Daughters of Penny Lane

by Ruth Hamilton

  Daughters of Penny Lane

  Ruth Hamilton

  MACMILLAN

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  One

  1946

  It was different here. Different? The houses hadn’t changed – bay windows, little front gardens with paths and gates, glazed attic dormers perched on some roofs, several residences doubling as shops. ‘It’s me,’ Alice Quigley informed her canine companion, ‘it’s me that’s different.’ Had returning to Penny Lane had an effect? ‘It’s stronger than ever, Frank,’ she whispered.

  It. The bloody it was taking over her life, and she wasn’t in the mood. Muth had nominated Alice’s it her ‘otherness’, as it separated her from ordinary people. She was special. She saw things, heard things, knew things . . . ‘But not today, please,’ she whispered. Having moved house just this morning, Alice was in need of some supplies.

  The sky was splitting into small prisms, tiny shards with no glue holding them together. ‘Sugar,’ Alice spat. ‘Clouds next, Frank. Clouds, mist, grey blotches, then action from long ago or far away. Or both,’ she reminded herself. Would she ever see the future? A rainbow was trying to form right above her head, but chances were that she alone could see it. Oh, Frank sometimes saw, too. And today it was different, more powerful than ever before. She needed answers to a hundred questions.

  As she opened the door of the ironmongery a few inches, shapes began to form in the air. It was, at first, a corner of the eye moment, a heraldic split second that warned of something momentous, and she tried to shake it off. She had no time for messing about today, because Dan was coming home soon. Did she have a choice? Had she ever had a choice? Frank, on his new red lead, was pulling slightly, trying to hold her back. He probably knew the day was out of order.

  All her life, Alice had experienced visions, flashes of times past – even of the present in places far away. Why now? Ah, it was clearing . . . no, it lingered inside the shop, and it belonged to the woman behind one of a pair of counters that formed an L in line with two walls. Alice pushed the door to widen her view of the interior.

  The shopkeeper was handsome, tall, middle-aged, with threads of white woven into severely pinned-back dark hair. The forehead was high, cheekbones well defined, and she carried herself proudly. There was an inherent elegance that defied the unremarkable clothing: a grey dress, a washed-out blue cardigan and an apron that tried hard to remember being white. This shop was not the right setting, since the keeper seemed to be a rare jewel planted in base metal.

  But Alice was here for . . . firewood and . . . and . . . ? For years, she had experienced othernesses, strange moments that were sometimes frightening and always strange. ‘You’re different, child,’ Muth had insisted. ‘You will see and know what others can’t, because you are a seven, and so am I.’ A seven? Alice wished she could have been a one or a six or an eight, or . . . or anything bloody ordinary. Even bottle-bottom glasses would have been preferable to second sight.

  The back wall of the shop was covered by creeping sepia smoke that only she could see. No. Once again she was all but certain that Frank could see it, too. It became a huge face with a wide-open mouth that seemed to frame a silent scream. So far, there was nothing new – she’d seen it all before.

  Alice opened the weighty door as far as it would go and stepped inside. There was no choice – she always had to face whatever turned up. Running would make no difference, because things always caught up with her, damn them. ‘All I want is to be normal, Frank,’ she said behind gritted teeth.

  The large, white dog hung back, his behind planted firmly on the outer doorstep.

  ‘Get in,’ ordered the owner of the nervous boxer. ‘Do as you’re told.’

  He scratched an ear. It was one of the habits he employed when wishing to distract himself and others. ‘In, Frank,’ Alice repeated.

  He abandoned his protest and followed her, parking his backside firmly between paraffin heaters and firelighters. It was going to be one of those days, and he wasn’t best pleased, because moving house was enough to take on without visions and all that palaver. He scratched the other ear. He hadn’t even been fed yet.

  ‘Unusual dog,’ the shopkeeper announced. ‘One like that, I am never see before in my life. Sad face, but so beautiful.’

  The newly arrived customer managed a tight smile; this ironmonger lady was by far the most unusual item in the small shop. ‘You’re not English.’ At least Frank was inside now, though he looked about as happy as a wet and windy weekend in Blackpool. He was doing that blowing out of his cheeks thing again.

