people say is a wicked thing, is a fine thing to others. I have no truck with them that say you shouldn’t step out with Rex Worrall, so let’s put a stop to this, please.’ He paused, but she didn’t reply. ‘There is a way, you know. If you don’t feel shame, then you can’t be shamed. You should try it. What crime have me and Babby committed? Loving someone? The only crime around here is that two men could kill each other over a four-shilling job. So, what d’you say – will we not shake hands and forgive?’
Violet rose, puffed out her chest and jabbed the air with a finger. ‘I will never forgive your father for what happened. My husband dead, and him living a life that is by right my Jack’s!’
‘And what life is that, then?’ asked Callum, angrily.
‘Who knows? But in Italy, I heard. Too ashamed to show his face in Liverpool. Left and not been seen since … Living the bloody high life, no doubt. Well, you’ll know all about that.’
Callum trembled. He knew he had to speak with a steady voice, for this was the most important thing of all.
‘The reason my father has not been seen is not because he left Liverpool.’
Violet shrugged. She looked at him, her eyes cold, glassy, uncaring. Though there was a part of her that wanted him to continue, she didn’t want to show it.
Callum paused, drew in breath, trying to calm himself.
‘My father, after he was brought in by the coppers for questioning and the
n let go, because it’s not a crime if a man hits his head on the corner of a table – well, he couldn’t exactly remember what had happened, but when he went back to work, images of the fight kept coming back into his head. One day it was so bad he collapsed, fainted right away in front of all the lads. When he came to, he was like a dead person. He couldn’t utter a single word. When he got home, he began to talk again, but he spoke in back-to-front sentences, didn’t know the right words for things. He would call the butter dish a cradle, a bicycle, a chariot. Stuff like that. He forgot my name, talked about his mother as if she was alive, sitting in the next room. He’d had a hard life, Da, as a boy. Maybe it was the memories of those days that did for him, maybe it was the guilt and desperation of what had happened to your Jack – well, I don’t know, but he slumped. Real bad. He visited the doctor, who said he was depressed, and they sent him to Rainhill hospital. And that was the beginning of the end. They put him on a ward for the mentally unstable. And my biggest fear was if people might say, “Where’s your da? Cal? I heard he’s in the Loony bin – the nuthouse.” I would have hated that. I would have felt ashamed. So I told no one. Started the Italy rumour to keep gossip at bay …’
Violet watched him gulp air and swallow. He’s probably expecting me to place a hand on his trembling arm and say, ‘Oh love, I had no idea’, but why should I? she thought. It won’t bring my Jack back.
‘I remember thinking …’ he continued. ‘It’s over, Da – that was when I came to visit him. They had put him in a bed, strapped his arms to the sides of it. He looked like, well, like it wasn’t him. Like it was some other chap that was wearing my da like he was a new suit of clothes. I’ve lost you to these people, whoever they are, Pops, I thought. And as if that wasn’t enough, when he started to cause trouble, kick up a fuss, say he wanted to leave, he was given electroconvulsive therapy and injected with something – what was it? Imipramine. Yes. Terrible, that was. Seemed to make him wilder and angrier. He was straining in the bed, screaming at me to untie him, baring his teeth like a wild animal and snarling, twisting the sheets, tearing at them, plucking at the air. And all I could think of was that it was because of the fight that had got him to this sorry place, and why weren’t they doing anything to help him? Then one day the doctors said to me, ‘If we let him go home, he might do something really bad, like kill a little ’un. That would be on your head as well, Callum. You wouldn’t want that, would you? This thing is only going one way.’ I said I would be happy to take the risk, but the doctors just laughed at me. Said that it was out of the question. Which was when they told me that there was this operation.’
Violet stared ahead, blankly.
‘They would get two nylon balls, put them into the scalp and then push rods through them into his brain, so that they could burn out the part that was making him violent. It sounded like Frankenstein or something. No bloody way did I want them them do that to him. I argued, of course. But they did it anyway. When I saw him after the first half of the operation, he looked like he was something out of a flaming horror film. He’d have given old Boris Karloff a run for his money, I reckon, with these strange lumps in his heads that were the balls. They pinned back his forehead, cut a flap of his skin, and opened him like he was a tin of pilchards. ‘Don’t worry we’ll shave off the lumps in his skullholes when we’re done,’ they said, but I felt so bloody sick to see him like that and I begged them to stop. But they didn’t.’
Callum waited for a response from Violet. There was none. Just silence and the soft tick, tick, tick of the clock.
‘I asked them how, if they don’t know where the mind actually is, they could find the right bits of the brain to burn? It’s not like you can see people’s thought, is it? They couldn’t answer that. Dad was operated on for hours. Wide awake, he was, when they did it all. Can you imagine, Violet? A week later he was sent to Saint Peter’s Home for the Feeble-Minded. Where he still is now. Italy?’ he added bitterly with a hollow laugh. ‘Hardly. Still has flashbacks to this day. Reliving that moment when your Jack crashed to the floor at the Boot Inn. The more drugs they gave him, the more they turned him into this kind of dead person . But maybe that’s a blessing …’
Violet turned her had away from the light. ‘I think you’d better go now,’ she said.
