The Staircase Girls

by Catherine Seymour

  Inevitably, as Edward’s illness worsened, she knew that she would have to nurse him at home as he became increasingly incapable of doing much for himself. Nine months after putting up the sign with her name on it, Edward was still insistent that Audrey go to work, that he’d be fine at home, alone. But soon she started to get desperate phone calls from him.

  At first when he called, or tried to, her two staff thought it was a dirty phone call because nobody spoke, and all they could hear was heavy breathing. They put the receiver down, but it rang again and they heard the same breathing, so it was put down again. On the third ring, Audrey somehow knew that it was her dad, and that he needed help. She ran out of the salon to catch a bus home, where she found him collapsed on the floor in the hallway with the telephone in his hand. She called the doctor who came round with an injection of morphine, after which Edward slept. The next day Edward insisted that she go to work, so she did. Three days later the same thing happened, and again a few times after that. It became too much for her to run the salon and care for Edward, so Audrey sold the business barely twelve months after she’d opened it.

  Edward died within weeks of Audrey taking on his care full time. While she grieved for him she was dealt another terrible blow. Only weeks after Edward’s funeral she and Barry returned to the Newmarket Road cemetery to say goodbye to her Aunty Maud. After giving up work as a bedder, Maud had drifted into a strange kind of life, spending almost as much time in the Fulbourn psychiatric ward as she did at home. Audrey tried to see her as much as she could, but with work, her dad and Maud’s illness (she’d stare vacantly at Audrey when she visited in Fulbourn, barely able to speak), somehow they didn’t see one another for weeks on end. It was an enormous shock though when Audrey heard that Maud had died at home, alone, after taking too many sleeping pills. The coroner ruled her death an open verdict because the number of pills that she’d taken was not excessive, and she may have taken too many while her mind was ‘unbalanced’, they said. Maud lay undiscovered for three days, which really upset Audrey. When she heard that, she cried non-stop for a day and a half.

  There were only a few people at Maud’s funeral, among them bedders who’d worked with her, including Bertha Mizen, in the cold chapel. The size of the congregation for Maud was considerably smaller than it had been at Edward’s funeral. Her dad had known so many people, mostly from the various public houses that he patronized in his forty years of drinking. Barry had known some of the mourners at Edward’s wake (which was held at the Racehorse, naturally). ‘Auds love,’ he’d told her late into the evening as the singing, drinking and toasting of Edward carried on some hours after they’d left the cemetery, ‘there mush be all the landlords and drinkers of Newmarket Road in ’ere. What a man your old dad was. I loved him . . .’ Audrey had left then, hoping to not have to go to another funeral for a while, but here she was only weeks later.

  Standing in the car park as a light drizzle wet her hair, Audrey approached Bertha and told her, ‘You can come back to mine if you like, Mrs Mizen, I can make some sandwiches.’

  ‘No, you’re alright, Audrey, I just wanted to pay my respects. I’d known her since she was a little ’un, and it weren’t all that long ago, neither. Dear little thing she was. And only forty-nine when she passed. Tsk.’

  ‘She spoke highly of you, Mrs Mizen. She liked you a lot.’ The women looked consolingly at one another. ‘Yes, she was a dear thing she was, my Aunty Maud.’ In her head she could hear her mum telling her, ‘No point in crying, Audrey,’ so she choked back the tears. ‘Like a mum to me, after my mum died,’ Audrey told Bertha.

  ‘She would have liked to hear you say that, I’m sure.’ Bertha touched Audrey’s arm gently. ‘She had such a bad start in life, no mum and just her nan. And to think her life ended just like her mum’s did.’

  ‘Yes, Maud told me her mum had been in Fulbourn,’ Audrey said.

  ‘Yes,’ Bertha was warming to the tale, Audrey could see. ‘Her mum had a breakdown after her husband’s ship sank. They gave her electric shock treatment I heard, but I think that made her worse. She killed herself there, ’pparently. And then poor Maud with Hugh, tsk. Old Mrs Ingram, she was a bit loopy, never let Hugh out of the house when he was a boy, kept him locked in his room they say. I was worried when Maud went to live there, I have to tell you. Poor Maud.’