  ‘No,’ the woman replied after a pause. ‘I am Russian, from a village over to the west of Moscow. But in England now many years.’ She stared hard at the customer. ‘Sitting down, please. Your face is being pale.’

  Alice sank onto a hard kitchen chair. ‘Alicia Marguerite Quigley,’ she said. ‘But they call me Alice.’ The shop darkened; even the street outside looked black, as if Penny Lane had acquired its very own dense cloud.

  ‘Olga Konstantinov. In Russia I am Konstantinova, but here I find women take father’s name unchanged, so I do same. Shop is called Konnie’s Korner – bad English I know, but my father wanted a name to remember.’ She shrugged apologetically.

  Smiling became impossible for Alice, and the shopkeeper’s voice faded away as her customer shifted into another dimension. The small, seated visionary accepted the inevitable, since there was little she could do to alter her environment. Frank settled, thought better of it, and moved to stretch out across Alice’s feet. He would guard her; his job was to care for the woman who fed and loved him.

  A door in the corner disappeared, as did all the display shelving. There was a cart. Muffled hooves seemed to beat the earth until the cart stumbled and spilled its contents onto the ground. Bodies. Adults and children tumbled down when a wheel parted company with the rest of the vehicle. The corpses fell in impossible shapes that imitated broken marionettes. It was like a silent film that kept sticking on the reel: jumpy, too fast, too slow. Alice stared into violence and chaos, and she shivered in spite of the warm weather. She was looking at the results of an unholy massacre.

  ‘Madam?’

  Alice was beyond listening to the here and now. ‘Children,’ she whispered. ‘Clothes ripped off. Jewels sewn in the hems of girls’ dresses. Children,’ she repeated. ‘All dead.’ A lone tear trickled down a cheek. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ in heaven, what am I seeing? And why am I seeing it?’

  Fortunately, there was a chair behind the counter, and Olga dropped onto it, grateful for the support offered by this wooden item. Was the unknown customer another Rasputin, the creature who had tried to rule the whole of Russia through his so-called mysticism? She shivered. In her book, Rasputin was a son of Satan, and she was grateful to those who had supposedly murdered him. Hell must have claimed the man, as he had been suitable for no other destination in the afterlife.

  For Alice, the picture faded, leaving just the silent, wide-open mouth, which disappeared after a few seconds. She blinked while returning to the now. ‘Sorry about that. It happens. I’m the seventh child of a seventh child – I wish I wasn’t. I get visions. This one was yours, though. What I just saw belongs to you and your family from somewhere else, not here, not this country.’

  Olga allowed a few beats of time to pass. ‘I am having no family here or
anywhere.’

  ‘In Russia?’ Alice asked. ‘Have you nobody in Russia?’

  ‘My grandfather and my father brought me here. My mother, she die young when I was about ten years. I have also two brothers who bled – they had bleeding disease and they die also when very young.’

  ‘Haemophilia?’

  Olga inclined her head. ‘I am carrier. If I have sons, they bleed, so I not marry. If I have daughter, she carry the illness and pass it on. Is only way to stop, to be alone, have no children, make it end.’

  Alice swallowed hard; this Russian lady was afraid. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  But today’s show wasn’t over. Frank raised his head and stared mournfully at his owner. Being a boxer meant that he always appeared puzzled or morose, but he managed a wonderful imitation of grief by displaying the whites of his eyes. He followed his mistress’s gaze, which was fixed on the woman seated behind the counter.

  Alice saw a younger Olga in a ball gown. Diamonds and other jewels – green ones – twinkled in a tiara and at her throat, and she was beautiful. ‘Your dress was purple, but not darkest purple. Like a deep violet. Where were you when you wore that gown?’

  The ironmonger shivered, but felt bound to answer. ‘It was our dacha. Usually small house for summer days, but ours was big. It was ball when I was almost eighteen years. Next day, we leave to other parts in Europe, and Europe was at war. Difficult, so journey took days. Romanov family dead one week after we go. We are escape revolution.’

  ‘So you’re rich?’ Alice’s words were delivered on a whispered breath. ‘Royal, like?’