He nodded and walked towards the door, then looked over his shoulder. ‘Who knows if my dad threw the first punch? But just because a man does one bad thing in his life, it doesn’t mean he’s not a good man.’
Shadows moved across the room. There was something in the breath that Violet let out, something that hinted at a darkness that came from the very depths of her soul.
‘You can let yourself out,’ she said.
Chapter Thirty-eight
She heard the door shut behind him, heard him sigh, heard the sound of his boots on the pavement. Standing, she moved across to the window, pushed the fraying curtain aside and watched him walk down the street, reduce to a silhouette, then disappear down the hill. She took a bottle, poured a neat gin into the coronation mug, took huge gulps, then stared into the bottom of it. Bewildered that she had finished it so quickly, she poured another, and another, and loathed herself for it, until she stumbled into the dresser, crashed down into a chair, and finally lost consciousness.
Two days later, Violet took the ten o’clock tramcar to the station. The train journey to Freshdale passed with her head gently vibrating against the window as she watched the outside rush past, grey turning green, then green turning to the powder yellow of the sand dunes, then yellow turning to the charcoal black of the spindly pine trees. Kathleen had had a friend who had worked at an asylum whose job was to take the dead bodies down to the mortuary. The dead body would be wrapped in a sheet and put in an open tin coffin and laid on the bottom of a trolley on a hidden shelf like a stretcher, with a sheet discreetly draped over a second shelf above; on top of this, sometimes a pot of tea and plates of biscuits were placed so that no one would guess that there was a person underneath as they rattled through the wards. They had laughed about it at the time, but today it seemed truly macabre. Please God, she thought, she wasn’t going to see these things for herself.
She got off the train and set off down Virgin’s Lane. In a dreadful revisiting, it was in the same road as the Mother and Baby Home where Babby had been sent and was run by the same order of nuns. Walking as fast as she could past the huge houses – priests’ homes, Saint Sylvester’s Orphanage, nursing homes, and the grim Saint Jude’s, eventually she saw the building. Saint Peter’s was like the others, but with a creaking cockerel weathervane, and there was no hint of what lay behind the wooden front doors. A thought came into her head that she puzzled over. Was Saint Peter’s where many of the poor souls in this road ended up? Like the girls in the Mother and Baby Home who were considered not to have the strength of character to cope in the real world? Or the unruly children in the orphanage who were always in trouble, back and forth to the police, until they also were deemed too out of control not to be restrained. Did they all make their way down this cul-de-sac, never to find a way out? Outside the hospital there were dried-up flower beds with stunted rose bushes with black spots on their leaves, and plant pots of wilted geraniums by the front gates.
To push away thoughts of what desperate souls might be behind the grey nets, for it was too distressing to contemplate, she tried to lose herself by counting how many windows, how many steps up to the door. She noticed that the first impression was designed to keep people out: the closed curtains, the signs saying no visitors unless by appointment, the barbed wire running on top of the fencing, the thorny, prickly, forbidding shrubbery. But then she had a darker thought. Was this designed to keep people in?
Then, without warning, the front door opened, and a nun came down the steps and got into an Austin Ten car which was parked on the front drive. Violet shrank back against the wall. It was Sister Agnes from Saint Jude’s! What the hell am I doing here? she said under her breath.
The car
drove off. Steeling herself, she stepped out from the bushes and went up the steps. She pushed the bell and waited. Finally, she heard footsteps. The door opened and a nun wearing a veil, whose starched white coif framed a smooth face, nodded hello. ‘You must be Mr Lynch’s visitor?’ she said.
Violet flinched. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up stiffly. Nuns were not to be trusted, she thought, shaking hands with the nun, who introduced herself as Sister Michael.
‘Follow me,’ said the nun. She spoke in soft Irish tones, one of those sisters who said skissors instead of scissors and fillum instead of film. She didn’t have the stern look of the nuns at Saint Jude’s. She looked almost happy, as though she was living a useful and rewarding life. She had a smile that was serene and compassionate and her face was unlined. There were no bags under her eyes, no deep grooves between the eyebrows like those etched into Violet’s face.
‘My dear, please don’t expect too much. Daniel is very sick. Each new year we can’t quite believe he has survived but he is a fighter. Fiercely independent and determined, I’d say.’
Violet was led down the long corridor that smelled of beeswax and the criss-cross of the parquet floor stretched out in front of her in zig-zag patterns. When she was ushered in to a large room by a beady-eyed nurse dressed in white with white rubber shoes, she felt panicked. Beyond, through a half-open door, she caught the vacant stare of a patient, a young woman in a grey cotton shift, sitting in a bath chair, and she wondered if this was terrible mistake, coming here. A kind looking eighty-year-old nun, with the smile of a young girl, breezed in and led her through another room – the breakfast room, she told Violet. This was where the more independent patients were allowed to sit. Then they were into another corridor, with more rooms off it. This place really was a rabbit warren, a maze of despair, thought Violet, noticing names, written by hand, on cards stuck on the doors. Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, no doubt. One was just a sad smudge. What had happened to the person whose name had been reduced to a smudge? she wondered. Death? They stopped outside a door with a brass name plate. Sister Mary Joseph, it said.
A Liverpool Girl Page 26