Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  ‘Ah, love.’ Eddie leaned his elbows on the table, his face sorrowful. ‘Love’s a tricky so-and-so. I’d give up on this Joe chappie. Forget him. He sounds like the sort who likes to break hearts.’

  ‘No,’ said Nellie. ‘No, it wasn’t him. It was my sister. She stole him.’

  ‘But did he ever belong to you in the first place, my dear? Did she steal him or did he steal her? Seems to me they both treated you badly. You lost out both ways, didn’t you? Have another drink, why don’t you.’

  In the noise and crush of drinkers, Eddie said he had a feather bed. Big as a boat it was, and so deep you thought you’d never stop falling into it. ‘Closest you’ll get to heaven,’ he said, and stroked her arm. ‘Aren’t I the fool, spending all my money on you and then offering you my bed too.’

  Nellie stood by the door of the bar while Eddie bought a jug of beer to take away. The monkey climbed on Nellie’s shoulder. Outside, the ships in the docks loomed like black mountains. Was Joe Ferier camped out in his canvas tent? She wanted to see him. To ask, had it been him or Vivian who’d sought the other out? She looked back at Eddie, who had his arms around the woman with the red mouth.

  Nellie sat down on the roadside, resting her head against the wall of the bar. She was so tired. A feather bed did sound like heaven. Her own bed at home would be even better.

  The next thing she knew, someone was wafting smelling salts under her nose. A green glass bottle waved in front of her, and she coughed and spluttered.

  ‘Come on now,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘You can’t sleep out here, love. The police will take you away.’

  It was the woman who had kissed Eddie. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a soft gauzy scarf around her narrow shoulders. Her black coat reached to her ankles, her bosom was lifted high, her waist small and waspish.

  ‘Your mouth is the colour of raspberry jam,’ said Nellie.

  ‘She’s dead drunk. Leave her. She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Eddie, have a heart. You got her in this state. You can’t just leave her.’

  Nellie felt Eddie and the woman lift her up. They walked her down the street. She tripped up a step and went through a door. Then they lay her down on a bed. It was hard and lumpy, but she was tired and she closed her eyes with relief.

  When she woke the next morning, she was on a threadbare settee with a coat over her. She lay there, unsure of what to do. Just as she thought she should get up and leave, the woman from the night before came in wearing a pale pink dressing gown, her hair loose in waves around her shoulders. She handed Nellie a cup of tea.

  ‘I’m Jane. Eddie’s wife. Don’t look so frightened, dear.’

  It was on and off between her and Eddie, she explained. She wanted to know how long Nellie had known him.

  ‘I gave the monkey a shilling last week. Then I saw them again yesterday.’

  ‘That’s what Eddie says. You’re not his type anyway. He tells me you’re down on your luck. Is that the truth of it?’

  Nellie’s head ached and she felt sick. She told her everything. She was aware as she talked that her openness was not expected. Had she said too much? Rose always said other people should never know your business.

  ‘So you’re quite alone?’

  Nellie nodded. She could not go home. She needed a job. A room and a job. She was a hard worker.

  ‘I’ve got a friend who might help you. Her brother’s looking for a woman to work for him. You get yourself ready.’

  Jane gave Nellie a jug of water and a bowl to wash in. When she was ready, she took her to a café to meet a friend called Trixie. Then she left her, telling her in future to stay away from other women’s husbands.

  ‘You been causing trouble?’ asked Trixie. ‘You a husband stealer?’

  ‘Never,’ said Nellie, affronted by the accusation. She looked at the woman’s lined face. She had the feeling Jane had left her here to get rid of her and that there was no job.

  ‘On your own, are you? Me too. I lost my husband ten years ago, sorry little widow that I am.’

  Nellie said she felt she had lost enough to qualify as a kind of widow too.

  Trixie knew what it was like to fall on hard times. Her husband had died owing money, and she’d lost her home and was living with her old mother and working as a draper’s assistant.

  She pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. ‘I’ve been ruined by marriage. He took my best years, and all the time he was spending every penny we had. The best I can do is try again. Get married, I mean. Good or bad, every woman needs a husband. I’ve found myself a better candidate this time. A very good man.’ She smiled, and nudged Nellie in the ribs. ‘He’s dependable, sensible, and as boring as a closed-up pub on a Sunday.’