  ‘No, not rich,’ was the quick reply. She paused for a second. ‘My father, Ilya Konstantinov, had farms. We had money enough, but not very rich.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  Olga sighed as if defeated. ‘She was . . . connected to Romanovs.’

  ‘Romanovs?’

  ‘Tsar Nicholas was killed with family and servants. Nicholas cousin to my mother, but we no speak of this. I have forty-seven year now, but Russia will find me out if you speak. Our lands gone, our houses gone, yet they fear return of royalty.’ She smiled and shrugged. ‘They think I go back with army? Just you, myself and dog? Speak not of what you know from today. As far as Russia believes, I am dead. Allow me to remain safely dead.’

  Frank chose this moment to rise to his feet and yawn before pointing a wrinkled face at the ceiling and delivering his impression of a whole pack of wolves, as his howling changed key for each one. Exhausted after a minute, he collapsed.

  ‘He’s too spoilt to howl for long,’ Alice said, pulling herself together determinedly. ‘Give us two bundles of firewood, Olga. I need a shovel and a box of candles, too. Oh, and calm down, will you? I’ll not tell nobody nothing about what happened here today. Anyway, I bet Russia’s not interested in you no more.’

  Bearing candles and a shovel, the Russian returned to her counter. ‘Me, I am being learning the English very slow. You go fast and make too many negatives. We being teached about double negatives.’

  ‘Taught,’ Alice replied promptly, a smile broadening the vowel sound. ‘You a Catholic?’

  ‘Russian Orthodox, but I go any church – don’t care. Christ say where two or more gathered, he is among.’

  ‘Not in the House of Commons or the Lords, I reckon.’

  Both women laughed. ‘Nor in Kremlin,’ Olga chuckled. ‘Stalin believe in Stalin, workers grateful for pennies they get. Idea is poor are all same, while rich bank in Swiss places. They think we not know this, but my father is understanding what was to happen. So we run and are come to here.’

  ‘I am running too, Olga. Lived in Bootle and got wiped out. There were only two houses standing on our road when the war ended, and they looked a bit drunk, all wobbly chimneys and crooked doors, and no glass in the windows. And funnily enough, we’re being resettled here, in the house where I was born.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. They’ve built an extra bit downstairs for my husband. He’s had a stroke and can’t do stairs. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Two shilling and sixpence; is good shovel.’

  ‘It had better be – that’s a day’s wages for some.’ Alice placed two florins on the counter and took her change. ‘I’ll see you soon.’ She picked up her purchases, and Frank followed her out of the shop.

  Olga Konstantinov sat for a while, her mind busy processing the recent happenings. It was a strange world, yet she had made a friend at last. Since Batya’s death, she’d been so lonely, communicating only with customers before going up to eat in the living quarters above the shop. Raising her eyes heavenward, she thanked her Maker. ‘Spasibo,’ she mumbled. ‘Thank you, God.’ And she also thanked her dad, her beloved Batya, for sending Alice Quigley to Konnie’s Korner. Olga had sold a shovel, but her heart had given itself away to a large white dog with sad eyes and a face that needed ironing.

  Alice’s neighbour on one side was a thin yet robust woman of indeterminable age with lisle stockings (wrinkled), very white teeth (false), rusty red hair, two sons (God alone knew where the buggers were), and a laugh that sounded like water rushing to find its way down a plughole. Although Alice was a native of Liverpool and inured to the speed of its speech, she decided that keeping up with this woman was going to be difficult. She found herself fascinated by the other’s eyes, because a turn in the left one grew more pronounced when she became excited.

  Vera Corcoran was a character, and she worked hard to show Alice she was deserving of the title. She had delivered babies, tended the sick, laid out the dead, and seemed to know everyone’s business. The Hillcrest family were all in a ‘sanctimonium’ with TB, Bert Warburton had been arrested for drunk and ‘disorderedly’, while an unfortunate woman called Philomena Lever had shingles on account of her Annie who had come down with chicken pox. ‘But Jimmy won’t let me do it no more,’ Vera went on sadly. ‘People die at night and babies are born at night, so he made me stop, cos he wants me safe.’