  ‘Yes,’ Audrey agreed sadly. ‘I didn’t go and see her as much as I should have. I know I should of, but what with my dad being ill as well, it was hard to get out of our house. I never knew how unhappy she really was . . .’

  ‘Don’t give yourself a hard time, she wouldn’t want that.’ Bertha held out a pink handkerchief to Audrey, who shook her head and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. ‘I’ve got to go,’ the older woman continued, ‘but do pop in and see me at the college for a cuppa and a chat any time, love. I remember you as a young ’un coming in with Maud on a Saturday morning.’ Bertha smiled, patted Audrey’s arm again and turned to walk home. As Barry drove the car slowly past her on their way out, Audrey wound down the window and called out, ‘Thank you, Mrs Mizen, and I’ll come and see you soon for a cuppa.’

  As much to keep herself busy as for the money, Audrey returned to hairdressing, but couldn’t bring herself to work for anyone else, so she had people come to her new home in Thorleye Road where she set up a ‘salon’ in the front room. She had regular customers and they recommended her to friends, and so she worked most days of the week. She kept up a steady stream of customers, even after becoming pregnant for the first time, in 1971 – which was a very pleasant surprise, as she kept telling everyone.

  She had to carry on working because Barry was on strike at the GPO, and the industrial action lasted several weeks. Barry didn’t mind that scores of women were descending on his home during the day; he was pleased that they were paying and told Audrey to stop doing favours for friends and start charging them too, since now more than ever they needed her to contribute to the housekeeping. Which was a bit of a cheek, since she always did.

  Sometimes she thought she was stupid for obediently handing over all of her income to Barry, emptying her purse to let him hand back just enough to do the food shopping. The failure of the salon, and the repayment of the loan she’d taken in order to get it, meant that Barry had taken full control of the family finances. He paid the rent and bills, making sure that he always had enough for him to go out and have a pint or several, of course. Even during the strike she’d seen him crawl home from the Drill Hall, where they’d had all they could eat (her) and drink (him) for just £5. It was because of his drinking that the landlords changed that particular Friday night policy sharpish, she was sure.

  They survived the strike, and after it was over Audrey continued to work from home as her belly grew bigger. But she still ended up with the same amount of ‘spending money’, regardless of how much she’d taken from her customers. Barry wanted to make sure that she didn’t have any extra for herself.

  ‘What are you going to spend it on anyway?’ he sneered at her. ‘It’s not like you’re going to go out, is it?’

  Actually, Audrey longed to be able to put on a nice outfit and go out with her old friends or the neighbours, maybe to see a film or just for a catch-up drink. But Barry forbade it.

  ‘You are not going anywhere unless I’m there with you,’ he insisted whenever she asked if she could have a few new pence extra for a night out.

  Maybe it was the pregnancy, or the loss of her dad and Maud, but Audrey no longer seemed to have the fight in her that she had had in the early days of their marriage. Although there was one occasion, when she was heavily pregnant but found it in herself to go against his wishes in the strongest way she could think of.

  She had told Barry she was going out, to the pictures with a friend, and he sat on the bed watching her get ready. ‘What do you think you look like? It’s embarrassing the way you look; you’re fat and ugly, look at you,’ he insulted her as she applied her make-up.

  It was far fro
m true and he knew it. He was worried that she was going to meet somebody else if she went out without him, even while heavily pregnant. When Audrey ignored him, Barry snapped.

  ‘You’re not going out,’ he told her heatedly.

  She laughed at him. ‘You can’t stop me, Barry.’

  ‘We’ll fucking see about that,’ he shouted, and stormed out of the bedroom, slamming the door after him. Audrey heard the lock click.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ she screamed and threw a lipstick at the door.

  ‘You’re not fuckin’ going nowhere,’ Barry yelled through the locked door at her, and stomped down the stairs.