  He was a draper whose wife had died a year ago, and she felt he was ready to marry her. The trouble was he didn’t want to move in with Trixie and her mother, and Trixie didn’t want to move into the flat above his shop.

  ‘Her spirit’s there. His dead wife. I feel like I’m going to suffocate in her curtains and soft furnishings. I’m trying to persuade him to sell the flat and get a new house. There are some lovely new villas out on the London Road. Gardens front and back.’

  It rained all morning and the two women sat slowly sipping their tea in the café, next to the window, watching the umbrellas of hurrying passers-by.

  ‘Well,’ said Trixie when the rain stopped and the waitress had asked if they were going to buy another pot of tea. ‘We can’t sit here all day. We should go and see about this job for you.’

  The sun shone a dirty yellow through grey clouds. Everything – windows, shopfronts, trees, hat brims – dripped water. Nellie’s suitcase was falling apart. It wouldn’t last another night homeless, and neither would she.

  Trixie took her to a green-tiled shopfront with pig carcasses hanging from hooks in the window. A great row of them dangled like giant sugar mice, waxy and pink and bright with raindrops. To enter the shop and stand in its cold interior with its smell of meat and pine sawdust, Nellie had to lower her head and walk under a bower of dripping pigs’ trotters.

  Trixie’s brother, Nathan Rumsby, wore a spotless striped apron. He was a bland-looking man with small eyes, close set and framed by thick lashes, so it was hard to tell what colour they were. With his butcher’s cap on his head he came up to Nellie’s shoulder. When he took it off, revealing a head of fine blond hair, he was an inch shorter.

  The butcher said he hadn’t heard of any Joe Ferier, but he had a room she could have if she worked hard. He couldn’t pay her much, but she could start right away. He’d feed her and she’d have lodgings for free.

  ‘Hard work rewards itself,’ said Nellie, thanking him. She was surprised to hear Rose’s favourite phrase slip so easily from her lips.

  As the weeks passed, Nellie became immune to the loneliness within her. The work wasn’t so bad here. It was blood she scrubbed out from under her fingernails these days rather than earth. Not what she had imagined, perhaps, but she clung to her new life, believing that this was what she needed, this solitude, a chance to see what fate had in mind for her.

  She saw Eddie again by chance, walking by the docks, but he looked straight past her, as if he didn’t know her, and she decided it was better that way. He was a married man. It made her blush to think of his invitation to share his feather bed.

  One night in October when the moon shone through her curtainless windows, she woke and saw the butcher standing in the room. He was naked, his skin as bloodless as uncooked tripe. There was a curved thickness to his thighs, his belly round and solid. She heard him go away, the door closing behind him. Nellie pulled her blankets around herself.

  The next day Rumsby acted as if nothing had happened. His eyes, which she finally worked out were a dirty moss colour, were as restless as ever, flicking over her and then away to the carcasses he was cutting up. The next night he was there again, at the foot of her bed. And the night after that. After a while, Nellie slept through his visits, only waki
ng to hear him make a small groaning sound, his naked feet slapping the bare floorboards as he hurriedly left the room.

  Winter wound its scarf of frost around the town. The bacon in the butcher’s shop carried diamond-sharp ice crystals in its thick bands of fat. Nellie worked 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week. Her days off she spent looking for Joe. She often went down to the docks. She thought he might be there, thinking of finding a ship to sail to Southampton, where the steamers left for America. She liked the docks and stood on the quay, watching the trading ships and the barges heavy with cargo. They drifted low in the water, loaded with coal, coke, malt, lime and bricks. It was amazing to see how this stretch of their river, so many miles away from home, was solid with traffic. To think of the isolated stretch of river her own cottage sat on.

  On Sundays, she tidied the flat and the butcher visited his mother, taking meat pies and parcels of pork for her. Rumsby dressed up then, a good hat and a thick wool coat, his boots polished, his beard trimmed. He rubbed lard into his fingers to make them soft because he said his mother liked to hold his hand. Nellie couldn’t imagine anybody would want to hold his hands if they knew what he did in her room at night.

