‘I don’t want repayin’ so that’s all right.’
Rosie smiled back at him now, rising from the sofa and putting the cup and saucer on one of the occasional tables as she said, ‘I must get back, they might need me.’ And then Zachariah froze, his whole body seeming to become still, as she took his hands in hers and said, her face straight now and her deep brown eyes looking hard into his, ‘You are the one person in all the world I can rely on, Zachariah. I can see why your friend, your Janie, cared for you so much.’ And before he could bring any reply out of the chaotic whirl his mind had fallen into she was gone.
Chapter Nine
Flora knew, as soon as she stepped into the hall after waving goodbye to Sally and Mick on the doorstep, that her father was waiting for her. The awareness, which caused the hairs on the back of her neck to prickle, was unexplainable, but born of years and years of such encounters, and it caused her stomach to turn and the palms of her hands to perspire.
She made no attempt to go straight to her room to avoid the forthcoming confrontation, knowing such prevarication to be useless. Her father was quite capable of forcing the door to her bedroom and had done so on more than one occasion in the past when she had tried to escape him.
‘Well?’ Flora had barely taken one step into the sitting room before her father spoke, and it was clear he had been spying on her from behind the net curtains when he said, his tone threatening, ‘And who was that scum you came home with?’
‘If you are referring to Sally and Mick, they are friends of mine.’ Flora met his gaze without flinching, her body quite still and straight.
‘Oh yes?’ Mr Thomas was standing with his back to the fire, his hands behind him as he held the bottom of his jacket up over his large backside, and he swayed a couple of times on his heels before he said, ‘And are you going to tell me where you have been all night?’
‘I’ve been at Rosie’s.’
‘Rosie’s. I might have known she was behind this.’
‘Behind what? I’ve just visited a friend’s house, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Don’t give me that. I suppose the little trollop made sure there were plenty of lads there, eh? What was it? A party of some kind?’
‘No!’ Flora’s tone was indignant now. ‘I went there because Rosie needed me. There was a domestic problem.’
‘I don’t doubt it with the rabble she mixes with.’
He was a cruel man. A very very cruel man. Flora stared at the dark angry figure in front of her. He knew exactly how Rosie was placed, he knew the struggle she had had to keep her head and the family’s above water for the last three years, but all he had ever done was to snipe and cast aspersions. ‘That’s unfair and you know it. Rosie is a decent person, she always has been.’
‘She’s not of our class and you know that.’
‘Our class?’ It was a strategy of his, this goading, but she couldn’t help retaliating. ‘What class do you think we are, for goodness’ sake! We’re working class, Da, whether you like it or not, and if you weren’t such an upstart you’d be proud of the fact.’
‘Flora, please.’
Her mother’s voice was low but of a quality that made Flora turn from her father - who had straightened at her words, his furious face flushing turkey-red - and say to the small, thin-faced woman in front of her, ‘I’m sorry, Mam, but I can’t help it. He’s so bigoted, you know he is.’
‘I’ll give you bigoted, my girl.’
Her father was undoing his belt as he spoke and Flora knew she had played right into his hands again in losing her temper, but she fought the fear that always gripped her in these moments and her voice was a low vehement hiss as she spat, ‘You dare! Just you dare try that one more time and I’ll do for you, I swear it.’
‘Is this the kind of language you’ve picked up from your guttersnipe friends, eh?’ Llewellyn Thomas’s voice was quivering with the force of his anger. ‘Well, it’s the last time you disobey me on this matter, I’m telling you. You don’t associate with the likes of Rosie Ferry again and that’s final. I’m not having our reputation sullied by your low acquaintances.’
‘Our reputation?’ Flora was glaring at her father, her back bent and her head straining upwards as she faced the man she loathed and detested. ‘Our reputation! What reputation? Who on earth do you think you are anyway? And Rosie is a fine person, she is.’
‘You’ll do as you’re told.’ His belt was out of his trousers and he stood, his feet a foot or so apart, with the leather strap held taut between his hands. ‘And I think it’s high time you were reminded of that.’
