by Mary Gibson
‘No! I’m not setting foot in that place. They had no time for my mother when she was alive. The only reason they’ve asked us back is because they think you’re famous!’
‘Shhh, Will. They’re your family and your mother wouldn’t want you to be rude.’
‘My mother cared too much about appearances. It was all compromise with her!’
Matty put a hand on his arm, which he shrugged off.
‘Will, please, just let’s get through the day.’ She couldn’t understand where this anger towards Eliza had come from. Perhaps he really did blame her for not waiting for him to come home before she’d died. ‘We’ll stop for a quick drink and then go,’ Matty said soothingly.
‘Oh, all right, just one, but then I’m off.’
But at the Green Ginger, Will found that he wanted more than just one drink and when he rolled off his chair halfway through her duet with Katie Gilbie, Matty began to regret persuading him to come. For Matty, drinks were never free. She always had to pay with a song and now she was trying to accompany Katie’s cigarette-smoked gravelly voice with her own sweeter tones in a version of ‘Pal o’ My Cradle Days’ – a choice Matty had tried to dissuade Katie from, given the occasion. They had reached the final lines and the whole pub was singing along in a heartfelt harmonious crescendo:
I took the gold from your hair, I put the silver thread there,
I don’t know any way, I could ever repay you, pal o’ my craaaaadle days!
It was the drink, Matty thought, rather than sentimentality, which caused Will’s locked-up grief to burst, for now he began sobbing audibly, and as he got up to push out through the crowd he stumbled and fell. George tried to help him up but Will turned on him, snarling like a terrier and upending a table.
‘Take your hands off me, you bloody hypocrite. You hated my mother, though God knows her politics were nearer yours than you ever thought. Bloody moral cowards...’ He now seemed to be in conversation with himself. ‘Both of them, father and mother, moral cowards... pal of my cradle days? Inconvenience me, ashamed of me, both of them... and that’s the truth...’
He would only have got louder if Sam hadn’t intervened, casting a look of mute appeal to Matty. She left Katie to carry on singing, with a hissed instruction to the pianist as she passed. ‘Play “Silver Lining”, for gawd’s sake – anything but this!’
Taking Will’s other elbow, she and Sam hoisted him out on to the street and Nellie followed with the boy’s coat and scarf.
‘Come on, son,’ Sam urged him. ‘You’re disgracing yourself.’
‘Disgrace? My parents were the disgrace.’ He turned unfocused eyes on Sam. ‘Him, bloody snob, and her, wishy-washy turncoat, betrayed her own class...’
Suddenly Nellie was in front of him. She was not a tall woman, but years of hard work had made her strong, and now she looped Will’s scarf over his neck and pulled him closer. Fixing him with bright blue eyes that had witnessed Eliza’s greatest triumph in the famous Bermondsey women’s strike twenty years earlier, she said in a low, fierce voice, ‘Betrayed her own class? Your mother did no such thing! She helped more working women than you’ve had hot dinners at that expensive school of yours. So you keep your opinions about Eliza to yourself till you know what you’re talking about!’
Something of Nellie’s ire must have penetrated Will’s alcoholic fug, for he nodded, obedient as one of her own well-behaved boys, and submitted as she helped him on with his coat. It made Matty laugh out loud to see Nellie rout the young communist and she felt that, of all the eulogies she’d heard that day, Nellie’s was the most heartfelt.
5
Tattered Dreams
November–December 1930
Eliza’s will still hadn’t been found. There had been no response from the TUC solicitor to Sam’s enquiry and he had come to Reverdy Road to search for the missing document. Will was sitting on the parlour floor, surrounded by a pile of his mother’s papers, huge bundles of yellowing correspondence and dusty documents all relating to past union causes and strikes, as well as notes for speeches and pamphlets. He was flicking through some letters from his father to Eliza.
‘Crikey, the old man was head over heels! Never knew he had it in him,’ Will said, waving the almost transparent remnant of his parents’ affair.