  At Christmas, he invited Nellie to accompany him. His mother lived in a house near the park. Nellie sat on an upholstered chair with the stuffing coming out of it. The striped wallpaper on the walls was faded and falling down in places. Trixie served candied fruits and mince pies on a tray.

  ‘She doesn’t hear,’ said Trixie when Nellie spoke to her mother. ‘Deaf, dearie. She can’t see too well neither, and her waterworks have sprung a leak. If I had the money I’d pay a nurse to look after her. I’m worn out by the old bird.’

  The butcher sat on the sofa by the gas fire, holding his mother’s hand. Nellie ate nothing, said very little and felt out of place. She realized she missed her home and the comfort of Vivian’s company.

  ‘Cold meats,’ said Rumsby as Trixie ushered them into the dining room where she lit the gas lamps. ‘We’ll have cold meats and bread and butter with a glass of cider.’

  Nellie sat at the table with the mother. Through the open door, she heard Trixie talking to her brother in the hallway. She was praising Nellie. Saying what a hard worker she was and he wouldn’t find better. Nellie leaned slightly towards the door. A look of fear passed over the butcher’s mother’s face. The old woman clutched her throat and gave a small cry of alarm. A puddle of yellow urine steamed around her shoes.

  ‘We’ll move Mother into your rooms,’ Trixie was saying. ‘Nellie will look after her. I’ve already a buyer for the house. We have to act fast or he’ll find another property and we’ll have lost our chance.’

  ‘What if Nellie won’t do it?’ Nathan said.

  ‘You must make her marry you. For goodness’ sake, Mother will only sell this place if you have a wife. She says you need her here until you have a wife to look after you. You know that. We must get a move on. We both need money, Nathan, and we’re not going to get it with Mother holding on to the house.’

  Trixie said Nellie was no spring chicken, but Nathan wasn’t exactly young himself and she was sure Nellie would accept a marriage proposal.

  ‘She’s too tall.’

  ‘She’s the best Jane could find. I just hope this one will stay and not disappear in the middle of the night like the last one.’

  ‘She’ll stay,’ Nathan Rumsby replied gruffly. ‘She’s got nowhere else to go.’

  When they returned to the flat above the shop that night, Nellie went to her room. She took a chair and wedged it under the door handle. She would find another place to live, but for the moment, with the winter so hard and so little money in her pocket, she had no choice but to stay where she was. For a week she put the chair against the door, and for a week the butcher left her alone.

  ‘If you pay me five shillings more, I’ll leave my door open,’ Nellie said to him one morning. She might be a countrywoman, but she didn’t have straw for brains. She was catching on to how people were with you when you were on your own. Well, she could play the game too.

  He put his hands in his apron pockets and his eyes flickered over her slowly.

  ‘How much for marrying me?’ he asked. ‘You’d keep your room. We can have a long engagement. As long as you like.’

  Nellie didn’t answer him. She thought that kind of decision might cost more than money.

  A grey, misty morning in February, Nellie and the butcher’s mother walked through the crowds on the docks, stopping to watch the fishing boats that had sailed in on the tide. Huge baskets of fish were being unloaded, stacked high on the cobblestones. Trixie had married her draper and moved away, and the butcher’s mother lived with them now. Nellie and the butcher were engaged. That was to say, if the old woman ever asked, she showed her a ring Rumsby had got from Woolworths.

  Seagulls screamed and Nellie thought of Joe, of the town he had come from in the north where the birds sounded like crying children. A seabird dived low over one of the fishermen, its yellow beak slicing the air close to his ear. The fisherman swung his head down, lost his footing and upturned the basket of fish he was carrying, spilling mackerel everywhere, a flickering silver dance at his feet.

  Other seabirds swooped down. The noise of the birds frightened a herd of cattle being driven through the thoroughfare and they began to barge and push each other, knocking into the piled baskets of fish on the quay, spilling more of them. Children and stray dogs came out of alleys and mossy passageways just as fast as the seabirds descended. Men and women, too, fought for space among gulls and urchins, cramming fish into their pockets and shopping baskets. All around, the seagulls screamed and the fishermen yelled.