  Audrey didn’t have to think for long about what to do, and she finished getting ready. Then she opened the bedroom window as wide as it would go and squeezed through it, feet first. The garage roof was only a six-foot drop below, so she clung to the sill and pushed gently away from the wall to land with bent knees on the flat roof. From there she climbed down onto the bins and was away before Barry knew anything about it.

  She knew what would be waiting for her when she returned, that by then Barry would have had several pints, which meant that he might – even in her condition – take a swing at her. But she was not going to let him rule her life, she told herself that night, and so she marched through the back door and into the sitting room where he lay sprawled on the couch. He was amazed to see her as he hadn’t realized she’d been out.

  She launched into him, shouting that if he thought she’d be at his bloody beck and call and only do what he wanted her to, he’d better be ready for a fight, because she wasn’t going to take it.

  Barry was clearly mystified. ‘No other bloody woman disobeys their old man! Why do you?’

  She pushed him back onto the couch as he tried to get up and confront her. ‘ ’Cos I ain’t no other bloody woman, that’s bloody why! I ain’t having no man tell me what to do!’

  For the next couple of weeks they barely spoke to each other, and on Fridays Barry refused to give her any money at all, telling her to get the shopping out of what she earned if she was so bloody independent. Which was why, on a Friday evening three weeks later, almost at full term, Audrey sat in the snug of a pub and sighed. She was with two old friends (they’d insisted she join them and they’d pay for a couple of rounds of drinks), and explaining that this would be the last evening out that she’d have with them for a while. She’d decided it was best to go along with what he wanted her to do for a while.

  ‘It’s easier this way,’ she told them, adding unnecessarily, ‘after all I am pregnant. What can I do? He’s insecure. So it’s best that I just go out with him.’

  The following night, Audrey and Barry went to the Drill Hall Post Office social club, where at least she could chat with the other wives while Barry and his mates propped up the bar.

  Following the birth of Nadine, which was surprisingly easy and quick, Audrey and Barry got along well. She didn’t go out without him, but then they didn’t go out much at all, since they couldn’t afford to. Instead they’d sit in front of the telly (rented for £2 a week), barely talking and occasionally laughing at the same jokes or films they watched. The weeks that Barry had been on strike had badly affected them and they needed to start trying to save some money in case he had to come out again, Barry warned. For nine months after the birth, Audrey did hairdressing in their front room, tended the baby, and put a bit away whenever she could (without telling Barry). Then she became pregnant again.

  ROSE

  Cambridge 1965–66

  Rose was in her early forties and had been a bedder for more than fifteen years when two tragic accidents led to her leaving the college. After a successful operation on her varicose veins, and with the introduction into the college of various labour-saving devices (one of which was as simple as a cart on wheels used to carry the dirty linen to the laundry), Rose moved back to working on two staircases (and cycling to work again), although she kept her original B staircase and the fellows on it. It was the middle of the 1960s, and while Cambridge had seen the Beatles and Rolling Stones perform at the Regal cinema, various boutiques open up selling new women’s fashions and the old Dorothy dancehall evolve into the Dorothy nightclub, life in college went on much as it always had. Except that there were an increasing number of incidents of students taking drugs and acting strangely.

  On more than one occasion Rose had entered a student bedroom early in the morning and found the detritus of the previous night’s activities. Where once there had been empty or half-empty bottles of alcohol left lying around, now there were little piles of tobacco, small medicinal bottles with lysergic acid diethylamide written on the label, and loose, small blue pills on side tables. One morning she found a bottle of pills that was exactly the same as the diazepam her doctor had recently prescribed for her nerves in the rooms of a nice young boy who didn’t seem nervous at all, to her. When she asked him about them – ‘Mr Alexander, are those pills for your nerves, then?’ he seemed confused about what she meant, until she said, ‘Dies-a-pam?’

  ‘Oh,’ a smirk of realization spread across his face, ‘my mother’s little helpers!’

  ‘What?’ Rose was shocked. ‘Has your mum been for a visit then? She must have been scandalized seeing the state of your rooms last night!’

  Alexander laughed so hard that he couldn’t answer, and annoyed at his rudeness Rose turned and left the room.