‘Will, you don’t have to go through their old love letters! Give them their dignity,’ Matty said, snatching it from him and returning it to the ribbon-tied bundle. She was actually thinking of the letters she’d written Frank while she was in California and he was in New York. Even as she’d written them she feared that one day all that passion would turn to bitter regret. There were only so many slaps, burns and losses that a love could survive, but she’d stayed with him for longer than most would have done. Typically, Frank had rarely replied to her letters, preferring the telephone. But she understood why Eliza, usually so unsentimental, had kept those old letters even when the thing had ended badly. She had often thought she would love to burn every word she’d written to Frank. But, perversely, she’d kept his few replies, perhaps as evidence that she’d had good reason, at one stage, to believe in his love.
‘I’ll have to leave you two to get on with it,’ she said and went to get dressed for a stint at the Green Ginger. She’d felt obliged to start paying Will rent and Katie’s offer had at least given her the chance to earn some instant cash. When she returned in a sapphire-blue cocktail dress with a fur-trimmed bolero, Will was tipping his mother’s papers upside down, growling with increasing frustration. Matty could smell the dust of her sister’s past rising as the boy rifled through the pile. He looked up distractedly.
‘I must get it sorted out before I go off with Feathers.’ Will had informed Matty that he would be staying with his friend at Fonstone, the Fetherstones’ large country house. ‘I’ve promised Victims of German Fascism they’ll have the money this year and I’ve decided the proceeds from the house are going to International Red Aid. Ma won’t have left me a lot, but it’s probably enough to keep a revolutionary cell going for ten years!’
He held Matty’s gaze, seeking her approval. ‘I’m obligated, Matty. It’s no good preaching solidarity, is it, if I don’t follow it through?’
Matty was silent for a moment, as she looked in the mirror above the mantlepiece. She pressed her auburn waves into position, but her hair and make-up were immaculate and didn’t really need checking. She was looking instead at the reflection of Will’s earnest face and realizing how much he was his mother’s son. His physical resemblance to Ernest James meant Matty had always thought Will took after his father, but in his extreme desire for justice, he was just like Eliza.
‘Of course you’ve got to stick to your principles, Will. It’s your money and your property – you do what you like with it.’
She perched a shell-shaped blue hat with a cockade on the side of her head. Just because it was the Green Ginger didn’t mean she needed to abandon all vestige of her West End style. Satisfied, she turned away from the mirror and picked up her bag. Inside were a lipstick and powder compact, and a purse containing three shillings and twopence ha’penny. The earnings from her provincial tour had gone to pay off some of Frank’s demands. She was officially broke.
This wasn’t the first time Will had spoken of his intention to give away the inheritance from his mother. His father’s money was in trust and would only come to Will once he’d completed his reviled Cambridge degree. Matty thought this was a wise proviso on the part of Ernest James. Perhaps he’d taken a keener interest and known his son better than Will ever gave him credit for.
A loud thud from above was followed by the sound of slow footsteps on the stairs. Sam pushed through the door, holding a cardboard box – it looked like an old Worth dress box.
‘This is the last one from the attic,’ Sam said, letting it fall beside Will, coughing as a thick layer of dust was dislodged from its top. ‘You’ll have to go through it, Will. I promised to be back home before the boys go to bed.’
Will drew the box towards him with a groan. ‘The perils of having literate parents,’ he muttered.
‘I’ll walk down with you,’ Sam said to Matty and, though unreadable to most people, Matty could see that he was irritated.
Once out in the crisp night air, she put her arm through her brother’s. ‘Has he been getting on your nerves?’ she asked immediately.
‘Oh, I know he’s young... and he’s got his principles,’ he said, ‘but doesn’t he know charity begins at home? There’s people in the family might need it just as much as a Russian revolutionary!’ He gave her a pointed look which she didn’t like.
‘Sam, it’s not up to us to judge. We can only guide him and we’ll do it for Eliza’s sake, won’t we?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose you’re right, my little canary!’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘But it’s as if he can’t wait to get rid of Eliza’s money and her house and her things... and her family! Besides, he knows she didn’t approve of bloody Stalin... I don’t think we’ll see much of him now she’s gone.’