  Anna Moats heard the commotion as she limped out of the Jug and Bottle. She saw the fish thick on the ground, the gleaners bent to their task, policemen and a few soldiers running, and the cattle stampeding. She decided to get a fish for her supper. The cattle veered towards her. Anna pulled a toad’s bone from her bag and held it out. The cattle cantered past, not one of them touching her.

  It had once been common knowledge that Anna had something cunning about her. She had been proud of her reputation. If you wanted a neighbour’s cows to stop giving milk and their hens to stop laying, then Anna Moats was the woman to call on. She could help if you were the one whose cattle had been cursed or the butter kept curdling. A runaway herd of cows on the docks held no fear for her, and anyone who had known her as a young woman would not have been surprised to see the way the animals parted around her.

  She tried to grab a fish, but her gnarled fingers couldn’t hold on to it. The fish were everywhere, slick and bright and smelling of the sea. A pain in her hip took her breath away. She looked at the harbour waters and tried to step away from them, but the crowds pushed and shoved her. If the cattle had been afraid of her, the people were not. Anna was old in her bones. She was too often seen drinking to be taken seriously. A man bowled past her and nearly knocked her flying into the water.

  By now, more people were coming to gather fish. The butcher himself had heard the commotion and brought a basket to fill. Rumsby’s mother complained about the smell of fish guts in the air. Nellie told her to hold her handkerchief tighter over her nose. The old woman coughed and spluttered and said she wished she were back in her own home again.

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ snarled Rumsby. ‘You smell worse than a load of fish yourself.’

  Nellie carried the basket into the crowds. The cattle had been driven off towards the market square, but people were still on their hands and knees on the quay, pulling fish from pools of cow shit. There was an old woman far too close to the water’s edge.

  ‘Be careful,’ called Nellie. When she got close, she realized she knew her.

  ‘Mrs Moats?’ she said, taking her arm. ‘It’s me. Nellie Marsh. Come away from the edge.’

  ‘Nellie Marsh?’ said Anna. ‘What’re you doing here? Your sister said you was visiting relatives. Let me look at you. You came to me year
s ago and I cured you. Didn’t I?’

  Nellie said she had.

  ‘People like you believe in what I do. These days all anybody wants is motor cars and machines. Men and women are slaves to ’em. They don’t care, do they? They have their picture houses and trips to the seaside and the old ways are being lost. If I had book learning I might have written books so nobody could forget how things were. I know just as much as doctors, and probably a damn sight more. I might not be able to read words, but I can read a face.’

  Anna pointed a finger at Rumsby. ‘That one, for example. I can read his face all right. He thinks he owns you. You should stay away from that man. He’s got blood on his hands.’

  ‘Pig’s blood, Anna. He’s a pork butcher.’

  ‘Not how I see it. You’ll have no life with that one, I assure you. Get away as quick as you can.’

  ‘I’ve nowhere to go,’ said Nellie.

  ‘Nowhere to go? But of course you do. You come on home with me.’

  Nellie glanced at Rumsby and his mother. They looked back expectantly, like large birds waiting to be fed.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. Just for a few days.’

  Five

  Vivian had no idea how the child would be born, but she loved it already. Some days she lay on her bed for hours, a hand on her belly, feeling the movements it made. How would it find its way out of her? Her ignorance shamed her. She’d heard Nellie talk of lambing. Of the afterbirth and the importance of it not being left in the ewes. She supposed a human birth would be similar. She’d read all their housekeeping books and found only passing references to childbirth. Water needed to be boiled and a layette should be prepared. She should have seen a dentist, one book said. Pregnancy loosened women’s teeth. Another book recommended that after the birth the mother should stay in bed for three weeks without moving. Then she could get up and wash herself. But how could she do that alone?

  Vivian looked at the clothes she had sewn, the small nighties and cotton caps, and hoped they would do. Everything was prepared as best it could be. She’d told the vicar’s wife she could not wash their linen any more, blaming the cold of winter, saying her fingers were rheumatic. She still wore a girdle tightly bound to hide her swelling shape, but in the cottage she risked undoing it, relieved to be able to breathe a little easier. She never took it off completely, thinking that if anybody came to visit her she’d have time to pull the girdle’s restricting laces tight again before opening the door.