  She knew that all manner of drugs were being taken by young people, including her son Clark, who had stolen some of her tablets from the bedside table. Still, she thought, it might do Clark the sort of good it did for her if they calm him down a bit, maybe. But when she also found Dexamyl tablets in his trouser pockets that were not in a bottle, she thought that he must be mixing them all up and that it couldn’t do him much good. Not that she saw a lot of Clark at the time.

  Now aged nineteen he had recently begun working on a vegetable stall in the market place and seemed to really enjoy it, even if he did have to be up and at work at the crack of dawn. Sometimes he was up and out before she was. Plenty of nights he’d stayed over at his boss’s place (he said) so he wouldn’t be late for work. The stall must have been successful, thought Rose, because they paid Clark enough that he had managed to buy himself a second-hand, four-year-old Mini. He also paid Rose half a quid a week for his keep and didn’t eat much at all.

  On weekends, Clark would take three or four mates in his Mini to nightclubs in other cities, sometimes to London, other times to Norwich, Ipswich or even as far as Leicester or Nottingham. The drive took hours but the dancing and the new scene was always worth it, he told Rose. He was kept awake by the amphetamine tablets which, he said, was the reason for having them. ‘You wouldn’t want me to fall asleep at the wheel and crash, would you, Mum?’ he asked reasonably.

  No, she’d agreed, maybe it’s best that he keep taking them if they were legal.

  ‘They are, Mum, don’t worry,’ he’d told her. But while they were legal, she knew they usually required a prescription before a person could get them. Clark didn’t have prescriptions as far as she was aware.

  In fact, she learned later, his pills came from a friend who worked in a chemist’s shop. He was stealing them for Clark to sell, and they were splitting the proceeds. The income from the sale of the pills meant that Clark could afford new clothes, petrol and the car. The shop was run by an ancient pharmacist who trusted Clark’s pal to do the stock taking, so nothing was missed. The arrangement worked perfectly for several months. Clark was so confident about the arrangement that on a Friday he’d drop by the chemist’s back door during his dinner break to collect the weekend stash. Everything went perfectly until one fateful Friday in November 1965, when Clark picked up a bag of pills and told his friend that after the Dorothy club that night they were heading north, about thirty miles, to an all-night party ‘at some rich bloke’s place’.

  Clark drove his friend and two girls that they’d invited along to the house, arriving just before 1 a.m.
having got lost in a slowly falling fog. While there, Clark made a good few quid selling blues, purple hearts and black bombers to a bunch of farmers’ sons and village boys who were not as smart as Clark had hoped. Still, they paid top price for his pills. The party wasn’t great though, and men outnumbered women so much that Clark’s female guests felt uncomfortable and asked to leave after only a couple of hours.

  The girls climbed into the back seats with the men in the front, and they set off just before 3.15. The fog had fallen heavily by that time, although there were brief spots of totally clear road so that it seemed as if the little Mini was an aircraft travelling through clouds. One minute its front lights were illuminating the tops of hedges and trees along the roadside for several feet ahead, and then a blank grey wall would appear and swallow them, rendering the lights little more use than a candle in a gale. Clark was a confident driver at the best of times, but after a few pills he was over-confident. There hadn’t been enough good music at the party for him to dance and work any of the amphetamines out of his body, and so he drove too fast into those banks of fog, unaware and unafraid of whatever might be hidden in them.

  The police told Rose that he hadn’t felt a thing. He hadn’t seen the lorry that he drove into the side of and which peeled the roof of the Mini backwards like the lid of a sardine can. Because he hadn’t seen the lorry, he couldn’t have felt fear as death approached, she thought. That was some consolation, as was the fact that while the two boys in the front had died instantly, the two girls in the back had escaped with their lives. They would be scarred physically and emotionally by the accident, but at least their mothers got to see, hold and talk with them again. Their mothers got to see their child grow up, have children and families. Clark would never do any of that. At his funeral Rose reminded herself that she always said he’d never make it to a ripe old age, that he was too full of life and his body couldn’t last with all that energy he had. But it didn’t make her feel any better.