‘And you know you’re turning into our dad, don’t you? He was always complaining about Eliza having time for everyone else but her family!’
She felt Sam sigh. ‘That was different.’
‘But you might be right about not seeing him much... he’s going to stay at his friend’s for a while.’
‘See what I mean! Not a thought that we might need him to be here. We’ve lost her too.’
For all her brother’s censure of Eliza in the past, Matty knew that for him, family ties were everything. He shook his head. ‘Well, I won’t go on about him, he’s an orphan and we’re all he’s got. I suppose when he needs us he’ll be back.’ He bent to kiss her before turning down Spa Road. ‘Good luck tonight, Matty, knock ’em dead!’
She treated him to a stage smile and a pirouette, then watched him walk away shaking his head and smiling.
‘Always knew you’d be famous!’ he called back to her.
Her dear brother had, with a tact born of love, never mentioned her dramatic fall in popularity or her lack of bookings. To him she had always been a star, whether it was as a seven-year-old mimicking Vesta Tilley or as a young woman in the music halls or in a Hollywood talkie, it simply didn’t matter, because Sam was always her greatest fan, and, apart from Nellie, Matty was his.
***
Will’s face looked like it had been turned to stone and his normal high complexion paled in an instant to alabaster. With his curls and his youthful clean-lined profile, he reminded Matty of a Greek statue she’d once seen on a trip to the British Museum. But only for a moment, for in the next instant it was transformed by fury, animated from within by a fire that reddened his face so intensely Matty thought she felt heat radiating from it.
‘But that’s not possible!’ he finally spluttered. ‘She can’t have!’ He looked to her and Sam for confirmation that the solicitor had interpreted it wrongly. But the lawyer looked back impassively, no doubt having seen such incredulity before in the face of an unexpected last will and testament.
He read out the same passage again. ‘Half my estate to go to my son William Michael James and the remaining half to Mathilda Gilbie, including sole ownership of my house... It’s perfectly in order, Mr James. It’s regrettable you didn’t know that the will was lodged with us, but your mother made her wishes quite clear when she came to see me. This is the change she wanted, along with the added small bequests to her brothers Samuel and Charles Gilbie.’
Will looked at Matty with such venom that she felt it as a blow, her heart drumming in her chest.
‘I didn’t know!’ she said in reply to his unvoiced accusation. ‘It’s not what I would have wanted, Will. I don’t understand it.’ She felt as shocked as Will looked.
‘Here is a letter she left for you, Mr James.’
Will snatched it from him. The silence was filled with Will’s audible, short breaths and the maddening ticking of the solicitor’s clock. Matty stared at the pendulum, wishing it would hypnotize her into a state less approaching a heart attack than she felt at the moment. She looked at Sam, who was shifting uncomfortably in his seat, pulling at his tie.
‘What could have possessed her, Sam?’ she whispered as Will read the letter.
‘I know what possessed her,’ Will spat out. ‘You came home with your sob story and she favoured you over me. Here, read it.’ He flung the letter at Matty.
Her mind in a turmoil, she had to read it twice before she could accept that it was true. Eliza explained her decision, saying that Will’s needs at Cambridge had been fully covered by his father’s trust and that afterwards, when he graduated, he would indeed be a wealthy man, free to do whatever he wished with Ernest James’s money, but that meanwhile their dear Matty was in great financial straits and needed a home. As a young man of principle, Eliza said, she knew he would not begrudge his beloved aunt this gift. And she had signed the letter with the endearment that made tears prick Matty’s eyes. God bless, my angel, my darling boy.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Matty said, not referring to money or houses, but to the loss of his mother. But the eyes burning back at her were not those of an angel, and any grief was obscured by a stubborn determination that his own wishes shouldn’t be thwarted.
‘I’ll contest it,’ he said, and slammed out of the office, leaving Sam to apologize. But the solicitor was unperturbed and assured him that the will would hold up in court. Once outside the office, which was in the City, Sam suggested they walk back to Bermondsey across London Bridge.