He was mad. He was, he was mad. The terror Flora had fought against all her life, and which was all tied up with the military-looking man in front of her, was drying her mouth and causing the sweat to prick in her armpits. She could still remember the first time her father had beaten her, when she’d been no older than three or four. It was burnt into her memory. And she could also recall her overwhelming bewilderment as she had screamed and cried and tried to escape the murderous belt that her mother hadn’t tried to help her, had done nothing beyond pleading with him to stop. But two or three years later, when her understanding had developed far beyond her years, she had come to recognize the significance of the sounds coming from her parents’ room some nights and why her mother occasionally wore long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the hottest of summer days and winced if she was inadvertently touched.
He was a hateful man, a sanctimonious, harsh upstart, and yet everyone thought he was so upright, so moral, so righteous. He paraded his standing in the community - the fact that he owned this house, his managerial post at the Castle Street Brewery, and his authoritative position as a deacon in the little chapel in Monkwearmouth - like a row of medals across his chest, and in a way they were. Her grandfather, and her great-grandfather, had been in the armed forces, and her mother had told her once that it had been expected Llewellyn would follow his three older brothers into the army or navy. But he hadn’t. Her mother hadn’t appeared to know why, but Flora suspected it was because her father liked his home comforts too much to give them up for the rigours of army life. But he had aimed to create his own little mini-battalion in the privacy of his home, and rarely a day went by when he didn’t berate her mother, in some form or other, for the fact that she had failed so miserably in her duty to give him the quiverful of sons he had required.
And her mother didn’t seem to have any strength to stand up against him; perhaps she never had had any and that’s why he had chosen her for his wife in the first place? She was of the old school that decreed the husband was lord of the wife, be he tyrant or saint, in all things, and that it was her duty to serve and obey without question. She didn’t seem to have a mind of her own at all.
Was it any wonder that she herself had so loved to be round at Rosie’s house when she was a bairn? This place might have the luxury of a bathroom and inside netty, but she had always known she would have swapped her comfortable lifestyle - the spacious bedroom all to herself, the wardrobe of clothes and the trappings of middle-class wealth - for Rosie’s cramped little two-up, two-down house where there had been warmth and laughter and love.
She hated her father and she wished he was dead.
It was a thought that had been at the back of her mind for years and was all the stronger for being unvoiced. The humiliation and pain that went hand-in-hand with his thrashings was always there. How many times had she told herself she didn’t need to feel such degradation? That he was nothing but a dictatorial, inhuman bully? Hundreds. Thousands. Nevertheless it was shame at her own weakness that kept her lips sealed about the years of beatings, not fear.
But she was seventeen now, and she wasn’t standing for it any more.
He was advancing on her in the same manner as always, slowly, even calmly, but this time Flora took two rapid steps towards him and something in her stance checked the tall broad figure wielding the belt. ‘I meant what I said. You try hitting me just one more time
and I’ll do for you, and I don’t mean physically,’ she ground out through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll tell Peter. I mean it, I will, and he’ll believe me. Oh yes, he’ll believe me all right. And that goes for Mam too, you touch her again and I’m straight to Peter and his da.’
‘Why, you young--’
‘And your boss at the brewery, Mr Barrett. I’m sure he’d be interested to hear about the goings-on here. And your cosy chapelite cronies? They’re not above a bit of nice juicy gossip I’m sure, in spite of all their piety. I’ll do it, I will, ’cos I’ve had enough.’
They were looking at each other now, the big, solid, moustached man and the slender young girl, and such was his surprise that he could say nothing. Even when the explosion came it was blustering and without weight. Flora didn’t answer him, there was no need; besides which her stand had taken her as much by surprise as it had him, perhaps even more so. She was actually awed at her temerity and amazed at her daring, but in those hours when they had sat and waited at Rosie’s house for Molly to be found, and she and Sally had acted the jesters as though it was just another ordinary evening, she had found herself hating all men. And when they had brought Molly in, wrapped in that gaudy bedspread or whatever it was, and she had looked into the young face that somehow wasn’t so young any more, the hate had begun to bubble up in a way that had made her want to hurt someone. No, not someone - she had known who she wanted to hurt. And she wasn’t going to be a victim any longer.