  Alice began to feel dizzy; did this woman never shut up? On the other hand, the relentless flow gave her time to work out Vera’s eye problem: sweat on the nose caused spectacles to slip, and the eye returned to its rightful place of abode only when the glasses were pushed back into the correct position.

  By two o’clock, Vera had stripped and cooked the bare bones of Alice’s curriculum vitae, and she intended to fill in all missing flesh at the earliest opportunity. A new neighbour was fair game and great fodder for Vera’s eclectic portfolio. Dan, Alice’s absent husband, had suffered two strokes. The first had struck when their Bootle house had got flattened and he’d been digging his wife out of rubble under which she’d been trapped; the second and larger event had happened on the docks, where he’d been loading munitions to be returned to arsenals at the end of the war.

  ‘What a shame,’ Vera said, head shaking. ‘Was he not in the war, love? Might have been safer abroad instead of lugging all them bombs about. Why wasn’t he called up?’

  ‘Fallen arches,’ Alice replied while she had the chance. ‘He couldn’t have got through basic training with feet as daft as his, so he specialized in loading munitions instead.’

  ‘And he’s been away for months with these strokes?’ Vera asked, sliding the words in between her descriptions of nightmare births and gruesome deaths, club feet, cleft palates, bunions and a very bad case of pneumonia in the middle of June 1941. ‘So I was always busy. What’s the dog called?’

  ‘Frank.’

  Vera blinked and adjusted her specs. ‘No, I mean what make is it?’

  Tempted to say ‘Rolls-Royce’, Alice curbed her impatience. ‘He’s a boxer.’

  ‘Oh.’ The neighbour wasn’t stumped for long. ‘I didn’t know they made them in white.’

  ‘Neither did I. He’s quite a rare specimen.’

  Vera folded her arms under a non-existent bosom. ‘Was his mam white?’

  ‘No. She was a kind of blonde colour – I have a photo of her somewhere.
It’s black and white, but you can see that she’s pale.’

  ‘His dad?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Vera launched herself into yet another tale, this time about the disgrace of a white woman with a white husband. ‘They live in Smithdown Road. She had a little lad, a darkie. She says he’s a throwback, and he is – a throwback to when the Yanks were here. Her husband fought his way through the desert and up Italy while she was working under the American air force one at a time.’ She patted her metal curlers. ‘Well, I’m saying one at a time, though you never know with Yanks, do you? Randy buggers, the lot of them.’

  Alice found no answer; she’d had enough of the surreal for one day.

  ‘Have you got anybody round here, like? You know what I mean: family, friends and all that.’

  ‘I had six sisters. One emigrated to Australia, and three died when a shelter got hit. Their kids are that bit older now, but it was sad when it happened, all crying and a big funeral with three coffins.’ She pinned Vera with piercing blue eyes. ‘Dad’s dead. Muth talked him to death, cos she never learned when to shut her gob. He just hit the floor like a sack of rocks while she was moaning on about the neighbours, know what I mean?’

  Vera bridled. For a small-boned woman, she bridled quite well, seeming to expand upwards and outwards while she unfolded and refolded her arms. The metal curlers shivered slightly as her head moved quickly from side to side. Her displeasure was evident, and her spectacles slid down her nose no less than three times, so overheated did her skin become.

  Alice, aware that her neighbour was shifting up a gear, put out her hand and patted Vera’s arm. ‘Lovely to meet you, Mrs Corcoran. I must go in and start getting the place ready for my Dan. They’re bringing him home soon.’

  ‘Oh. Can I help? I’m very good with them what’s not well. Our doc’s always saying I should have been a nurse, cos I’m a natural.’

  ‘Er . . . no need, thank you.’ She didn’t want the eyes and ears of Penny Lane assessing her worth, her furniture and every word she spoke. ‘I know where all the stuff is, so I’ll manage better by myself.’ She turned and walked into her house with Frank hot on her heels. The door clicked shut, and she pressed her back against its welcome support. Getting used to Vera Corcoran wasn’t going to be easy. She wondered who lived at the other side. Oh, how she hoped Vera was a one-off . . .