‘I think I need to clear my head a bit before I go home and try to explain this to Nellie,’ he said.
It was lunchtime and office workers crammed the pavements, darting down the marble steps of offices in search of cafés and pubs for a rushed sandwich or pint. The place had its own particular smell, with roasted coffee aromas wafting from side alleys as they wove through back courts, and the smell of beer and spirits seeping through open doors of ancient lop-sided inns. As they walked towards the river and London Bridge, the crowds began to clear; it was only during the morning and evening that the bridge became unpassable, but at this time of day the commuters were firmly shut inside the square mile. Finally, Matty asked, ‘What do you make of it all, Sam?’ There was a tremor in her usually well-controlled voice. She’d been gripping her handbag so tightly her fingers were stiff.
‘I’m shocked, of course I am, but she did think a lot of you, Matty,’ he said in his understated way, looking at her as though gauging her reaction.
‘But no fonder of me than of you or Charlie, and not enough to leave me the house!’ She was remembering Eliza’s surprising last words to her, how she’d always loved her. Was Will right – was it simple favouritism? ‘Why me? I don’t feel entitled. Can I refuse it?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think you can, and perhaps you shouldn’t if that’s what Eliza wanted. You could give it back to him, I suppose, once you’ve inherited it. But he’s so pig-headed he probably wouldn’t take it from you. Besides, he’s in a hurry.’ Sam jammed his hands into his pockets and as they reached the end of the bridge he took her elbow.
‘He’s always been in a hurry,’ Matty mused, remembering the whirlwind presence Will had been as a child.
The square-turreted tower of Southwark Cathedral rose before them as they reached the end of the bridge.
‘I’m not ready to go home, Sam. Feel me, I’m shaking.’ She held out her hand for him to take.
‘Let’s have a sit down then, duck.’ And he led her down some stairs to a little garden outside the cathedral. As they sat on a bench beneath its ancient chequered flint walls, the hiss of traffic from the bridge and clatter of carts from Borough Market faded to a cloistered quiet.
‘I’m not so sure it’s about the house and the money anyway, Matty,’ Sam said, leaning his elbows on his knees. He had worn his Sunday suit for the meeting, and he felt about in his pockets.
‘Left my tobacco in my work jacket.’
She took out her own cigarettes and they lit up.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, blowing out a long stream of smoke. She hugged her jacket more tightly around her.
‘She idolized him, and he knew it. Suddenly she’s favouring you. I think it’s plain jealousy.’
‘I wish she’d told him what she was planning. It’s too much of a shock for him.’
‘Perhaps she meant to let him know, probably thought she had all the time in the world. Like all of us.’ He coughed a little and banged his chest, and seeing her anxious look, patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t lose me too. I’m fit as a fiddle. It’s just the roll-ups.’ He paused. ‘Matty, is there something you’re not telling me?’ he asked suddenly.
‘I should think so, what do I want to tell you all me secrets for!’ She laughed and was glad to see him smiling.
‘I just mean, Eliza obviously knew more about your money worries than I did. I don’t want to pry, but are you really on your uppers, love?’
She nodded briefly. ‘I made some bad choices in America, Sam, and the work’s drying up. In fact I’ve been thinking I’ll have to get a proper job soon, Peek’s or Duff’s. Can you see me in the hat?’ she tried to make light of it.
Sam looked shocked. ‘What? Factory work? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you with my problems. You’ve got your own, what with those three boys eating you and Nellie out of house and home!’
He waved the suggestion away. ‘No, it’s a good job at the Brick.’
But Matty knew that money was tight for Sam as well, and was pretty sure the ‘good’ suit he was wearing today was the same he’d been married in.
‘But, if you really are brassic,’ Sam went on, ‘I reckon you should just accept Eliza’s gift gracefully and if the boy wants to waste a load of money contesting the will, then let him. But he’s only got one family. That James lot don’t want to know him. Sooner or later he’ll realize.’