She left the room steadily, not rushing but taking her time, and as she did so she glanced once at her mother’s white, drawn face, but the other woman’s distress did not cause her to pause or falter. She had stepped over a line tonight, and although it had been the means of extricating herself from the power and authority of her father, it had also had the effect of distancing her from her mother. Her mother was too petrified of him to cast her allegiance with her daughter and they both knew it.
A few minutes later as she stood in her own bedroom, her arms crossed and her hands gripping either side of her waist, Flora looked about her. This room was full of appeasement. It was seeping out of the pretty bedspread and matching curtains and the big thick square of carpet in the middle of the room. It was in the small bookcase filled with expensive books and the gramophone in one corner, its stack of records lining the shelf above. She had all the latest hits - ‘Chicago’, ‘Limehouse Blues’, ‘I wish I could Shimmy like my Sister Kate’ - and they had all been bought by her father. Everything in this room had been bought by him. It was the same with her mother; when her father had spoken of buying a wireless set last week, with a loud-speaker instead of headphones so they could all listen to it, she had known her mother would be wearing concealing clothes and moving carefully. Oh why, why couldn’t her mam fight back just once? Tears were trickling down Flora’s face now but she made no effort to brush them away as she stood, swaying slightly back and forth, in the middle of the room. But she wasn’t going to be bought off any more, and neither was she going to be intimidated into keeping quiet. She would tell Peter or Mr Barrett if her father raised his hand to her again.
Oh . . . She walked across to the bed and sat down abruptly on the flowered coverlet. She wished she was Rosie. She did, in spite of all this with Molly, and Rosie’s mam being like she was with the drink and all, and Rosie having to watch every penny; she still would give everything she possessed to be Rosie. What was that bit in the Bible that her old Sunday School teacher had been so fond of? Oh yes: ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’ Some of the other bairns had laughed at Miss Brent but she had known exactly what the old maid had been getting at. By, she had.
Part Three
Marriages and Homecomings
Chapter Ten
The traditional Egyptian house was two-storeyed and rectangular, built of brick moulded from mud, and the flat roof was supported by big palm rafters. The tall, broad-shouldered man standing looking down into the sun-baked fields below, where a line of family laundry, drying from a rope held between two ancient fig trees, fluttered gently in the sun and light breeze, could have been mistaken for a native of Cairo by his dress. The long flowing galabiya was of white linen and the man looked comfortable and relaxed in it as he stood eating from a small bowl of rice, lentils and pasta liberally sprinkled with white, crumbly and highly salted goat’s cheese.
The meal finished the man turned, and immediately his greeny-brown eyes set in a face that was unmistakably foreign, and his light hair bleached golden brown by the fierce sun, proclaimed he was not an Arab, although his nut-brown skin was as dark as any national’s.
Why was he putting off the inevitable? Davey Connor narrowed his eyes as he stared up into a sky as blue as the cornflowers back home. Home. He moved restlessly, his tanned brow wrinkling, but today he couldn’t keep the lid on his thoughts as he usually did. Today they were determined to escape and have free rein and it was something of a relief to let them go.
He had been away for almost five years but he felt he’d aged five decades, aye, and then some. When he looked back on the ignorant and naive lad who had left Sunderland he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or weep. Left? The word mocked him with its dignity. It had been an ignominious retreat at best, but he hadn’t realized it until the day when he had acknowledged he’d exchanged the hell of the pit for an equally precarious existence under the jurisdiction of a complete madman.
When he had signed on the cargo vessel bound for the Suez Canal four days before his nineteenth birthday, after three months of working on the Culler tugboat in Tynemouth, he had counted it as good fortune. He’d wanted to get right away from Tyne and Wear and all it held, and the Mediterranean, with the exotic-sounding names it encompassed, had seemed perfect. Two days into the voyage he had understood why none of the more experienced sailors had wanted to sail on the President - its captain, a great brawny giant of a man with skin like weathered leather and the biggest hands Davey had ever seen, was an unbalanced tyrant.
The crew of twelve had had their work cut out to manage the big cargo vessel and it didn’t help that most of them were young landlubbers like himself. Captain McGrathe had worked them like dogs, nineteen or twenty hours a day, until they had dropped.
He could still picture the turret ship in his mind’s eye, its big deck raised along the centre rather than flush in an effort to reduce the deck area and lower the passage charges at the Suez Canal, and hear the piercing screams of Micky Rawlings, one of the lads whom Captain McGrathe had had flogged for some minor infringement of the rules. He’d decided then that if he lasted until Port Said he would jump ship and forgo the payment due when they returned to England, even if it meant he was stranded in a foreign country with no money or belongings and just the clothes he stood up in.
It had been mid-June when the ship had arrived in Port Said and Davey had felt he’d sailed into an oven. The air was desiccated and scorching, but when the ship had docked just before sunset and the Mediterranean had become a saffron sea, the sun dropping into it surprisingly quickly like a juicy ripe Egyptian orange, he had been hooked. His past life - Sunderland, Rosie - had faded to an impossible, half-remembered dream, an illusion so far removed from the blazing hot world of colour and light he found himself in as to be unattainable.
It had been surprisingly easy to jump ship during the night, and he had determined to make his way across country towards the Nile in an effort to lose himself in this new land.
The cordiality displayed by the ordinary Egyptian people to this stranger in their midst who had been unable to speak a word of their language had both amazed and humbled him. He had discovered hospitality was almost a sacred duty in their culture, dating back to the times when nomadic tribes frequently roamed the deserts - harsh places even at the best of times - and with a relentless sun beating down all day, and nightfall bringing a sharp drop in temperature and producing shivering cold, he’d been glad of the unwritten law that food and shelter be g
iven unquestioningly to any stranger.
It had taken him almost eighteen months to work his way to the ancient city of Cairo, positioned at the apex of the fertile Nile delta some hundred kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast, and in that time he had tried his hand at whatever employment came his way. He’d spent a couple of months gathering dates from the tall palm trees in one place, a few weeks ploughing fields in another, but eventually he arrived at a small farm on the outskirts of Cairo in January 1922, penniless and virtually in rags.
And he had been fortunate, he knew that now. Egypt’s land was rich in natural fertilizers and bore fruit the whole year round - wheat, rice, corn and flowers thrived during the winter, cotton and sugar in the spring and fruit in the summer - and owing to an outbreak of cholera having taken Mohamed’s - the owner of the farm - three sons and wife and daughter two months before he had arrived, the wiry gnarled Egyptian had been hard-pressed and glad of another pair of hands.
Davey had toiled long and hard in the fields surrounding the farm using methods introduced some five thousand years before, but still effective. He had become accustomed to the shaduf, a device with a weighted lever used to raise water from the river Nile into the irrigation canals running between the crops, and the saqiyya, a water wheel drawn by oxen.
The sight of his fellow workers ploughing the fields and women carrying home the harvest on the backs of donkeys had satisfied something deep in his soul, and he had earnt first Mohamed’s respect and then his friendship with the zealousness of his commitment to the farm and his work.
In return for his services Mohamed had given him shelter and food in his own house, along with a small wage, and Davey had told himself he was content in this country of a thousand minarets, where the nights were scented by the sweet white jasmine flowers and sun-warmed crops, and visits into the city echoed with the sound of the muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to prayer. His former life underground in the dark bowels of the earth only surfaced in the odd nightmare, now his waking hours were spent in the warm clean air, and for the first year or so he had revelled in it despite the occasional hankering for England’s green countryside and rainy summers. He still revelled in it, but . . . He sighed irritably. She was always there in the back of his mind, his northern rose, and the urge to find out where she was, what she was doing, who she was with was gnawing at him.
Reach for Tomorrow Page 16